#Pankaj Mishra

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

We find ourselves in an unprecedented situation. Never before have so many witnessed an industrial-scale slaughter in real time. Yet the prevailing callousness, timidity and censorship disallows, even mocks, our shock and grief. Many of us who have seen some of the images and videos coming out of Gaza – those visions from hell of corpses twisted together and buried in mass graves, the smaller corpses held by grieving parents, or laid on the ground in neat rows – have been quietly going mad over the last few months. Every day is poisoned by the awareness that while we go about our lives hundreds of ordinary people like ourselves are being murdered, or being forced to witness the murder of their children.

Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza

[literary-illuminati]

Okay look I know you know who Attaturk was. You mentioned him like half a chapter ago.

[impromptu-manifesto]

The Shoah after Gaza (a long read by Pankaj Mishra, in the London Review of Books)

[sucka99]

[metamatar]

Yet private avarice, which Putin identified as central to public life in the West today, does not entirely explain the whitewashing of Modi or the greenwashing of Adani. Ideological delusion also plays a role. In the mainstream Western narrative shaped during the Cold War, India – with its regular elections – starred as a counterexample to many authoritarian and anti-Western countries. The tattered fable about Indian democracy is being urgently revamped as the Biden administration pursues its new Cold War against Chinese and Russian autocracy. Walter Russell Mead, a leading foreign policy commentator, argued in the Wall Street Journal in March that the US should pursue greater intimacy with Modi’s party since it ‘will be calling the shots in a country without whose help American efforts to balance rising Chinese power are likely to fall short’.

Pankaj Mishra in the The Big Con, London Review of Books

[bookcoversonly]

Title: Run And Hide | Author: Pankaj Mishra | Publisher: Penguin (2023)

[townpostin]

Press Club of Jamshedpur Demands Justice for Assaulted Journalist

Delegation calls for immediate action against attackers of Basudev Karan in Baharagora. A delegation led by President Putul Singh of the Press Club of Jamshedpur visited Baharagora today to address the recent assault on journalist Basudev Karan. JAMSHEDPUR – The Press Club of Jamshedpur, led by President Putul Singh, paid a visit to Baharagora today to have a discussion about the unfortunate…

[asg-stuff]

In 1980, the Israeli columnist Boaz Evron carefully described the stages of this moral corrosion: the tactic of conflating Palestinians with Nazis and shouting that another Shoah is imminent was, he feared, liberating ordinary Israelis from ‘any moral restrictions, since one who is in danger of annihilation sees himself exempted from any moral considerations which might restrict his efforts to save himself’. Jews, Evron wrote, could end up treating ‘non-Jews as subhuman’ and replicating ‘racist Nazi attitudes’. (via The Shoah after Gaza | London Review of Books)

[dipnotski]

Kolektif – 19. Yüzyılın Sonundan 1945’e Modern Asya Entelektüel Tarihi (2023)

Bu kitap Türkiye’deki tarih okurlarının pek aşina olmadığı birçok isme ve olaya yakından bakarak modern Asya entelektüel tarihinin temel meselelerini ele alıyor. Hem Batı-merkezci hem de onunla aynı ölçüde sorunlu Asya-merkezci bakış açılarının ötesine geçebilmek adına dikkatle seçilen makalelerle Asya’nın kolonyal geçmişine ve postkolonyal bugününe ilişkin yeni pencereler açıyor. Kitapta Michael…

[bollywoodirect]

36 Years of Main Zinda Hoon (05/06/1988)

Directed, written, and with a screenplay and story by Sudhir Mishra, the film stars Rajendra Gupta, Pankaj Kapur, Deepti Naval, Kulbhushan Kharbanda, Sushmita Mukherjee, Sarita Joshi, and Alok Nath. Produced by NFDC and Doordarshan, the film features cinematography by Rajesh Joshi and editing by Renu Saluja.

At the 36th National Film Awards, the film won the National Film Award for Best Film on Social Issues. Distributed by Doordarshan, it was included in NFDC's 2012 film restoration project, which involved 80 Indian cinema classics.

