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, April 29, 2023

मिस्र पंच...'Abou Naddara'...Twin Sister of 'The Avadh Punch'?


On July 27 2011, I wrote "Shallow People Demand Variety. Even in Cartoon Captions".

Following example illustrates how even cartoons need not be different, just like cartoon captions!

In a wonderful essay 'The Egyptian Satirist Who Inspired a Revolution', Anna Della Subin and Hussein Omar write about James Sanua, founder of 'Abou Naddara', in The New Yorker dated June 6 2016. 

Subin and Omar write:
"...In the three years since Sisi overthrew the democratically elected President Mohamed Morsi in a military coup, public dissent in Egypt has been violently muted. State police have raided newspaper offices, and journalists have been imprisoned, N.G.O.s expelled, and hundreds of suspected activists forcibly “disappeared.” Yet, in April of this year, the streets of Cairo broke out in protest once again when Sisi announced that he had given a pair of islands in the Red Sea to the government of Saudi Arabia. On the surface, the fate of the uninhabited islands would seem to have little impact on the daily lives of Egyptians. But to many observers the news seemed like proof of the hypocrisy of Sisi’s regime. The President himself had amended the constitution to prohibit the country’s ruler from ceding Egyptian territory to foreign powers; the gift of the islands coincided with Saudi Arabia’s promise of an oil deal and $1.5 billion in investment. It was easy to feel as if Sisi were now selling off bits of Egypt to the highest bidder. On April 9th, the exiled satirist Bassem Youssef tweeted in Arabic, “Roll up, roll up, the island is for a billion, the pyramid for two and a couple of statues thrown in for free.”

There is a cartoon from the late nineteenth century that conveys the very same scene. In it, Egypt’s leader sits at a table in front of the Giza Pyramids, wielding an auctioneer’s hammer, as a crowd of interested foreign buyers looks on. “Lovers of antiques, the pyramids and the Sphinx are for sale in cash. The currency is pounds,” he cries. “A la uno, a la due, by God people, bid!”..."


Egypt’s leader auctioning off the Giza Pyramids to a crowd of foreign buyers.

  Artist: I don't know, 'Abou Naddara' (1878-1910), May 30 1879

All this reminded me of India's 'The Avadh Punch' (1877-1912 , 1916-1936). I have written about it on August 26 2007 here.

 Is it just a coincidence that two great magazines dedicated to satire were launched by two great ancient civilizations around the same time?
'Swadeshi movement and the boycott of foreign goods'

 Artist: I don't know, The Avadh Punch, November 16 1905, Courtesy: Niyogi Books

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