David Berlinski on Pankaj Mishra

While Indians respect Pundits we don't actually want to read what they write. If their Punditry is useful, it is welcome to change the world. If it isn't useful, it is nobody's business save that of equally useless Pundits. By contrast, Indians have a soft spot for the auto-didact- i.e. a guy whose love of arcane texts does not involve jizzing copiously over their leaves- more particularly if he makes a fool of himself by publishing polemical articles based on his own obstinate misologies and ludicrous misprisions. 

However, we don't class a guy with no academic credentials as an auto-didact. You must be a graduate- otherwise you are merely plying a trade. G.V Desani didn't finish school. But he did well as a journalist and lecturer before turning into a Yogi of some sort. 

To understand why an auto-didact must be a graduate- a 'snatak' to use a Brahminical term- I should explain that, when I was young, if a person said 'my son-in-law is a graduate' everybody understood that the fellow was unemployed. This was considered a good thing. If he bought and read books- all the better. He might turn into an amusing sort of auto-didact.

A fellow who didn't have a degree might suddenly get a job as a bus conductor or a travelling salesman. Next thing you know, that fellow has started up some shady business. Even the Sarkar can't stop him getting rich. Hai! This is Kali Yuga. Without degree-vegree even a backward caste chai-wallah can become Prime Minister! 

Of course, being a graduate soon ceased to be enough. You had to fail your M.A. That was the needful, humanizing, touch. The son-in-law, spurned by Sarasvati, nevertheless, gains a Grha-Lakshmi. Anyway, the fellow can give tuition to the little kiddies and make himself useful around the house. 

Nirad Chaudhri failed his MA and became the annalist of his own irrefragable irrelevance and obscurity. V.S Naipaul failed his B.Litt and became the skulking Gollum of Post-Coloniality's sorry saga. Pankaj Mishra actually got an MA. But it was from J.N.U. and did not involve beating people. Obviously, the boy had no future in India- not in the sense that he couldn't have done well in Publishing or Advertising or Corporate P.R or other such lucrative fields- but that future would have represented a rupture with his, his caste's, Augustinian past as a vanquishment that might too easily vanish in the neo-liberal present. He had to move to London to recuperate a sense of virtuous Brahmin victimhood. The Soviets really should have tried harder to turn India Red before throwing in the sponge. But, in a sense, wasn't this really the fault of the British? If only they had held out a little longer, India might have been liberated by a Red Army of its own. Of course, for this to happen, America would have had to finance the Raj. Thus, ultimately, everything is America's fault. 

David Berlinski- an odd fish if ever there was one- might, for all I know, rank as a sort of Nirard or Naipaul for Jewish intellectuals of his vintage. He is a senior fellow at the 'Discovery Institute'- i.e. has a bone to pick with Darwin- and edits the Inference Review- which is financed by Peter Thiel. 

For some reason, Berlinski- who is Biden's age- feels he has a duty to take a stick to Pankaj Mishra in the pages of his rag. For God's sake- why? Mishra is genuinely brown skinned. This is not Rachel Dolezal in drag. He is a 100 percent authentic Indian- not Elizabeth Warren pretending to be Pocahontas. 

Berlinski quotes this, perfectly sensible, passage in Mishra's latest book

What I didn’t realise until I started to inhabit the knowledge ecosystems of London and New York is how evasions and suppressions had resulted, over time, in a massive store of defective knowledge about the West and the non-West alike. Simple-minded and misleading ideas and assumptions, drawn from this blinkered history, had come to shape the speeches of Western statesmen, think tank reports and newspaper editorials, while supplying fuel to countless log-rolling columnists, television pundits and terrorism experts.

Berlinski, whose first language appears to have been German, writes-

Living on hot air, logrolling columnists, like certain abstemious yogis, do not generally require fuel,

They need money- though a lot less money than a self-respecting yogi- and are generally on the qui vive for a 'Senior fellowship' at some bogus Institute where they can coach their own favourite brand of Ann Coulter. 

although they may require logs; and a knowledge ecosystem suggests nothing so much as a child’s terrarium: wood, water, weeds, worms.

Worms are not generally considered to be knowledge seeking or knowledge trading. An ecosystem which contains knowledge production is nothing like a child's terrarium. Berlinkski may not believe in biological evolution. Still, if he thinks worms are actually part of a sophisticated knowledge economy- some in the pay of Big Water, others in thrall to Big Wood- then good luck to him. He is a very very special old man.  