[notsoterriblymisanthropic]

In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’

Pankaj Mishra, The Shoah after Gaza

[literary-illuminati]

2024 Book Review #27 – From the Ruins of Empire: The Revolt Against the West and the Remaking of Asia by Pankaj Mishra

Yet another work of nonfiction I picked up because an intriguing-sounding quote from it went viral on tumblr. This was the fifth history book I’ve read this year, but the first that tries very consciously to be an intellectual history. Both an interesting and a frustrating read – my overall opinion went back and forth a few times both as I read and as I put together this review.

The book is ostensibly a history of Asia’s intellectual response to European empire’s sudden military and economic superiority and political imperialism in the 19th and 20th centuries, though it’s focus and sympathy is overwhelmingly with what it calls ‘middle ground’ responses (i.e. neither reactionary traditionalism nor unthinking westernization). It structures this as basically a series of biographies of notable intellectual figures from the Islamic World, China and India from throughout the mid-late 19th and early 20th centuries - Liang Qichao and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani get star bidding and by far the most focus, with Rabindranath Tagore a distant third and a whole scattering of more famous personages further below him.

The central thesis of the book is essentially that the initial response of most rich, ancient Asian societies to sudden European dominance (rung in by the Napoleonic occupation of Egypt and the British colonization of India) was denial, followed (once European guns and manufactured goods made this untenable) by a deep sense of inferiority and humiliation. This sense of inferiority often resulted in attempts by ruling elites and intellectuals to abandon their own traditions and westernize wholesale (the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms, the New Culture Movement in China, etc), but at the same time different intellectual currents responded to the crisis by synthesizing their own visions of modernity, and tried to construct a new world with a centre other than the West.

I will be honest, my first and most fundamental issue with this book is that I just wish it was something it wasn’t. Which is to say, it is a resolutely intellectual and idealist history, convinced of the power of ideas and rhetoric as the engine for changing the world. Which means that the biography of one itinerant revolutionary is exhaustively followed so as to trace the evolution of his world-historically important thoughts, but the reason the Tanzimat Reforms failed is just brushed aside as having something to do with europhile bureaucrats building opera houses in Istanbul. Not at all hyperbole to say I’d really rather it was actually the exact opposite – the latter is just a much more interesting subject!

Not that the biographies aren’t interesting! They very much are, and do an excellent job of getting across just how interconnected the non-Western (well, largely Islamic and to a lesser extent Sino-Pacific) world was in the early/mid-19th century, and even moreso how late 19th/early 20th century globalization was not at all solely a western affair. They’re also just fascinating in their own right, the personalities are larger than life and the archetype of the globe-trotting polyglot intelligentsia is one I’ve always found very compelling. While I complain about the lack of detail, the book does at least acknowledge the social and economic disruptions that even purely economic colonialism created, and the impoverishment that created the social base the book’s subjects would eventually try to arouse and organize. And, even if I wish they were all dug into in far more detail, the book’s narrative is absolutely full of fascinating anecdotes and episodes I want to read about in more detail now.

Which is a problem with the book that it’s probably fairer to hold against it – it’s ostensible subject matter could fill libraries, and so to fit what it wants to into a readable 400-page volume, it condenses, focuses, filters and simplifies to the point of myopia. Which, granted, is the stereotypical historian’s complaint about absolutely anything that generalizes beyond the level of an individual village or commune, but still.

This isn’t at all helped but the overriding sense that this was a book that started with the conclusion and then went back looking for evidence to support its thesis and create a narrative. Which is a shame, because the section on the post-war and post-decolonization world is by far the sloppiest and least convincing, in large part because you can feel the friction of the author trying to make their thesis fit around the obvious objections to it.

Which is to say, the book draws a line on the evolution of Asian thought through trying to westernize/industrialize/nationalize and compete with the west on it’s own terms (in the book’s view) a more authentic and healthy view that rejects the western ideals of materialism and nationalism into something more spiritual, humane, and cosmopolitan, with Gandhi kind of the exemplar of this kind of view. It tries to portray this anti-materialistic worldview as the ideology of the future, the natural belief system of Asia which Europe and America can hope to learn from. It then, ah, lets say struggles to to find practical evidence of this in modern politics or economics, lets say (the Islamic Republic of Iran and Edrogan’s Turkey being the closest). It is also very insistent that ‘westernization’ is a false god that can never work, which is an entirely reasonable viewpoint to defend but if you are then you really gotta remember that Japan/South Korea/Taiwan like, exist while going through all the more obvious failures. One is rather left feeling that Mishra is trying to speak an intellectual hegemony into existence, here. (The constant equivocation and discomfort when bringing up socialism – the materialistic western export par excellence, but also perhaps somewhat important in 20th century Asian intellectual life – also just got aggravating).

