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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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Feeling
Economic
Difference
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" Indonesia's diversity is formidable: some thirteen and a half thousand islands, two hundred and fifty million people, around three hundred and sixty ethnic groups, and more than seven hundred languages. "
Pankaj Mishra
Diversity
Two
Three
" 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
" 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
Economic
More
Political
" 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
" 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
Think
You
World
" 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
" Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance. "
Pankaj Mishra
Acts
Best
Criticism
" 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
" 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
" 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
Segregation
Political
Home
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Audience
" 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
" 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
" National independence, and the preceding political struggles, helped create the space for literary creation in many post-colonial countries. Much of modern Indian or Chinese literature is inconceivable without the political movement for freedom from foreign rule. "
Pankaj Mishra
Freedom
Independence
Political
" 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
" 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
Work
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
American
Late
White
" '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
Party
Meaningless
Everything
" 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
" 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
" As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony. "
Pankaj Mishra
Europe
Norms
Universal
" 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
" 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
" My dominant feeling every day is one of great ignorance. "
Pankaj Mishra
Feeling
Great
Ignorance
" Force-backed humanitarianism, which relies on rational influence over events in other countries, may have been a more feasible project in the bipolar era of the Cold War, with its relatively defined and stable web of alliances and proxies. "
Pankaj Mishra
Project
War
Influence