Alternate Modernity in Asia

Pankaj Mishra asks good questions. As he has ascended from posh-poor Brahmin in provincial India, to New York Review of Books contributor, to London-based Bloomberg columnist, he has posed his trenchant questions to ever wider audiences. In his 2006 travelogue, Temptations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond, Mishra catalogued local answers to the eponymous question. In his recent journalism, he appears to take special pleasure in impertinently interrogating the unexamined prejudices of the Economist-toting classes (for example, Should contemporary China's economic system really be considered "Western-style capitalism"? Do the pronouncements of Niall Ferguson actually make any sense?)