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 01, 2010

Where Cricket Bowlers Gallop through their own Intestines

The Free Dictionary: "match: One that is able to compete equally with another"

The Times of India, March 29 2010:

"...India's Sports Minister M S Gill said the rules of cricket had been changed by the IPL, and acquiesced by the BCCI, by way of giving batsman advantage over bowlers to promote entertainment, allowing mongoose bat and shortening boundaries, all to earn profit."What the IPL is doing, the bowler is only the victim and the bat -- now you have a mongoose bat (and) I look forward to a cobra bat. The boundaries have been shortened ... the whole thing is to entertain the masses. And the bowler is just an instrument for this promotion. IPL is fundamentally business..."

This reminded me of Ernest Hemingway's book “Death in the Afternoon”, 1932 which was about the ceremony and traditions of Spanish bullfighting.

Cricket bowlers today in limited-overs cricket are like horses from the book.

They were not expected to leave the bull-ring alive. The bull’s horns usually gored the horses’ sides and stomachs and they were often tossed in the air or flipped over. Hemingway describes as ‘comic’ the occasions where horses galloped through their own intestines. (They say this practice in bullfight has changed since then.)

So Mr. Gill this is comic and not trajic and, in any case, can you really argue with popular tastes of the day?

Following happened in US of A less than 111 years ago:

"...On Sunday afternoon, 23 April 1899, more than two thousand white Georgians, some of then arriving on a special excursion train, assembled near the town of Newman to witness the execution of Sam Hose, a black Georgian. Whole families turned up to watch. Parents sent notes to school asking teachers to excuse their children. Postcards were sent to those who could not attend the spectacle, and photographs were taken to preserve it in memory.

After learning of the death of her husband at one such occasion, Mary Turner – a black woman in her eighth month of pregnancy – swore to find those responsible and have them punished. A mob assembled and determined to teach her a lesson. After tying her ankles together they hung her from a tree upside down. While she was still alive her abdomen was cut open with a knife. The infant fell from her womb and its head was crushed by a member of the crowd. Then, as hundreds of bullets were fired into her body, Mary Turner was killed.

Were the smiling children who were photographed watching such events gnawed by remorse for the rest of their days? Or did they recall them with nostalgia and quiet satisfaction?..." (John Gray, 'Straw Dogs', 2002)


Artist: Reginald Marsh, The New Yorker, 8 Sept 1934
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