Midnight's Children - the movie fails to stand tall

Some books lend themselves beautifully to movies and some don’t. Midnight’s Children appears to be one of those books that are hard to adapt to movies. I say ‘appears’ because I have not read the book but watched the movie last Saturday. I’m reluctant to criticize Deepa Mehta for the shortcomings of the movie because the defects a naïve movie watcher like me found in the movie would have been spotted by a movie maker of her calibre with three eyes closed. But  I have a few bones to pick with her for choosing Midnight’s Children for a movie-adaptation.

The story starts in Kashmir about 30 years before India’s independence and meanders its way through various incidents to Bombay where two boys are born exactly at the time India got independence, on 15th August, 1947; one rich, coming from the clan that migrated from Kashmiri, and the other poor, the love child of a poor minstrel musician's wife and a Britisher who is leaving India.

The two newborns are swapped by a matron as a tribute to her Marxist lover, condemning the rich boy to poverty and the poor to wealth - as a metaphor of social justice - forever altering their fates. The rich child is named Salim and the poor Shiva whose paths cross several times during their lives, Salim representing the accommodative, kind India and the tough India of Indira Gandhi, Sanjay Gandhi, the state and system embodied by Shiva. Their birth coincides with the birth of India and their lives move in tandem with India’s history (till Emergency) shaping their lives – which, I felt, was a larger metaphor of how the lives of people are shaped by lives of nations.

This is a rough sketch of the story. Amidst this there are many plot devices used to bring various angles into the story, like Salim’s ability to summon, in his imagination, a bunch of children (born at mid night during India’s birth/independence) representing varied social strata of Indian society, his ability to sniff danger etc. The problem with this kind of plot (and it has come to this after lot of snipping by the screenplay writer who was also Salman Rushdie) is that it's very difficult to effectively flesh out its naunces in visual form. (Many reviews have complained about how the film has turned out to be a very emaciated version of the book, which rids the film of the richness of its literary sibling.)

And the result is often that one incident leads to another without any logical dots linking them, reducing the film to a collage of multiple frames forming, maybe, a very broad thematic narrative but without any immediate connection with each other. Characters come and go and after the movie is over you feel many characters just disappeared from the story without any conclusive end given to them.

However, Rushdie’s background narration is where the movie scores. Some of the lines are just too haunting and told in curt, British accent.

Probably Deepa Mehta got swayed by the grand pull to become the first person to recreate the book on screen. The book was staged in 2002 and, according to many critics, it didn’t work. Mehta could have learnt from the precedence. Or maybe the movie was made for people who have read the book thinking that the audience, having read the book earlier, would overlook the oversights in the movie narrative and would see the movie for the sheer joy of watching what they have read.

Joseph Anton - a Memoir by Salman Rushdie

In the 90s, news papers told us Salman Rushdie had some kind of death sentence on him for writing The Satanic Verses. But we never understood how serious it was, whether it represented an actual threat to Rushdie’s life, whether a book could really offend people so much, did people who were offended actually read the book. And above all, could a book ever be so world-churning? 


Joseph Anton, a memoir by Rushdie, gives you an accurate measure of the crisis’s magnitude The Satanic Verses had created, and chronicles Rushdie’s day-to-day life for 10 years under fatwa (the death sentence); how people and various governments reacted to it; and how it affected him and in many ways altered Rushdie’s life.

Following the issuance of fatwa on Salman Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini, the theocratic head of Iran, people suddenly seemed to take note of the book and outpouring of passions against its author began. And its author had to stay amidst heavy security, moving from one hideout to another, for roughly 10 years, which changed his life in many ways.

There are varied arguments on the issue. The most common arguement given against The Satanic Verses is no one has the right to offend people’s religious sentiments. I find this self-defeating – because no book sets out to hurt your sentiments; it just makes a point and leaves it to you to decide how you want to receive it. Nor does a book create any controversy. A controversy is how the world reacts to a book and, as it happens, this reaction is often shaped by reasons that have very less to do with what is actually written in the book.

An author can write controversial material in his book but there is enough evidence to show that those who shout over books don’t read the books they oppose. And outsiders to a controversy lend their voice to the group they want to be identified with and depending on the stand of their chosen camp they either oppose or favour a book. Independent views falling outside the 'either with us or them' narrative are mostly ignored. Thus builds the protest narrative around a book.

Once the fatwa was out, this is how public narrative started building around The Satanic Verses. Some British politicians had initially supported Rushdie, but  they changed their stand later to oppose him (or aligned themselves with the 'appropriate' side of the narrative).

