"The West, or the universal civilization it leads, is emotionally rejected. It undermines, it threatens. But at the same time it is needed for its machines, goods, medicines, warplanes, the remittances from the emigrants, the hospitals that might have a cure for calcium deficiency, the universities that will provide master's degrees in mass media. All the rejection of the West is contained within the assumption that there will always exist out there a living, creative civilization, oddly neutral, open to all to appeal to. Rejection, therefore, is not absolute rejection. It is also, for the community as a whole, a way of ceasing to strive intellectually. It is to be parasitic: parasitism is one of the unacknowledged fruits of fundamentalism." --from AMONG THE BELIEVERS: An Islamic Journey (1981) by V. S. Naipaul
"Great subjects are illuminated best by small dramas." V. S. Naipaul
The complexity of your subject, the simplicity of your expression. That has attracted me to you. And, here, behind your 'universal civilisation' I find in my own way the tucked away secret, a juggernaut pattern wobbling, namely human kinds wobbling, cupidity being palliated by cupidity, great wording with some sense shed being hollowed by greater wording but just parroted so. And, sadly, a norm or pattern of homogenisation, the chase ahead, despite such unthinkable gulf of insulation between fellow human beings growing wider and more edgy. I am deep down in it, embedded. If you can't speak a foreign tongue, you're fool now. If you can't speak Chinese, you're backward. Then isn't it, at last, all about the sensual culture playing on our weakest spot?
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