True to magic realism, Salman Rushdie is worried about Indian cities vanishing. In an exclusive interview to TOI, he laughed, "This is going to make me sound ancient but I remember Juhu Beach when there weren't any buildings on it. You'd go through countryside and arrive at this amazing beach. I remember driving from Delhi to the Qutab Minar through countryside. Mehrauli was a little village - that's all gone. Indian cities have transformed so much, they're different cities. We did some filming for Midnight's Children in Colombo because we couldn't find the locations in India! Bombay is not that Bombay anymore. To write about Bombay now, I'd have to go and spend months and months there," Rushdie smiles, "I wouldn't mind doing that - at all."
Belying his acerbic image, Salman Rushdie comes across as a gentle, soft- spoken man - with razor-sharp wit. How would he deal with attacks on art? His smile goes. "I really worry about how it's become so easy to attack books, movies, paintings, works of scholarship - there've been so many attacks in recent years. That trend worries me a lot. It's partly driven by expediency. It's easier to stop something than defend its right to happen. The police tend to blame the writer, painter, filmmaker for being a trouble-maker, rather than defend them against the actual trouble-makers creating threats, sometimes violence. I worry we're getting things upside down - we're not defending what we need to defend. There seems more of that than ever. When Rohinton Mistry's novel was criticized by some little Thackeray, within five seconds, the book was taken off Bombay University's syllabus. Any society that wants to think of itself as a democracy must pay attention to free speech attacked - a real problem."
Rushdie is visiting India to promote the Deepa Mehta-directed Midnight's Children, based Was working with Deepa Mehta, targeted by far-right Hindus, logical for someone persecuted by radical Islamists? "We never thought about that. Both of us are actually sick of having that kind of history hung around our necks. I'm sick of being called controversial. We never discussed all that. The only time was when people started suggesting that because of this history, nobody would show this film in India. That was very depressing to think - but fortunately, it turned out to be not true. The frustrating part of being tagged controversial is people go looking for trouble where there isn't any to look for."
Last year, Rushdie's plans to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival had to be scrapped in the midst of a huge row. Asked if he had been invited by the organisers this time, he said flatly, "Nope". Is he annoyed about that? "Nope. Just got work to do," he said.
I don't mind 'rediscovering' Bombay, Salman Rushdie says
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I don't mind 'rediscovering' Bombay, Salman Rushdie says
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I don't mind 'rediscovering' Bombay, Salman Rushdie says
