Peter Frankopan: “...This region is where the world’s great
religions burst into life, where Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and
Hinduism jostled with each other. It is the cauldron where language groups
competed, where Indo-European, Semitic and Sino-Tibetan tongues wagged
alongside those speaking Altaic, Turkic and Caucasian. This is where great
empires rose and fell, where the after-effects of clashes between cultures and
rivals were felt thousands of miles away. Standing here opened up new ways to
view the past and showed a world that was profoundly interconnected, where what
happened on one continent had an impact on another, where the after-shocks of
what happened on the steppes of Central Asia could be felt in North Africa,
where events in Baghdad resonated in Scandinavia, where discoveries in the
Americas altered the prices of goods in China and led to a surge in demand in
the horse markets of northern India....” (The Silk Roads: A New History of the
World, २०१५)
मध्यमवर्गीय लोकांचा अलीकडे एकत्र भेटल्यावर बोलण्याचा एक आवडता विषय म्हणजे - मोटारगाड्या... (मला मोटार चालवता येत नाही आणि लहानपणापासून त्याबाबदल आवडत नाही. बसायला आवडते.)
आता कल्पना करा घोडा हा १७-२०व्या शतकात महाराष्ट्रात किती लोकप्रिय बोलण्याचा विषय असेल ते... मी २०व्या पासून लिहल्या गेलेल्या खूप मराठी ऐतिहासिक कादंबऱ्या वाचल्या नसतील, पण मी ज्या वाचल्यात, त्या कोणत्याही कादंबरीत घोड्यावरती दीर्घ, सूक्ष्म , समाधानकारक असे मला काही आढळलेले नाही ....
