Indian - Novelist | 1969 -
In 1853, American warships bullied Japan out of centuries of virtual isolation and into the modern world. The threat of force compelled Japan, like India and China before it, to accept trade agreements that were economically ruinous and eroded national sovereignty.
Pankaj Mishra
WorldIsolationAmericanIndiaOut
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.
EducationTrainingRootsEmployees
Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled.
NationalismIndiaEthnicPakistan
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.
FreedomSpaceIndependencePolitical
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.
SuccessPeopleStrongUniqueNow
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.
BeginningManSmallPoliticalYoung
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.
RiverRoadFirstYearsAfghanistan
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.
HappinessPowerProgressPolitical
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.
KnowledgeProgressViewNewEmbrace
In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else.
IntegrationEconomicMoveEverywhere
As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.
AchieveEuropeNormsUniversalCame
Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.
FreedomBestCriticismEnlightenment
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Pankaj Mishra quotes