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You need to work yourself up into some kind of a state every morning and believe that you are doing something terribly important upon which the future of literature, if not the world, depends. Buddhism tells you that this is just a foolish fantasy. So, I try not to think too much about Buddhism early in the morning. From noon on, I think about it.

Pankaj Mishra

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Pankaj Mishra
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: February 9
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Thinking
Trying
Literature
Terribly
World
Work
State
Tells
Much
Upon
Foolish
Every
Future
Buddhism
Kind
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Fantasy
Something
Need
Early
Believe
Important
Depends
Think
Needs
Morning
Noon

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To think that land reform is going to somehow automatically create an equitable system, I think that's just wrong. It's a very technical view of the world.
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Despite all the boosterish talk of globalization breaking down barriers, most writers in Anglo-America are still working within the nationalist assumptions of their traditionally powerful societies.
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I suppose I've become less judgmental about individuals leading lives according to false ideas and false consciousness, because sometimes entire societies are prey to false ideologies and national delusions.
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I feel very privileged to get to read and write and not to have to do things that I don't like, and I don't want to give that up. Everything else is just a bonus and often a distraction from the writing, reading, and traveling that gives me the most pleasure.
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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.
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The American writer is a very pampered figure - by foundations, by fellowships, by publishing advances. Even though I am not American, I have been pampered enough myself to know how it can make your life too frictionless.
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I feel that I already have the life I love and I don't see how it could be improved radically by any greater material success I might have - bigger advances, more prizes. It's a kind of madness. And the culture of prize-giving is so corrupt.
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Whether you are in the West, the East, the North, or the South, we should all feel pressured to attempt more, find new ways of outwitting ourselves, in our writing and thinking.
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I think the reporter or journalist is well served by having a responsibility to the powerless, to use a much-abused cliché. The voice of the powerless is in some danger of not being heard in the elite discourses we now have in the mainstream media.
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In America, you don't even have proper holidays. It's really one of the most prosperous slave societies in history. People work their asses off all year long and get two weeks off! It's incredible.
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Buddhism has always been a religion for people who've worked their way through a cycle of materialism and still feel discontented and want more, or have questions that their state of prosperity is not answering.
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The whole idea of mindfulness is all about having a second-level monitoring of your thoughts and being able to recognize them as being negative or harmful before they become a part of your being, before they become some kind of action like writing an angry letter to someone or speaking too strongly to someone.
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I don't think of myself as particularly earnest. I have long bouts of cynicism and skepticism. So much of my early life was full of uncertainties. It still is. My Buddha book expresses that. Perhaps that's what created this impression of earnestness.
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There have been many instances of people combining the political life with the spiritual life, a life of constant self-examination. Gandhi was a great example of that.
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As a novelist, your impulse is toward multiplicity: multiple voices, multiple perceptions, multiple nuances, the ambiguity in human communication. Fiction really is the ultimate home for that sense of ambiguity.
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I think excessive rationality can be very dangerous. Certainly the kind of rationality we've seen in the last hundred years, and still see on a daily basis when Madeleine Albright says that it's all right, we have to live with the idea of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children dying because it contains Saddam Hussein.
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You have to be able to decide, 'Well no, I'm not going to be violent, I'm going to suppress that impulse I'm not going to be greedy.' Unless you're able to do that you're stuck with adversarial politics that leads nowhere and creates ever greater violence.
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I feel the responsibility of the novelist is to create a very complex world populated by very complex individuals and to deepen that as much as possible. I don't think the responsibility of the reporter or journalist is fundamentally different.
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If you belong to a small country that is geopolitically not that important, or strategically not that important, you have no place among nations. Those countries are neglected and left to fend for themselves.
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The asymmetries of power that have shaped relations between the West and the rest of the world also exist in the realm of literary criticism.
Pankaj Mishra