मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Gosh darn

In the past, comic Marathi serials on TV would make fun of Hindi soap opera like “Sans Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” but would kindly leave their ‘sister’ programming in Marathi alone. Time has now come for them to light into Marathi soap opera because Marathi serials on TV have hit a new low.

For a long time now most of them have been either vulgar or prurient or dumb or combination of them. Silly but not dangerous perhaps. Now, they have crossed the threshold. They have turned injurious to our health.

Serial “Asambhav” on Zee Marathi give credence to things like rebirth, ghosts, black magic etc. Many of them (“Vahinee Saheb”, “Avghachi Sansar”) show abominable violence against women. They perhaps would like to show more sex to make the ultimate cocktail but currently don’t.

If there are any sensible actors involved in making of this trash, I am sure they ask:
“During rehearsals, at least, couldn’t I just say ‘Gosh darn’?”

Artist: Richard Decker The New Yorker 12 Jan 1963
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Harrison, yes, it’s just a game

Why have we become so jingoistic when it comes to sports?

Cannot we just enjoy a good afternoon of bat versus ball when no wicket falls, not many runs are scored but still enough happens to show us game’s inherent beauty.

Adam Gopnik puts it well for football: “ -- man accepting his hard circumstances, the near-certainty of his failure. There is, after all, something familiar about a contest in which nobody wins and nobody pots a goal. Nil-nil is the score of life.”

John Carlos 1968 Mexico Olympics 200m Bronze Medallist- who along with gold medallist Tommie Smith raised black-gloved fists on the podium for the medal ceremony to protest US government’s policies:

“Why do we have to wear the uniform of your country? Why do they play national anthems? Why do we have to beat the Russians? Why do the East Germans have to beat the West Germans? Why can’t everyone wear the same colors but wear numbers to tell them apart? What happened to the Olympic ideal of man against man?”

Artist: Richard Decker The New Yorker 4 Oct 1958
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Lead them to their death

NYT article by CARL ZIMMER on March 27, 2007 screams : “Scientists Explore Ways to Lure Viruses to Their Death”.

It says : ” There are only a few basic ways to fight viruses. A vaccine can prime the immune system to attack them as soon as they invade the body. If a virus manages to establish itself, a doctor may be able to prescribe a drug to slow down its spread. And if all else fails, a doctor may quarantine a patient to head off an epidemic.
Now some scientists are exploring a fundamentally different strategy to fight viruses. They want to wipe them out by luring them to their destruction, like mice to mousetraps.”

Next what? Chattering viruses?


Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker 2 Aug 1941
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