Midnight's Children Events: "Interview with Salman Rushdie & President Lee Bollinger"

Midnight's Children is the second of Salman Rushdie's novels but even to call it a novel in a way is an error modern novels had plots and unless history is a plot god forbid this work is not easily classifiable in that genre it is Restless in the extreme part history texts part autobiography part social theory part poetry part magic part realism part fable part allegory part Bollywood showbiz and part lyrical epic it is with the other of his works a new species of narration it is plura cultural and multi vocal and responses to it continue to vary from the embrace of critics to the hostile Rushdie I am convinced is clearly guilty of the sin of polyglot aney Salman Rushdie has trained his traveled eyes those of an expatriate on one of the most convulsive events in modern history the partition of India and Pakistan a moment of idealized hope and simultaneously a moment of immediate extreme violence he authored the continuing story with fascination and provocation while dreaming of an unlikely redemption for refugees everywhere this is a parable and a metaphor for peoples of developing countries today as well as those within fully developed countries with failed or even failing democracies it is a story which is always urgent and never more so than today I would like to turn this afternoon over to our instigator and ally in this venture president Lee Bollinger who had the vision and the fortitude to enable this large project to speed forward is his good grace that has allowed the many complexities of this challenging work to emerge to everyone's benefit join me in pleasure and an honor in welcoming Salman Rushdie and Lee Bollinger so we're just going to have a conversation none of this has been rehearsed we have not gone over this sallman says that he loves unrehearsed life and we're going to do our best to make it as good as we possibly can and I'm interested in really pursuing I think some of the great issues of the time and how your views as a novelist and writer and public figure so to speak to these and how you think about it now I have to begin with this question don't you sometimes wish you were a lawyer well you know I was supposed to be a lawyer that was that was my father's plan my father was a lawyer he's qualified as a barrister in England and clearly thought that that's what I should do I didn't and when I left college and mentioned him that I was thinking of wanting to be a writer this this kind of Yelp came out of him which was completely he was he wasn't trying to be horrible but he couldn't help himself he said what will I tell my friends well are you having said that after that he was he was supportive of my trying to start out but it's not you know it certainly wasn't the plan I mean I think you know I think I have you quite a good lawyer that's that's always been my hunch but I mean I like arguing we'll wait to see till the end of this interview where so I think one of the ways to frame this is the fact that this is your second appearance at Columbia and the first appearance was a really dramatic entry into Lowe library on December 11th 1991 some 1,000 days after the death threat against you and this was the first public appearance that you made sense that death threat it was very dramatic and it was on an occasion of the celebration of the First Amendment and justice Brennan was to be the the honoree and you were the special guest I was a surprise you were the surprise guest and nobody knew until that moment really as you walked through a curtain that you would be there and you received a standing ovation and you gave a speech which I want to refer to because you say a number of things in there that I think are very revealing so about you and about life and about great issues and so I if we could I'd like to start with that and then end with sort of where we are now and use that as the time frame and in a sense in a sense this was sort of a birth I know births are very important to you metaphorically and fictionally and in this particular birth on December 11th 1991 the talk that you gave was if I were to use one word to describe sort of the impression that you created in the audience it would be that you were feeling a sense of abandonment that here you were living in complete isolation and terrible things had happened to you and meanwhile friends had had turned against you well as strangers things were being said about you that were extremely painful and while you were also finding reason for hope there was the sense that the rest of the world was going on about its business and you were being treated as you described it at various points as somebody in a bubble unable to have real human contact and sort of outside and and this you concluded with a again a metaphor of a balloon you started and concluded and how you were sinking in this balloon and and people should in a sense reach out to you to help is that I mean this is your interview I'm sorry to go on for so long but it's a powerful it's a powerful sort of theme is that consistent with how you've felt at the time yeah it was a very bad time you know and it was probably the worst time actually because as you say until that moment I hadn't really been able to begin to fight back you know I'd really been kept somewhat against my will out of the public eye and not and you know for a long period of time hadn't been able to fight my corner you know and and that's that feeling of helplessness is very distressing you know actually from that moment on it kind of changed because I did begin to do that and immediately felt better it was an amazing thing coming to Columbia that time because everybody got very excited the police you know I I got I found myself being met with an 11 vehicle motorcade with me in the middle vehicle which was a a white armored vehicle right so and all the other cars were black you know I've in the white so there's a very big neon sign the skies and the the the police officer who was in charge of the operation I believe to be certifiably insane and he was I will identify only him only as the lieutenant Bob he had you know he talked into his sleeve a lot and and he was known for the day as Hudson