An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites. Pankaj Mishra More Quotes by Pankaj Mishra More Quotes From Pankaj Mishra In the end, of course, all novelists will be judged by their novels, but let's not forget that we will also need new ways of assessing the latter. There are people who will continue to write nineteenth-century novels in the early twenty-first, and even win major prizes for them, but that's not very interesting, intellectually or emotionally. Pankaj Mishra winning writing people I guess I am nostalgic for a time - the nineteenth century and early twentieth - when writers were, to use Stefan Collini's phrase, "public moralists" and politicians, plutocrats, bankers, arms dealers, and experts and technocrats were not solely defining the moral norms as well as the political lives of our societies. We do have some writers claiming to be public moralists, but, as I said, they have actually been more jingoistic than even the henchmen of Bush and Blair. Pankaj Mishra political experts bankers There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations. Pankaj Mishra couple writing art I am happy to accept that badge of ambivalence if that means some progress in dismantling this false opposition: writers boldly using their privileges of free speech in the morally superior West versus pathetic wimps in repressive countries we don't like. Pankaj Mishra progress mean country No one is obliged to take a position on the urgent issues of the day, but there are times when our impoverished public sphere could do with some occasional assertions of literary and moral authority. Pankaj Mishra spheres issues moral The internet has spawned people for whom knowingness is more important than knowledge. It equips you with the illusion of offering knowledge instantly - and quite easily - so you can read a few articles on a few subjects and feel well informed but not actually know any of those subjects in any depth. Pankaj Mishra important offering people Modernity has created more problems than it is capable of solving. Millions of people are now condemned to wait endlessly for their redemption through modernity. Pankaj Mishra redemption waiting people The whole Hollywood conception of Tibet as this peace-loving country denies the complex humanity of the Tibetan people. Their ideas exist in a high degree of tension with impulses toward corruption, toward violence, toward all sorts of things. The Dalai Lama himself would say that he has to fight these impulses himself on a daily basis. Pankaj Mishra fighting country ideas I think the Buddha presents an image of someone who believes in self-control. I think he's offering, perhaps, a critique of the romantic idea of the passions being this wonderful source of life or vitality that define you or your writing. Pankaj Mishra passion writing believe Nietzsche's vision of the superman is of someone who's able to control and tame his passions and turn them into something richer than raw emotion and raw feeling. I think the best writing does that too. Untamed passion basically results in bad writing or bad polemics, which so many writers and public intellectuals are vulnerable to. Pankaj Mishra passion writing thinking We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world. Pankaj Mishra empathy compassion ideas Christianity and Islam are concerned with the idea of justice, which can turn into political justice, social justice, economical justice, and so on. Buddhism is not so concerned with the idea of rights. There is more talk of responsibility than of demanding rights. Pankaj Mishra buddhism responsibility rights Most of what I read is for reviewing purposes or related to something I want to write about. It's slightly utilitarian. I definitely miss that sense of being a disinterested reader who's reading purely for the pleasure of imagining his way into emotional situations and vividly realized scenes in nineteenth-century France or late nineteenth-century Russia. Pankaj Mishra emotional reading writing Buddhism resonated very powerfully with a lot of my preoccupations. Pankaj Mishra very-powerful preoccupation buddhism I am a secularist in the Gandhian sense of the word, not the Nehruvian one. Nehru thought religion was an antique superstition which stood in the way of rational modern politics. I side with Gandhi, who wanted religious figures out of politics but also was suspicious of purely rational politics. Pankaj Mishra antiques superstitions religious When I first decided to be a writer, that meant dealing with preoccupations and concerns that took little account of Indian traditions. I saw India's past as part of an antiquity rendered irrelevant by modernity, which with its science, nation states, free enterprises, and consumer societies was supposed to have solved all problems. Pankaj Mishra india littles past I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It can damage successful writers by giving them an exalted sense of what they've done, and it can crush less successful writers by infecting them with envy and malice at an early stage in their careers. Pankaj Mishra crush careers successful I wrote for many years without showing my writing to anyone, because I was constantly comparing it to what I was reading. You have to compare yourself to the best and feel totally inadequate. Pankaj Mishra reading writing years There is a lot of anxiety in India about writers selling out to foreign audiences, but I’m neither flattering the Indian audience nor the American audience. I’m uneasily somewhere in the middle. Pankaj Mishra selling anxiety india The internet has created a transnational audience. If you publish something in the New York Times, it's read all over the world. Who knows how big this audience is or how long it will last. Pankaj Mishra lasts new-york long
