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."

Sunday, November 06, 2011

Dileep Pardeshi- When Marathi Language Teacher was a Hero to Middle Class

Anon:

"Can't believe we officially have 7 billion people on Earth...yet the top news is Kim Kardashian's marriage"

Stephen Marche:

"Celebrities are not appendages of our society anymore; they are the basis of our communal lives. Literature and architecture, art and politics, are at most sidelights—small, ancient alleyways down which fewer and fewer minds wander. Pop culture has long since left the word culture behind to become the primary way we understand the world."

Pauline Kael:

“When we championed trash culture, we had no idea it would become the only culture.”

Marathi writer Dileep Pardeshi (दिलीप परदेशी) died recently.

He taught higher Marathi at division A on ground floor of Class 12th Science at Willingdon College, Sangli in year 1976-77.

I was in division B on first floor and I don't remember who taught Marathi to us because I bunked most Marathi periods! But I used to hear about his teaching from my friends in division A. Almost no one bunked his class.

Today I miss Pardeshi-sir and so should all those who love Marathi literature because he certainly created love for Mararthi literature among his pupils, many of them just 16-year old studying science and aiming to become engineers and doctors.

As I write this, he reminds me of a long-lost era when a 'mere' teacher of Marathi language was a hero to a large number of middle class students.

And the fact that he dressed stylishly and, if I remember correctly, kept fairly long hair added to his appeal.

A lot of his students, including many pretty girls, from classes 12th to Master of Arts doted on him. (And boy, didn't we feel jealous?)

Does this happen these days in our ad-backed celebrity hell also known as Marathi urban midddle-class popular culture? I doubt.

I have not read his single book in entirety and never thought much of him as a writer. I never tried to meet him even after I (probably) topped the college in Marathi that year beating 12th arts students.

He was a great fan of G A Kulkarni (जी ए कुलकर्णी). (Who wasn't then?)

Here is a letter by him to G A:

courtesy: "Priya Jee E Sa. Na. Vi. Vi.", 1994 (प्रिय जी. ए. स. न. वि. वि.) edited by G A Kulkarni's cousin-sister Ms. Nanda Paithankar (नंदा पैठणकर)
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