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" In December 2004, I travelled on the road from Uzbekistan across the Oxus River on which the first Soviet convoys had rolled into Afghanistan 25 years before. "
Pankaj Mishra
Which
River
Road
Related Quotes:
" 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
" An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. "
Pankaj Mishra
Intellectual
Society
Global
" The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic. "
Pankaj Mishra
Political
Revolution
Enlightenment
" Economic disasters or foolish wars are hardly guaranteed to bring about large-scale individual self-examination or renew the appeal of truly participatory democracy. "
Pankaj Mishra
Individual
Democracy
Foolish
" 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
" Though there are laws against blasphemy and insult to religion in many European countries, France has institutionalised its anti-clerical past by proscribing religion from public life. "
Pankaj Mishra
Religion
Insult
Past
" Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. "
Pankaj Mishra
India
Pakistan
Nationalism
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Decisions
Blessed
New
" 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
" 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
Hollywood
Late
Strange
" Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically. "
Pankaj Mishra
Poverty
Masses
Rising
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
World
Find
Free
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
China
Like
Look
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped. "
Pankaj Mishra
Done
Capitalism
Trade
" The Korean War, which China entered on the side of North Korea, fixed Mao's image in the United States as another unappeasable Communist. "
Pankaj Mishra
Communist
War
China
" Ineptitude and negligence directed British policies in India more than any cynical desire to divide and rule, but the British were not above exploiting rivalries. "
Pankaj Mishra
Cynical
More
Divide
" The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual. "
Pankaj Mishra
Age
Information
Intellectual
" 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 started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form. "
Pankaj Mishra
Publish
Go
Before
" 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
" 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
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Like
Dreamers
Student
" Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education. "
Pankaj Mishra
Employees
Roots
Training
" 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
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Reaction
Literature
Nationalism
" 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
" It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference. "
Pankaj Mishra
Feeling
Economic
Difference