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, October 27, 2011

प्रलयकाळी टीरेक्स जाती। तेथे पर्गाटोरियस वाचती ॥Tyrannosaurus Rex goes, Purgatorius lives.

I have been watching Animal Armageddon on Animal Planet this month, October 2011.

First of all it is very humbling. You watch, 65 million years ago, a small mammal Purgatorius, our ancestor, hanging on to her dear life and you realise what all you need to worship in animal kingdom beyond elephants, snakes and cows.

Second I imagine if the likes of Dnyaneshwar (ज्ञानेश्वर), Tukaram (तुकाराम) and Shakespeare knew these extinct animal kingdoms and their annihilation, their imagery would have been even more colourful.

For instance, this is how Tukaram describes the importance of being small (and humble):

तुका म्हणे बरवे जाण| व्हावे ल्हानाहून ल्हान|| महापुरे झाडे जाती| तेथे लव्हाळे वाचती||

(Tuka says become smaller than small. In a deluge trees are washed out but grass survives.)

Tyrannosaurus Rex goes, Purgatorius lives.

As I watched the documentary television miniseries, I realised that, with luck, I would dodge an animal armageddon in my lifetime.

But yesterday, on Laxmi Pujan day, as I heard and saw crackers being burst so savagely around me, I felt many birds and animals must feel that this indeed was the armageddon of their life.

Deep down, even I can't escape that feeling.

My ancestor Purgatorius

Picture courtesy: Wikipedia

p.s. 'प्रलयकाळी' (cataclysm / universal devastation) is one of my favourite Marathi words. Why? Read this.
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