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Pankaj Mishra

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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.”

PeopleIdeasCountryWholeHumanityFightingViolenceDegreesHollywoodBasesComplexesCorruptionDenyImpulseTensionConceptionTibetanLamaTibetDalai
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“Incidentally, I am intrigued by how many European and Latin American writers expressed their political views in the columns they routinely wrote or write in the popular press, like Saramago, Vargas Llosa, and Eco. This strikes me as one way of avoiding opinionated fiction, and allowing your imagination a broader latitude. Similarly, fiction writers from places like India and Pakistan are commonly expected to provide primers to their country's histories and present-day conflicts. But we haven't had that tradition in Anglo-America.”

WayWritingCountryAmericaPoliticalImaginationViewsFictionHavensConflictTraditionIndiaPressesExpectedStrikesOne WayLatinAllowingAvoidingPakistanColumnsLatin AmericaIntriguedPresent DayFiction WritersEcoOpinionatedAmerican WriterLatitudePolitical ViewLatin AmericanIndia And Pakistan
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“Today, practically every country outside the West is undergoing an intellectual, political, and cultural churning, from China to Bolivia, Egypt to Indonesia, but we haven't really had, after the 1960s, a major oppositional culture in Western Europe and America. The Occupy movement was so startling and welcome partly because it was the first such eruption of mass protests in decades.”

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“It is this capacity for relentless self-criticism that should be - everywhere - the true measure of intellectual freedom and cosmopolitanism, not the entrenched cultural power and self-congratulatory moral rhetoric of some people in countries long accustomed to telling other societies what to do and how to behave.”

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