Pankaj Mishra's new novel

Jennifer Wilson has a review of Pankay Mishra's new novel in 'the Nation'. This paragraph caught my eye-

In 2015, Time magazine announced its choices for that year’s 100 most influential people. Among them was the newly elected prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. In his brief essay on the right-wing Hindu nationalist, whose Bharatiya Janata Party fanned the flames of Islamophobia on its path to victory,

9/11 fanned the flames of Islamophobia around the world. It directly led to the attack on the Indian Parliament and the Godhra atrocity. The BJP was already in power when it happened. Vajpayee was considered a peace-maker but once General Musharraf toppled Navaz Sharif, little progress could be made.

America lead a War on Terror in which 1.3 million Muslims lost their lives. Iran, China and Russia were the main beneficiaries of this War. 

Barack Obama offered nothing but praise.

Because Modi shared his concern with climate change and also India would benefit from his deal with Iran. On the other hand, India had refused to send troops to kill Muslims. This was very illiberal of it. Brown peeps should help White peeps kill Brown peeps. 

“As a boy,” he wrote, “Narendra Modi helped his father sell tea to support their family. Today, he’s the leader of the world’s largest democracy, and his life story—from poverty to Prime Minister—reflects the dynamism and potential of India’s rise.”

What's wrong with that? Obama had met Rahul, who was only 8 years younger than himself, and decided he was a moon-calf. Modi was good at his job. 

For Obama, the president of a country built on the myth of meritocracy,

Obama was Black. America was built on killing Injuns and whipping niggers. Why does Jennifer not know this?  

Modi’s (romanticized) rags-to-riches story

He isn't rich. He holds the country's top job because he is better at it than anybody else. Before that he was a three term Chief Minister of Gujarat. 

was a shiny bauble whose charms he could not resist.

Jennifer is so much smarter than Obama. The fellow scratches his wooly head and tries to grab 'shiny baubles' because there are some charms he can't resist.  

Jude Cook, writing for the Spectator, gives a precis of Mishra's book-

The first novel in more than 20 years from the essayist and cultural analyst Pankaj Mishra is as sharp, provocative and engagé as you’d expect.

In other words, it is boring narcissistic shite.  

An exploration of Narendra Modi’s autocratic, Hindu-nationalist New India

it isn't. Mishra would have to write about a BJP ruled state in order to explore that theme. But, he is writing about Delhi which went from Congress to Kejriwal. I suppose Himachal does have a BJP Chief Minister with strong RSS ties. But he is not considered an autocrat. The party is backing him to the hilt so as to fight off AAP's bid for power in the State. 

seen through the progress of three graduates from the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology,

in Delhi.  

it’s also reassuringly rich in characterisation and the sheer sensory overload of modern life.

Sadly it isn't the modern life of people who actually live in Delhi.  

Narrated by Arun Dwivedi to an initially unnamed interlocutor, the book follows his journey from poverty to modest success as a translator in Delhi, while his feckless friends Aseem and Virendra make it big in America.

Kejriwal is an IIT graduate. Prashant Kishor, who went to a Government school in Buxar, had to drop out of a Statistics degree in Hindu College, Delhi, because of ill Health. He holds a post grad qualification in Public Health. He has changed the way politics is done in India. Ten years ago, no one could have foreseen that Kejriwal or Kishor would have such political importance in a rapidly changing country. Meanwhile, everybody has forgotten Arundhati Roy and Pankaj Mishra. 

Meanwhile, those who 'make it big' in America have to face the fact that some Indians are making it bigger in India. But, it is China which will eclipse America by the end of the decade. 

 A desire to escape ‘the material deprivations and the moral shabbiness... determined much of our lives’, Arun reflects, as they embark on their ‘strange, self-distorting journeys’.

Whereas Modi and Kejriwal and Prashant have actually changed things for those more deprived.

His own lucky break comes when he’s transformed into ‘an upper-caste Hindu by the stroke of a schoolmaster’s pen’, giving him a Brahmin surname resulting in ‘a lifelong fear of being found out’.

Mishra is wrong. Dwiwedi is not necessarily a Brahmin surname. It means 'able to distinguish right from wrong'. Dubey would be more usual. However, a guy who got into IIT in the General Category only did so because of his exam performance.  Nothing else matters.

