Indian - Novelist | 1969 -
In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.
Pankaj Mishra
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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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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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Devout Anatolian masses rising from poverty have transformed Turkey politically and economically.
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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.
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The advocates of retaliatory wars will continue to assume a much simpler reality with their hoary oppositions: Religious and secular, backward and enlightened, free and unfree. But if we are to admit how deeply and irrevocably interconnected our world is, then we must find new ways to break the cycle of counter-productive violence.
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The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.
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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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