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
achieved austere china communist economic education government health india less public realm strikes visitor
Just as China achieved much more than India in the realm of public health and education under an austere Communist regime, so its economic growth under a capitalist-friendly government strikes a visitor from India as nothing less than spectacular.
achieve economic enhanced europe greater happiness helps military national origins power rapid successes western
The idea that modernisation makes for enhanced national power and rapid progress and helps everyone achieve greater happiness has its origins in the astonishing political, economic and military successes of western Europe in the 19th century.
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The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962.
al broad including itself mainstream nearly western
'Islamism' itself is such a broad and nearly meaningless word as used by the mainstream Western press, including everything from Turkey's AKP party to al Qaeda.
across british former humiliated larger success
Britain's unique success as an industrialised nation-state prompted strong imitative endeavours not only across Europe, but also in Asia. Now many people, who were once humiliated into a sense of nationality by British rule, loom larger than their former masters.
disrupted
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption.
clear cold determined discourse featured moral rhetoric rule shaped war western worldview
So much of western self-perception and intellectual worldview has been shaped by the moral rhetoric of the Cold War, the discourse in which communism featured as a clear enemy, determined to rule the world.
comforts educated greater men passed poorly seek visits witnessed
As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi.
artificial commanding compared countries iran iraq popular rebuild stable state structures thailand wholly
Countries that managed to rebuild commanding state structures after popular nationalist revolutions - such as China, Vietnam, and Iran - look stable and cohesive when compared with a traditional monarchy such as Thailand or wholly artificial nation-states like Iraq and Syria.
birthday wrote
In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.
wisdom
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.
fully intend novelist novels several
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
languages marx national rather trade
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.
attempted brought education given initially
Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.