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 18, 2012

Missing Mr. Bal Thackeray Only As a Cartoonist

Since late afternoon of November 17 2012 all shops- including medical ones- in our area are closed. Today November 18 we could NOT even get any milk in the morning. So far water is running in our taps. But who knows? Yes, we have no choice but to mourn the death. I remember how much I suffered as a bachelor in Mumbai for 3 days after Mrs. Indira Gandhi had died. On that day no Indian radio station was ready to say: Mrs. Gandhi was dead. My cable provider on November 18 blocked all TV channels except the news ones. Great men and women are forced to be mourned alike!


"Mumbai’s communal fault lines were thoroughly exploited by Thackeray and his Sainiks, especially in the weeks after the demolition of the Babri Masjid in December 1992. As the Srikrishna Commission documents, Muslims were systematically killed in riots engineered by Sena leaders."

I do not want to say a word about Mr. Bal Thackeray as a politician but he was a good cartoonist. (Although not a great one in my books.)

I still remember his Marmik (मार्मिक) pictures. They were repetitive but funny. Funniest were of the late  Babu Jagjivan Ram's.




The cover of the late Mr. Thackeray's latest book featuring his cartoons

The only Thackeray- who played a big role in public life- I respect deeply is the late Prabodhankar Thackeray ( प्रबोधनकार ठाकरे),  one of the greatest sons of Maharashtra, indeed  India. I wish Maharashtra walked in his footsteps rather than his son's.

Wikipedia states: "Winston Churchill was an accomplished artist and took great pleasure in painting, especially after his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1915. He found a haven in art to overcome the spells of depression which he suffered throughout his life."

Amartya Sen wrote in Economic & Political Weekly February 16-22, 2008:

“…Winston Churchill’s famous remark that the Bengal famine of 1943 was caused by the tendency of people there to breed like rabbits belongs to this general tradition of blaming the colonial victim. This had a profound effect in crucially delaying famine relief in that disastrous and easily preventable famine. The demands of cultural nationalism merge well with the asymmetry of power and can have quite devastating effects…”

Estimates are that between 1.5 and 4 million people died of starvation, malnutrition and disease in that famine.

Artist: Charles E. Martin, The New Yorker,  6 February 1954

I wish Mr. Churchill did only painting and not politics!

I have yet to see cartoons drawn by others on Mr. Thackeray's departure but they will find it hard to beat Mr. Tailang .


Artist: Sudhir Tailang, The Asian Age, November 18 2012

Mr. Tailang achieves so much in this picture...Mr. Thackeray's first love was a drawing board...so he departs from there and not from his throne...departing paws...not shown in colour here but perhaps red...maybe a slight hesitation before the final leap into darkness...moving...
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