Never mind. Readers will get the point.

No. They will think you are a senile ignoramus who has wasted his life. 

They could hardly miss it. In hanging around London and New York, Mishra encountered a good many dopes.

I hang around London but I give most of its 'knowledge eco-systems' a miss because, frankly, at my age, pity replaces schadenfreude. There may be worse ways of making a living but surely rent-boys and truck stop whores move in a better class of Society?

With Biden's election, it is clear that Mishra is on the winning side of the debate about historic Racism. This may marginalize him as indigenous, more working class, 'critical race theorists' displace his decidedly Brahminical oeuvre. The future belongs to Suraj Yengde and Sujatha Gidla. Mishra fades into V.S Nightfall's shade. True, in his case, it was a Soviet, not an Anglo-Saxon, Whitey who is to blame for his epistemic Oliver Twistedness. But his frustrated wails are for Whitey all the same. 

Berlinski, with typical perversity, highlights this quite reasonable passage from Mishra-

Astonishingly, British imperialism, seen for decades by Western scholars and anti-colonial leaders alike as a racist, illegitimate and often predatory despotism, came to be repackaged in our own time as a benediction that, in Ferguson’s words, “undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour.”

British Imperialism had to pay for itself. In the short run, racist and despotic measures could boost profits but this led to long term stagnation. This in turn meant lower defensibility for the Empire as a whole. Now, it is quite true that we don't really have the maths to properly model what I am referring to. But the intuition behind it was clear enough to people like Warren Hastings.  

Berlinski, who may be forgetting English- which I believe to be his second language- in his dotage, writes-

It is unclear whether Mishra thinks that Ferguson’s benediction was not beneficial or that it was otherwise withheld.

This is utterly mad. Mishra thinks racism and predatory despotism WAS BAD. Also, Berlinski may be astonished to hear, Mishra thinks Hitler was evil. People at the 'Discovery Institute' may think differently but then those people are the product of scatological, not biological, evolution. To be clear, they are turds who can walk and talk.  

“Never mind,” he says,

that free trade, introduced to Asia through gunboats, destroyed nascent industry in conquered countries, that “free” capital mostly went to the white settler states of Australia and Canada, and that indentured rather than “free” labor replaced slavery.

But, people like Warren Hastings saw that this sort of sharp practice hurt the investors. A better way forward was to do business in line with what economists call the 'folk theorem' of repeated games. Smith and Burke and Ricardo and so forth did not have the fancy maths to prove this sort of intuition but the thing was common sense. A lot of good people lost their shirt in the 1840s. There was a better way forward for all concerned. Remarkably, some English merchant adventurers in the late Seventeenth century where writing in very modern terms. Sadly, the mercantilist policies of the home government prevented a much greater growth in trade which would have contributed more to both the defense and the prosperity of the home country as well as its colonial possessions. 

He does not stay to argue these points.12 And for every good reason. Someone might argue back.13

If they are economists, well and good. If they aren't they look- as Niall Ferguson does- an utter fool. The fact of the matter is that the British Empire was a gift of the Royal Navy- which was necessary for Home Defense. The optimal policy for England would involve increasing non-coercive commerce of a type able to defend itself. In the very short term- piracy is a good option. In the short to medium term, distorting the terms of trade is profitable. But to have long run endogenous, self-defending, growth you need equitable terms of trade of a Muth rational and therefore robust type. What exactly this may be is ideographic and requires transfers from time to time. However, its very existence reduces uncertainty and is reflected in higher growth. Had Britain entered this type of negotiation after 1860, the true noon-tide of Empire might well have been 1960- but both Britain and India and the rest of the world would have been very different. For a start, no Jews or other minorities would have been killed in Europe because it would have been a paying proposition to resettle such people in places where they could be happy and productive. Indeed, there may have been no 'Kaiser's War' because Germany would have lacked a naval threat point. 

The British Empire chose to be racial, not Roman. When its power was strongest, its mind was weakest. The British people paid a high price in blood and treasure for this mistake. The pity of it is, so did much of the rest of the world which had little conception of the values English folk hold dear. There is no great irony in Mishra arriving at his love of the English language- or indeed in his marrying a nice English girl and settling here- via his childhood love of Soviet magazines and books. A bestial, gangster regime appeared less morally repugnant than England. Why? A cheap and vulgar racism came to be seen as a magic wand by which wealth and security could be commanded. Two Wars taught England its error. 

