Pankaj Mishra's novel 'Run and Hide' is a cautionary tale of the widening gap between rich and poor, the baggage of class and caste, and the collateral damage that can come with unthinking push to modernity. Photo: Windham Campbell Prize
Pankaj Mishra's novel 'Run and Hide' is a cautionary tale of the widening gap between rich and poor, the baggage of class and caste, and the collateral damage that can come with unthinking push to modernity. Photo: Windham Campbell Prize
Pankaj Mishra's novel 'Run and Hide' is a cautionary tale of the widening gap between rich and poor, the baggage of class and caste, and the collateral damage that can come with unthinking push to modernity. Photo: Windham Campbell Prize
Pankaj Mishra's novel 'Run and Hide' is a cautionary tale of the widening gap between rich and poor, the baggage of class and caste, and the collateral damage that can come with unthinking push to mod

'Run and Hide': Pankaj Mishra's first novel in 20 years is another warning to the world


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Over his fascinating career as a writer, thinker and essayist, Pankaj Mishra has written searing histories of colonialism, and explored his concerns about a global pandemic of rage, populist revolt and fanaticism. But in his first novel in 20 years, he found a deeper truth in the emotional lives of people trying to navigate the many upheavals of the 21st century. A place where he didn’t have to be a polemicist for hire but could ask questions, leave ideas unresolved.

“Being a novelist enables you to hold a conversation with different parts of yourself,” he says. “And be critical of your own milieu, too ...”

Run And Hide does feel as much of a warning to the world as Age Of Anger, his 2017 non-fiction book which argued that social, economic and political disenfranchisement was causing global disorder.

A group of friends who meet at the Indian Institute of Technology take every opportunity available to them at the turn of the century to succeed. Aseem is a media personality and novelist, Virendra is a Dalit who becomes a Wall Street billionaire. It’s only our narrator, Arun, who is reluctant to follow the money, checking out of the expected career path to become a translator in the Himalayas. They have all come from nothing. What they choose to do with their previously unimaginable amounts of financial and social capital is a lesson for our times.

There’s become this obligation to reinvent yourself to survive this new world. You might have to give up languages or religions that you grew up with in order to become ‘modern’
Pankaj Mishra,
author

“Just about anything they want is available to them by the time they reach middle age, and that is the experience of a certain generation in India when it opened up to economic liberalisation and globalisation was becoming a reality,” says Mishra.

"They were perfectly positioned to take advantage of all the opportunities, not by working in a back office, but actually going to America, working through the tech companies, through the dotcom boom, through hedge funds and banks to become senior executives.”

Those options weren’t so available, says Mishra, for the generations that would follow. But without plot-spoiling Run And Hide too much, it doesn’t end particularly well for the friends who chase this dream. As Arun, who gets a taste of liberal metropolitan life in London, heads back to the Himalayas, he muses: “The new India will never make it.”

It feels very much like Run and Hide is a cautionary tale of the widening gap between rich and poor, the baggage of class and caste, and the collateral damage that can come with an unthinking, rapid push towards change and modernity.

'Run and Hide' by Pankaj Mishra tells the story of a group of friends who take every opportunity available to them at the turn of the century to succeed. Photo: Penguin Random House
'Run and Hide' by Pankaj Mishra tells the story of a group of friends who take every opportunity available to them at the turn of the century to succeed. Photo: Penguin Random House

“Yeah … the problem with the 'new India' project was that it was not aiming to be like, say, a successful middle income country of the kind that exists in Asia or Latin America,” says Mishra. “The project was to become an international superpower, on par with the US, Western Europe, and indeed, China. That was a totally fantastical and delusional project.

“In Run and Hide, Arun has come from a village where people are fed these fantasies, which are cruelly unrealisable. It’s my belief that Arun’s opinions are shared by literally millions of people who know how hopeless it is, without any proper education, to get a job or even be part of the subsistence economy.”

It’s fair to say Run And Hide isn’t afraid to explore these issues with some gusto; Arun becoming a quasi essayist at times in his extended observations on his generation’s desire to vie for “rewards that are as dubious as they are elusive”. But in a novel, Mishra can explore the deeper, more psychological effects chasing the dream can have on a country and its people. There’s more than one nod to VS Naipaul’s A Bend In The River, and its existential imperative to trample the past into the ground.

“Something very poorly understood in the West is that the transition from rural economies to metropolises was something Europeans went through for nearly a century,” Mishra explains. “But what India and China have experienced in the post colonial era, the migrations, the uprootedness has been compressed into two or three decades.

