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" As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. "
Pankaj Mishra
Century
Early
Forces
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" Many Indians and Israelis seem set to elect, with untroubled consciences, those who speak the language of torturers and terrorists. More disturbingly, these corrupted democracies may increasingly prove the norm rather than the exception. "
Pankaj Mishra
Speak
More
May
" As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination. "
Pankaj Mishra
Beginning
Man
Small
" The cultural decoding that many American writers require has become an even harder task in the age of globalisation. The experience they describe has grown more private; its essential background, the busy larger world, has receded. "
Pankaj Mishra
American
World
Busy
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Communism
Enemy
Moral
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Rise
Thought
India
" For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life. "
Pankaj Mishra
People
Political
World
" I am often struck by the anxious inferiority many well-educated British people display towards the U.S., particularly Londoners dazzled by New York, when many postcolonials are accustomed to regarding Britain's old imperial cosmopolis as the true capital of the western world. "
Pankaj Mishra
True
People
World
" In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty. "
Pankaj Mishra
Isolation
World
Like
" Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe. "
Pankaj Mishra
Speak
Community
Thinking
" If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction. "
Pankaj Mishra
Wisdom
Writing
Your
" Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe. "
Pankaj Mishra
University
More
Rest
" Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. "
Pankaj Mishra
Acts
Best
Criticism
" As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony. "
Pankaj Mishra
Europe
Norms
Universal
" Tanpinar presciently feared that to embrace the western conception of progress was to be mentally enslaved by a whole new epistemology, one that compartmentalised knowledge and concealed an instrumental view of human beings as no more than things to be manipulated. "
Pankaj Mishra
Progress
View
Knowledge
" Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo. "
Pankaj Mishra
Down
Ethical
Foreign Policy
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Health
Education
Government
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Happiness
Political
Power
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Now
People
Strong
" My life was made easy - I lived in a village, and by writing for some newspapers and magazines, had enough to live on. I was happy to be there and write. "
Pankaj Mishra
My Life
Writing
Live
" I think the presence of caste in India, how the villages are geographically structured on caste lines, is very different from China. The presence of an egalitarian culture is striking in a Chinese village. "
Pankaj Mishra
Think
India
Culture
" In the 1950s and 60s, geopolitical intrigues did not much engage masses in Asia and Africa; it was something for elites to sort out. "
Pankaj Mishra
Masses
Much
Engage
" Decolonisation seems to have dented little the sense of superiority that since 1945 has made American leaders in particular consistently underestimate the intensity of nationalist feeling in Asia and Africa. "
Pankaj Mishra
Underestimate
Africa
American
" Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. "
Pankaj Mishra
Wide
Ideas
World
" For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world. "
Pankaj Mishra
Like
Alone
World
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Early
Journalism
Help
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Students
Money
Dictatorship
" Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy. "
Pankaj Mishra
Social Welfare
Growth
Welfare
" The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan. "
Pankaj Mishra
Empire
Still
Politics
" In 1919, at the Paris Peace Conference, Japan had put forward a proposal to guarantee racial equality at the League of Nations, but Woodrow Wilson overturned it in the face of majority support. "
Pankaj Mishra
Forward
Peace
Support
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Life
Party
Presence