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How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, And Beyond
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
June 2006
On Sale: June 6, 2006
323 pages
ISBN: 0374173214
EAN: 9780374173210
Hardcover
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Fiction
A vivid, often surprising account of South Asia
today by the author of An End to Suffering
In his new book, Pankaj Mishra brings literary
authority and political insight to bear on travels that are
at once epic and personal. Traveling in the changing
cultures of South Asia, Mishra sees the pressures--the
temptations--of Western-style modernity and prosperity, and
teases out the paradoxes of globalization. A visit to Allahabad, birthplace of Jawaharlal Nehru,
occasions a brief history of the tumultuous
post-independence politics Nehru set in motion. In Kashmir,
just after the brutal killing of thirtyfive Sikhs, Mishra
sees Muslim guerrillas playing with Sikh village children
while the media ponder a (largely irrelevant) visit by
President Clinton. And in Tibet Mishra exquisitely parses
the situation whereby the Chinese government--officially
atheist and strongly opposed to a free Tibet--has discovered
that Tibetan Buddhism can "be packaged and sold to
tourists."
Temptations of the West is a book concerned with
history still in the making--essential reading about a
conflicted and rapidly changing region.
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