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."

Friday, May 29, 2009

Severed Heads: Govind Pant Bundela, V Prabhakaran and near miss Nguyen Van Thieu

p.s After I published following post on May 29 2009, this was in the papers on June 25 2009:

"Despite pledges to protect South Vietnam, former US President Richard Nixon privately vowed to "cut off the head" of its leader-Nguyen Van Thieu-unless he backed peace with the Communist North, tapes released on Tuesday showed..."

One more fan of severed head.

Post that was published on May 29, 2009:

William Faulkner: “The past is not dead; it is not even past.”

The Sri Lankan military has released pictures of Tamil Tiger leader Velupillai Prabhakaran which it says prove conclusively that he is dead.

Those parental-guidance-suggested pictures are insufferable.

M.R. Narayan Swamy says:

“…The Indian Army once intercepted a wireless message from him (Velupillai Prabhakaran ) asking a colleague to kill two rival Tamils and deliver their severed heads to him…”

(“How a guerrilla chief grew drunk on blood”, Asian Age, May 20, 2009)

‘Severed-heads’ have always been with us. They brought another sorry episode from history to my mind.

In December 1760, Atai Khan, working on the orders of Ahmad Shah Abdali severed the head of sixty-plus years old Govind Ballal Kher aka Govind Pant Bundela, a Subedar of Maratha, and sent it to his boss- Abdali.

Abdali 'presented’ it to the head of Maratha army, Sadashivrao Bhau. This act surely dented the morale of Maratha army badly. On January 14, 1761, it was trounced in the third battle of Panipat, a sort of Vietnam of Maratha empire.

On May 19, 2009, the Sri Lankan military was adjusting the corpse for cameras to photograph the head that looked severely damaged, if not almost severed.

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