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
french greatest
The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.
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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.
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My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance.
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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.
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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.
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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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Thomas Friedman's 'The World is Flat' sold more copies in India than in the U.K. The market for go-getting business books or wonkish tomes by corporate moguls posing as philosopher kings has grown dramatically in modernising China and India.
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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.
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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.
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Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.
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Gandhi, brought out of his semirural setting and given a Western-style education, initially attempted to become more English than the English.
experience wide
Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world.
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Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.