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."

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Say No to Arun Bhatia because he calls Pune “Poona”!

Niall Ferguson:

“…Without the British Empire, there would be no Calcutta; no Bombay; no Madras. Indians may rename them as many times as they like, but they remain cities founded and built by the British…”

“Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World”, 2003)

On a TV program that was telecast on Marathi news channel IBN-Lokmat on April 21, 2009, Arun Bhatia, a candidate for Pune Loksabha seat, was heckled by studio audience because he called the city of Pune by its old and legitimate name: Poona.

And on the same day I read following in NYT:

“Name Not on Our List? Change It, China Says:

… The bureau’s computers, however, are programmed to read only 32,252 of the roughly 55,000 Chinese characters, according to a 2006 government report. The result is that Miss Ma and at least some of the 60 million other Chinese with obscure characters in their names cannot get new cards — unless they change their names to something more common…”

Chinese government wants people to change their names to suit the national database!

Swaminathan S Anklesaria Aiyar observes in The Times of India (April 19, 2009):

“…The Indian economy grew fast in the last five years, but remained far behind China’s. India’s big population makes its GDP look big, but also means it has the largest number of poor people, infant deaths, maternal deaths in childbirth, and highest child malnutrition in the world. India cannot end Maoist violence in 160 of its 600 districts or insurrections in Kashmir and the North-East. The Indian state looks weak and incompetent even as the Chinese state looks strong and competent…

… India scarcely matters. It is still a country that instinctively seeks aid and foreign concessions. On the international scene, it is a taker, not a giver. China, however is now a giver. In the proposed expansion of the IMF’s lending, China has offered to supply $40 billion, against $100 billion from Japan and possibly the US. India does not figure in this giver’s list — it would rather be a receiver.
Even as China gets hyphenated with the US, India is getting re-hyphenated with Pakistan via Islamic militancy…”

The last word belongs to अशोक शहाणे Ashok Shahane:


["मुंबई नगरी बड़ी बांका" 1997] ( नपेक्षा, 2005)
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