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Pankaj Mishra IDRC Photos: Tecklesphoto.com

 

 

Intellectuals in “newly influential” countries like India have “moral and intellectual”  challenges in a post-9/11 world and following the economic crisis of 2008, said author Pankaj Mishra, during a public discussion at IDRC's head office in Ottawa on November 2, 2009.

 

"We know now that the free market doesn't deliver a whole range of public services, a whole range of public goods, and this is a very important question in a place like India,” Mishra said. “A large percentage of the population lives with destitution, lives with no health care, suffers terrible infant mortality rates – all kinds of terrible problems that a large majority of the population deals with."

 

“I think the challenge for us is how do we define a new modernity for ourselves. ”

 

Mishra also spoke about India’s relations with its neighbours — Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and China — and their impact on his country’s future. He also discussed India’s “deep” connection to Tibet and the central role he says the conflict in the Kashmir region has on the Indian subcontinent.

 

Mishra is a respected Indian novelist and author whose essays have been published in The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other Indian, British, and American publications. He is the author of several books, including Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India, a travelogue that examines the social and cultural changes in India triggered by globalization.

 

Mishra’s discussion marks the final installment of the India Lectures, the series of public events marking the 25th anniversary of IDRC’s regional office for South Asian and China in New Delhi. The lectures also celebrated IDRC’s continued collaboration with its research partners in India. Breaking with the format of previous lectures in the series, Mishra’s talk was in the form of a conversation with IDRC President David Malone.

 

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