 Well, my name is Spankaj Mishra and I'm a writer and I've just published this book called The Age of Anger, History of the Present, which is essentially about the global craziness that we see today, every time we pick up a newspaper, demagogues, terrorists, various far-right political movements on the rise everywhere and it's an attempt to understand this particular phenomenon historically and in other ways as well. Can you tell a little bit more about what is going on in terms of The Age of Anger in India? Well, it was what actually made me want to write this book. It was the arrival in 2014 of a man who should ideally be in prison and he became the prime minister of this country and he's now the most powerful prime minister this country has had in decades. So that made me think that we need to analyze this phenomenon slightly more deeply than say journalistic analysis that we need to go back to history. We need to look at how demagogues in other countries have flourished, what kind of false promises they've offered to the voters, to the masses at large and how they're able to acquire power and hold on to it. So in many ways this book is prompted by my Indian experience and while I was writing it, Modi's or people like Modi started to appear in different parts of the world and again I saw people falling for succumbing to strongmen who they thought would deliver to them on the promises that various ruling classes had made in the past in the recent past and and and not delivered. You know in one sense I still am loyal to an enlightenment, one enlightenment idea which is that individuals still have it in their capacity to do good and that is the kind of power that I can still trust today. Everything else the power of corporations, the power of governments that is something to be distrusted especially at this moment and I think we've seen modern history has produced ample evidence that the kind of expansion of power that is that is the modern project really in many ways that has led to all kinds of calamities all kinds of disasters it has overwhelmed individual capacities to do good and so I think what we need to recover at this point is this this this this early ideal which is individual autonomy, individual freedom, the individual capacity to do good. I think intellectuals which as a class really start to emerge in the late 18th century and I try to show in the book right from the very beginning they are allied with power often with despotic power with the intention that their ideas might be actualized might be realized by powerful people might be institutionalized and I think that's a very dangerous illusion and we've seen that over and over again how intellectuals thinking that they can shape political power and that their ideas can be implemented fruitfully in different parts of the world has led to one disaster after another whether it's new conservative intellectuals most recently advocating the invasion of Iraq and the imposition of democracy in the Middle East or indeed any number of modernization theorists running around the world saying we have the right formula for progress and development in these societies and and uprooting large numbers of people you know creating essentially all the ingredients for violent revolutions such as the kind we saw in Iran for instance after two or three decades of Bosch modernization by international elites so I think we have to be more suspicious of this figure the international and it's not easy for me to say because you know I am one of those people I criticize but I do think if we need to move forward at this point all of us and I include myself have to examine our own assumption what makes Alexander Hefzen with whom you definitely sympathize the kind of intellectual you think he's worthwhile to read I think Hefzen was doing all the things that I would ideally expect intellectuals to do which is to criticize their own work criticize their own ideas and constantly re-examine their assumptions you know here is a man who comes to Europe from Russia wanting to learn the secrets of progress from Europe from European intellectuals and quickly realizes that they have very little to teach him that Russia needs to follow its own particular path shaped by its own history by its own circumstances that this notion that everyone can progress in the same sort of way the kind of formula that the Europeans are offering they are deeply deeply defective so in in many cases it's very easy for someone like myself from India to identify with Edson because he comes from a country that is supposed to be backward and supposed to be pre-modern barbarous and he wants modernity of some kind or other and he realizes that the modernity that is on offer in 19th century Europe is not what he wants and if Russia does fall for it it would be catastrophic for Russia the kind of transformation thinking I'm asking for is not something that can be done by technocrats or by people in Silicon Valley devising solutions for general world improvement or uplift or progress I think we have to examine our own role in the world as it exists today at level of individuals and then we have to think about devising modes of politics and economy which are not fraught with the kind of political risks that we've seen recently and also there are environmentally sustainable you know this is the biggest question that faces us today of climate change whether hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese can live at the same level of material affluence that a few million Europeans and Americans have enjoyed remains an open question and I think we can say safely the answer is no at this point so is our progress going to be environmentally sustainable do we not need transformational thinking about the good life what constitutes the good life there are diverse ways of conceiving it and I think we've been told that there's only one and that alone calls for transformational thinking