Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishra
Pankaj Mishrais an Indian essayist and novelist and a recipient of the 2014 Windham–Campbell Prize for non-fiction...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
CountryIndia
intense promising sameness turns
It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
chinese communist indian life organised presence
Life in a Chinese village is much more organised because the Chinese Communist Party has a presence even in the remotest Chinese village - a presence of the kind that no governmental or non-governmental organisation has in Indian villages.
french greatest
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
authority credited dalai lama leader million national politics religion six spiritual tradition
As the spiritual leader of six million people, the Dalai Lama can be credited with a significant renunciation of the authority of tradition - of the conventional politics of national self-interest as well as of religion.
against consensus energetic given money solid students tactics
To Westerners, the students at Tiananmen may have given an impression of a solid and energetic consensus against dictatorship and for democracy, but they were an egotistical and fractious lot, riven by disagreements over tactics and money.
admired available came cultural exalted foreign great male milieu tried trouble white widely writers
Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
britain century countries early japan populist twentieth weaker
Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism.
admit assume backward break continue cycle deeply religious simpler wars ways
The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
arab democracy dictators fight good human overthrow people president rights spring stand talk themselves wait
The Arab Spring showed that people are not going to wait for an American president to make good on his big talk about democracy and human rights; they are going to fight for those rights themselves and overthrow pro-American dictators who stand in their way.
attracted beijing dreamers early join kong ma order returned square student
Tiananmen Square in early 1989 attracted many dreamers like Ma Jian, who returned from Hong Kong to a one-room shack in Beijing in order to join the student protests.
engaging fiction history point possibly reach review ruins ways
Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.
grew places provincial subject towns
I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra - places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle.
adequate clear compulsory draw education elementary employers include ought provide publicly technical vocational
Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education.
cameron cover elites foreign investors provide surrender tried
Political elites look increasingly interchangeable: Blair, Brown, and Cameron have all tried to provide cover for the surrender of sovereignty to foreign investors with invocations of 'British' values, and, more opportunistically, anti-immigrant rhetoric.