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, February 24, 2018

लाकडी वाघ ठेवून खऱ्या वाघांना मारणारे....Tipu's Three Real Tigers and Arthur Wellesley

खालील तिन्ही उतारे Jon Wilson's "India Conquered: Britain's Raj and the Chaos of Empire", 2016 यांच्या अप्रतिम पुस्तकातून साभार.
“...French craftsmen had built the mechanism inside the famous life-size toy tiger that is now on display in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. The tiger, a symbol of the Mysore regime, has sunk its fangs into the throat of a prostrate European man, and it roars when it bites. Wellesley was worried that France and India would collaborate in more than symbolic craftwork, fearing particularly that the French navy would invade western India from its base at Mauritius to join up with Mysore and drive the British from southern India....”


Tippoo's Tiger, ca. 1793 (made), location: the Victoria andAlbert Museum, UK

 पण या लाकडी वाघाच्या बरोबरीने इंग्रजांना तीन खरे वाघ सापडले होते...
 “...The Company’s armies arrived at Tipu’s capital of Sriringapatam in April. The city survived a month’s siege, but on 2 May the Company managed to blow a series of big holes in the walls of the fort and then, over the next two days, fought their way into the city. Tipu was seen shooting from the battlements with hunting rifles, but was killed in the fighting, his still warm body later found in a room full of corpses. Inside the palace, soldiers found Tipu’s mechanical tiger, and three of the real beasts, caged and starving.
Arthur Wellesley was appointed military governor of Tipu’s lands. His first act was to shoot the tigers: ‘[T]here is no food for them, and nobody to attend them, and they are getting violent.’...”

दुसऱ्या महायुद्धात ज्यावेळी जपानचा मद्रास वर हल्ला होणार असे वाटत होते....
"... In Madras, the prospect of invasion seemed so imminent that government offices were moved to towns scattered throughout the interior, and the big cats in the city’s zoo killed to stop them rampaging after the inevitable attack. When the city’s Indian chief officer complained that ‘everyone seemed to have lost their head’, the British chief of police sent a platoon to the zoo who ‘ruthlessly did their job in minutes’. By the middle of 1942, the government was drawing up plans to retreat from India and lead the fighting against Japan from Australia. Indians withdrew their savings from British-run banks and could not even trust paper money so started to collect small coins..."


Artist: Joe Dator, The New Yorker, 2017

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