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."

Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Setsuko Hara@100

Today June 17 2020 is 100th birth anniversary of Setsuko Hara (1920-2015).
After seeing a Setsuko Hara film, the novelist Endo Shusaku wrote "We would sigh or let out a great breath from the depths of our hearts, for what we felt was precisely this: Can it be possible that there is such a woman in this world?"
In year 2012, I saw two Japanese films  'Late Spring', 1949 and 'Tokyo Story', 1954. Both masterpieces by Yasujiro Ozu, both starring Setsuko Hara.

Watching them was like reading G A Kulkarni's (जी ए कुलकर्णी) 'Kairi' ( कैरी)  one more time. Such tenderness, such lyricality, such beauty, such simplicity and yet very little sentimentality...While I had known GA's story for more than thirty years, where was 'Tokyo Story'?

I am glad I did not 'meet' Ms. Hara at a more impressionable age unlike Ms. Nutan. If I had, I would have madly fallen in love with her, would have lost the sleep for a few days.

Ms. Hara's partnership with  Mr. Ozu reminds me of Nutan's partnership with Bimal Roy.


Setsuko Hara, in Yasujiro Ozu's masterpiece 'Tokyo Story'

Photograph courtesy: the distributor of the film or  the publisher of the film.



In Hrishikesh Mukherjee's Anari, 1959

Image courtesy: Wikipedia

Ms. Hara foreswore the acting profession in 1963 and became a Greta Garbo-like figure. Nutan never did anything like that but she too remained an enigma for me.

They both- June borne- look stunning on B&W screen. While they are there, I look at nothing else. I also notice  a touch of melancholy that goes with an incredible amount of beauty. 

That's what makes them special.
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