"That’s been a really traumatic experience for many people, and there’s become this obligation to reinvent yourself to survive this new world. You might have to give up languages or religions that you grew up with in order to become ‘modern’. You might even disown your parents if they speak with the wrong accent or don’t speak English at all.”

It sounds dramatic, but it is just this experience, this broken contract with the past, that Mishra’s characters try to navigate — with mixed results. Arun, though he could have everything in this modern India, is still searching for something that will bring him true fulfilment.

Mishra knows that he could be quite easily accused of being part of the intellectual, metropolitan left who he takes time to mercilessly satirise in the closing phases of the book — people whose hearts might seem in the right place but are blissfully unaware of the larger landscape of cruelty and injustice, or sometimes unwittingly complicit in it. It was only in the writing of a novel that he could interrogate his own feelings more intensely as a product himself of systems of injustice in India.

“Writing a novel now was a revelation to me in the way I wanted to speak to people,” he says. “And not just people in India. I think anyone who’s grown up feeling an outsider because of their class, their background — even their accent — will understand the scars of my characters.

"But that’s what novels can do; speak at different levels to readers shaped by different contexts and experiences.”

Run and Hide (Hutchinson Heinemann) is out now

Watch The National's interview with Pankaj Mishra right after he won the $150,000 Yale literary prize in March 2014:

Veere di Wedding
Dir: Shashanka Ghosh
Starring: Kareena Kapoo-Khan, Sonam Kapoor, Swara Bhaskar and Shikha Talsania ​​​​​​​
Verdict: 4 Stars

Walls

Louis Tomlinson

3 out of 5 stars

(Syco Music/Arista Records)

Labour dispute

The insured employee may still file an ILOE claim even if a labour dispute is ongoing post termination, but the insurer may suspend or reject payment, until the courts resolve the dispute, especially if the reason for termination is contested. The outcome of the labour court proceedings can directly affect eligibility.


- Abdullah Ishnaneh, Partner, BSA Law 

Global state-owned investor ranking by size

1.

United States

2.

China

3.

UAE

4.

Japan

5

Norway

6.

Canada

7.

Singapore

8.

Australia

9.

Saudi Arabia

10.

South Korea

The years Ramadan fell in May

1987

1954

1921

1888

Cherry

Directed by: Joe and Anthony Russo

Starring: Tom Holland, Ciara Bravo

1/5

MATCH INFO

World Cup qualifier

Thailand 2 (Dangda 26', Panya 51')

UAE 1 (Mabkhout 45 2')

How Voiss turns words to speech

The device has a screen reader or software that monitors what happens on the screen

The screen reader sends the text to the speech synthesiser

This converts to audio whatever it receives from screen reader, so the person can hear what is happening on the screen

A VOISS computer costs between $200 and $250 depending on memory card capacity that ranges from 32GB to 128GB

The speech synthesisers VOISS develops are free

Subsequent computer versions will include improvements such as wireless keyboards

Arabic voice in affordable talking computer to be added next year to English, Portuguese, and Spanish synthesiser

Partnerships planned during Expo 2020 Dubai to add more languages

At least 2.2 billion people globally have a vision impairment or blindness

More than 90 per cent live in developing countries

The Long-term aim of VOISS to reach the technology to people in poor countries with workshops that teach them to build their own device

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Director: Jafar Panahi

Stars: Vahid Mobasseri, Mariam Afshari, Ebrahim Azizi, Hadis Pakbaten, Majid Panahi, Mohamad Ali Elyasmehr

Rating: 4/5

Specs

Engine: Dual-motor all-wheel-drive electric

Range: Up to 610km

Power: 905hp

Torque: 985Nm

Price: From Dh439,000

Available: Now

If you go

The flights

Fly direct to London from the UAE with Etihad, Emirates, British Airways or Virgin Atlantic from about Dh2,500 return including taxes. 

The hotel

Rooms at the convenient and art-conscious Andaz London Liverpool Street cost from £167 (Dh800) per night including taxes.

The tour

The Shoreditch Street Art Tour costs from £15 (Dh73) per person for approximately three hours. 

Indoor Cricket World Cup Dubai 2017

Venue Insportz, Dubai; Admission Free

Fixtures - Open Men 2pm: India v New Zealand, Malaysia v UAE, Singapore v South Africa, Sri Lanka v England; 8pm: Australia v Singapore, India v Sri Lanka, England v Malaysia, New Zealand v South Africa

Fixtures - Open Women Noon: New Zealand v England, UAE v Australia; 6pm: England v South Africa, New Zealand v Australia

Keane on …

Liverpool’s Uefa Champions League bid: “They’re great. With the attacking force they have, for me, they’re certainly one of the favourites. You look at the teams left in it - they’re capable of scoring against anybody at any given time. Defensively they’ve been good, so I don’t see any reason why they couldn’t go on and win it.”

