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, April 26, 2015

ओ हो हो ! काय अद्भुत सौंदर्य हो !... The Sun on the Ganges...Avalanche on Everest

Of  hundreds of  Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे) cartoons I have seen and loved, this probably is the most moving....



This is from Sarwate's book 'Sawdhan! Pudhe Valan Aahe!' (सावधान! पुढे वळण आहे!), 1990.

It is the second picture from a series of three but for me it stands on its own.

The guy (with a kind of skates) has missed the turn, is airborne and is heading towards a crash. All that is there to save him is the umbrella. In the earlier picture, he has started opening it and in those few seconds has managed to open it.

We (and probably Sarwate) hope he will be able use it like a parachute to land safely. But it's just a hope. Most likely we know how it's going to end.

But meanwhile look at what the guy is saying:

 "ओ हो हो ! काय अद्भुत सौंदर्य हो !" (oh...oh! What an awesome beauty!)

That's the wonder of life on Earth that doesn't end not just in air but even in space.

When I was watching 'Gravity', 2013, I remembered this picture.

The most moving scene for me in the film is when Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) drifts away in the space towards a certain death. 

His final words are:

 "Oh, my God... Wow. Hey, Ryan?...You should see the sun on the Ganges. It's amazing". 

(Watch it on YouTube here.) 


courtesy: Warner Bros

p.s. 

After I finished writing the post, earthquake struck  in Himalayas. The avalanche that resulted. from the quake killed people at Everest. I am sure seconds, minutes, hours before they died, they too would have exclaimed: 'oh...oh! What an awesome beauty!' ('ओ हो हो ! काय अद्भुत सौंदर्य हो !')

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