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.”
W H Auden: "But in my arms till break of day / Let the living creature lie. / Mortal, guilty, but to me/ The entirely beautiful."
Will Self: “To attempt to write seriously is always, I feel, to fail – the disjunction between my beautifully sonorous, accurate and painfully affecting mental content, and the leaden, halting sentences on the page always seems a dreadful falling short. It is this failure – a ceaseless threnody keening through the writing mind – that dominates my working life, just as an overweening sense of not having loved with enough depth or recklessness or tenderness dominates my personal one.”
John Gray: "Unlike Schopenhauer, who lamented the human lot, Leopardi believed that the best response to life is laughter. What fascinated Schopenhauer, along with many later writers, was Leopardi’s insistence that illusion is necessary to human happiness."
Art Spiegelman: "You know words in a way are hitting you on the left side of your brain, music and visual arts hit on the right side of the brain, so the idea is to pummel you, to send you from left brain to right brain and back until you're as unbalanced as I am."
विलास सारंग: "संदर्भ कुठलेही असोत, संस्कृत, इंग्रजी, बुद्धिवादी, तांत्रिक, इतिहासाचे, खगोलशास्त्राचे, आधुनिक पदार्थविज्ञानाचे, शिवकालीन व पेशवाईतील बखरीचे, अगणित ज्ञानक्षेत्रांचे, अशा वैविध्यपूर्ण ज्ञानावर लेखन- विशेषत: कवितालेखन- उभं राहत."
Saturday, June 13, 2009
USA is lucky though. It still has Bill Maher, Jon Stewart.
I have already regretted the absence of Jon Stewart like figure in Indian media. Read it here.
It was not always like this.
India once had Avadh Punch and Shripad Krishna Kolhatkar श्रीपाद कृष्ण कोल्हटकर.
In USA, Leno did not let American leaders, celebrities, sports persons, media, corporates, murderers, lawyers, judges, doctors, devices, technology, food, clothes, dogs, cats get away with their hypocrisy and pompousness. Like Maher, Leno thought America's most important battle cry was not coming from Iran or Afghanistan but from their kitchens.
I particularly liked his dislike of mobile texting and twitting.
In India, the closest we get to Leno, Maher or Stewart is Cho Ramaswamy. But Cho is 75 years old and hosts no TV program in English or Hindi. (Recently on national news, Cho was at his best explaining tongue-in-cheek why M. Karunanidhi must find a suitable role for his daughter Kanimozhi.)
These days I find 40 year old TV-genic Raj Thackeray playing Cho's role in Marathi for people of Maharashtra.
I don't agree with Thackeray's methods but on many everyday-life issues he talks a lot of sense.
Mr. Thackeray is very fond of political cartoons, particularly the art of David Low but finds no time for his passion. I hope some day Raj Thackeray will host a TV show in Marathi. It will entertain me. And who knows, may further his political career.