Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie
Sir Ahmad Salman Rushdie, FRSL, احمد سلمان رشدی; born 19 June 1947) is a British Indian novelist and essayist. His second novel, Midnight's Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. Much of his fiction is set on the Indian subcontinent. He combines magical realism with historical fiction; his work is concerned with the many connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations...
NationalityIndian
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth19 June 1947
CityMumbai, India
CountryIndia
I have been only the humblest jugglers-with-facts; and that, in a country where the truth is what it is instructed to be, reality quite literally ceases to exist, so that everything becomes possible except what we are told is the case; and maybe this was the difference between my Indian childhood and Pakistani adolescence--that in the first I was beset by an infinity of alternative realities, while in the second I was adrift, disoriented, amid an equally infinite number of falsenesses, unrealities and lies.
It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.
What happened in Pakistan was that people were told: You're all Muslim, so now you're a country. As we saw in 1971 with the Bangladesh secession, the answer to that was: 'Oh no, we're not.'
If you live in free countries, you don't have to spend all your life arguing about freedom because it is all around you. It seems redundant to make a lot of noise about something when, in fact, there it is. But if someone tries to remove it, it becomes important for you to formulate your own defenses of it.
If you look at Indian movies, every time they wanted an exotic locale, they would have a dance number in Kashmir. Kashmir was India's fairyland. Indians went there because in a hot country you go to a cold place. People would be entranced by the sight of snow.
Pakistan is alarmed by the rising Indian influence in Afghanistan, and fears that an Afghanistan cleansed of the Taliban would be an Indian client state, thus sandwiching Pakistan between two hostile countries. The paranoia of Pakistan about India's supposed dark machinations should never be underestimated.
Every Day Is for the Thief, by turns funny, mournful, and acerbic, offers a portrait of Nigeria in which anger, perhaps the most natural response to the often lamentable state of affairs there, is somehow muted and deflected by the author's deep engagement with the country: a profoundly disenchanted love. Teju Cole is among the most gifted writers of his generation.
In Europe, the Enlightenment of the 18th century was seen as a battle against the desire of the Church to limit intellectual freedom, a battle against the Inquisition, a battle against religious censorship. And the victory of the Enlightenment in Europe was seen as pushing religion away from the center of power. In America, at the same time, the Enlightenment meant coming to a country where people were not going to persecute you by reason of your religion. So it meant a liberation into religion. In Europe, it was liberation out of religion.
If Turkey wants to join Europe, it will have to become a European country, and that might take a long time.
In the real world, immeasurable hurt is caused by terrorists based in Pakistan who attack countries like India.
If terrorism is to be defeated, the world of Islam must take on board the secularist-humanist principles on which the modern is based, and without which Muslim countries' freedom will remain a distant dream.
Certainly, poverty and economic decline have a lot to do with the so-called rage of Islam. You've got all these young men in countries which are economically in bad shape. The idea that they might be able to make a good living and get married and have a family, a decent life, seems very remote to a lot of people in a lot of the world.
Two things form the bedrock of any open society - freedom of expression and rule of law. If you don't have those things, you don't have a free country.
I've been gradually reclaiming all kinds of freedoms over these years..,