Mishra is a deeply silly and ignorant man but, it must be said, he got his MA when 'post colonialism' was going great guns in the academy. Mishra, having run out of other material, jumped on that bandwagon and, with Kamala Harris looking like a possible future President, his time has come- and, precisely for that reason, gone. 

Berlinski, who is Biden's age, lives in France. A heartfelt note enters this otherwise foolish essay-

Mishra’s real point—his only point—comes down to a question. Can the French tolerate expressions of cultural and religious distinctiveness? It all depends. Who in France would scruple at the veil if the veil were all that provoked scruples?

Or the turban. Apparently, there's an elderly Sikh guy who wouldn't take off his turban for the security photograph and thus lost his entitlement to social security. The poor chap had to return to India- were, no doubt, he will be honoured for his religious scruples.  

The French are unwilling to accommodate anti-Semitism of the grossest kind,

So, they have changed for the better since the time of Marshall Petain. Good for them. 

a vicious contempt for the French state and its secular commitments, religious obscurantism, and murder in the name of Islam.86 These are not matters of cultural or religious distinctiveness. The French regard them as intolerable.87

So do I.

I hope Berlinski is right to pin his faith on French intolerance in this respect. The problem, of course, is that young Jewish people may feel stigmatized or that there is a hostile environment. Israel, as a vibrant knowledge economy with a large pool of marriage partners, may beckon to them. If the youngsters start leaving, a tipping point could be reached. 

(Tony) Judt and Mishra regard the destruction of European Jewry and the expulsion of central Europe’s ethnic Germans as the flash of the same terrible whip.

No. Mishra is a Brahmin. He thinks Jews are like Brahmins. Christians and Muslims want to convert or kill them. On the other hand, there's no point sticking up for Hindus or Jews because virtue signalling Brahmins or Cohens will immediately call you a Nazi. 

God alone knows what Tony Judt really thought.  

 They are persuaded that the hands that held that whip were in service to the Versailles ideal of national homogeneity.

There was no such 'ideal'. One of Wilson's 14 points recognized the need for a 'Polish corridor- i.e. economic and strategic considerations would trump all else. Apparently one Americans historian- Professor Coolidge- thought the German speaking portions of Bohemia should be left to go their own way. But he was ignored. The Czechs got saddled with a 24 per cent German speaking minority- thus creating the Sudeten problem. 

He who wills the ends wills the means.92

No. Kant said he who will the ends wills the indispensably necessary means to it that is within his control. Since Kant was happy to be asexual, this particular piece of stupidity didn't bother him at all. The fact is, the ends to which the will is directed, such that other wills might exist, involves surrender of all means of control over another will. Either that, or you just get married.

The facts are rather more complicated. For a very long time, historians assigning blame for the outbreak of war in 1914 took as their starting point Élie Halévy’s declaration that
[w]e should ask, not who, but what [emphasis original] was responsible for the three declarations of war; and the answer should be: “The rotten conditions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the fact that the revolutionary principle of nationality was at work within its limits, and that it was about to break up into a number of independent States.”

This was far from obvious at that time. The fact is the Nationality question in the Crown-lands was being resolved by negotiation- e.g. the Moravian Compromise of 1905 and then that of Bukovina in 1909. Essentially, the German speakers were giving up some power in order to 'lock in' an advantage which was bound to erode. However, purely economic forces would militate for their swallowing their pride and learning the language of the majority. Indeed, the extension of this type of negotiation to Bosnia represented an existential threat to Serbian or Southern Slav dreams. This was precisely that the superior efficiency of the Hapsubrg bureaucracy would prevail once it became acceptable to non-German speakers because of an adroit handling of their linguistic and 'national' demands through the creation of a non-territorial 'autonomy' which a traditional 'monarchia composita' was well placed to affirm. However, it must be said that such 'compromises' were more difficult in some places- e.g Galicia- and unthinkable within the Hungarian realm. 

What is curious is why the Kaiser showed little appetite for gobbling up the German portions of the Crown-lands. If Austria-Hungary truly was a corpse, surely Germany would be the vulture which would insist on getting first pick? No doubt, the Hapsburgs kept things sweet with Berlin for precisely this reason. Still, they were playing a dangerous game. If the Germans left them in the lurch, the Kaiser- making a separate peace- could compensate himself from their territory. 