But does a lesser author or book deserve to be defended as such? Rushdie has empathised with Taslima Nasrin who shared with Rushdie the plight of being banned from visiting India, their homeland, which in case of Rushdie lasted for some years since the publication of The Satanic Verses. (However, Taslima is still being denied visa by the Indian government.)

The book opens with a BBC journalist informing Rushdie that he had been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini for authoring The Satanic Verses. Britain agreed to give Rushdie protection and Rushdie was asked to choose a pseudonym to hide his actual identity. He tried out various combinations clubbing different writers’ first names with other writers’ surnames and finally arrived at Joseph (from Joseph Conrad) Anton (from Anton Chekov).

After a steamy prologue written effectively by Rushdie, the book digresses into Rushdie’s childhood and early years in England. His early years in England were not happy at all bringing to him the real England of racism and dashing the imaginary image of the country the bookish young Rushdie had in mind owing to Enid Blyton and the like. The young Rushdie was a clever kid and a bright student, which together with the fact that he was a foreigner, according to Rushdie, made him an intolerable proposition for his peers at Rugby school. This, Rushdie says, led to his school peers’ racist attitude towards him.

Rushdie’s family back home in Bombay was a liberal Muslim household where people freely exchanged scholarly and dissenting views on religion. This environment shaped Rushdie’s worldview and he finally consummated his irreligious outlook in England by eating pork, which, despite the family’s liberal attitude, was strongly forbidden by his parents back home where they didn’t eat it, although alcohol wasn’t a taboo.

Although the British government gave him security protection, Britain popular mood was that the author was being spent too much money on and he, and not having done anything for Britain, didn’t deserve it. In the US, on the other hand, the author found an atmosphere of support and sympathy which was responsible for Rushdie’s eventual shift of base from the UK to the US - New York - where he currently stays.

Until many years since the issuance of fatwa, the UK had Tories in power and Rushdie insisted them to browbeat Iran to drop the fatwa, but the Tory government was reluctant to do so. Things changed for the better once the Labour party came to power in Britain coinciding with Democrats coming to power in the US. Britain had Tony Blair and America, Bill Clinton.

I felt Rushdie wrote the book under an extreme sense of victimhood – which is understandable - which informs his attitude towards contrary views which he dismisses with a self-righteous and aggressive flourish without, I sometimes felt, handling them with reflective consideration. For the most part, it's like Rushdie taking on a lynch mob baying for his blood.

However, I don't want to get too self-righteous about this - which I found many reviewers doing - because when you read what he went through, this question keeps coming back to you: "How he maintained his sanity?." Rushdie maintained his sanity aided by his friends and family and after sometime, I felt, he got innured to the daily business of receiving threats, hate letters and derogatory comments from the media.


Finally, following diplomatic pressure and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini, the subsequent regimes in Iran assured several times that the fatwa would not be carried out but refuted themselves later under internal pressure. But the threat perception dropped gradually to a level where the British intelligence thought it unnecessary to continue giving protection to Rushdie.

Albeit, the shadow of the fatwa still stalks him and although he travels and lives freely now, there are some countries he still can’t visit and countries that don’t have a formal ban on him but they refuse to let him in fearing backlash by Muslim orthodoxy (recently he was disallowed to visit Srilanka where Midnight's Children was being shot).

If you read Joseph Anton without being judgmental, you will enjoy it.

Shrinking Artistic Tolerance in India

Recently the Indian government armtwisted Jaipur Literature Festival organizers to have Salman Rushdie dropped from their invitee list. The government has justified its decision by saying that Rushdie’s visit will hurt Muslim sentiments thanks to his book Satanic Verses which insulted Islam by caricaturing the Prophet Mohamed.

Rushdie has been coming to the festival since it started, but it’s the first time the government wants us to believe his visit will wound religious sentiments. UP elections are near and UP has a sizeable Muslim population. UP is a place the Cong, the leading party of the ruling coalition, can ill afford to lose because being among the largest states in India, UP has a big impact on general elections.

The Rushdie controversy is not an isolated incident. It’s the recent installment of a series of incidents in India where outfits of all political hues or their affiliates have attacked people or work (books, movies , paintings, etc) opposed to their strain of beliefs.

The reasons for the outbursts are varied. Sometimes it’s a political party desperate to retain its political space, sometimes a political newbie trying to make a mark for himself, sometimes a political party making a desperate bid to woo a community (Hindu or Muslim).

Three incidents related to books will help you understand the pattern.

