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."

Monday, August 30, 2010

Will Jayant Narlikar One Day Write Marathi Sceptical Essays?

John Gray:"Science fiction was once driven by a faith in human ability to change the world. These days, the genre seeks to expose the illusions of everyday life."

I have enormous respect for Jayant Narlikar (जयंत नारळीकर).

I have most of his Marathi books (a few of them little boring). I read whatever I come across written by him.

He has been a great science popularizer in Marathi and has led a campaign against superstitions and astrology. He has proven himself to be an institution builder and is famous as much for his integrity and honesty as his science.

He is humble and reportedly lives a simple life.

He has appeared on this blog a few times earlier.

Narlikar has started writing for The Asian Age. His first article there appeared on April 28 2010 on the subject of The Large Hadron Collider(LHC).

Narlikar is irritated by the media hype created by LHC and wonders if stands for 'large hype creator'.
He is right. Even Marathi news channels go into tizzy talking about LHC.

Will people in media ever behave differently because of Narlikar's essays?

I have been reading 'Sceptical Essays' by Bertrand Russell. John Gray has written a preface to it.

Gray says of Russell: "...As reformed he believed reason could save the world. As a sceptical follower of Hume he knew reason could never be more than the slave of the passions. Sceptical Essays was written as a defence of rational doubt. Today we read it as a confession of faith, the testament of a crusading rationalist who doubted the power of reason."

(As I said earlier, Vinda's 'Ashtadarshane' (अष्टदर्शने),2003 remains moth-eaten without David Hume.)

Electronic media is a business where passions masquerade as facts. Reason can never trump passions there.

The next question is: Will readers of Narlikar behave differently?

Narlikar has often expressed his unhappiness (disgust?) over continued popularity of pseudoscience of astrology. (At Miraj, where our next door neighbour was an astrologer, I witnessed how even very poor people went to him to seek divine intervention for very complex problems in their lives.)

John Gray says:"...As a sceptical philosopher, Russell knew that science could not make humanity more rational, for science is itself the product of irrational beliefs..."

In Russell's own words:"...The great scandals in the philosophy of science ever since the time of Hume have been causality and induction. We all believe in both, but Hume made it appear that our belief is a blind faith for which no rational ground can be assigned..."

Do those who believe in astrology innately know this?

Not everyone believes in Joseph Conrad's (or G A Kulkarni's जी. ए. कुलकर्णी) sceptical fatalism.

And even if they do, some of them probably still try astrology - like prayer or voodoo- as a last ditch effort to control their fate.

People have always danced to the tune of miracle, mystery and authority. Religion provides them.

And so do many others like LHC.


Artist: Stan Hunt, The New Yorker, July 28 1986
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