No such scruples trouble his thrusting friends. While the wildly indiscreet Aseem becomes a literary mover and shaker,

a gormless parasite 

Virendra

a Dalit 

becomes a billionaire at a hedge fund.

see above 

Both are Modi’s ‘cheerleaders’, holding aloft ‘New India’s banner of entrepreneurial pluck and sparkle’

No. They'd have begun their ascent under UPA. If Vierendra is Gujarati or Marwari, he might be a 'bakht' but, if so, Mishra is saying that this won't keep you  safe from the Enforcement Directorate. As for Aseem, being pro-Modi was a handicap in the 'literary' world.  

When Arun retreats to Ranipur to look after his ailing mother, we learn the identity of the novel’s addressee. Alia Omar, a writer from a conservative Muslim background and a one-time TV anchor and model, enlists Arun to help with her book on crooked global elites, interviewing him about his friends. Some of Run and Hide’s most affecting passages are set here, as Arun and Alia begin a tentative relationship — the wider ‘hyper-connected world of unprecedented possibility’ contrasted with the poverty and tradition of the village overlooked by the ‘stern majesty’ of the Himalayas.

Not 'stern majesty' of Modiji? Shame. 

 The centre, unsurprisingly, cannot hold, as Virendra is arrested for money laundering, insider trading and tax evasion, and Aseem is found guilty of sexual misconduct.

So, the ED is no respecter of persons. Is Aseem modelled on Tarun Tejpal? Who cares?  

Arun’s reaction is to retreat further into mysticism and isolation, super-aware of the inescapable commonplace that the personal is the political.

Unless it isn't because you are stupid and people only pay attention to smart people like that Prashant Kishor dude.  

As an exuberant chronicle of a late capitalist world fatally mediated by Twitter and Instagram, Run and Hide might be the most zeitgeisty novel you could read.

Ten years ago- sure. Instagram had a million downloads a day in 2012.  

By the end, Arun recalls Hermann Hesse’s non-conformist heroes, his searching insight and principles of social equality assailed but still intact. On his return to Delhi, he comments: ‘The thought suddenly came to me, shocking in its stark clarity: New India will never make it.'

There was a New India which Mishra failed to notice in the Nineties. There may well also have been a new Britain and new America and so forth. But new things don't last. People will turn against such soulless distractions. Sooner or later they will return to sitting under stern majesty of Himalayas and playing with their own feces while saying 'boo to Neo-Liberalism. Marx was right about Modi. The fellow is not properly grasping the dialectical mung ki dal of the phurr phurr of the laltain. What to do? Backward Castes are like that only.'

In his previous novel, Mishra had written of a tough guy on campus who had taken him- because of his caste- under his wing. Though attracted to the BJP, the tough guy quoted Iqbal- the Nietzschean Poet Prophet of Pakistan.

Aseem appears to play a similar role in this novel- ' 

Aseem, who saw himself as a mascot of triumphant self-invention,

epitome not mascot.  

loved initiating his friends into his dream of power and glory.

sharing his dream or seeking to make his dream infectious 

He presented it, in fact, as an existential imperative, ceaselessly quoting V. S. Naipaul: ‘The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.’

This is plausible.  

It won’t be easy, he would say, for self-made men of our lowly social backgrounds.

Kids at the IIT didn't say things like that. They knew things would be easy if they 'cracked' the UPSC or other such exams. Those from more rural areas where more fiercely competitive than the urban middle class.  

He would cite Chekhov – how the son of a slave has to squeeze, drop by drop, the slave’s blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real man coursing through his veins.

This is unlikely. Russia really had serfdom. It wasn't the case that these kids had any ancestral memory of 'hali' or other such feudal practices.  

He would become very emotional speaking of the struggle to take ourselves seriously – which he said came before the struggle to persuade others to take us seriously, and was more exacting.

This is the language of the CPI. Mishra must have picked it up from the vendors of Soviet publications. Sanghis had a different idiom. In Mishra's book, a Dalit is forced by an older Tamil student in the IIT hostel to lick the anus of a Brahmin. That was the delightful Indian Liberalism which Modi's rise put an end to. The RSS is respected because it is too stupid and backward to teach young people about rim jobs. This New India of Modi's is bound to fail. Mishra's Brahminical anus needs attention. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.