This has now changed. The Empire has undergone a posthumous improvement, historians assigning it many of the virtues that its subjects always believed it possessed. It was stable, fair, well-administered, tolerant, and decent.

In The Habsburg Empire, Pieter Judson argued that whatever the ostensible yearning for national purity,

Judson does not speak in these terms. He upholds the view that different nationalities were being conciliated. But facts can't be gainsaid. Von Hotzendorf plunged the Empire into an abyss. The fish had rotted from the head. We can't concern itself with what might have been. What happened was colossal stupidity which could somehow still impress its contemporaries as some novel type of strategic brilliance. 

the states that followed the Hapsburg Empire were themselves little empires, fractious within themselves, and so impure. Every state after 1918 was a Vielvölkerstaat, whose survival demanded the integration of multi-ethnic populations, the successful—if often authoritarian—attachment of peripheries to centers, and the development of a positive sense of shared identification, even among people who claimed to belong to the same nation. Far from marking the end of the Vielvölkerstaaten, 1918 could be said to have witnessed their proliferation.

This is foolish. Empires are always multi-ethnic and most traditional monarchies were composite. What happened in 1918 is that some on the losing side lost territory- and thus became irredentist- while some on the not losing side became unstable by reason of the inclusion of an unhappy minority. 

The striking contrast between the Versailles ideal of national homogeneity

There was no such ideal. 

and the rabble of little empires throughout central Europe might suggest that the ideal was unachievable.

No. It suggests that it was never on the cards.  

The perfect truth.

No entity without identity, W. V. O. Quine once remarked.

He was wrong.  Identity is not model-theoretically axiomatizable in first-order logic. However we can use the term 'Liebniz congruence' for a situation where we can't discern any difference within the language concerned and thus think- 'this is identity'. But, obviously, this refers to the granularity or other limitations of our language. I have written elsewhere on this topic.

Berlinski has a PhD from Princeton and has written about Mathematics. Given his parents' background- refugees from Hitler- and the fraught nature of things in France right now- there is some special meaning to what this erudite wordsmith is saying here. How does it relate to the cretin Mishra? As an even less educated Brahmin, I am curious to know. 

Sets are identical if they share the same members. Simple, sane, sensible.

But this is only true for Set theory by virtue of the axiom of extensionality. It isn't true of many useful things done to a set- which, being meaningful, are intensional- i.e. substitution of co-extensive expression changes logical value. It isn't sensible to say something in natural language which has no application to any of the sorts of useful or meaningful operations which natural languages perform.  

Thereafter everything goes dark. Identity is an imperious demand and one not much amenable to definition.

No. It is 'intensional' under a type theoretic schema and yields univalent foundations for some algorithmic procedure of a utile kind. We could say any 'buck stopped', protocol bound, juristic procedure could determine identity well enough for some specific purpose.  But this is defeasible, not imperious. 

“We shall call ‘ethnic groups,’” Max Weber remarked,
those human groups that entertain a subjective belief in their common descent because of similarities of physical type or of customs or both, or because of memories of colonization or migration.

Weber lived long before DNA was discovered. It may be that we are heading towards a world where my entire DNA sequence can be computed in less than the time it takes for me to sign my name or undergo a retinal scan. It may be that there is a purely objective way to classify me into some group or other which would better correlate with the grouping of my distant descendants. I suspect, that in Huxley's brave new world, I would be immediately spotted as a retard and sent off to breed with my own kind in the sewers.  

Sicilians are slanderous and cruel, as de Vitry observed in the thirteenth century. The inference goes from similarities among Sicilians to a subjective belief in common descent.

Perhaps this is why this bloke is against biological evolution. Maybe we are all the same and it is merely prejudice which asserts we have different inherited traits. 

And thereafter any pretension to analytical refinement disappears. How might common descent be justified? Memory and court records may take a Sicilian to his great-grandparents, but beyond that, there is only the turbid ebb and flow of the Mediterranean world. An appeal to genetic diversity leads nowhere. There is no discernible coincidence between ethnic and genetic identity.

Well, there would be between me and Berlinksi. 

Berlin under Nazi rule was no more genetically homogeneous than the Bronx, and although China is genetically quite homogeneous, there are more than fifty recognized ethnic groups within China today.

Sub-saharan Africa would be a better example of great genetic heterogeneity. It appeared pretty peaceful though, no doubt, slave traders and so forth existed.  

