How does one even begin to describe a big book packed with a cornucopia of intellectual and historical riches, one that is from a lively writer, historian, and linguist? Though the title, Dancing on the Edge of the Widening Gyre: A History of Our Times, may have apocalyptic overtones, it is not a futuristic fantasy…
Growing up in an innocent and sheltered pocket of Southwestern India, bordered on the west by the Arabian Sea, on the east by the Western Ghats mountains, and on its southern side by a state with speakers of Malayalam, a language totally incomprehensible to me, I did not really know the difference between black and…
This post was originally a response to someone quoting a few lines from one of my books (Impressing the Whites) without the larger context of the book itself and of my other work. But it’s absurd for me to react to every such post. My books range from 60,000-125,000 words, and anyone may select…
Once upon a time, I thought it a criminal waste of precious, Universe-given time and life to watch grown men running after an inflated ball. Or batting it, or bowling it. Once upon a time, as a child, I did both: kick balls, and hit them with bats and hockey sticks (hockey I was better…
The title of my new book, “Works in Progress,” emphasizes my position that nothing is final for me: I am always open to rethinking my conclusions (if any), and my stories are just one tiny strand in the vast tapestry of human history and thinking. I have a bad habit of publishing and unpublishing books,…
(Random thoughts, in 1996, of an evolving, changing mind*.) Butter Chicken in Ludhiana is a hilarious book, though having admired its author greatly, and perhaps too much, I suddenly began to ask myself, “Who does Pankaj Mishra think he is?” [Okay, he is a writer, and so am I. Writers write stuff.] For it is…
Some people believe that restrictions on language — official or social censorship of speech and writing — compel writers and other artists to be more creative, and these restrictions are therefore a good thing. While this argument has some merit, on the whole, restrictions on language are restrictions on thought, which must reflect natural speech…
Formatting my 2000 book Impressing the Whites in order to make it easily available on createspace.com and Amazon, I was surprised by some lines in the document (yes, authors write many books, and sometimes forget much of what they’ve written in their earlier books), such as this paragraph: … as the number of wars and…
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