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."

Tuesday, August 07, 2012

Lions and Horses at Fence 11, Nelson's Column at London 2012

Joseph Brodsky:

… should the truth about the world exist, it’s bound to be nonhuman.


Joseph Conrad:

...even if a man has taken to flying- a great uplift, no doubt, but no great change. He doesn’t fly like an eagle; he flies like a beetle. And you must have noticed how ugly, ridiculos, and fatuous is the flight of a beetel.

At London 2012 each of the 12 obstacles used for the equestrain events pays homage to an important landmark or historical note.

At one of them, fence 11, Nelson's Column, pictured below, four bronze lions flank the base of the monument.

courtesy: http://cs.thehorse.com

I was little surprised by the choice of lions.

Wouldn't that scare off the horses?

Or will the lions get bored? And if they do, would they behave the way they do in the cartoon- one of the best I have seen- below?


Artist: Vasant Sarwate (वसंत सरवटे )

Sarwate has this to say about his cartoon:

"The picture of inanimate statues of lions on a gate springing to life and jumping at each other, presumably to relieve boredom, looking at each other and scenery around, nonstop for years and years, induces a spontaneous laughter in us. The unexpectedness of the happening tickles us at a first glance. After enjoying this momentary amusement, a second thought enters our mind and suggests a non humorous human dimension to the incident. Is it not the kind of response we human beings sometimes adopt, without much thought, and seek a change, just a change to overcome boredom and land in another situation even more boring? The lions have gone through similar experience and found to their regret that jumping has not improved the situation!"