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."

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Indian War of Independence, 1857 and Suez Canal...१८५७च्या भारतीय स्वातंत्र्ययुद्धामुळे सुएझ कॅनॉल घडला

While browsing S. C. Burchell's "The Suez Canal", 2016, I came across this...

"...But a day came when the opposition to the canal received a serious setback. In March 1857, near Calcutta, the disastrous Great Mutiny began. Native troops revolted against the British, and reinforcements had to be rushed to India in order to put down the rebellion. Of course, the only way they could be rushed from England was by ship on the four-month-long voyage around the Cape of Good Hope. It was painfully obvious that a canal through the Isthmus of Suez would have saved countless British lives. As it turned out, the British government was finally forced to beg Said’s permission to send troops through Egypt overland across the isthmus to the Gulf of Suez. English newspapers were quick to see their government’s folly. “Nothing could be a more complete avowal of the utility of M. de Lesseps’ scheme,” said the London Daily News, “and the action of the Government is the implicit condemnation of Lord Palmerston and Lord Stratford de Redcliffe.”

A personal opponent of de Lesseps’s was removed when, because of a general lack of confidence in his government, Lord Palmerston’s cabinet fell in February 1858...."

Look at the situation in 1855:

"...Britain’s powerful navy patrolled the waters from Gibraltar to Alexandria and guarded the sea lanes that led to India around the Cape of Good Hope. Any threat in these two areas was a blow at her heart. And it happened in 1855 that the Frenchman Ferdinand de Lesseps was making such a threat. To Great Britain, the idea of a canal through the Isthmus of Suez was unthinkable. The British had long dominated the route to the Far East around the Cape of Good Hope and were not interested in any change. Moreover, the canal now proposed - the British government felt with some justice - would be monopolized by the French, despite de Lesseps’s insistence that it was to be an international undertaking. If France controlled the canal, British prestige would decline throughout the Middle East. Its Indian empire would be in danger and so, too, would its leadership in trade with the Orient. In the eyes of the British government, the political aspect of a Suez canal was a simple one. De Lesseps had hold of a dangerous idea, and to add to the unpleasantness, he was a Frenchman as well. The British were going to fight, and the first battlefield they chose was Constantinople...."


 cover artist: Dinanath Dalal


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