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."

Thursday, January 19, 2023

रेडिओ राजकन्या... Indira Devi of Kapurthala: Cinema, War, Driving Ambulances, BBC

 "Maharajkumari Indira Devi (a.k.a. Princess Indee), born in 1912, was the daughter of Maharaja Paramjit Singh and Maharani Brinda of Kapurthala. By all accounts a spirited, intelligent young woman, she left India for Britain in her early 20s to become a movie star. She studied at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London, and worked briefly in the movies, narrating a few films.

After the outbreak of WWII, this feisty young princess successfully passed the St. John Ambulance examination and drove ambulances during air raids! She eventually joined the BBC in 1942, and hosted several series of radio broadcasts in Hindustani for Indian forces stationed in the Middle East. She also became famous for hosting ‘The Debate Continues’- a weekly broadcast to India. For this programme, she reported from the House of Commons, where she was the only woman in the entire press gallery!
Popularly known as the ‘Radio Princess’, she continued to work for the BBC till 1968. She passed away in 1979, in Ibiza, Spain.” 
 
 Picture- dated c. mid 1930s
 
courtesy: Tanveer Kinsey Studios and Mapin Publishing
 
She surely knew Balraj Sahni & his wife…George Orwell knew her well as documented below:
 
"...In other programme series, Orwell drew on members of the expatriate Far Eastern community living in Britain. These included Mulk Raj Anand, who read many of Orwell's broadcasts on the air. Other Indian novelists and essayists, Cedric Dover, Ahmed Ali, Prem Chand, and Narayan Menon among them, represented the "class that the [BBC's] literary broadcasts were aimed at." They discussed subjects like "Race Mixture and World Peace," "The Problems of Cultural Expression," and "The Federal Idea," with the intention of bringing "East and West a little nearer together." Many of the speakers invited by Orwell were women, including Princess Indira of Capurthala and fellow intellectuals such as Inez Holden and Rebecca West..."
(from '"Talking to India": George Orwell's Work at the BBC, 1941-1.943' by Jutta Paczulla)

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