Early this morning, I read Ben Macintyre’s weak review of Pankaj Mishra’s Temptations of the West. The prose is laudatory but bland. You wouldn’t know from the review that Mishra has written anything else, or that other brown folks have over the years wasted a lot of ink on the troubled subject of modernity’s divided legacy. Before I had even finished my tea, I posted a blog about it, and then, a minute later, I thought better of it and turned the polemical remarks into a letter to the editor. In that brief missive, I tried to quickly suggest that, unlike Mishra, Macintyre doesn’t in the least seem to be among the vast majority of this world’s inhabitants who have suffered under modernity even as they’ve also desperately yearned for its fruits. This large population of folks that I’m talking about exists on a different planet from those privileged others for whom modernity’s dilemma might be nothing more than the choice between a neighborhood bistro and a Starbucks. (Oh, the anguish of having to choose where one will buy one’s chai-latte!)

pankaj-mishra-temptations-of-the-west-ben-macintyre