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" 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

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Knowledge

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" The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. "

" Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. "

" 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. "

" I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary. "

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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. "

" 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

Look

" Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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

Dreamers

Student

" If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction. "

" Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained. "

" As in the early 20th century, the elemental forces of globalisation have unravelled broad solidarities and loyalties. "

" 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. "

" 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

Political

" It should be no surprise that religion in the non-western world has failed to disappear under the juggernaut of industrial capitalism, or that liberal democracy finds its most dedicated saboteurs among the new middle classes. "

" An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career. "

" 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. "

" 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

May

" 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. "

" 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. "

Pankaj Mishra

Political

Rhetoric

" Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe. "

Pankaj Mishra

University

Rest

" 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. "

" 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. "