Sunday Posts

I have now finished reading Pankaj Mishra's From The Ruins of the Empire, a fascinating tale of the idea of Asia in the time of European conquests. This is a colonial history in the reverse, a sensitive, balanced tale of interactions, tensions and ideas around the lives of men who made it. The story is structured around the lives of two central figures, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838 - 97) and Liang Qichao (1873 - 1929), and their many contemporaries who debated and developed the idea of the new Asia in the face of the advances and adventures of the newly industrialised Europe. Other prominent Asians, men like Rabindranath Tagore, Gandhi, Rashid Rida, Sun Yet Sen, Lu Xun, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, leading men of Japan leading the Meiji restoration and imperial Japan, the young Ottomans and European Socialists all make an appearance, all in stark contrast with the old world colonialists such Lord Elgin, the Czar, David Lloyd George etc alongside a rhetoric-obsessed, duplicitous Woodr...

In the context of my recent comment regarding the East Asian Community, I decided to post Yukio Hatoyama's article from International Herald Tribune, where it appeared in English. This article, understandably, created so much anxiety in the Washington Policy circles. However, it is said that there is less to worry about Hatoyama's intent than is currently thought. His comments about the failure of American style capitalism is all but common these days, and his idea of an East Asian community is not a new one. Besides, it was pointed out that the English article omits important sections that appeared in the original, longer, Japanese one, sections which would have made this sound much less belligerent. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Yukio Hatoyama heads the Democratic Party of Japan, and has since become the prime minister of Japan. A longer version of this article appears in the September issue of the month...