commander that was his name Roger Hudson commander Wilson look out yes Roger copy that and I mean at you my literary agents Andrew Wylie who was with me in this vehicle said it was the greatest day of his life you know streaking down 125th streets in an 11 vehicle motorcade with the whole of Harlem on the street for me was less pleasant but I'm glad to have brought him some pleasure he I said to lieutenant Bob I said lieutenant Bob this is a lot you know he said it's what we do for Arafat at this point what it's like to be us around fires in New York but I said well I said suppose you know what would you do for the president and he said well sir for the president we'd closed down a lot of these side streets here but in your case we didn't want to do that because we thought it would look too conspicuous it was just crazy you know the snipers on rooftops oh it was but then as I say from that point on I did feel able to begin to you know to begin the kind of political and intellectual fight back against that threat and I want you to be true you mentioned that that I lost friend actually didn't lose that many friends exactly in fact I had somewhat the opposite experience of my friends coming much closer to me and actually making friends as a result of the threats against me there were some I mean there were some writers who who broke right so they're really surprisingly few at you know I can count them all on fingers one hand list you know John Berger and John McCrae and they still got some fingers left over there's up there they were very actually very few writers who a roll-down children's writer I know fascist and you see my dead person anyway he was nasty but actually the literary community on the whole was astonishing in its solidarity given that the military community in general is not noted for its solidarity I mean that it's a that it's quite a separated separation you know individualist and even infighting and rival Rus community you know within this particular case I think because people could see that something serious was at issue actually did you know abandonment you said yeah I politically certainly that was a moment where I felt nobody really had any energy to solve oh and and that it was much easier to sweep me under the carpet and hope I went away you know and that's why it's one of the reasons it took so long I mean interestingly when the government's changed you know when when they stopped being conservative government in Britain and you know first Thatcher and then and then John Major were replaced by the Labour government the Blair government and when the you know Bush one was replaced by Clinton yeah it really did change everything because suddenly in both countries there was a political will to resolve the matter and as a result rather rapidly of what results and which and what it showed me there could have been done years before if only anybody had bothered to do it you know but I mean I remember coming shortly after that Columbia visit I was able to go to Washington to speak at a free speech event there and during that time people tried to arrange political meetings for me at the george bush senior White House and completely failed and and that memorable thing of Marlin Fitzwater announced that he saw no reason why President Bush should meet me because after all I was just a writer on a book tour so and that was the kind of characteristic attitude of that presidency that it changed dramatically when the Clinton came to power so let me just pursue that for a second all right I don't want to be too so about this but when you read the talk that you gave it has a solemn very abandoned sort of feel to it I mean you you talk about that your life that this had been a degree course in worthlessness and and I'm wondering about the relationship of humor and these feelings for you and I'm interested in them in how it translates into your writing and into your because I think you know there's a strong sense in reading your writings and in listening to you that it's somehow that combination of really deep deep issues and personal things personal deep feelings and a sort of very airy humorous sense of the world as well and is there would you say that's right yeah yeah I would say that's right I think yes I'd forgotten having written that thing about about the degree course at worthlessness it did I mean it strikes me as you quote it that I obviously was in quite a depressed frame of mind to have written that sentence and said that sentence but it was partly because it was it's it's hard to remember now because because thank goodness life isn't like that anymore but but there were at that time everybody had an opinion about me everybody and m'p inion was not based on on knowing my work or having met me or having heard anything I'd said or seen me on television or it was based on nothing you know and yet everybody hadn't you could have stopped you know a taxi driver in the street of any city of the world and said what do you think of some understanding had a feed of had a point of view you know and and that was a alarming thing to feel right you know just how did that happen you know and many of those views were negative prey and what was being published in the newspapers was in many cases and I'm not now even talking about a kind of Islamic attack I mean that's one thing right or an Islamist attack right that's one thing but just at the level of newspaper commentary there was people get tired of saying poor guy he's in danger right that not very rapidly people start looking for another angle and the interesting I go is what did he do you know right as my English teacher right they dug up my old English teacher from from high school who gave what I consider to be the best quote of the whole thing he said who'd have thought such a nice quiet boy could get in so much trouble but he's wrong about nice quiet moment there but it was horrified horrified to have my character reinvented for me every day 20 different ways to have my motives described for me in ways which I didn't recognize to have my integrity questioned almost by the minute to have my you know my writing torn to pieces in front of my eyes after you know 15 years of working as a writer to discover that