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."

Sunday, December 09, 2007

The Dolphin is the Cow of the Brahmaputra/ And Brahmaputra is My Mother

Asian Age November 29, 2007 reported: “Brahmaputra’s dolphins dying out”.

My first thought was a deep regret: Although I lived in Assam from 1989-1992 intermittently, I never saw a dolphin even once! My ‘affair’ with Brahmaputra is documented here.

I fell in love with river dolphins after reading Amitav Ghosh’s “The Hungry Tide”(2004).

I liked the book mainly because it has so much 'water' and water-borne objects in it.

I was raised in western Maharashtra, land of hills and stream-like rivers. Those rivers sometimes have no water, let alone hungry tides, crocodiles and dolphins!

Ghosh has portrayed romance between protagonist Piyali Roy and Irrawaddy dolphins (Orcaella brevirostris) with great sensitivity.

Sadly, the book has no pictures. As reported in the press, I hope they don't make a shoddy Hindi film based on the book and instead include pictures of Sundarbans in the next edition.

R K Sinha, a Patna-based ecologist who studies the river’s eco-system intimately says:

"The Ganga has more life in it than a forest; its biodiversity is rich. We know so little because its aquatic life is largely undocumented. The river dolphin is an indicator of the river’s health as it is at the top of the riverine food chain, like the tiger is in a forest. That’s why locals say: “Sons bachao nadi mein,/ naam kamao sadi mein”. (Save the river dolphin,/ earn name and fame.) “Sons Ganga ki gaia hain/ Ganga meri maia hain”. (The dolphin is the cow of the Ganga/ And Ganga is my mother.) … Only some 2,000 dolphins remain today…”

If intelligent dolphins come to know about what we have done to them, they might say...

Artist: Warren Miller The New Yorker 30 December 1991
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