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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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Educated
Young
Leaving
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" Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically. "
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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. "
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" I grew up in small towns in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra - places like Akola, Betul, Wardha, Jhansi; I thought the rise of provincial India would be an interesting subject to tackle. "
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" The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption. "
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" For boys like me, in north Indian railway towns in the '70s and '80s, where nothing much happened apart from the arrival and departure of trains from big cities, the Soviet Union alone appeared to promise an escape from our limited, dusty world. "
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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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" In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else. "
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" 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. "
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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. "
Pankaj Mishra
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" 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. "
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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
" 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
" As an Indian, you feel easily connected with certain histories in places like Indonesia, where one sees, because of the presence of the Hindu-Buddhist past, Hindus still living there or Muslims performing rituals that are instantly familiar. "
Pankaj Mishra
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You
Past
" 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
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" 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
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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. "
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" 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
" 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
" After India and China, Indonesia was the biggest new nation-state to emerge in the mid-twentieth century. "
Pankaj Mishra
Century
India
Emerge
" 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. "
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" 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
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" Gandhi's ideas were rooted in a wide experience of a freshly globalized world. "
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Ideas
World
" Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled. "
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" The White House tapes, the recordings that Nixon made of his conversations in office, have long been recognized as a marvel of verbal incontinence. "
Pankaj Mishra
House
White House
White
" In a democratic age, you can't buck demography - except through civil war. "
Pankaj Mishra
Through
Age
War
" 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. "
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War
Influence
" 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. "
Pankaj Mishra
Now
People
Strong
" 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
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Africa
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" 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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" Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe. "
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