suddenly you had no money in the bank you know that you've been I mean the static message was my fifth novel my fifth book and so it wasn't that I just sort of arrived from nowhere and but it seemed as if I had it's even as if I nothing I had done before existed right and there was just suddenly this thing I mean this is this is one of the things you say you said after describing really the horrendous sort of conditions that you had been subjected to you sort of ask yourself the question isn't there something you may think there's something I could do about this so here's the paragraph you may ask why I'm so sure there's nothing I can do help myself at the end of 1990 dispirited and demoralized feeling abandoned that's probably where I got the word abandoned from even then in consequence of the British government's decision to patch things up with Iran and with my marriage at an end faced by deepest grief my unquenchable sorrow and having been torn away from cast out of the cultures and societies from which I'd always drawn my strength and inspiration that is the broad community of British Asians and the broader community of Indian Muslims I determined to make peace with islem even at the cost of my pride which I want to get to but I mean that certainly conveys as very powerfully a sense of dislocation and abandonment so and and when you think about what you I mean you think about midnight stone you think about the partitioning you think I mean how much of this is of sort of critical importance to your view of the world well I think it's it's it falls into the category of be careful what you wish for yeah because because I think clearly the subject of dislocation migration fracturing etc I mean that's what I was writing about it long before any of this happened to me you know the in Midnight's Children when the doctor at the beginning falls in love with this woman through we sees only in bits through a hole in a bedsheet that in a way that fracturing of the woman you know and her assembly in his mind over a period of time right bit by bit you know he's gonna lose her together in his imagination and then falls in love with it that was in a way also a figure of how the whole book was constructed you know as the world seen in fragments and and then in some way united by the imagination of the what the writer and yeah also of the reader so I was that in shame there's a whole riff in there somewhere about when I remember John Fowles has a sentence in one of his novels in which he speaks about how the only thing that man is what he calls whole site you know he says if you don't have whole site that all the rest is sort of meaningless and and I remember but I read that sort of wanting to argue with it as a sentence you know because it seemed to me that one of the things we don't have anymore his whole site you know the world has become too fragmented and disputed a territory for anybody to be able to claim to see everything it's to see everything that kind of Renaissance man idea of being able to have the whole of knowledge at your disposal right is no longer possible right I mean partly because there's too much knowledge and partly because it's too argued over right we can't we can't even agree about what is the case you know anymore so so so it seemed to me that it again against that foul Xion idea of whole site I wanted to invent a kind of a kind of broken mirror you know a kind of fractured reality yes and to see what those pieces could show us and then you know and then it happened to my life so of course you know it was it was a very scary thing because one of the ways in which I can't remember if it was in that essay or elsewhere but it felt like somebody broke my picture of the world you know we all live inside a picture of the world right which is which is how we think things are you know when somebody smashes that one way of describing that is insanity yeah you know if you if you don't have a picture of the world you're sort of crazy right yeah and and you have to begin to put it back together and that's that's what I had to do in those years right so one of the things that you speak to then and now and it just makes me extremely happy to hear you talk about it is freedom of speech and you have a statement in here which I just I mean it's just wonderful you say at the end of your talk in 1991 that free speech is a non-starter says one of my Islamic extremist opponents no sir you say it is not that free speech is the whole thing the whole ballgame free speech is life itself and I wonder if we could talk about that a little bit that is why is freedom of speech what what made you think that freedom of speech is the whole thing and I guess the the larger frame in which I I would like to sort of pursue this is that a hell of a lot of the world does not think that freedom of speech is the whole thing and one of the great issues of our time is to what extent will sort of Western values be insisted upon or imposed upon other societies in the world that do not accept those values and liberalism has the kind of in free speech has the kind of paradox in it because a lot of what freedom of speech liberalism is about is having very active imagination being able to put yourself in other people's positions and so on that's the basis of tolerance and that's the basis of of a lot of what we take to be Western values and yet there are some things that we think we should insist upon and one of those is free speech the very thing that has is its core sort of trying to understand other points of view is something we're not prepared to give up on and that means at the end of the day we sort of have to have an argument for why that kind of value is something that we should insist upon and you take that position free speech is life itself it's the whole ballgame it's the whole thing and you as the one of the most powerful symbols in the modern world of the denial of free speech because of the death threat have a really sort of an unusual perspective it seems to me on the importance of that so what I'd like to invite you to do is to talk about why free speech is the whole ball game why it is life itself why it is something that we should insist upon how long have you got it's just on the