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, October 03, 2007

Great Sportsperson is all about Courage and Courage is Not a Perfume!

Two chess champions were in the news last week.

Viswanathan Anand became world chess champion on September 29, 2007 and former world chess champion Garry Kasparov-only human never conquered by Anand- decided to run for Russian president on October 1, 2007.

Kasparov’s book “HOW LIFE IMITATES CHESS” was published this year.

The Times Literary Supplement wrote: “…Kasparov is not only the greatest chess player the world has ever seen, he is also the leader of the opposition and the last hope of democracy in Russia. He has been brave enough to defy the man he refers to contemptuously as “a mere lieutenant-colonel in the KGB” with nothing more than his wits to live by. So the game Kasparov is now playing with President Putin is for his life…

He explains that his decision to retire from professional chess in 2005 – still the highest-rated player after two decades – was “largely based on what I saw as the need to join the resistance to the catastrophic expansion of authoritarian state power in my home country”…

Yet this coded manifesto of a book is only the latest sign that his courage at the chessboard has not deserted him in the political arena.”

I gave up playing cricket very early in life because I kept taking my eyes off fast, moving, red, hardball. Therefore, I admire those cricketers most who show fearless attitude on and some times off the sporting arena.

Few Indian names from the hall of courage:

Mohinder Jimmy Amarnath (easily most courageous of them all), Sunil Gavaskar, Anshuman Gaikwad, and Rahul Dravid. They wouldn’t flinch from playing a fastball with their body if they thought otherwise they would nick it with their bat.

Vivian Richards on courage:
“'My first captain (Brian Close) was an inspiration to me. I knew all about him from the 1963 series. How he kept walking down the pitch to Wes Hall and Charlie Griffith in the Lord's Test. Several times Wes had to stop in his run-up to check out what was happening.

'I think I was pretty tough as a youngster. But Closey was tougher still. He reinforced the message that you yield to no one. …..I learnt so much from him - not necessarily about technique but about attitude.

'Man, he was brave. I remember playing against Gloucestershire and Closey was fielding at silly point. Mike Procter leant back and cracked a square cut. The ball hit Closey on the head and ballooned towards Dennis Breakwell. But Dennis watched the man rather than the ball and joined the rush to see if the captain was OK. When he came to Close's first words were "Did we get him?" He was none too pleased to hear that Dennis had failed to complete the catch.

'I was fielding at short leg when Close was playing for England in 1976 at the age of 46…..'Anyway, at Old Trafford, Close got hit in the chest by Wayne Daniel and sank to the floor. OK, I was playing for my country, but this was my skipper on the ground and in pain. So I went up to him. "Are you OK, skipper?" Closey eventually gathered himself together and bellowed "Fuck off." What a man.”



Artist: Helen E. Hokinson The New Yorker May 30, 1942
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Morning’s at Seven, K L Saigal is on the Air and All's Right with the World! Vividh Bharati at Fifty

They say all good things come to an end.

But few of them don’t. Vividh Bharati, for example. It completes 50 years today October 3, 2007.

During my school days at Miraj, 1965-75, Radio Ceylon (I haven’t forgot even a jingle “hey, hey Binaca Green, Binaca Green hey hey..”) occupied haloed place in our lives because we couldn’t quite tune to short-wave Vividh Bharati every day. Signal wasn’t reliable. Except on Sunday afternoons, when a guest star hosted the program Vishesh Jaymala, waves complied.

Radio Australia and BBC were more reliable. (btw- There hasn’t been anything more thrilling, yes including T20 WC, on either TV/radio, than 1975-76 Australia-West Indies test cricket series, heard on RA. India-West Indies 1974-75 was better in cricketing terms but was not as well commentated on and photographed-courtesy Patrick Eagar).

Although Vividh Bharati gives me Browningian reassurance of ‘All's right with the world!’ with K L Saigal number in the morning, the program I best like is Chhayageet at 10 PM.

It calms my nerves and creates hope for the next day. I have this habit of recording favourite but unpossessed song on a tape but when I am listening to Chhayageet, I don’t do it. I just let that moment of bliss prevail. Greed can wait.

10 PM in Pune is a time when noise outside is low, hot summer day is giving in to persistent cool breeze, birds & dogs are quiet, rain is not lashing very hard, cold winter night is still away, all of us have shut up and Vividh Bharati is on a song. Trance is never too far.


Artist: Robert J. Day The New Yorker September 20, 1947
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