An ethnic identity is, as Weber understood, something artificial. It is made up. An inference is required from language, skin color, habit, geography, or shared memory to the presumption of common ancestry; and if an inference, then a choice. All human beings are similar in some respect. If a choice, by what standard? There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, and every one of them is right. This is something that Mishra recognizes:

The fervour of the ideologue manqué made no room for the sober fact that almost every nation state harbours a disaffected and volatile minority, whose size varies constantly in inverse relation to the alertness, tact and wisdom of the majority population.

Unless the majority is disaffected and volatile, in which case the minority might find it wise to tactfully run away. This is certainly what Hindus have tended to do from Pakistan and Bangladesh. 

If this is so, what remains of the image of central Europe as a blasted heath? Poland is today genetically homogeneous, pure in virtue of mass murder and ethnic expulsions. No one could mistake genetic homogeneity in Poland for cultural or political homogeneity. Those pure Polish Poles are today divided—polarized, in fact.

They seem to be doing fine.  

The disaffected and volatile minorities in Europe are today based on

being disaffected and volatile. When is the last time a bunch of orthodox Jewish grannies went rampaging through the streets? How about Hindus? What of the highly educated French people who are here in Chelsea and Fulham? Why are they not running around toppling statues of Nelson or Wellington? 

class, economic, political, racial, religious, and sexual distinctions. This hardly means that ethnic distinctions have disappeared.

It means their importance has diminished.

On the contrary- if ethnicity correlates with having a horror of being considered 'volatile' or 'disaffected' then its importance increases because it becomes the engine of upward mobility and capital formation. 

Between Mishra’s decent and generous commitment to multiculturalism,

Which is wholly hypocritical. He doesn't want to see the Hindus of Wembley marching upon Trafalgar Square to demand the end to cow slaughter. He may say he is cool with Muslims demanding the head of Charlie Hebdo- but that's just virtue signalling. The truth is, like other Hindus, Mishra wants London to be predominantly White, English speaking and well educated. He does not want to be chased through the streets by Libyan soldiers intent on anal rape.  

and his unwillingness, or inability, to follow his argument to its end, is an area of unease.

An area of hypocritical virtue signalling. Ferdinand Mount is his father-in-law. This is not a guy who wants London to turn into a fucking ghetto.  

What a century of conflict has demonstrated is that

fucking over the 'volatile' till they stop being 'volatile' is the way to go.  

every form of presumptive purity is an unstable bond of state formation,

only if volatility obtains. If the thing is beaten to death, bonds are stable. If not, nothing is.  

one incapable of dissolving, or even constraining, the fractiousness of life itself.

 Fractiousness disappears quickly enough where punishment is swift and draconian. However, to be sustainable, the thing must be incentive compatible. Mechanism design is what guards against volatility- save such as might drive liquidity in markets or innovation in certain fields.

Why is Berlinski, who obviously knows nothing about India, concerned with whether the British Raj was a good or bad thing? I suppose you could argue that, as a person of Jewish descent, he may hate Israel and thus may cherish fond memories of the role played by Raj officials in pressurizing the British Government to restrict Jewish migration, not just to Palestine, but to any destination in the Empire. The Evian Conference was a splendid example of the world cooperating to ensure that few Jews could escape Hitler.

Berlinski ends thus- 

The British left India, but their institutions remained.

No. There were no more Viceroys or Governor Generals. India chose to be a Republic but to remain a member of the Commonwealth. Its Constitution, on the Irish pattern, enunciated a doctrine of autochthony. 

They are in place today: the extraordinary railway system,

Railways are a form of transport- not an institution. 

the irrigation network,

Which had existed and was added to  

the common law,

which however was different from English common law.  

the British administrative system,

which never existed in Britain or any of its settler colonies 

the peculiar nature of British political ideals.

Like what? Continually talking bollocks? 

If we cannot easily or confidently judge the Roman Empire after 2,000 years, who on earth would think it easy to judge the British Empire after one hundred years?

The guys who got it to fuck off and whose lives were much much better for its so doing. As for the Roman Empire- it's gone. Get over it. 

The truth about the Roman Empire is, as one might expect, very large. 

The Catholic Church could be considered its successor state. So if you are Catholic you might have the hots for various Caesars. Was Rome good for the Jews? No. Greece- maybe- 2nd Maccabees is written in Koine. But Rome did the Jews no favors.  

So, too, the truth about the British Empire.

