मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

Why Vinda, Kusumagraj, Khandekar but NO Bhagwat, Tendulkar, Chitre?

Vinda's popularity after the Jnanpith (ज्ञानपीठ) Award soared and probably reached the levels previously attained by Kusumagraj (कुसुमाग्रज) and V S Khandekar (वि स खांडेकर).

All three of them Jnanpith awardees.

Like Vinda, Kusumagraj too was a good poet and a great human being. (Kusumagraj was our family friend and attended my sister's wedding. He had great regard for my father and his writings. He exuded only kindness and love.)

The same can be said of the third awardee, V S Khandekar. Average writer but a great humanist who motivated scores of budding artists. (At IIT, Madras, I once asked my Tamil speaking class-mate: who were popular Tamil writers? His answer stunned me because one name on that very short list was Khandekar. Yes, V S Khandekar in translation! Yes, he was that popular.)

The award was not given to Durga Bhagwat, Vijay Tendulkar and Dilip Chitre, for my taste, all of them better writers than the Jnanpith trinity.

Is it because M/s Bhagwat, Chitre and Tendulkar constantly rebelled against the establishment? The government of the day as well as extra constitutional authorities and power-centres in Maharashtra.

Remember fearlessness of Durga Bhagwat during the emergency, Vijay Tendulkar's run-ins with Shiv Sena and the government on many issues, death threat to Chitre in the wake of James Laine controversy?

Vinda, Kusumagraj, Khandekar avoided such conflicts. I like to think: Not for want of courage but they were built differently.