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."

Monday, November 01, 2010

Miraj, Where almost everyone seemed to be on my Facebook

Laurie Penny: The tragedy of The Social Network is also the intimate tragedy of an age whose self-alienation has nothing to do with social networking. The paranoid atomisation of modern social relations has, in fact, very little to do with the internet at all. It has everything to do with a global economic machine that trains human beings to understand one another as manipulable objects or faceless consumers. That, unfortunately, is a trend that did not start on Facebook.

Recently, I removed many "friends" from my FB. Not that I had many, either there or in real life, to begin with.

I have removed people meeting following criteria:

1. I already have a meaningful relationship with the person in real life. Facebook doesn't add any value.

2. I had a wholesome relationship with the person in the past but the time and distance have created a barrier, Facebook can't help cross.

3. I have no substantive interaction with the person even in cyber world.

4. I had sent them a friendship request based on some interaction on e-mail. I was hoping to transform those interactions into something more substantial. It didn't happen for many weeks.

5. People who sent me a friendship request because I was in their address book and they thought I was their fan. They have no interest in me whatsoever. All they want is their own promotion.

6. Relatives who are not much interested in me as a person. Or if they are, they got axed because points 1 or 3 above.

Facebook for me now is just a depository of links to what I like on WWW and collating of my interests. People say FB is the future. Maybe. But not for me.

RACHEL MARSDEN: The term friend has been linguistically inflated through social media to the point of having almost no value...Too many people seem to be grasping for ways to connect with others while rarely actually connecting in a way that has true value or significance.

Contrast this with my social life in Miraj where I spent my first 21 years of life. I seemed to know the whole town and the whole town in return seemed to know me.

Miraj was a friend where Facebook would be such a waste. Like a large open sewer that lay about 100m from our house.



Cartoonist/Illustrator: Roger Latham, The Spectator, October 2010
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