Adam Philips: 'The world without the people who matter to us is not the same world and so not the world at all. Life becomes progressively stranger as we get older - and we become increasingly frantic to keep it familiar, to keep it in order - because people keep changing the world for us by dying out (mourning is better described as orientation, the painful wondering whether it is worth re-placing oneself).'
In 1970's, I atteneded many public lectures of Shivajirao Bhosale (शिवाजीराव भोसले) at Miraj (मिरज). His voice still rings in my ears.
Although they were informative, I was never hugely impressed by them unlike lectures by Narhar Kurundkar (नरहर कुरुंदकर). In fact, I walked out of one or two of them because of sheer boredom.
However, it's a nice feeling that, not too long ago, thousands in Maharashtra flocked to his lectures on the subjects like Sri Aurobindo, Swami Vivekananda among others.
I wonder how many would do so today sacrificing their prime time decadent Marathi TV.
Wrestler Chandgi Ram who passed away on 29 June 2010- like Satpal Singh- became very popular personality in Maharashtra. It was nice to read rich tributes paid to him by his former rival wrestelers of Kolhapur (कोल्हापूर).
Abhijit Marathe (अभिजीत मराठे) my classmate died in Miraj on June 27(?) 2010. I was not in touch with him for a long time but we spent years from June 1969 to March 1975 together at Miraj High School.
His family- easily one of the wealthiest in the region- was 'first family' of Miraj, even ahead of that of family of Miraj's former ruler.
But he wore all this lightly. He was probably the only guy who was addressed using his first name without any corruption. That is always 'Abhijit'. Never 'Abhya' or 'Marathya'. (Unlike me who, to my father's irritation, was always 'Kulkya'.)
He was good in studies and, like many of us, obsessed with cricket. When he joined us playing a Sunday game, putting together a cricket gear was never a problem.
His bunglow had a tennis court and a ping pong table. Marathe's also had a decent book library. I sure read a few books there.
Abhijit could be wickedly funny. I remember he would go to a parrot fortune-teller near our school and enquire if he could tell fortune of Abhijit's penis! (I was with him on one such trip.)
In 1974, when I went back to school after a gap of number of days, our class teacher made me stand up and was enquiring where I was. I was fumbling with an answer because I was lying. Abhijit blurted out: He had plague!
The whole class including me was in splits.
Go well, Abhijit.
Launched on Nov 29 2006, now 2,100+ posts...This bilingual blog - 'आन्याची फाटकी पासोडी' in Marathi- is largely a celebration of visual and/or comic ...तुकाराम: "ढेकणासी बाज गड,उतरचढ केवढी"...George Santayana: " Everything in nature is lyrical in its ideal essence, tragic in its fate, and comic in its existence"...William Hazlitt: "Pictures are scattered like stray gifts through the world; and while they remain, earth has yet a little gilding."
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."