subject of the death threat I just thought you know in parentheses it would be worth saying that that was one particular battle hard as it was to fight that in fact we like win right you know that they tried to suppress a book the book was not suppressed they tried to suppress the writer the writer was not suppressed it's you know it was a difficult battle as I say we I mean you know lots of people but their readers but a lot of people paid big costs including you especially nevertheless very good to win because the operating tables on the lose and just in you know in the matter of the ayatollah khomeini one of us is dead but just that's in parentheses him here but free speech that was an example of you speak here's what i think first of all why it began came up I mean you're right that I became I was obliged to learn about free speech as an issue yeah by the process of somebody tried to take mine away and I think that's not that unusual because you know when there's enough air to breathe it seems ridiculous to be carrying around placards to say how it's important to have air to breathe right you know because you've all got it you know so what's the story what's the subject you know what's the beef it's when somebody starts turning off the air supply that you suddenly notice that it's pretty important to be able to breathe and you start making a noise about it and that's really I felt what happened to me somebody started turning off the air supply and I became suddenly extremely conscious of what I had previously just taken four grunts you know I mean the going in position writing The Satanic Verses was this was that this came out of material that was my life material and we belong to be as much at the belong to anyone else and that I had a perfect right to approach it and write about it and explore it anyway I chose that was going in position they were clearly people who disagree with that so but that made me first of all aware of how automatic that going in position had been right you know and how and the kind of strength of questioning that it then came under because you're right it's plenty of people who don't think like right and I guess I'd give you a theoretical and practical other kind of as it were circumstantial answer I think the theoretical answer is and why I said you know the whole ball game and life itself is not because of what what what you called Western values because I would actually I don't particularly think of free speeches in Western value I think it's something which everywhere I've been in the world people enjoy indulging it right now and don't like it when they're prevented from doing so you know I've been I've been in Pakistan during military dictatorships people didn't enjoy that you know I've been in India during the in Oregon the emergency people were very upset about about the censorship but they didn't feel that they were so you think you you think freedom of speech is a universal desire such things as universal values is there such a thing as a human value which is not culture specific no and and my view is that one way of approaching that question is to look at our actual nature as human beings and what is it that is required for us to be the beings that we are you know and and since one of the things we are is as far as we know the only self conscious creature in the world the only one that is actually a bit able able to discuss itself to imagine itself you know and have ideas about itself and so on it is very important for such a creature to be able to go through that process which is a part of his essential nature know well as far as I know unique in the Indus storytelling animals you know dolphins as far as one knows don't don't tell each other stories maybe they do as Saul Bellow once said about something else you know I'm waiting for the great dolphin literature so you know the case is not proven I don't when I say storytelling animals I also don't just mean that we write stories I mean that in a way we define ourselves by stories you know an example that I sometimes use about this is the family inside a family there are family stories knowing the stories of the family is an important part of belonging to the family when you and these can be very weird family stories which you don't tell Outsiders so much and when people join either when a child is born or somebody marries into the family or whatever it may be gradually they are told the stories of the family and then they know those stories they are members of the family you know and in the end you know inside the family when we die and generations move on what in a way what remains of us is a story you know we become part of that of that group of stories so you know so we are people who exist in stories and by stories personally I'm not talking about what writers do I'm talking about what individuals do so given that so much of our deepest nature centers around the idea of self discussion and of description through story if somebody tries to control that by deciding how you may speak and what you may speak about it what is permissible and not from this rule we simply in my view cannot be ourselves you know and and that's why I think I would offer it as a human value and not as a cultural specific value but some but some stories that people tell are very offensive to other people's stories yeah that's okay that's all right you know I mean lots of stuff and doesn't mean you have to shut them up you know this is what let me said because this is the other thing I was gonna say that which I think odds of the question this the practical example or thing that happened to me after the Hawaii five-o in Pakistan was that there is a movie made about me a movie called international guerrillas and and the International guerrillas were a kind of proto Al Qaeda group who were the heroes of the film and whose job was to assassinate me I was then I was dressed in a very villainous series of kind of series safari suits and the camera always started at my feet and pans slowly upward so there was a lot of safari suit very offensive to me fashion note anyway I mean while in the same film was shown living in what looked like you know the Philippines guarded by what they look very like Mossad you