It’s somewhere between interesting and bleakly amusing that modernity and liberal democracy have apparently been discredited and ideologically exhausted for more than one hundred years now! Truly we are ruled by the ideals of the dead.

I could honestly complain about the last chapter at length – the characterization of Islam as somehow more deeply woven in and inextricable from Muslim societies than any other religion and the resultant implicit characterization of secular government as necessarily western intellectual colonialism is a big one – but it really is only a small portion of the book, so I’ll restrain myself. Though the casual mention of the failures of secular and socialist post-colonial nation-building projects always just reminds me of reading The Jakarta Method and makes me sad.

So yeah! I felt significantly more positively about the book before I sat down and actually organized my thoughts about it. Not really sure how to take that.

[playermagic23]

Web Series Review: Panchayat Season 3

Star Cast: Jitendra Kumar, Raghubir Yadav, Neena Gupta, Chandan Roy, Faisal Malik, Sanvikaa, Pankaj Jha

Director: Deepak Kumar Mishra

Synopsis: PANCHAYAT SEASON 3 is the story of the feud between a villager and an egoistic MLA. After the events of the second season, a new 'Sachiv' (Vinod Suryavanshi) arrives in Phulera. Brij Bhushan Dubey (Raghubir Yadav), the Pradhan Pati, devises a plan. He keeps the Panchayat office locked on the day of the new Sachin's joining. Brij even doesn't pick up his call and so does Vikas (Chandan Roy). The new Sachiv complains to the MLA Chandrakishore Singh (Pankaj Jha), who in turn, complains to the DM (Kusum Shastri). The DM urgently calls Manju Devi (Neena Gupta), the Pradhan, to her office. Manju and Prahlad (Faisal Malik), the Up-Pradhan, make it clear that they want Abhishek Tripathi (Jitendra Kumar) back as the Sachiv. As luck would have it, the same day, the MLA is jailed for killing a dog. The DM cancels Abhishek's transfer and asks him to join Phulera Gram Panchayat. Brij, Manju, Vikas and Prahlad are overjoyed to have Abhishek back with them. But there are certain problems in front of the village. Prahlad is depressed over the death of his son, Rahul (Shiv Swaroop) and has turned an alcoholic as well. Meanwhile, the Gram Panchayat elections are around the corner and Bhushan (Durgesh Kumar) is determined to win at any cost. As part of his strategy, he decides to send an olive branch to the MLA. Soon, this leads to utter chaos and madness in Phulera. What happens next forms the rest of the show.

Panchayat Season 3 Story Review: Chandan Kumar's story is terrific and the writer manages to neatly take the story forward. Chandan Kumar's screenplay is very effective and is peppered with lots of entertaining and dramatic moments. But the surprise this season is that the show scores big time with the emotional scenes as well. Chandan Kumar's dialogues are sharp and hilarious as required. Some dialogues are bound to become memes, just like it happened in the previous season. A few one-liners, however, do give a feeling that they were written keeping in mind that it'll become meme-worthy.

Deepak Kumar Mishra's direction is praiseworthy. Like the previous seasons, the execution is neat and uncomplicated. Often, several cult shows tend to disappoint in the subsequent seasons. But PANCHAYAT has proved to be an exception. The writer and director have taken care that nothing is added for the heck of it and at the same time, the new developments carry the essence of the show. This time, the stakes are higher and hence, even the tension levels go high in some scenes.

On the flipside, some developments are silly. For instance, the idea of the Pradhan to not pick up the call of the new Sachiv is childish. But since it leads to LOL-worthy moments, one won't mind. The same happens with the scene where a family is given a house under the PM Awas Yojana scheme though they don't qualify for it. The reason behind it is far-fetched. However, it makes for a nice watch. Secondly, the romance between Abhishek and Rinki (Sanvikaa) doesn't progress much and it's a bit of a downer.

