Pankaj Mishra SCEB

When the divisions of the cold war were still in place, communist regimes were seen as
belonging to an eastern bloc that stood apart from the main body of western civilisation.
Given that they were attempts to implement a quintessentially western dream, this was a
curious view. Far from being anti-western, communism was hyper-western. Stalinism and
Maoism were not versions of oriental despotism - as generations of western scholars have
maintained. They were the result of a utopian experiment that aimed to realise the most
radical ideals of the European enlightenment. The current view of Islam as being
somehow anti-western is just as unreal. In terms of its basic picture of the world Islam
belongs in the western tradition of monotheism, and radical Islam is in many ways a
hybrid offshoot of Leninism and anarchism - also western ideologies. Like Soviet Russia
and Maoist China, Islamist movements owe more to the modern west than we - or they -
care to admit.

"The west" is a ramshackle construction that changes shape along with the shifts of
geopolitics, and in cultural terms it is just as unsettled. In his previous book, An End to
Suffering: The Buddha in the World, Pankaj Mishra showed that the milieu in which the
Buddha emerged resembled our own in many ways. Intellectual disorientation and a
pervasive mood of nihilism provided fertile ground for the Buddha's teaching, which
offered a remedy for spiritual distress and acted as a catalyst of cultural renewal. In what
is now Afghanistan, it created a Greco-Buddhist civilisation whose traces survived a
succession of kingdoms and empires until the Taliban set about destroying them. The
wheel continues to turn today, with Buddhist philosophy having a stronger resonance in
the modern west than that of the ancient Greeks.

The fluidity of cultural frontiers is a recurring theme of Mishra's work, and it is central to
Temptations of the West. Like his study of the Buddha this is a genre-bending book. It
begins autobiographically with an account of Mishra's time as an unofficial student,
reading voraciously in the decaying libraries of a run-down Indian university, and
continues with his adventurous travels throughout India, Kashmir, Pakistan and Tibet.
Today he spends part of the year in India and part in Britain, and his view of both
societies is in some ways that of an outsider. His portraits of politicians and officials,
business and media people struggling to make sense of their rapidly mutating and
sometimes collapsing societies are sharply observed and often poignant. Deeply
immersed in the history of the region, he tells the reader more about the true condition
of much of Asia today than can be gleaned from any number of weighty academic tomes.

Many of the personalities and landscapes Mishra describes are richly exotic. Bollywood
entrepreneurs and their mafia financiers, Kashmiri independence fighters and Tibetan
nationalists are only some of the figures who stalk its pages, and his description of the
lakes of Kashmir and the Himalayas is vivid and lyrical. Yet there is nothing here that
smacks of romantic orientalism. The people he describes are no different from any others
in their basic needs, and they have all the usual virtues and vices. Mishra is unflinchingly
realistic in his account of the flaws of the societies through which he has travelled. The
picture he presents is of societies whose new self-assertion conceals intractable problems.
Temptations of the West will make uncomfortable reading for some in India and
Pakistan.

What distinguishes this from other accounts of the problems of Asia is Mishra's sceptical
view of the west. He takes it as given that the era in which the world could look to
western models is now definitively over. While American neo-conservatives and their
followers in Britain dream of crusades for "western values", the world's centre of gravity
is shifting to countries that reject the west's universal claims. China and India differ in
many ways, but they are at one in insisting on modernising on their own terms. However,
as Mishra shows, there is an irony in the rise of Asia. If India and China are now able to
challenge western hegemony - in the realm of culture as much as in geopolitics - it is
partly because, despite themselves, they have emulated some of the west's more dubious
achievements.

In a brilliant chapter Mishra observes that one of the central aims of India's 19th-century
anti-colonial movements was to invent Hinduism as a religion. As part of building a
modern Indian nation that could resist and overthrow British rule, the Hindu elite
simplified and remoulded India's unfathomably rich inheritance of beliefs and practices
into something resembling a western creed. Like Shinto in Japan, Hinduism as it figures
in Indian politics today is a byproduct of an encounter with the west. In order to resist
western domination, Asian peoples have found themselves compelled to copy them. As
Mishra observes, India's anti-colonial elites "denounced British imperialism as
exploitative, but even they welcomed its redeeming modernity, and, above all, the
European idea of the nation - a cohesive community with a common history, culture,
values and sense of purpose - which for many other colonised peoples appeared a way of
duplicating the success of the powerful, all-conquering west." The result has been to
exacerbate sectarian divisions, and create them where they did not exist before.