know and I had a whiskey bottle in this hand and a whip in this hand and was sometimes a sword and there's a moment of high unintentional comedy in the film where one of the international guerillas is captured you know by the Israeli Secret Service and is brought to my island paradise that is tied like this between palm trees you know and then I you know with him and you know I torture it with my scimitar and drinking whiskey while I'm doing it in my series safari thing and when I've done that for a while you know what I've sated but I've slaked my bloodlust I say well the character plainly says take him away and read to him from the Satanic Verses all night anyway at the end of this film in fact I do get killed so you know it's it's sort of I get killed by a divine intervention my kind of Thunderbolt anyway I get fried so very offensive many ways and but well they try to bring it to England and the distributor's went to get a certificate for it and clearly the the the what's called the British Board of Film classification censors body were given legal advice that the film is of nineteen thousand waves defamatory and that if they gave it a certificate I consume them as well because they would become party to the defamation by giving it a certificate right so they refused to the certificate I then come into the problem that I'm writing a free speech battle I'm being defended by an active censorship right so I had to write a formal legal letter to the British Board of Film classification foregoing my legal right of suing said I will not take lawsuit out you must give this film a certificate which they do eventually did and the producers booked very big cinemas of two thousand seats cinema in in town of Bradford in Yorkshire which is the largest Muslim population in Britain and nobody went nobody with nobody wanted to see a bad movie you know I had that film being banned it would have become a hot video it would have its power would it be multiplying right it was wonderful to me demonstration of the free speech position which is that people are actually able to make up their own minds that you could just put the stuff out there even if it's offensive to you et cetera and people broadly speaking have good sense you know even if the even if they being told something about me which they might even or sympathize me they still don't want to pay you know ten dollars to see a rubbish EB and and so I read that broadly speaking became my view let let it be there let me there the best way of arguing with it is if it's out there right the ideas don't cease to exist because you suppress them right let's let's come back to that let's move let's take the next sort of subject which is very much related to that and one of the again great issues of the moment and of the time and that is the relationship of religion to political and social life and I think many let me just put it in a more a personal sense I think there is a I have the sense that religion is directly in any bit put it this way there are very serious problems we are facing in the world from a to close connection between religious beliefs and political life and I would like to ask you to reflect on that because again this is very much a matter that you have written about thought about a lot in the talk at Columbia 1991 you say that you were very much committed to a secular Muslim kind of view of the world and life and very concerned about the risks of sort of actually existing Islamic culture religious culture moving into political life as you called it what do you think about that as as background to come from in the to come from an Indian Muslim background right I had has two aspects because both Muslims are minority in their own communities that's it's a different experience than being in a country where Muslims are the majority or indeed are the whole population almost so and in India the Muslim community always from the very early point in the nationalist movement accepted secular values because those were the values devised by Nehru and Gandhi as a way of protecting minorities you know from the 85 percent Hindu majority and it was believed that if the Constitution of India were to be in some way religious in character I did by by the very large in the majority that would be extremely destabilizing for community relations and so on and therefore the country should be secularist in order to protect minorities of whom of course the Muslims are by far the biggest minority I mean roughly speaking a hundred million Muslims in India roughly speaking eight hundred and fifty million right Hindus and roughly speaking you know fifty fifty million everyone else so very very big minority and so you grew up in an Indian Muslim family you were quite naturally secularized it wasn't right it wasn't a big subject and certainly you know in those early years two first two or two twenty-five years of Indian independence when the Indian Congress party more or less had the political support of the Muslim community it was a very secularized right so there's that I mean the other thing is that I just I mean I grew up in a family without much religion just you know the ordinary level but my parents didn't seem to be particularly religious people and I'm grateful to them for that because they just let me off a particular hook you know and it's it was well this one of the strange things to me and I've discussed this with with writers from all over the Muslim world really writers from Lebanon and Egypt and Syria etc and one things that we've been saying is if you look at the cultural life of the great cities of the Muslim world fifty years ago look at it in the late 50s look at Beirut great city right great cosmopolitan city look at Damascus there are right Lahore you know these were great cities with vibrant cultures they were open cities they had they had a culture of discussion and argument and disputation and etc what happened you know what happened this is and okay we can blame superpower politics for a share of that and of course that's so right you know right but that's not the whole story right you know this is a story of cultural decay which you can't escape if you look around what these what these cultures were half a century ago and