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."

Friday, June 08, 2018

Anthony Bourdain On Rice Culture

#AnthonyBourdainDead

Recycling my post dated October 10 2014

Today October 10 2014 is 77th Birth Anniversary of my rice-manipulated mother.

 Richard Klein:
"...Broadly put, neo-Epicureans suppose not only that you are what you eat, but that you think what you eat. Take German idealism, says Nietzsche. It has the leaden consistency and gaseous redolence of a diet thick with potatoes. Italian thought, one might add, is marked by the slippery texture and doughy blandness of pasta. Jewish metaphysics has the astringency and smoky intensity of briny pickles and cured fish. The indistinctness of Buddhist thought resembles white rice..."

Jared Diamond:
"Today just three high-carbohydrate plants –wheat, rice, and corn– provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life."


Yuval Noah Harari, ‘Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind’, 2014:

“…The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return. The Agricultural Revolution was history’s biggest fraud.

Who was responsible? Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants. The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice and potatoes. These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.

Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat. Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East. Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world. According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth. In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of kilometers without encountering any other plant. Worldwide, wheat covers about 2.25 million square kilometers of the globe’s surface, almost ten times the size of Britain. How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?

Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage...”
 
It was not wheat but rice that manipulated my Konkan-born Chitpavan-brahmin mother and her family. Thanks to her,  rice is my favourite food too.

Curd-rice (दहीभात) is  my ultimate comfort food. Some times even just a thought of eating it is quite soothing!

When we lived in Miraj, I felt little shy to admit it because rice-eating then was considered 'sissy' in Western Maharashtra. Eating jowar (Sorghum) bread was considered manly.

Later in life I realised, rice is eaten far more than jowar across the world and a lot of guys who eat them are as tough as they come.


It was interesting to read Anthony Bourdain on the subject of rice culture.
"...His love of the simple beauty of rice culture is a deep one. He loves Vietnam and Cambodia, for instance. He’s even gone so far as to have sit-downs with former Vietcong and Khmer Rouge Cambodians.

“This weekend I’m heading off for Vietnam. Love it. First love. It’s f--king beautiful. Any rice culture is beautiful.”

Any rice culture?

“It’s super-intricate. Just the irrigation systems, the level of cooperation with your neighbors. You need to manipulate the water levels, every little thing. Rice has something magical about it. Rice is an explanation for everything.” It dawned on me that “rice culture” embodies his celebration of communal work one finds all the way back in Kitchen Confidential..." 

('Anthony Bourdain’s Theory on the Foodie Revolution', Smithsonian Magazine, July 2014)

Does that explain a lot of why South India is distinct from the West? Why haven't I  read anything like this in Marathi on the subject of  rice culture?


Artist: Leo Cullum, The New Yorker, 25 November 1991

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एडवर्ड गोरी, प्रभाकर गोरे, जीए.....Gorey and Goray and GA

सदानंद रेगे:
"... बुकजॅकेटमध्ये अक्षरशः त्याने (प्रभाकर गोरे) क्रांतीच केली. आज जे बुकजॅकेटच स्वरूप आहे ते गोऱ्यामुळेच आहे, हे तुम्हाला कबूल  करावं लागेल. हे दलाल आणि मुळगावकर यांच्यामुळे नाही. दलालमुळगावकर हे गुळगुळीत चित्र काढीत असत. पण जे काही चैतन्य आलं त्या क्षेत्रामध्ये ते सगळं गोरेमुळं आलं. पण गोरे हा तसा अतिशय स्मार्ट मनुष्य होता. उत्तम वाचक होता. अनेक प्रकारची अनेक विषयांवरची पुस्तक... विविध विषयात त्याला रस होता. शेवटी शेवटी होमिओपाथी, नंतर रंगाद्वारे रोग बरे करणे इथपर्यंत त्याच प्रकरण गेलं होत. त्यामुळे तो अतिशय हुशार मनुष्य होता. साहित्यातील त्याला अचूक काही कळत असे. कोण काय लिहतो कसं लिहितो..." (पृष्ठ ८३, 'अक्षर गंधर्व: सदानंद रेगे', १९८७)    

एडवर्ड गोरी (Edward Gorey) १९२५-२००० या लेखक-चित्रकारावरती लेख एप्रिल २०१८मध्ये वाचला आणि त्यांचेच आडनाव असलेले , त्यांच्या इतकेच प्रतिभावान  प्रभाकर गोरे आठवले..... आता प्रभाकर गोरेंच्या बरोबर जीए नेहमीच आठवतात.... त्याबरोबर त्यांचा 'प्रवासी'....आणि हा पहा एडवर्ड गोरी यांचा भटक्या.... 'प्रवासी'...


आणि ही पहा प्रभाकर गोरेंची काही मुखपृष्ठ....

"... ह्या पुस्तकांच्या चित्रांतून गोरे जीएंवर भाष्य करत होता...." ('जिगसॉ', रामदास भटकळ, पृष्ठ ९२, १९९७/ १९९८)

अर्थात एक लक्षात ठेवा: "... जीएंना ही चित्र फारशी आवडलेली नव्हती..." ! (वरील पुस्तकातच तसा उल्लेख आहे.)

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