Sublime

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it,

The country’s political class responded to the crisis incoherently, and in some cases treacherously. The behavior of leaders charged with the general welfare was so destructive that it revealed more than ordinary incompetence. The pressure of the pandemic showed how little was left of public service and national unity even as ideals. In their place

The trouble with the narrow-minded, blinkered, bureaucratized, malicious and petty semi-intelligentsia of this fucked-up country is that the moment someone writes well in an informal, freewheeling manner on unacademic subjects, as you do, his virtuoso writerly virtues are used to cast doubt on his equal and separable credibility as a first-class

Three developments in the present century frame my study: the rise of Asia – in particular, China; the crisis of planetary sustainability; and the decline of transcendent and universalist ideals. To what extent are Chinese and Indian intellectuals and activists beginning to address these issues? I

For me, the insistence on talking as if we are still in ‘the colonial world’ is the most unhelpful dimension of the decolonising discourse. Constructing new societies and the new humans that are to emerge from the ashes of colonisation, and forming states headed by governments that respect the inviolate dignity of their citizens and are answerable