where they are now you know just I've talked about culture I'm not talking about you know economics or politics I'm talking about how people lived in a place understand you know and these were tolerant open society in a way that so in my lifetime that decline has been in my view shocking you know having said that religion in politics that's not a subject exclusive to Islam absolutely I mean last year I was for mysterious reasons invited in Washington to address to address a group of Democrat senators and a group of Republican senators about you know the president discontents right I mean at that time al Qaeda in Afghanistan and so on one of the things that really struck me as a difference cultural difference between the Democrats and the Republicans that I met was that the Republicans spoke more or less entirely in religious language more or less entirely you know and that was a surprise you know that they were so overtly the language of religious war you know I don't mean an actual war I mean religious conflict between cultures I remember one of the senators saying to me with real anger that the thing that really annoyed him about the sama bin Laden was that Osama bin Laden said that America was a godless country how can he say he said we're credibly godly I said well senator I guess he doesn't think so but so it struck me then that what was happening was a religious conflict of this sign of offense - right I think that's I think that's absolutely right I think everybody there's fundamentalism in this country and it takes all different religious forms as it does around the world but I guess the question to be asked is at this point is given the turmoil that the world seems to constantly be drawn into which has these religious sort of connections and where free speech and other civil rights are disputed in you point to a kind of innate desire for openness and tolerance and a life that reflects that do you think there is also an existential need that is not met by that kind of life yeah yeah and and that there's something in whether it's paradoxical or whether it's explicable or what but I mean there's there's it's not simply a world where there are enlightened people with commitments to freedom of speech and secularism and so on and then the rest of the world that somehow just doesn't quite get it life is built a lot more complexity in this and there are deep existential needs on the other side toward you myself field the world spiritual should be outlawed for about 50 years because makes me think of naked Californians on mountaintops the chanting in Tibetan you know in order to be in touch with the cosmos or don't you just ban it so much for free speech right I was gonna hike believe me I caught it so go ahead but I think what's different is this politicized religion that's that's that's a that's a religion with the backing all right highly organized political movements which you know after all when they take charge in various countries have been shown to be first of all not representative and secondly catastrophically bad at doing the job so in those countries where religion has actually taken over the government right no Taliban Afghanistan you know Khomeini I'd Iran it's a catastrophe and I we look at you run Iran before the fellaini Revolution I mean you know and I hold no brief for the show by the way you know one of the world's great bastards and the budget plate you know and the British and the Americans fault you know the shower so I mean let's I'm not trying to be you know what they what be what I sometimes hear being called a Persian the shara faction you're they're always pleasures after the show at the time of the change the time the Khomeini revolution Iran had Iran with a net exporter of food to the region it was extremely wealthy and developed economy one of the most developed in the third world had a very powerful trade union movement and a highlighter highly developed feminist movement it had a broad range of political parties starting from the Communist Party and going to kind of free market capitalism on the other side it had a very highly developed educational system all these groups joined to depose the show right and and without the without all these groups you know combining the shower would not have been deposed and the tragedy of either of Iran is that Khomeini April every year right but he basically destroyed all those people who have brought into power in order to impose very narrow society and since then Iran is a economic basket case you know a whole generation has been wiped out you look at a useless war there are food riots because instead of exporting food to the region there's no food in the shops for people to eat the you know the economy is a catastrophe right so they can't run the country right and that's of course why in Iran now they're very unpopular now but if there is this existential tension I want to pick up on India and the sort of secular state of Nehru and and the kind of state socialism versus the movements of the past decade which are representative changes throughout the world and that is the sort of globalized free trade and the question is I suppose the question is are you concerned on this kind of striving to resolve these tensions we're talking about are you concerned by what you see in societies that you know well by the shift to a market-based form of life so that free speech is life itself and that's become markets or life itself it's a big shift as you say because India came into being with a pretty protectionist economy you know tariff barriers around with a command economy you know where the government made these five-year plans you know auto rather soviet model which the economy was then supposed to respond to with a lot of stimulation from above you know things were done like for example I mean famously Coca Cola was banned in India so that local cola drinks you know could emerge it was became illegal to import foreign cars so that there could be an Indian motor industry right and and so on right and and that's how the country proceeded yes for 30 years more than unaligned non-aligned relationship with the Soviet Union than with the United States right in those days the United States used to rather suspect