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, October 08, 2010

Hope my ancestor was like Uganda's Moses Kipsiro

Should India spend tax payers' money on organising 'expensive' international sports events?

I don't know but I will never forgive Indian media because they tried to kill general public's interest in CWG 2010.

Who in the position of considerable power, in either government or private sector including media, in India is not corrupt? Very few.

History of India is replete with the corruption of its rulers and the civil servants. (Read a post on the subject here.)

Along with this, we have "senseless opportunism and termite greed of the ‘cultured’ strata" (D D Kosambi) and their own filthy logic to justify it.

Therefore, media should have pursued whatever they wanted to without affecting the spirit of games.

But I will not allow this malaise- corruption and media- to kill my interest in life. And hence I am following CWG2010 with as much interest as recently held events like WC football in SA and WC field hockey in Delhi.

My big pay day arrived soon, on the evening on October 6 2010, in the form of men's 5,000m final.

It was run in muggy Delhi evening. It broke no record. And yet I will find it almost impossible to forget it.

These 1.5K, 5K and 10K meter runs are like great games of chess. Read relevant sections from David Wallechinsky's "The Complete Book Of The Olympics".

Kipsiro and Kenya's Kipchoge produced a spectacular final lap where I thought one of them might die.

It was Moses Kipsiro who came out on top.

I kept watching Kipsiro after the race. He made no sound. No triumphalism. He didn't even smile. He just kept jogging along. His face showed almost no feelings. Perhaps like a yogi.


Artist: Peter Arno, The New Yorker, December 10 1927

I: "Hope some one like Moses Kipsiro was my direct ancestor."

p.s. 'Naughty' Peter Arno is easily one of the greatest cartoonists of 20th century. You will find a few of his cartoons on this blog.

I often wonder what pictures he would have drawn in this, for more "naked", century.

Peter, we miss you.
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