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" If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction. "
Pankaj Mishra
Wisdom
Writing
Your
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" As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. "
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" As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony. "
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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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" 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. "
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" The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats. "
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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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" 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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" 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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Happiness
Political
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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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Done
Capitalism
Trade
" 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. "
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" It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference. "
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Feeling
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Difference
" 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. "
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Like
Dreamers
Student
" 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. "
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World
Find
Free
" 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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Publish
Go
Before
" 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
Ignore
Moral
" The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. "
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Terrorist
Consumption
Capital
" The Indonesian nationalists, mainly Javanese, who threw the Dutch out - in 1949, after a four-year struggle - were keen to preserve their inheritance and emulated the coercion, deceit, and bribery of the colonial rulers. "
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Out
Who
Deceit
" Many writers from the suburbs of history, such as Ireland and Argentina, produced more original work than their counterparts in the United States; they still seem to. "
Pankaj Mishra
Argentina
More
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" Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career. "
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Out
Real
Writing
" 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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Kings
Posing
Business
" 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. "
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Peace
Support
" 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. "
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Health
Education
Government
" 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
" Shallowness and ignorance have been our lot in the mass consumer societies we inhabit, where we were too distracted to act politically, apart from periodically deputing political elites to take life-and-death decisions on our behalf. "
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Decisions
Act
Political
" In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English. "
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Birthday
Before
Essay
" 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
American
People
Good
" The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. "
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House
White House
White
" The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic. "
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Political
Revolution
Enlightenment
" 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. "
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People
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" German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature. "
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Reaction
Literature
Nationalism