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" If you think of India in the 1980s, there weren't many writers in English around. The ones that were there, Amitav Ghosh or Vikram Seth, were living abroad or publishing from abroad. "
Pankaj Mishra
Think
You
Living
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" 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. "
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" 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. "
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" Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained. "
Pankaj Mishra
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" Though blessed with many able administrators, the British found India just too large and diverse to handle. Many of their decisions stoked Hindu-Muslim tensions, imposing sharp new religious-political identities on Indians. "
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" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
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" Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy. "
Pankaj Mishra
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Welfare
" The Dalai Lama can claim the sanction of the Buddha, who is said to have altered his teachings in order to reach a diverse audience. "
Pankaj Mishra
Said
Claim
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" The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. "
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Communist
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China
" 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
" In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. "
Pankaj Mishra
Integration
Everywhere
Economic
" 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. "
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World
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" 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
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" 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
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India
Culture
" After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. "
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Century
India
Emerge
" After the oil crisis of 1973, many European countries tightened restrictions on immigrants. By then, millions of Muslims had decided to settle in Europe, preferring the social segregation and racial discrimination they found in the West to political and economic turmoil at home. "
Pankaj Mishra
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Home
" Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination. "
Pankaj Mishra
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" '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. "
Pankaj Mishra
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Meaningless
Everything
" Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe. "
Pankaj Mishra
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" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
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People
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" As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories. "
Pankaj Mishra
Famous
Used
Who
" 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. "
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Man
Small
" 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
" Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. "
Pankaj Mishra
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Criticism
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Educated
Young
Leaving
" As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. "
Pankaj Mishra
Century
Early
Forces
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Kings
Posing
Business
" The clash of civilizations or the clash between Islam and the West may be cliches. But there is an even bigger cliche around: that this clash actually goes on within Islam, between reformists and fanatics. "
Pankaj Mishra
West
Within
Bigger
" A free and rooted society ought to consist of a web of moral obligations. We have the right to ignore them, but we ought to be actually obliged not to let other people starve or to let them lapse into destitution. "
Pankaj Mishra
Free
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" It's strange to recall that America animated none of my youthful daydreams. I did not see a Hollywood film until my late teens. "
Pankaj Mishra
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Late
Strange
" Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career. "
Pankaj Mishra
Out
Real
Writing