Pankaj Mishra is an essayist and novelist. Born in 1969, he grew up in small towns in northern India and studied in Allahabad and New Delhi. On graduating, Mishra moved to Mashobra, a Himalayan village, where, he has said there was “nothing to do except read and write”. He contributes essays and reviews regularly to the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker and the London Review of Books. His books include the novel The Romantics (2000) and From the Ruins of Empire (2012), which was shortlisted for the Orwell prize. His latest, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, is published by Allen Lane this month. He divides his time between London and India.
1 | TV
This series has been highly – and rightly – praised. I was particularly held by Riz Ahmed’s performance in the central role as the son of a Pakistani cab-driver. He is able to express a great range of emotion with extraordinary poise and his character’s journey from innocence to a hardened understanding of violence and inequality is both thrilling and agonising to watch.
2 | Film
Mountains May Depart (2015)
Jia Zhangke is simply one of the finest film directors in the world today. His career, coinciding with China’s transformation, the greatest ever in history, shows in each of its phases the growth of a profound moral and historical imagination. His latest, Mountains May Depart, moves from the grimy small-town China of the 1980s, a favourite setting of Jia’s, to a futuristic Australia of sleek condominiums, building up tremendous emotional and intellectual power. Jia understands the seductive but impossible promise of both underdevelopment and overdevelopment.
3 | Food
Aurelec Cafeteria, Pondicherry, south India
For years now, I have been going to Aurelec Cafetaria, a small and beautifully sited canteen for lunch in a village north of Pondicherry. The buffet offerings are mostly south Indian, and entirely vegetarian, but various, always fresh and remarkably inexpensive. The surroundings are simple but elegant. I could eat there every day for the rest of my life.
4 | Music
Solstice by Frank Kimbrough
I have found it strangely hard to listen to music in recent months. A review by Adam Shatz, one of the finest writers on music today, alerted me to an enchanting new album, Frank Kimbrough’s Solstice. Shatz recommends it for precisely its ability to release the listener from the demoralising mood created by the political events of recent months. In these times, when reality presses too hard, its lyrical melodies offer, he writes, “a different entry point into the real, those lower frequencies of expression that political language tends to render inaudible”.
5 | Magazine
I was not surprised to read the other day that Barry Jenkins, the director of the superb new film Moonlight, educated himself in cinema through reading Sight & Sound. There are few magazines with such an acute and cohesive aesthetic sensibility. Its reviews and features seem much more alert to politics and history, and a great deal more internationalist, than Anglo-American literary criticism has been for a while. There are always new discoveries to be made in its pages – films and TV shows unjustly forgotten.
6 | Book
The Face of the Buddha by William Empson
Teaching English in Asia in the 1930s and 40s, the English literary critic William Empson became fascinated by the many representations of the Buddha. He wrote down his impressions and insights but the manuscript got lost and was not discovered until 2003. Recently published as The Face of the Buddha, it reveals the extraordinary richness and originality of Empson’s mind. His encounter with Buddhism deepened something we seem to need a lot of right now: an understanding of ambiguity and contradiction in human affairs.
7 | Documentary
I almost balked at OJ: Made in America this year after having watched the TV feature The People v OJ Simpson. How much of one’s life can be spent immersed in the career of an American football player? But the documentary, which places OJ’s life in a tormented history of race relations in the United States since the 1960s and covers it beyond the notorious murder case in 1994, is an unqualified triumph. OJ emerges as a tragically damaged figure, unable to rid himself, despite all his attempts at colour-blindness, or whiteness, of the marks racism has left on his body and psyche.
8 | Dance
Bharatanatyam
Just before the new year in the garden of a small cultural centre/guesthouse called Aurodhan in the centre of Pondicherry, I saw an evening performance of bharatanatyam, one of the more distinguished forms of Indian dance. I last went to a performance nearly 20 years ago and came away this time mesmerised by the simultaneous sensory experiences of music, bodily movements and facial expressions. Here was classical Indian art in its most intoxicatingly multimedia and dreamlike form.
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