Writing of Benares as he knew it when he lived there in the 1980s, Mishra tells us that he
did not know that the ancient Hindu city was also holy for Muslims as well and was
unaware of the 17th-century Sufi shrine to be found behind the tea-shack where he spent
his mornings reading. In late Mogul times a tolerant Indo-Persian culture flourished in
which Islamic and Hindu traditions could coexist and develop without needing clear
boundaries between them, but as India has become more like a western state this easy-
going hybridity has been compromised. Religion has come to be a tool of the state which
is used to homogenise society - just as it was in early modern Europe, and remains in
parts of Europe today. In forging themselves into modern states capable of holding their
own against western power, Asian countries have found themselves reproducing some of
the west's ugliest features.

Mishra sees India and Pakistan as striving for a modernity they have only partly framed
for themselves, and which is still deformed by the inheritance of western colonialism.
Strikingly, he is more positive about Tibet - a culture that, more than almost any other,
has suffered the ravages of brutal modernisation. Since the Chinese invaded in 1950,
about one million Tibetans have died by torture, execution and starvation - a fact that
western opinion, anxious not to glamorise the medieval country that existed before the
invasion and fearful of jeopardising trade with China, prefers to forget. Despite all the
assaults on it, Tibet's unique culture remains alive, and the Tibetan cause has some
vigorous western defenders. Yet Rupert Murdoch voiced a common view when he
declared: "The main problem in Tibet is that half the population still thinks the Dalai
Lama is 'the son of God'." For Murdoch as for Mao, the enduring attachment of
Tibetans to their religion only shows how backward they are. If genocide has been done
in Tibet, it is all in the cause of progress.

Temptations of the West concludes with the thought that "a freer Tibet, whenever it
comes about, may be better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies". This
may seem a remote prospect, but it is not as far-fetched as the idea that the west is the
supreme embodiment of human progress. In the end, this subtle, vivid and inexhaustibly
thought-provoking book is as much about the illusions that rule the west as it is about
lands that lie beyond its frontiers.
Cloud Called Bhura
Book starts with description of Tammy’s birthday and how a mysterious brown cloud has
covered a 352 km space over Mumbai skies. Book sarcastically shows the ridiculous
stories built up by News Anchor. Scientists are yet to confirm how this cloud is formed.
Second chapter of book shows a politician claiming the cloud to be sent by enemy nation
while a pundit saying it was an act of god. Major characters in the book : Tammy, Amni,
Mithil, Andrew. Tammy, Amni and Mithil are discussing brown cloud when it strikes
Amni that Mayuri Di on23 rd floor has telescope. They go to Mayuri’s apartment and
have a look at brown cloud. They were amazed to see that the cloud was made of big and
small spots, with dark grey and back lines. All of these jostling with one another.
The third part describes the group of politicians met to discuss the strategy for brown
cloud. It has been over a month now, nothing has been done. There are tremendous
reports of people falling sick, coughing, eyes feeling watery. Insurance companies have to
pay a lot of amount for this, while the saints and hospitals are making money. It also
describes conversation between two sisters, twins, who are climatologist. Although they
work outside India, they were in India to attend a marriage and have now been assigned
by their bosses to study this cloud
The next chapter discusses a fall of baobab tree, an African kind, which can live for 3000
years. It was apparently 152 years old and had fallen. One of the sisters said that its
because of the cloud and climate change while the other sister dismissed it, resulting into
quarrel between her. Next it shows that the climatologist are surveying the cloud by
sending the drones in the cloud. A while later all those drones come crashing to the
ground.
This part of the story shows how everyone in the city is finding it hard to breathe and are
having bronchial problems. It also speaks about how animals and birds are seriously
affected by this change in weather.
The next part talks about how a certain ant species flew in earlier than expected as they
were confused about weather conditions. Vidisha, one of the twins, explains that this is
just the starting and she has submitted a report that says this being a result of climate
change.
The politicians dismiss the cloud as result of climate change. Instead, he tries to get rid
off the cloud using a technology developed by local engineers. However, the attempt to
suck the cloud is a colossal failure.
UN Committee for Economic Social and Cultural Rights introduced the right to water as
a human right for the first time through General Comment No 15 in 2002
National Green Tribunal established to dispose off cases relating to environmental
damage and to provide enforcement, compensation and damages to persons and
property due to this.
Tammy
Andrew
Mithil
Amni
Kids

Bombay
Huge cloud 350 km covered Bombay- brown cloud
Poisonous gases
Climatoglogists come and study
Twin sisters- bidisha vidisha
Vidisha is pro climate change
Bidisha is not

Head minister is being asked- he says terrorist nation

Visibility low
Health poor
No solution
Vidisha report climate change pollution- head minister report junk
Group of engineers- come up a vaccuum machine- a lot of fanfare
Machine breaks
No solution
Hot water pouring from cloud
Lawer plus vidisha- campaigns pro climate change hashtag
Mobilise kids within bombay city
Report
File PIL
Page 240- court judgment
Court mandates state and centre against climate change