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."

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

The Office [Indian]

Over last several months, I have been following TV serial “The Office [American]” on Star World. The dominant theme there is – Sex.

India is no different. See a related earlier post here.

At a multinational IT company where I worked in India, there always was gossip in the air about who was sleeping with whom. Almost always male concerned was higher ranked than female.

I hope things have changed and they now have Michael Scott- Jan Levinson kind of pairs.

Times of India reported on January 30, 2008:

“…If a new survey by staffing company TeamLease Services is to be believed, India Inc has made a brazen admission about being more open to office romances.

The ‘Romance at Workplace' survey, which covered 402 respondents across seven cities, reveals that what was a taboo earlier is now acceptable. Nearly 34% of working executives feel that it is alright to have an affair with a married colleague. Shocking as it may sound, 44% believe that an office romance is a legitimate means of climbing up corporate ladder. Another 20% believe that an office romance is fair way of getting “sex for fun”. Yet others feel that it is a good way to escape from miserable marital lives.

If you feel this is a new economy-young-employee profile phenomenon, think again. The survey looked at employees of all age groups in companies in BPO, retail, pharma, and manufacturing. Says Surabhi Mathur, GM, TeamLease, “The forces at play here are enhanced intimacy in work environment, longer hours, extensive team play and a shift from individual to group tasks.”

Nearly 56% of the respondents in the survey felt that “romantic liaisons at workplaces impact the quality and speed of work”. But in the same breath, 56% also said that the organization shouldn't interfere in such affairs.

So, what should companies do because, after all, they ought not to be probing into the private lives of employees? But at the same time, there is an ethical issue at play here: when the romance affects efficiency and breeds discrimination. Most companies that TOI contacted, refused to talk about it deeming it as a sensitive issue…”


Artist: Peter Arno The New Yorker 29 March 1947
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