Discontent and its Civilizations: Dispatches from Lahore, New York, and London
Mohsin Hamid
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1594634033
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
From the bestselling author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, “a near-perfect essay collection, filled with insight, compassion, and intellect." (NPR)
In both his internationally bestselling fiction and his wide-ranging journalism, Mohsin Hamid has earned a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" (Foreign Policy). A "water lily" who has called three countries on three continents his home (Pakistan, the birthplace to which he returned as a young father; the United States, where he spent his childhood and young adulthood; and Britain, where he married and became a citizen), he has achieved a truly
panoramic perspective on the clash of forces - political, economic, religious, cultural - that have transfigured the face of contemporary life and shaken the old certainties about how to navigate it.
In Discontent and Its Civilizations, Hamid traces the fracture lines generated by a decade and a half of seismic change, from the "war on terror" to the struggles of individuals to maintain humanity in the rigid face of ideology, or the indifferent face of globalization. Whether he is discussing courtship rituals or pop culture, drones or the rhythms of daily life in an extended family compound, he transports us beyond the alarmist headlines of an anxious West and a volatile East and helps to bring a dazzling diverse world within emotional and intellectual reach.
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Sharp against my skin. I lifted it, opened it, and plunged in. That first reading spanned a single afternoon and evening. I made it from cover to cover, pulled along relentlessly. I was transfixed by Pereira’s beauty. In its compression it approached perfection. It swept me off to Lisbon in the thirties, to a “beauteous summer day, with the sun beaming away and the sea-breeze off the Atlantic kissing the treetops, and a city glittering, literally glittering” beneath a window. I developed a.
York and London combined. Pakistan normally ranks fourth in the world’s production of cotton and milk, and tenth in wheat—but this terrible year it will not. Slowly and painfully, however, Pakistan should recover. And beyond that, its future need not be bleak. The country’s assets are enormous, after all. It has the world’s sixth-largest population, with more children under the age of fourteen than the US. While poor, it has appreciably lower levels of hunger and child malnutrition than India.
Daughter, not even for having an affair or becoming pregnant, but for marrying outside her kinship group without permission.” Moreover it is enduring, having survived, for example, “more than half a century of transplantation of Pakistani immigrants to the very different climes of Britain.” It has done much the same in the far less dislocating shift to Pakistan’s cities, sustained, as in Britain, through constant replenishment by newly migrating kin from the countryside. The effects of kinship.
Sci-fi movies and TV shows of the time: Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Space Ghost, Star Blazers, Battle of the Planets. Meanwhile, my dad did his PhD, my mom worked in the accounting department of an early Silicon Valley electronics firm, my little sister was born, and our battered second-hand Datsun clocked tens of thousands of miles. I’d been so fluent in Urdu, and such a talker, that my parents never realized just how completely I’d forgotten the language until we.
Ally. I am well dressed. A navy suit, pinstriped, three-buttoned. White shirt, blue tie, brown face, brown eyes. I shaved this morning but missed a patch beside my chin. The stubble there, though short, is dense. Fundamentalist stubble. Ayatollah, Hezbollah stubble. Fighting in the heights of Kashmir stubble. But just a hint. In uncalloused hands, marred only by cuticles in need of a lesson, I hold my remaining documents: letter from employer, bank statement, proof of insurance, recent pay.