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."

Saturday, July 21, 2012

Why Dnyaneshwar Would Shudder at Diogenes's Gesture!

Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, 'Freedom at Midnight', 1975, page- 378:

"On both sides of the border a man's sexual organ became, in the truest sense, his staff of life."

Wikipedia says:

"In Western culture, the finger (as in giving someone the finger or the bird), also known as the middle finger or flipping someone off, is an obscene hand gesture, often meaning the phrases "fuck off" ("screw off"), "fuck you" ("screw you") or "up yours". It is performed by showing the back of a closed fist that has only the middle finger extended upwards..."

New Trump building West side shore, in shape of obscene gesture

Artist: Tom Hachtman, The New Yorker, 20 Sept 1999

Now, it is not just Western culture alone anymore! In following pictures of the finger giving or flipping the bird, two out of three are Indians.

Anthropologist "watching" Desmond Morris- who once was a best seller writer even in India- says of the gesture: "It's one of the most ancient insult gestures known. The middle finger is the penis and the curled fingers on either side are the testicles. By doing it, you are offering someone a phallic gesture. It is saying, 'This is a phallus' that you're offering to people, which is a very primeval display.".

Why is it also called "flipping the bird?"

Stuart Jeffries writes in The Guardian, Feb 22 2012: "The charmingly unreliable Urban Dictionary argues that "flipping the bird" is "the process of taking a bird, normally a pigeon, and turning it upside down in an effort to see its genitalia"".

One of the UK's best known body language experts Robert Phipps says:

"The cultural difference in this is that flipping the bird over in US is like the V sign over here, It's telling you to eff off. They don't have any other gesture like that. Over here it's become quite accepted and doesn't carry the same meaning. Most people under the age of 50 don't find it offensive. It didn't even exist in this country until about 30 years ago."

Does "finger" gesture exist even today in non-metro India? I am not sure.

In Miraj (मिरज), where I grew up, I heard probably some of the foulest Marathi (मराठी) spoken ever.

[I have travelled all over India and lived in the East and the South and I wonder if any spoken Indian language gets as vulgar as Marathi does at times in Western Maharashtra!

But remember what Vinoba Bhave (विनोबा भावे) has said: "सबंध ज्ञानेश्वरीमध्ये तुम्हाला एकही कठोर शब्द सापडणार नाही...आमच्या साहित्याच्या उगमस्थानी इतके मार्दव आहे ही फार मोठी आनंदाची गोष्ट आहे..."

("You will not find a single hard word in the entire Dnyaneshwari...such tenderness lies at the beginning of our literature is a matter of great happiness...")]

My young friend and fellow Mirajite Nikhil Bellarykar (निखिल बेल्लारीकर) has recommended me following book. Its title is "Vulgar Sayings and expressions in the Marathi language" ("मराठी भाषेतील असभ्य म्हणी आणि वाक्प्रचार") by A D Marathe (अ द मराठे).

I may buy it but I wonder if it has anything I already don't know!

In Miraj I also saw a few lewd gestures often. The popular ones were:

1) Close all the fingers of right hand together, hold one's right wrist with left hand, hold the right arm parallel over the ground, swing the right hand up and down.

It sure said: "This is a phallus".

2) Extend the middle finger of the right hand, don't close the other fingers, hold the right arm perpendicular to the ground and then move the right arm in horizontal movement.

Once again it said for sure "This is a phallus".

Note that the 2) above is different from "showing the back of a closed fist that has only the middle finger extended upwards".

Stuart Jeffries: "In Gestures: Their Origins and Distribution, anthropologist Desmond Morris and colleagues argue that the digitus infamis or digitus impudicus (infamous or indecent finger) is mentioned several times in ancient Roman literature...Before that, in Athens in the fourth century BC, Diogenes the Cynic told visitors what he thought about the orator Demosthenes by extending his finger and saying: "This is the great demagogue." ...As early as 1886, a baseball pitcher for the Boston Beaneaters was photographed giving it to a member of the rival New York Giants..."

So even Diogenes gave the finger.

Virat Kohli, India's newly crowned ODI Cricket Vice-Captain in January 2012

Mr. Narendra Mohan, son of the then Mumbai Congress chief Mr. Kripashankar Singh in February 2012
courtesy: The Times of India

Adele shows her displeasure at the Brit awards by giving the finger to 'the suits' in Feb 2012
Photograph courtesy: Yui Mok/PA and Guardian, UK

Indian Field Hockey player S V Sunil, who scored unforgettable peach of a goal against Pakistan in Azlan Shah Cup May/June 2012, was reprimanded but escaped a ban for showing his middle finger to spectators after scoring the match-winner.
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