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, July 10, 2009

Amitabh Bachchan, We Just Fall Apart

Mr. Bachchan, 66, is unwell.

His blog has these beautiful lines from his father's Madhushala:

बनी रहें अंगूर लताएँ जिनसे मिलती है हाला,
बनी रहे वह मिटटी जिससे बनता है मधु का प्याला,
बनी रहे वह मदिर पिपासा तृप्त न जो होना जाने,
बनें रहें ये पीने वाले, बनी रहे यह मधुशाला।।

On July 8 2009, he writes there:

“…I was due to travel out tonight but a small problem has arisen. I developed a pain in the stomach much like the one I got last birthday. And it happened just when I was getting set to leave from London. So I travelled home in order that I may be in a climate that understands my condition, rather than stay back in alien country and subject myself to a medical from those that are unaware of my history. I drove straight to my doctor on arrival late last night and after some external physical examinations was subjected to CT scans this morning. The results do not show anything, but the trouble exists, albeit in a much smaller scale than the last time. Some more tests have been advised tomorrow. I have therefore postponed my travel until there is a fix on the problem and a possible line of treatment. I would not want to get moving again and land up in unknown territory and end up in hospital. Its disturbing to be in such state. Frustrating that despite extreme care a repetition of this problem keeps occurring…”

It makes sad reading.

Note: “Frustrating that despite extreme care a repetition of this problem keeps occurring.”

Why?

Dr. Atul Gawande has tried to answer it in the New Yorker April 30, 2007:

“…The idea that living things shut down and not just wear down has received substantial support in the past decade…

Today, the average life span in developed countries is almost eighty years. If human life spans depend on our genetics, then medicine has got the upper hand. We are, in a way, freaks living well beyond our appointed time. So when we study aging what we are trying to understand is not so much a natural process as an unnatural one. Inheritance has surprisingly little influence on longevity…

If our genes explain less than we imagined, the wear-and-tear model may explain more than we knew…

Nonetheless, as the defects in a complex system increase, the time comes when just one more defect is enough to impair the whole, resulting in the condition known as frailty. It happens to power plants, cars, and large organizations. And it happens to us: eventually, one too many joints are damaged, one too many arteries calcify. There are no more backups. We wear down until we can’t wear down anymore…

I spoke to Felix Silverstone, who for twenty-four years was the senior geriatrician at the Parker Jewish Institute, in New York, and has published more than a hundred studies on aging. There is, he said, “no single, common cellular mechanism to the aging process.” Our bodies accumulate lipofuscin and oxygen free-radical damage and random DNA mutations and numerous other microcellular problems. The process is gradual and unrelenting. “We just fall apart,” he said…”


Therefore,

बनी रहे यह मधुशाला...It will perhaps

बनें रहें ये पीने वाले....Never



‘Never bite old people, son, they all taste of statins.’

The Spectator, 2009
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