Around seven years ago, Taslima Nasreen (the writer of Lajja) had been forced out of Bengal by the Left government and then out of the country by the central government which refused to renew her visa. Why? Because Taslima had expressed blasphemous views in her book Lajja and mobs had taken to the streets demanding her ouster from Bengal when her visa was due for renewal. The Left government justified its decision saying her stay would have led to communal riots.

About a year ago, a political aspirant from the Thackeray clan (a family that founded and heads a regional political right wing outfit which models itself on Hindu nationalism and chauvinism) got together a mob which burnt the copies of Such A Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry alleging the book to have provocative material (not sure to provoke whom) demanding the removal of the book from English honors syllabus. The authorities obliged (apparently to quell the mob).

And then came this Rushdie controversy.

As the instances above demonstrate, it’s not just parties coming from one strain of political or social belief who demand book bans and persecute writers (or creative people guilty of challenging popular beliefs through their work) for their ends, but parties of all political color (from left to right) partake in them and frame their demand and actions according to their constituency.

If you read the books as against the claims that the ban-seekers make, you will know that they don’t read the books they seek ban on. Lajja has nothing against Islam in it; it’s a story about a Hindu Bengali family in Bangladesh; and Such A Long Journey was published in the 70s (and demanded a withdrawal of in 2011) and is loosely about Congress politics in Bombay, in the 70s, a party which the Thackerays are anyway hysterically opposed to. (I have read Lajja, but not Such a Long Journey.)

This hostility on books or any creative output works on a certain belief.

Banning of a book or movie doesn’t hit people’s interest in the way, say, closing of a factory does. So whether you are part of the establishment imposing a ban or forcing out an author or you are part of sloganeering mob demanding a ban or an ouster, the belief on either side is since the common man won’t be hurt beyond, say, the denial of a book or a movie, they will move on and the intelligentsia will stop shouting on TV once the media get another story. Elections are won and lost on more immediate and tangible issues, not on books, after all.

And, of course, there is the additional gain for the political party of ingratiating itself with a group/community (whatever) through the emotive route, which has a long-lasting electoral value, where reason is always a casualty.

What the establishment overlooks is each time you yield to a bullying mob, you concede a space that is hard to retrieve. What they also forget is when application of force becomes an accepted means to silence a contrary voice, you lose the ability to tolerate because you don’t need to stress your endurance to tolerate; an easier option is available – force.

It’s one thing to brag about having great values (in this case, freedom of speech and free thought) as a nation; it’s another to be ready to defend them at whatever cost they demand. Great Britain gave knighthood to Rushdie in the teeth of opposition from the Islamic world. France gave political asylum to Taslima Nasreen after she was hounded out from India.

Just Books and Cricket

I enjoy reading interviews and interviews of writers have been a long-time favorite. The book I am reading currently is a compilation of interviews of 30 ‘famous’ writers interviewed by Sunil Shetty. Sunil hosts an interview show on NDTV and these are a collection of interviews he has done since the inception of the show in 2005. In his foreword, he writes in what circumstances the idea of the show had come about.


The program is aired on NDTV Profit, a sub-section of NDTV which features stock market and business news. As the stock market closes on Fridays for the weekend, a substantive show had to be conceived to fill the vacuum. In a meeting, many ideas were tossed around and the one most frowned up was interview of writers.

Sunil recalls the idea was tossed up by Pronoy Roy’s wife, who is an inveterate reader, and the reason why people were skeptical about it was that writers, being recluses, don’t make great TV personalities. They are generally reluctant to talk about their work. Although some writers refused to be interviewed on TV, majority obliged and ‘Just Books’ became a success.

The book presents a short profile of writes followed their interviews. The interviews are not free flowing but in question and answer format. Some interviews are compilation of two, three interactions with the writers held at different locations and sometimes by different people.

The reason why I like writers’ interviews is that they open a window to the world of books, the books that had an impact on them, the writers they read etc. Another reason is their personalities and distinct style of putting things. Salman Rshdie is flamboyant; William Dalrymple garrulous; Amitava Ghosh matter of fact; Khushwant Singh simple and unpretentious.

Many times these interviews have led me to books and writers that I wouldn’t otherwise know.



                                                World Cup Finale

On Wednesday, for the first time in my last seven years of stay away from home, I regretted not having a TV, thanks to the India Pakistan World Cup semi final at Mohali. I watched the match at office. It was like a virtual day-off for people at work. They remained glued to the TV screens, sometimes moving away to attend to their professional duties only to rush back before TV again. They cheered every wicket taken, run saved or scored by India. Sometimes I also found myself erupting in excitement. I felt sports can make one so sadistic, taking pleasure at some else’s defeat. But tomorrow I am going to do that again, when India will look to repeat 1983 and Srilanka, 1996.