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."

Wednesday, November 20, 2013

In Search of Lost Food...उदाहरणार्थ अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे



...Past, present and future are not checkpoints, but porous membranes where one tense washes into another.
Time is ruthless and deadly, living is all loss, and the paradox of memory is that it gives you back what you had on condition that you know it has been lost. To regain it, you need to know it has gone; to remake the world, you need first to understand that it has ended. HG Wells had published The Time Machine in 1895. Proust showed that we are the Time Machines, though we are rarely at the controls..."





"...“Indians want to be treated as a new exotic culture, whose poets are the best in the world, whose novelists outshine Proust” he tells a correspondent, whereas, in fact, they are “half-baked and exhausting”: there is “no intellectual bite, no firmness, no toughness at all”. And he concludes on this note: “If real social justice and rationalisation ever come to India it will be through some spellbinder whom people won’t bother to resist and under whose spell they will enjoy falling.”..."

Whatever else you take from the quotes above, Marcel Proust is a literary benchmark and year 2013 is 100th anniversary of arguably one of the greatest (and the longest?) novels of all time: Proust's 'In Search of Lost Time'.  


It is in seven volumes, running 4215 pages! I own one volume and haven't read even a page from it.

(The earlier English translation of the book was titled  'Remembrance of Things Past' )



Artist: Edward Frascino, The New Yorker, 1 April 1972 

(Here is an example, dated October 18 2007, from this blog, of a cartoonist targeting Leo Tolstoy's 'War and Peace' for its length, 1225 pages.)

Proust is little known to Marathi speaking world, including me. I haven't read him either in French or English. I don't think he is available in Marathi.

And I don't know if I will ever know him too but when I can't read a book I try to read about it. 

I liked what Ian Jack had to say in 'The Guardian' in November 2013: "What of all the vanished foods we can never taste again?":

"Marcel Proust's narrator took a little piece of sponge cake and dipped it into a spoonful of tea. "No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me," Proust wrote in Swann's Way, as translated by CK Scott Moncrieff. The extraordinary thing was an involuntary memory. We know how the story goes, though Proust takes his time in telling it. Many sentences follow, and then: "The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray … my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane." Out of this sensation comes the "vast structure of recollection" that taste and smell alone can provide "when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered … "
But what if the tastes and smells of the previous age no longer existed?..."

There are quite a few food items (almost) no longer available to a typical Marathi middle class person.

Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar's (1871-1934 श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर)  book 'Sudamyache Pohe'  (सुदाम्याचे पोहे) - for me one of the greatest prose in Marathi- was first published in 1910. 

It has a wonderfully funny essay : 'Pandutatyanchi Nirjali Ekadashi' (पांडुतात्यांची निर्जळी एकादशी)- 'Pandutatya's water-less fasting day'.

It makes merciless fun of what all some Marathi speaking middle-class (most of them Brahmins) people ate (and still do) on the fasting day in the name of religion. 



courtesy: 'सुदाम्याचे  निवडलेले पोहे' (abridged 'sudamyache pohe'), Varada Prakashan (वरदा प्रकाशन)

After reading the essay, I realised that quite a few fit-for-fasting delicacies listed there- captured in the quotation above-  have never been tasted, or even seen,  by me and probably never will be.
  
The title of the book, at the time of its first publication, was "Arthat Athara Dhanyanche Kadbole"  (अर्थात अठरा धान्यांचे कडबोळे).  I loosely translate it as "meaning pretzel / cracker made from eighteen grains"....Have I tasted or seen such a snack ever? NO!

[The third edition, published in 1923, and later editions of the book came with the subtitle of 'Arthat Sahitya Battishi' (अर्थात साहित्य बत्तिशी)]




                                                          Shripad Krushna Kolhatkar

courtesy: 'Bahurupi' (बहुरूपी), 1957 by Chintaman Ganesh Kolhatkar (चिंतामण गणेश कोल्हटकर)