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, June 27, 2013

A Sacred Geography? Maybe. A Sacred Geology?

Will Durant:

"Civilization exists by geologic consent, subject to change without notice."


Norman Mailer:

"Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it."

बा सी मर्ढेकर (B S Mardhekar):

"असशील जेथे तिथे रहा तू,
हा इथला मज पुरे फवारा !"


I bought much praised, best-seller in India, Diana L. Eck's "India A Sacred Geography", 2012 in January 2013.


I did not find it very exciting unlike Wendy Doniger's "The Hindus: An Alternative History", 2009. I thumbed through it and since then it remained on "to read" list.

Last night I went through its index for Kedarnath. It appears most between pages 226-33.

I read those pages. Not an inkling it gives that "June 2013" might happen there one day.

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe I think so today. Maybe such things have happened in the past but have gone unrecorded. Maybe I am having a stroke of  'cemetery-reclusion' (स्मशान वैराग्य) after reading and watching about the disaster...But  as long as I live, I will always associate Kedarnath more with the colossal tragedy that took place in June 2013 than Lord Shiva's abode,,,




                                          Kedarnath Temple in the high Himalayas

courtesy: Diana L. Eck's "India A Sacred Geography"

The book ends with these words:

"...We began this journey in Kāshī, often said to be preeminent among those places where one who has come to the end of this life can find liberation, crossing over to the far shore of immortality. As Shiva shows his beloved city to the goddess Pārvatī, he compares the city to a ferry boat, exclaiming:

Look dear! Look at Kāshī, a boat stretched out for the crossing …a boat not of wood and iron, but the light of illumination for all the people it ferries across the sea of  life.
And yet, in exploring the sacred geography of India more widely, we have learned that one might board this boat for the great crossing-beyond at any of the seven tīrthas of India said to be mokshadāyaka, “bestowers of liberation.” But even more—the claim to a crossing inheres in the very notion of a tīrtha. While the tīrtha may ferry one over the trials and tribulations of earthly life, the tīrtha is finally a ferry to help one cross over from the entanglement of repeated birth and death to the freedom of liberation. One just might board that boat anywhere. Taking a pilgrim journey to a distant place may be a necessary discipline, but not because the nearby place is not also a crossing. Tīrthas are plentiful—where the rivers meet, where the hill rises, where the temple flag waves. The south Indian poet Dasimayya writes that for the one who is truly awake to the reality of Shiva, “his own front yard is the true Banāras.” And the tīrtha just might be closer still. Lalla, a fourteenth-century devotional poet from Kashmir, wrote: “I, Lalla, went out far in search of Shiva, the omnipresent lord; having wandered, I found him in my own body, sitting in his house.”..."

Why should I go for "chardham" pilgrimage when he is sitting in his house? And even if he is not, as poet  B S Mardhekar says in the quote at the top: You stay where you are, for me sprinkling here will do !
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