It could have been a proper Empire but Racism and Stupidity fucked the thing up. England had to get shot of it to begin to give its working people a fair crack of the whip.  

In his Autobiography of an Unknown Indian, the well-known Bengali writer Nirad Chaudhuri began his book with a most Aristidean dedication, one that Naipaul calls “staggering but appropriate.”103
To the memory of the British Empire in India,
Which conferred subjecthood upon us,
But withheld citizenship.

Nope. In 1914, the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act clarified that Nirad was as much a British citizen as Winston Churchill. But there had already been a couple of Indian origin M.Ps at Westminster. Indians could settle in England and vote in elections without any restrictions. 

To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge:
“Civis Britannicus sum”

No. The Indians kept telling the Brits to fuck off because they wanted to move into their nice bungalows and take over their well paid jobs. On the other hand, after the UK imposed visa restrictions on us, we suddenly thought being British might actually be rather nice. The only problem with the Yookay was the vast hordes of Pakistanis wandering around the place speaking horrible Punjabi style Urdu and trying to pass off their rustic fare as Mughalai cuisine.  On the other hand, the Sylhetis are excellent chefs.

Because all that was good and living within us
Was made, shaped and quickened
By the same British rule.104

Says a guy who saw the ignominious defeat of the British Indian Army in Burma and then a big Famine and massive ethnic cleansing in his native province. He thought the solution to his region's problems was a return of Whitey- any type of Whitey. But nobody wanted any part of that starving shithole which was unable to defend or feed itself.  

Chaudhuri was vilified for his dedication by Indian politicians and writers, who failed to grasp entirely its irony.

What irony? At the end of his big book he begs for Whitey to come back. He explains that Hindus are shit. They wear dhotis. Muslims are a little better because they wear pajamas which is just one step away from proper trousers. Anyway, he himself is actually Aryan. Please help me big Aryan brother!  

He repaired to England in 1972;

where his son had established himself as a leading historian- the Braudel of the Indian ocean.  

he was welcomed and even feted. He never returned to India and died an old man. Dilexi iustitiam et odivi iniquitatem propterea morior in exilio.

He was 75 when he settled in Oxford. I vividly remember his one-man show 'Oh Calcutta!' whose critical success, however, arose out of its innovative use of full frontal nudity.  

Naipaul, in reviewing Philip Woodruff’s The Men Who Ruled India, recognizes, as Mishra does not, the British Book of Accounts: “Woodruff,” he writes, “has written with sad, Roman piety of the British achievement. It was a tremendous achievement; it deserved this piety.”

It could have been a much more productive achievement. British piety or eusebia- which is the Greek word for 'dharma'- has to do with 'economia'- a suave and discretionary management of matters such that productivity and mutuality burgeon. This was Warren Hastings vision of 'a time not distant' when friendly commerce and mutuality of interest would bind the two countries not some stupid Roman shite. 

In assessing the Raj, Naipaul adds, “There is always an embarrassment, of racial arrogance on the one hand, and of genuine endeavour on the other.

No embarrassment is entailed in granting acclaim to genuine endeavor. Racial arrogance, like other sorts of stupidity, is something to be ashamed of. No wonder Naipaul failed his B.Litt. What he puts into one hand, he fails to correlate with what he absent minded puts in the other. The fact is that it doesn't matter at all whether officers were called 'Sahib' or 'Bwana' or 'Dorai' or just 'Sir' by their servants. My Dad was called all these things and, no doubt, used similar honorifics in addressing those higher in rank. When in foreign countries, Dad must have known that locals would laugh at his accent and grammatical mistakes. But the same thing happened to foreign diplomats in his native land. So what? The thing didn't matter in the slightest. Only a neurasthenic nut-case would get wound about such things.

Which is the reality? They both are and there is no contradiction.”

The reality is economic. The fantasy is some shite about Nirad and Naipaul- both of whom were good at cramming but who failed at the post-grad level because their brains were full of shit- being oh so sensitive to racial slights and suffering so greatly coz they came from provincial or very poor parts of the world. 

Mishra too is a very special little snow-flake, but- in his case- we know that he could have done well in Delhi just by showing a bit of entrepreneurial spirit. Hopefully, he has done well enough in London and won't suddenly show up on the King's Road, got up as a Gandhian rent-boy with a cardboard sign around his neck saying 'up me arse for a fiver'. 

How could it be otherwise?

And on that oracular note, let us bid adieu to Berlinsky.  Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.