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, February 16, 2009

The Greediest Generation has made Traffic Deadlier than Terrorism

Earlier I asked: “What is Deadliest at Pune. Traffic,Temple Queues or Terrorism?”

The answer still is: Traffic.

Black humour now has mushroomed on the subject. Times of India Mirror reported on Jan 1 2009: "Death has a five day week...almost". You are less likely to get killed on a Pune road on Thursdays and Sundays.

Not just that. Times of India reported on December 17, 2008: drowning,poisoning, fire, by falling, electrocution, lightning strikes, due to firearms are also deadlier than terror.

"According to the Planning Commission, the social cost of road accidents in India stands at Rs. 55,000 crore annually. This constitutes 3% of the country's GDP." (Times of India, December 12, 2008)

The cost of terrorism is certainly less than 3% of GDP.

Marathi news daily Pudhari पुढारी reported on Sunday December 08, 2008:

“Pune has 2400 (road) accidents in a year involving 450 deaths.”

Considering this stat, terrorism- even of the latest kind- is a side-show.

Shame on us! The Greediest Generation.

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN said in NYT on December 07, 2008:

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about Tom Brokaw’s book “The Greatest Generation,” that classic about our parents and their incredible sacrifices during World War II. What I’ve been thinking about actually is this: What book will our kids write about us? “The Greediest Generation?” “The Complacent Generation?” Or maybe: “The Subprime Generation: How My Parents Bailed Themselves Out for Their Excesses by Charging It All on My Visa Card.”

Our kids should be so much more radical than they are today…”

Should be.

But I don’t see them anywhere. Most of the middle-class kids I see are highly conformists. They want to drive their own vehicle- a big one at that.

Carl Sagan has said:

“…Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations- perhaps for insisting that small children and even infants sleep alone instead of with their parents; or exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life; or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees; or criminalizing the use of euphoriants by adults; or allowing our children to grow up ignorant.”

India is already guilty of “…exciting nationalist passions as a means of gaining popular approval and achieving high political office; or allowing bribery and corruption as a way of life …”

If Sagan were to be alive and visit Pune now, he would have surely included “keeping public transport paralysed while encouraging more and more private vehicles on lawless roads of Pune” to his list.



‘So do you fancy staying in and getting obese or going out and getting murdered?

The Spectator 2007

My caption:

‘So do you fancy staying in and getting obese or going out and getting killed on a Pune road while driving?’
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