For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.

I think there is no reason for us to bring to Islamism or political Islam the fear and ignorance of Western commentators and their hysterical vocabulary.

The Sino-Indian War in 1962 has fundamentally shaped and distorted Indian attitudes towards China. It also obscured a great deal of what has happened in China since 1962.

Enlightenment values of individual freedom are manifested best in individual acts of criticism and defiance.

The French Revolution actualised the Enlightenment's greatest intellectual breakthrough: detaching the political from the theocratic.

In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else.

Indonesia is hardly immune to catastrophic breakdowns, as the anti-Communist pogrom showed. But, like India, it has been relatively fortunate in evolving a mode of politics that can include many discontinuities - of class, region, ethnicity, and religion.

In 1980, shortly before my 11th birthday, I wrote my first essay in English.

The onslaught of new and complex information, the academic and thinktank cults of expertise, not to mention the impossibility of bohemia in the age of high rents, have conspired to assassinate the public intellectual.