PANCHAYAT SEASON 3 begins on a very entertaining note and the first episode sets the mood. The sequence between Prahlad and Damyanti Devi (Abha Sharma) is lovely and the most emotional sequence of the show. The real fun begins once the MLA arrives in the village for a truce meeting. The scene starts ordinarily but ends on a high and is sure to bring the house down. From here, the show is highly entertaining. This time, there's also action and the final episode is very nail-biting. The last 10 minutes give a 'Katappa ne Baahubali ko kyun maara' or 'Lonavala mein kya hua' (THE FAMILY MAN) vibe and enhance the excitement for Season 4.

Panchayat Season 3 Performances: Jitendra Kumar doesn’t have much to do initially but later on, dominates the show. He’s totally gotten into the skin of the character by now and is very impressive. Raghubir Yadav, too, puts his best foot forward. Neena Gupta is first-rate and this time, her character gets a deeper understanding of politics. This adds a lot to her role and also her performance. Chandan Roy lends able support, as always. Faisal Malik has a difficult role this time but comes out with flying colours. Sanvikaa is a fine talent and her mere presence instantly lifts the impact of a scene. Pankaj Jha is outstanding as the antagonist. The same goes for Durgesh Kumar. Sunita Rajwar (Kranti Devi; Bhushan's wife) leaves a huge mark. Ashok Pathak (Binod) this time has a longer role, considering the popularity of his memes perhaps, and does very well. Asif Khan (Ganesh) is highly entertaining while Aanchal Tiwari (Raveena) is sweet. Abha Sharma is adorable and Vishal Yadav (Jagmohan) makes his presence felt. Prateek Pachauri (Babloo) and Ebaabdullah Khan (Dabloo) are funny. The others who do well are Tript Sahu (Khushu; Vikas's wife), Bulloo Kumar (Madhav; who sides with Bhushan), Gaurav Singh (Chottan Singh; MLA's PA), Amit Kumar Maurya (Bam Bahadur), Kusum Shastri, Vinod Suryavanshi, Shrikant Verma (Parmeshwar), Vishwanath Chatterjee (Sanjay Yadav; cop) and Diwakar Dhayani (BDO). Kirandeep Kaur (Chitra; MLA's daughter) doesn’t have much to do and hopefully, will have a stronger part in Season 4. Lastly, Swananad Kirkire (MP) has a promising cameo.

Panchayat Season 3 music and other technical aspects: Anurag Saikia's music enhances the impact. As for the songs, the Manoj Tiwari track is damn good. But watch out for 'Thame Dil Ko', sung by Abhijeet Bhattacharya. Amitabha Singh's cinematography is satisfactory. The bird's eye view shots of the village, especially, are memorable. Karishma Vyas' costumes and Naveen Lohara and Sayali Naikwadi Singh's production design are straight out of life. The action is realistic. Amit Kulkarni's editing is smooth.

Panchayat Season 3 Conclusion: On the whole, PANCHAYAT SEASON 3 fulfils all the humongous expectations and rests on bravura performances, some funny and dramatic sequences, nail-biting climax and meme-worthy dialogues. This time, the show also scores on the emotional front and also boasts of action scenes. Thanks to the insane popularity and word of mouth, the third season is bound to emerge as one of the most most-watched or maybe the most most-watched show for Amazon Prime Video this year. Recommended!

[anotherfanaccount]

Finally watched Masaan. And god it breaks you down to your soul. And then says life goes on because you're still here. Your life is still yours even if it's hard right now.

For a movie to deal with grief it's a oddly comforting one. The songs the ghats the rawness are one of the reason. And of course thank gods for heartfelt actors.

[metamatar]

this interview/article with pankaj mishra is a pretty good presentation of the frustration's of describing the nature of india's sectarian fascism to the west.

[sivavakkiyar]

Edmund Wilson was a weirdo and an idiot in a lot of ways but’s one of those writers who has always helped me masquerade as better read than I am, so bless him for that