मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि 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: "… . . 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Ian Chappell, Isn't this a kinda Tampa?

I always suspected that many Australians were racial. The way many Indians are casteist.

Sure, the official Indian delegation again blocked all mention of caste at the UN conference against racism in Durban in April 2009. But we all know they are the same.

e-Media in India are reporting every single violence against any non-white immigrant in Australia. The Asian Age reports on June 3, 2009: “Crimes against Dalits on the rise across country. A total of 06,942 incidents of murder, rape and other crimes were reported in 2008 in UP.”

Let us leave India out at the moment.

Will Australians stand up against this hate in their country?

I am counting on Ian Chappell, the best cricket commentator by some distance for my taste.

In Ashley Mallett’s book “Chappelli Speaks Out” (2005), there is a chapter titled “Tampa and the 1968 Australians.” It talks about Chappell’s involvement in social causes such as the campaign against refugee detention centres.

IAN CHAPPELL on Tampa:

“Anyhow, I'm living this reasonably quiet life and suddenly the 'Tampa' crisis had blown up. I'm sitting there in front of the television news and watching all those people on the 'Tampa', and I'm thinking, "This is terrible. "No matter what you think about protecting the Australian borders, these are human beings and you can't just treat them like that .I was getting really angry.

The games that I've played in my life are very good tutors in teaching you what is fair and what is unfair. And that was offended by what I saw with the Tampa crisis. I just thought, That's not fair. In cricketing parlance, it was like cheating -that I felt that those people, the refugees, were being cheated out of a fair go. Anyhow, I'm railing at the television set, and my wife, Barbara-Ann, she said, You know, bad things happen when good people do nothing. And that sort of jolted me a little bit. I thought, "I'm not gonna do a lot of good sitting railing at the television set…”



Artist: Sudhir Tailang, The Asian Age, June 2 2009