“Two Centuries Ago, A Former European Colony Took It Into Its Head To Catch Up With Europe. It Has

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra & William Shakespeare

Did you know? Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra fought at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), was wounded, captured, imprisoned; he escaped, was enslaved and finally ransomed. Returning to Spain, he worked as an army quartermaster but spent several spells in jail on financial charges. Then, at the age of 58, he wrote the world’s best selling novel, Don Quixote.

In his modest house in Madrid’s Calle de León, Cervantes died on April 23, 1616, perhaps the saddest day in literary history ― for on the same day, the world also lost William Shakespeare.

JNU Violence: JNUSU President Briefs Media Hours After She Was Brutally ...

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REVISITING NATIONALISM - 4

REVISITING NATIONALISM – 4

REVISITING NATIONALISM  – 4       

Prasanna K Choudhary

TWO VIEWPOINTS

The viewpoint that gets manifested prominently in European nationalism seeks to think in terms of absolutely opposing categories, in terms of dichotomies like God vs Satan, Good vs…

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The Brazilian government has strongly rejected suggestions by two U.S. anthropologists that the only way to protect the country’s isolated tribes would be to establish contact with them.

Real life, life finally uncovered and clarified, the only life in consequence lived to the full, is literature. Life in this sense dwells within all ordinary people as much as in the artist. But they do not see it because they are not trying to shed light on it. And so their past is cluttered with countless photographic negatives, which continue to be useless because their intellect has never 'developed' them. Our lives; and the lives of other people, too; because style for a writer, like colour for a painter, is a question not of technique but of vision. It is the revelation, which would be impossible by direct or conscious means, of the qualitative difference in the ways we perceive the world, a difference which, if there were no art, would remain the eternal secret of each individual. It is only through art that we can escape from ourselves and know how another person sees a universe which is not the same as our own and whose landscapes would otherwise have remained as unknown as any there may be on the moon. Thanks to art, instead of seeing only a single world, our own, we see it multiplied, and have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, all more different one from another than those which revolve in infinity and which, centuries after the fire from which their rays emanated has gone out, whether it was called Rembrandt or Vermeer, still send us their special light. This labour of the artist, this attempt to see something different beneath the material, beneath experience, beneath words, is the exact inverse of that which is accomplished within us from minute to minute, as we live our lives heedless of ourselves, by vanity, passion, intellect and habit, when they overlay our true impressions, so as to hide them from us completely, with the repertoire of words, and the practical aims, which we wrongly call life. To put it briefly, this art, complicated though it be, is actually the only art that is alive. .... The work carried out by our vanity, our passion, our imitative faculties, our abstract intelligence, our habits, is the work that art undoes, making us follow a contrary path, in a return to the depths where whatever has really existed lies unrecognized within us. And of course it was very tempting to recreate real life and rejuvenate one's impressions in this way. But it called for all kinds of courage, including emotional courage.

Marcel Proust, 'Finding Time Again'. Translated by Ian Patterson.

अनन्त का छंद - 6

अनन्त का छंद – 6 प्रसन्न कुमार चौधरी ग. ज्ञान 75. इस पूरे प्रकरण में ‘नॉलेज़’ शब्द के लिए ‘जानकारी’ की जगह आम तौर पर प्रचलित ‘ज्ञान’ शब्द का इस्तेमाल किया गया है । वैसे भारतीय चिन्तन परम्परा में ज्ञान का प्रयोग सार्विक भाव के उदय के लिए किया जाता रहा है । यह ज्ञान पूंजी कदापि नहीं हो सकती । इसे हासिल करने की कोई वैज्ञानिक-तार्किक विधि नहीं । इसी तरह जानकार और ज्ञानी में भी फ़र्क किया जाता है…

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“There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one’s idea for thirty-five years; there’s something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever…”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot