The Need for Roots brought home the modern era’s disconnection with the past and the loss of community | #Pankaj_Mishra | Comment is free | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/18/need-roots-disconnection-past-community
Having recently moved to a Himalayan village after a peripatetic life in the plains, I had begun to feel rooted for the first time, connected to a stable community which, living off the land, neither poor nor rich, and low rather than upper caste, was marked above all by dignity – remarkable in a country where villages had become synonymous with destitution. And when #Weil asserted that the central event of the modern era was uprootedness – the disconnection from the past and the loss of community – she seemed to speak directly to my experience.