Indian - Novelist | 1969 -
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 briefly disrupted celebrations of a world globalised by capital and consumption.
Pankaj Mishra
WorldCapitalConsumptionAttacks
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.
ReligionDemocracyWorldCapitalism
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.
LookThailandRebuildChinaVietnam
Since the end of the Cold War, metropolitan elites everywhere have identified progress and modernity with the cornucopia of global capitalism, the consolidation of liberal democratic regimes and the secular ethic of consumerism.
ProgressWarColdCapitalismEnd
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.
PoliticalValuesLookSurrenderMore
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.
CapitalismPoliticalMoreWithin
It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
GrowthFeelingEconomic GrowthOut
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.
MenVillageYoungLeavingSeeBig
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.
PeopleSocietyFreeIgnoreMoral
Certainly, imperial power is never peaceably acquired or maintained.
PowerNeverImperialAcquired
The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962.
GreatWarChinaDealHappenedSince
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.
CultureThinkIndiaVillageChina
Copyright © 2024 QuotesDict Pankaj Mishra quotes