Mohamed Salah’s debut campaign at Anfield: “Unbelievable. He’s been phenomenal. You can name the front three, but for him on a personal level, he’s been unreal. He’s been great to watch and hopefully he can continue now until the end of the season - which I’m sure he will, because he’s been in fine form. He’s been incredible this season.”

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Scoreline

Saudi Arabia 1-0 Japan

 Saudi Arabia Al Muwallad 63’

Paltan

Producer: JP Films, Zee Studios
Director: JP Dutta
Cast: Jackie Shroff, Sonu Sood, Arjun Rampal, Siddhanth Kapoor, Luv Sinha and Harshvardhan Rane
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1970

October 26: Bahrain withdraws from a proposal to create a federation of nine with the seven Trucial States and Qatar. 

December: Ahmed Al Suwaidi visits New York to discuss potential UN membership.

1971

March 1:  Alex Douglas Hume, Conservative foreign secretary confirms that Britain will leave the Gulf and “strongly supports” the creation of a Union of Arab Emirates.

July 12: Historic meeting at which Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid make a binding agreement to create what will become the UAE.

July 18: It is announced that the UAE will be formed from six emirates, with a proposed constitution signed. RAK is not yet part of the agreement.

August 6:  The fifth anniversary of Sheikh Zayed becoming Ruler of Abu Dhabi, with official celebrations deferred until later in the year.

August 15: Bahrain becomes independent.

September 3: Qatar becomes independent.

November 23-25: Meeting with Sheikh Zayed and Sheikh Rashid and senior British officials to fix December 2 as date of creation of the UAE.

November 29:  At 5.30pm Iranian forces seize the Greater and Lesser Tunbs by force.

November 30: Despite  a power sharing agreement, Tehran takes full control of Abu Musa. 

November 31: UK officials visit all six participating Emirates to formally end the Trucial States treaties

December 2: 11am, Dubai. New Supreme Council formally elects Sheikh Zayed as President. Treaty of Friendship signed with the UK. 11.30am. Flag raising ceremony at Union House and Al Manhal Palace in Abu Dhabi witnessed by Sheikh Khalifa, then Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi.

December 6: Arab League formally admits the UAE. The first British Ambassador presents his credentials to Sheikh Zayed.

December 9: UAE joins the United Nations.

The biog

Profession: Senior sports presenter and producer

Marital status: Single

Favourite book: Al Nabi by Jibran Khalil Jibran

Favourite food: Italian and Lebanese food

Favourite football player: Cristiano Ronaldo

Languages: Arabic, French, English, Portuguese and some Spanish

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Reading List

Practitioners of mindful eating recommend the following books to get you started:

Savor: Mindful Eating, Mindful Life by Thich Nhat Hanh and Dr Lilian Cheung

How to Eat by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Mindful Diet by Dr Ruth Wolever

Mindful Eating by Dr Jan Bays

How to Raise a Mindful Eaterby Maryann Jacobsen

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Sand storm

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  • Visibility: Often dramatic with thick "walls" of sand
  • Duration: Short-lived, typically localised
  • Travel distance: Limited 
  • Source: Open desert areas with strong winds

Dust storm

  • Particle size: Much finer, lightweight particles
  • Visibility: Hazy skies but less intense
  • Duration: Can linger for days
  • Travel distance: Long-range, up to thousands of kilometres
  • Source: Can be carried from distant regions
The five pillars of Islam

1. Fasting 

2. Prayer 

3. Hajj 

4. Shahada 

5. Zakat 

The burning issue

The internal combustion engine is facing a watershed moment – major manufacturer Volvo is to stop producing petroleum-powered vehicles by 2021 and countries in Europe, including the UK, have vowed to ban their sale before 2040. The National takes a look at the story of one of the most successful technologies of the last 100 years and how it has impacted life in the UAE. 

Read part four: an affection for classic cars lives on

Read part three: the age of the electric vehicle begins

Read part two: how climate change drove the race for an alternative 

Benefits of first-time home buyers' scheme
  • Priority access to new homes from participating developers
  • Discounts on sales price of off-plan units
  • Flexible payment plans from developers
  • Mortgages with better interest rates, faster approval times and reduced fees
  • DLD registration fee can be paid through banks or credit cards at zero interest rates
F1 The Movie

Starring: Brad Pitt, Damson Idris, Kerry Condon, Javier Bardem

Director: Joseph Kosinski

Rating: 4/5

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