pankaj mishra as gunga din, i.e. the loyal indian sepoy who will take a bullet for his white masters. (from the rudyard kipling character gunga din who sacrifices his life so that the white sahebs will be saved.)
see pankaj practically wet himself in his eagerness to please the white masters, sort of like a little puppy, wagging his tail madly.
down, boy, down. here, have a dog biscuit.
sure, he got his carrot, his regular space in the 'New Yorker' and the 'New York Times' which he uses appropriately to write poisonous attacks on India.
uncle tom-ism. and its new variant, 'uncle pankaj-ism'
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Below is a revealing 'confession' by one of India's all-time
xxx
Barbara Epstein (1928-2006) New York Review of Books
By Alison Lurie, Darryl Pinckney, Diane Johnson, Edmund S. Morgan, Elizabeth Hardwick, Gore Vidal, John Ashbery, Larry McMurtry, Luc Sante, Pankaj Mishra, Patricia Storace
Barbara Epstein, my friend and fellow editor for forty-three years, died on June 16. She did much to create The New York Review and she brought her remarkable intelligence and editorial skill to bear on everything that appeared in these pages. We publish here memoirs by some of the writers who worked closely with her and knew her well.
—Robert Silvers
PANKAJ MISHRA
I first met Barbara Epstein in New Delhi in 1997. She had come to India to give a talk on Edmund Wilson, whom I had idolized since discovering his books in a neglected old library in the North Indian city of Benares. I never expected to meet anyone who had known Wilson; the young Americans I met in India had barely heard of him. Such youthful idealism as mine does not usually survive its encounter with reality. Yet Barbara's graciousness, wit, and ironical intelligence more than matched my fantasies of the remote American world of Wilson.
Like many writers, I feel I was a special beneficiary of Barbara's generosity. When I first met her I had published a travel book in India, but I was still struggling to find my subject, voice, and audience. Her startlingly straightforward invitation—"do you have anything for us?"—brought me out of the sterile resentfulness I had drifted into, and introduced me to literary possibilities—reportage, memoir, the long review-essay—that I otherwise would never have fully realized.
For weeks afterward I worked on a small piece of memoir about reading Edmund Wilson in Benares. When Barbara finally published it, several drafts and months later, I felt I could at last call myself a writer. She would later become both an editor and a good friend to me. Looking back, I find it almost impossible to separate the two.
It was while working with her that I learned the most valuable lessons of our friendship. I began to see more clearly how literary and political journalism requires much more than the creation of harmonious and intellectually robust sentences; how it is linked inseparably to the cultivation of a moral and emotional intelligence; how it demands a reasonable and civil tone, a suspicion of abstractions untested by experience, a personal indifference to power, and, most importantly, a quiet but firm solidarity with the powerless.
Barbara was strongly political. But this did not stem from any sense of personal incompleteness, or the related impulse of self-aggrandizement which deludes many intellectuals into ideological crusades. Her concern for justice and her hatred of violence flowed out of her instinctive compassion, and she showed tremendous kindness to strangers as well as colleagues, friends, and relatives.
Committed to a way of writing and an ethic that rejected the self-important and the merely rhetorical, Barbara stood aloof from people who took it upon themselves to magnify American power in the world during and after the cold war. She—with her co-editor Robert Silvers—valued intellectual and ethical clarity about the so-called national interest, which explains partly why this New York–based magazine spoke directly, during the latter half of the American Century, to so many people in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The commitment of the Review to a cosmopolitan liberalism becomes even more bracing as America's image darkens in the world and many great American institutions appear diminished. I find it hard to imagine a more important legacy than the one Barbara helped to create, even though I know she would never have put it quite like that herself.
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