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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.
Pankaj Mishra
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Pankaj Mishra
Age: 55
Born: 1969
Born: February 9
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Reform
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More quotes by Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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
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
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
I myself, at one time, wanted to be like the explorers of the Himalayas that I used to read about people intoxicated on the myth of history.
Pankaj Mishra
The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, they find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
What happens when we examine the claims made for Western liberalism as a universalizing ideology of tolerance, human dignity, equality, and compassion is the fact that the patron saint of modern liberalism, John Stuart Mill, thought that barbarian peoples like the Indians were unfit for self-rule.
Pankaj Mishra
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
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
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.
Pankaj Mishra
Western conception of history has had great consequences over the last two hundred years. You see it in the invasion of Iraq. You see it in almost everything that is said and done.
Pankaj Mishra
A sustained engagement with the world, a sense of how it was and how it ought to be, and what has been lost, is imperative to good writing - I just don't know how you can be a serious writer without it.
Pankaj Mishra
In the modern world, nationalism remains a very important force. We delude ourselves into thinking that globalization has made all of that redundant and that everyone just wants to be like America.
Pankaj Mishra