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."

Monday, April 09, 2007

Sex in no longer a taboo subject but........

When I googled Taimes of India’s website for word “sex” “appearing in headline” for “within past 30 days”, it threw up three pages of results.

One imporatnt search result: Governments of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat and Maharashtra have banned sex education in school. The sex education classes were part of the adolescence education programme for Class IX and above, aimed at creating AIDS awareness among students.

Chief minister of Madhya Pradesh said: "...... Children should be taught yoga and Indian culture and tradition instead of sex education.” (March 20).

A Maharashtra law maker said: "The message reaching younger generation will be different from what the government aimed at. Instead of having a healthy attitude towards sex, the images currently used actually harm young and impressionable minds. These books are so bad and lacking in sensitivity that they will destroy Indian culture." (March 30)

There is another important news item dated April 4 2007: “US 5th-graders arrested for having sex in class- Five fifth-grade students face criminal charges after authorities said four of them had sex in front of other students in an unsupervised classroom and kept a classmate posted as a lookout for teachers.”
Artist : Eldon Dedini The New Yorker 17 Sept 1966
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Temples of modern India or disease of giganticism

Ramachandra Guha in his essay “Prime Ministers and big dams” for Hindu on December 18, 2005 says:

“SPEAKING to the Central Board of Irrigation and Power in November 1958, Jawarhalal Nehru deplored a "dangerous outlook developing in India", which he termed the "disease of giganticism". The "idea of doing big undertakings or doing big tasks for the sake of showing that we can do big things," remarked Nehru, "is not a good outlook at all". For it was "the small irrigation projects, the small industries and the small plants for electric power which will change the face of the country, far more than a dozen big projects in half a dozen places". The Prime Minister drew his audience's attention to "the national upsets, upsets of the people moving out and their rehabilitation and many other things, associated with a big project". These upheavals would be on a lesser scale in a smaller scheme, enabling the State to "get a good deal of what is called public co-operation……..For this was the same Nehru who was an enthusiast for large projects, who once celebrated big dams as the "temples" of modern India.”

I see no problem here.

Great leaders are like great books. And to follow them, we do Ned Flanders (the Simpsons Character) when he says: “ I've done everything the Bible says - even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!”
Artist: Richard Decker The New Yorker 17 July 1948
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