मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, June 02, 2018

आयझेया बर्लिन आणि राज कपूर यांचा आवरा...Insensitive Isaiah Berlin

आज जुन २ २०१८, राज कपूर यांचा तिसावा स्मृतिदिन

आयझेया बर्लिन (Isaiah Berlin), जे माझे आवडते विचारवंत आणि लेखक आहेत, यांचा उल्लेख या ब्लॉगबर ४-५ वेळा तरी झाला आहे.
बर्लिन आपल्या डिसेंबर २८ १९६१च्या पत्रात ते पंडित नेहरूंबद्दल काय लिहतात पहा.
"Meanwhile, I have been to India – they are very enthusiastic and half-baked and exhausting and Nehru is extraordinary. He knows perfectly well what he is doing: he knows that he applies a double morality, and is not the least ashamed of it; he knows that he is travelling with the Africans and the Asiatics, that Russia is a fellow-traveller, and he thinks on the whole that the West is out. He would like to go more gently than the Chinese, with less massacre, and thinks that his 400 million Indians – a large, soft, pacific, inefficient, heavy mass – will as always absorb all the foreign poisons and work out its own salvation more painlessly, if more chaotically, than the more ruthless and disciplined militarised nations to the East and West of him.
He is tremendously vain, and the fact that the Russians broke through the police cordon at Tashkent and swarmed round him and showed genuine warmth of feeling moved him profoundly, and he has been a friend of the Russians ever since; he similarly adores the Japanese, who showed similar feeling; as for the English, his whole political outlook – the playing by ear, the occasional unscrupulousness, the empiricism, the disdainful reference to Marxism as interesting in the nineteenth century but obviously too crude for us today – all that is very England-derived. He is touchy, he is self-conscious, and like everyone else in the world he wants recognition. There is no doubt that Hegel had the profoundest insight of anyone when he realised [that] what people want more than anything else in the world is to be recognised – whether they are individuals or nations or classes – and that all aggression derives from a wound to that particular craving. When Nehru began speaking of his surprise that some third-rate Indian film had had a wild success in Moscow, where everybody was singing the tunes, his face glowed more than at any other point in our long interview; when the Indians at my conference were told that the Russians esteemed Tagore as one of the greatest poets in the world, that a medal was struck in his honour, and four stamps, and that 60,000 schoolchildren etc., they were far better pleased than by any other single thing which had been said.
The Indians want to be treated as a new exotic culture, whose poets are the best in the world, whose novelists outshine Proust, people who dazzle if they are looked up to, and the whole British connection therefore – and in a sense too much about them is known, they have not been behind a wall like China or Japan or Central Asia, it is a nuisance to them – they would like to start life again.
It is extraordinary to me that anyone should be surprised about Goa (I say, suddenly changing the subject). The thought that Nehru or anyone in Asia believes in rules or principles, even on the ground of expediency, because it is a labour-saving device and likely to produce favourable conditions for development at a lesser price than power politics, must be off his head. Nehru does not seem to me to have the slightest respect for the United Nations, but looks on it as I find myself unconsciously looking at it, as an instrument registering the shifts in the balance of power, and not an entity possessing some kind of deliberative or executive character of its own. Nehru is infinitely sensitive to public opinion, but the public opinion that he recognises is in the first place that of India itself, then Asia, then Africa, then the Iron Curtain countries, and the West hardly at all. Naturally, since America is powerful, it must be kept in with, and he greatly enjoys his encounters with the West – he likes them individually, he is intrigued by them, adores flirting with handsome Western ladies like a Samson who practises brinkmanship with a number of formidable Delilahs, and he loves Western company. Something like Roosevelt – a man who has betrayed his class and has become a popular idol – he delights in his own virtuosity, and has before his eyes constantly the fate of the Kuomintang – an ossified nationalist party which rotted away until it fell before Communism. Hence the extraordinary position of Menon, whom he keeps by his side, not only, I think, because he is tied to him by sentimental bonds, but also in order to prevent himself from selling out or appearing to sell out to comfort, appeasement, respectability, a cosy semi-capitalist regime which, he perfectly realises, means stagnation and ultimately collapse and defeat. At any rate, that is my reading of his complex and peculiar character...."
('Building: Letters 1960-1975')

मला एक गोष्ट आवडली नाही : ... "... some third-rate Indian film had had a wild success in Moscow, where everybody was singing the tunes..."

राज कपूर यांच्या आवरा (Awaara), १९५१ बद्दल लिहतायत बर्लिन... त्यांनी पहिला तरी होता का आवरा ? मग का म्हणतायत ते त्याला third-rate?....

आवारा हूँ  ('Awaara Hoon' ) बद्दल विकिपीडिया लिहत:

“The song was written in the Urdu language by lyricist Shailendra and sung by Mukesh. "Awaara Hoon" immediately struck "a chord in audiences from various classes and backgrounds all over India and beyond: in China, in the Soviet Union, in the Middle East." In China, "both the song and film were said to be Chairman Mao's favourites." In a May 2013 BBC poll, the song was rated the second-greatest Bollywood song of all time.”

नर्गिस आणि राज कपूर , यु एस एस आर , १९५४ 
सौजन्य : युट्यूब