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, June 20, 2011

Will Pigs of Pune Pave its Paths?

"Human stink worse than other animals- While we tend to think of other animals as smelling more unpleasantly than we do, a new study suggests that the truth may actually be the opposite."

('Business Line', February 27 2011)

FT, July 14 2011:

"Pigs at front line in China inflation battle:
Pork prices have risen 57 per cent. Economists say a fall in the cost of the meat could be the key to bringing inflation under control
"

I see so many pigs in our neighbourhood that they keep appearing on this blog often.

Occasionally, I watch them closely. If they were cleaner, I would have probably fondled them.

Recently, I learnt that pigs are far more intelligent than dogs.

Now Carl Sagan's prediction seems more and more likely:

"...Some of the habits of our age will doubtless be considered barbaric by later generations-...or keeping pets; or eating animals and jailing chimpanzees;..."

(“The Dragon in My Garage” from “The Demon-Haunted World” 1996)

And I see not just pigs, but many other species.

In October 2010, I saw an injured donkey limping around for two days, trying to graze on the weeds that grow near road dividers. Third day it was lying dead on the side. And I remembered the story of Saint Eknath (एकनाथ) giving water to a donkey in distress.

Shame on me, I haven't learnt a thing from him.

Pune's roads at the end of rather heavy monsoon 2010 are easily in much better shape than any year since 1999. But as I write early monsoon of 2011 is challenging my contention.

Very soon, I am sure, they will need help. A lot of it.

Kristen Hinman says in The Atlantic:

"How pig manure can pave our streets—and a path to cleaner energy...Enter the executives at Innoventor, a design-build firm based in St. Louis, who, with the help of almost $1 million from the Environmental Protection Agency, have created a contraption that recycles pig waste for road-paving and roofing products. The technology, which Innoventor believes has billion-dollar potential, eliminates the need for manure lagoons and could reduce reliance on fossil fuels...

...The technology passed a milestone in April, when a 300-foot stretch of test pavement went down on a busy Missouri road near a Six Flags amusement park. Lux is confident the road will hold up; he says the binder had to pass more than a dozen lab tests before transportation officials would use it. And no, he doesn’t expect drivers to raise an eyebrow. “I was out there twice on my hands and knees, putting my nose to the pavement,” he swore to me. “The road does not smell.”"

What would pig think about this? "If a Swine could Talk, we could not Understand Him!"

I see in real life arrangements similar to the picture below very often. I enjoy them.


Artist: Carl Rose, The New Yorker, 27 May 1933

But I have yet to see a jenny suckling her baby. Does she envy sow's "happy, happy" motherhood?
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