India because of that Soviet connection and in Henry Kissinger's phrase would tilt towards Pakistan and that clearly was created mutual suspicion right between between India and the United States so a lot of which actually was dispelled with at the time the Clinton visit so that was right beneficial effect of that right anyway and then there's this huge shift right huge which is a shift that happened everywhere in the world that's right the dropping of tariff barriers right the result of that I wouldn't say has been all awful yeah you know I mean just look at one of the benefits at that time in the time of the of the command economy in the protectionist economy there was very tight censorship of news media particularly broadcast media you know the print media were more or less allowed to function but that's but the broadcast the radio you know everybody listened to in television as that became more important completely controlled then along comes the star satellite Rupert Murdoch right beaming down you know CNN MTV etc etc right and suddenly there was a way for people in India to receive news information right which the Indian state could not censor right and it completely transformed the nature of the Indian media almost overnight yeah you know that the ability of the ability of the pret of the government to control information vanished right no vanished overnight and of course then then comes the internet and it exponentially increases that that's that so so there's a sense in which there have been clear benefits there's also been an enormous quantity of wealth creation as a result of I mean stunning number of Indian millionaires I mean really quite remarkable number of people of great wealth in Indiana and and those people are generating a very powerful economy now and particularly in new technology areas and so on but you know I mean Bombay for example was always a city of great wealth and great poverty was always you know that the slogan that cliche in Bombay was the hope was about Havel and the high-rise right next to each other and and that was always there but now Bombay has unbelievable well is this an all is this all unbalanced for the good or you're troubled by it has that that Gulf that widening gulf between the rich and the poor is the thing from which populist crypto-fascist politics has emerged elsewhere in the world you know and it's that's where it comes from India if you look at the growth in Bombay specifically of the neo-fascist political party the Shiv Sena it grew entirely by understanding that the important thing was to work at the detailed grassroots level you know if you went to the Congress party and you add validity were a slum dweller I mean arrivee biggest lamination in Bombay it's not quite what people might think of his Islam I mean it's got roads it's got electricity you know it has its got some plumbing in various places stand pipes and so on you know so but people are living in shacks made of tin and cardboard in very dreadful conditions if you're standpipe starts what stops working you know there's no drinking water nobody would dream of going to the Congress party guy because he only comes round at election time he wants your vote but the shifts saying a guy would say okay and that afternoon there'd be a plumber around there he'd fixed the standpipe this is exactly how the Nazi Party started exactly huh and they understood that indy and learnt that lesson if you work at the grassroots level you're the guys who are there and deliver you start building a power base then they actually structured themselves exactly like the Nazi Party and you know as using I mean both are a the leader of the ship said I famously would have a picture of adult Hitler on his desk you know as a role model so that's what happened in Bombay and it's now it's it's created a degree of communal tension yeah that never used to exist that it's very extremely worried we have one more question then we have to close and I'm going to quote one of your statements this is the optimistic side of your statement a self description in your talk in Colombia at low library in 1991 and the question I want to read this and the question is do you still feel this is an accurate self-description you say yet I must cling with all my might to that chameleon that Shimura that shapeshifter my own soul must hold on to its mischievous iconoclastic out-of-step clown instincts no matter how great no matter how great no matter how great the storm if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox so be it I've lived in that messy ocean all my life I fished in it for my art this turbulent sea was the sea outside my bedroom window in Bombay it is the sea by which I was born and which I carry with me wherever I go yeah I mean you know one of the things it's I guess there's a very last thing to say is it I think the freedom art literature these are not tea parties you know these are not quiet civilized locations you know these are turbulent brawling you know arguing abrasive things you know you don't you know a free society is not a society in which everybody neatly says after you know after you you know it's one in which people on that level isn't it good that people in New York have started being rude to each other again I mean I thought after you - after you how you do that you all right all that stuff I sort of good work what's that about you anyway so I've always seen all these related things you know democracy freedom literature the world of the imagination the world of the intellect etc as being turbulent places and you know out of that turbulence comes work and you know out of those sparks you know fly which are sometimes creative and sometimes not you know but without that turbulence you know in a calm sea nothing happens so you know let's have the storm so I want to say on behalf of Columbia solving we look forward to welcoming you back in 2015 12 thanks very much for this you

Channel: Columbia University

Views: 18,738

Rating: 4.6078429 out of 5

Keywords: education, columbiauniversity, midnightschildren, salmanrushdie, leebollinger, columbiaschoolofthearts, royalshakespeare

Id: 5YkaMhnIZ3E

Length: 54min 57sec (3297 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2010