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, August 13, 2007

Vilasrao Deshmukh receives a letter

Dr. Shreeram Lagoo डाँ. श्रीराम लागू- a good stage artist, a ham cinema (both Hindi and Marathi) actor and an activist- has written an open letter (Lokmat Aug 5, 2007) to Maharashtra Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh.

It’s worth reading in its entirety. It sums up degeneration of Maharashtra leadership- both social and political.

It talks about democracy becoming just a formality because of caste, money, power and gundaism. It narrates number of instances where blatant violence was used by major political parties to silence the dissenting voice and how the administration did nothing.

It reminds the minister that the Indian Constitution declares scientific temperament as a fundamental duty of all citizens. The letters asks why the Maharashtra Eradication of Black Magic and Evil and Aghori Practices Bill, 2005 took such a long time to progress to its current stage. (btw- The State Government has sought suggestions from public on the bill by 30th August 2007) Read more on the bill here.

I wonder where the minister and his cabinet colleagues stand on the issue of superstition personally. Most of them are seen wearing amulets,stones, rings, threads, chains and what-have-you.


Artist: James Thurber The New Yorker June 1, 1935
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Unless the bridges get blown up by helpful terrorists……..

Just one bridge fell in Minneapolis and people in US are talking about health of the most of the bridges in that country.

“Federal officials have admitted that as many as 70,000 bridges across the US - representing 12 per cent of all bridges in the country - had recently been rated structurally deficient. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers, the US would need to spend $9.4bn annually for the next 20 years to address all the problems with its aging bridges."

Garrison Keillor writes: “…Bridges are not supposed to fall down unless there is an earthquake. People die in violent storms, plane crashes, epidemics, but a person is supposed to be able to drive home on a summer evening and cross a river on a steel truss bridge and not find himself plunging headlong into the abyss…..
Unless the bridges get blown up by helpful terrorists, making us eligible for Halliburton to come in and rebuild them, I don't imagine that much will happen. There will be an investigation and someday, when we are much older, we will learn that the bridge collapsed due to a unique set of circumstances that could not have been predicted by anybody. Nobody had sex with that woman. Everybody was doing a heckuva job….”

NYT editorial (Aug 11,2007) says: “In its last state inspection, the Brooklyn Bridge rated 2.9 on a scale of 7, an unabashed poor rating, barely passing. It was not bad enough to close it or further limit traffic and city officials pronounce the bridge safe, but New Yorkers should be excused if they begin looking at the 124-year-old landmark in a different way.

Those who live in its magnificent shadow are in the same uneasy place as the millions of other Americans who traverse bridges daily. Many, in inspections prompted by the Minneapolis disaster, have been found to have structural, design or maintenance problems. ……”

Welcome to India!

I wonder what ratings bridges in India would get. We of course have digested bridge falls as easily as neighbourhood water logging during monsoons. Jaane-Bhi-Do-Yaro (1983), one of our all time great feature films, carries a backdrop of a bridge fall in Mumbai.

A fallen bridge always reminds me of “The Bridge on the River Kwai”. One of the most moving scenes is when on the eve of the blast Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) reminisces his days in India. He says he helped build railway bridges all over India.

Regardless of their ratings most of them stand today.



Artist: Mike Luckovich
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