i recently participated in a star tv seminar on maharashtra in 2020 . top politicians , top journalists , actors , singers ......and me . lots of impressive statistics floating around about the bright prospects of maharashtra . i said , we know there are three types of lies " lies, damn lies , and statistics " . ( iam quite brave on tv seminars ).I said  rather than self-congratulatory statements about  how Maharashtra is the greatest state in the country, we need to do a SWOT analysis to effectively take the state forward.
 Furthermore, there are two aspects to this. Maharashtra going forward, and maharashtrians going forward. Mutually exhaustive. Maharashtra  will continue to prosper, with or  in spite of maharashtrians. Since this was a function for a marathi  channel, I said let's restrict ourselves to how maharashtrians  will go forward. maharashtrians believe, and rightly so, that we have some of the greatest writers/ and poets/ fine artists/ playwrights/ filmmakers etc .  but then so do Tamil Nadu, kerala , gujarat  and most other states in India. and each state happily lives in, what in Sanskrit is  called,' cupa manduka vrutti' . as long as people in your own state and in your own language know the gems  that we possess, who gives it damn if anybody  else outside your state knows about them or not. all states believe this .  All except Bengal. Today if a ravindrnath thakur or a vivekananda or a ramakrishna  is a household name across India and across the world, it's because Bengal took them  beyond the confines of the state boundary and their own  language. this is not to doubt their greatness,  it is to point out how other states and other languages also had more or less similar great people that are not even heard of outside their states. this is where we need to break the umbilical cord of our mother tongue and take  our great literature,  great writers et al to  the rest of India, in a language that they understand.  how many of us have made the efforts to read gurudev thakur's 's gitanjali in bengai ( p.l. deshpande did .  and how many amongst you, who are non-maharashtrians,  know  who p.l. deshpande is ) .

 case rests .