During an online conversation with TOI’s Vinita Dawra, Rushdie said, “After these 10 years of writing a Western-based novel, I am starting to write a book that appears to be an Indian novel set entirely out there. is … which means I have to come.” Nangia. This was Rushdie’s first appearance at an Indian Litfest since he withdrew from the Jaipur festival amid a controversy in 2012.
Rushdie lamented his horrific trips to India, where his 1988 book The Satanic Verses is still banned.
In many ways fiction is the opposite of falsehood: Rushdie
The last time I was in Mumbai was more than seven years ago. Sometimes it becomes very difficult for me to come to India and it can be very difficult. Either because of religious objections or because of involvement in security operations. You can’t have coffee with friends on Colaba Causeway if you have an army of people with guns! Rushdie laughed with the promise to return.
Readers are pandering to the chance to peek into Rushdie’s writing sanctuary in New York—a spacious, pleasant room lined with tall bookcases and a crisp white fireplace—which has spawned some of the author’s most beloved novels. . It took a British-Indian writer to hand over the keys to his out-of-bounds field of COVID-19 and this year’s Times Lit Fest’s digital intimacy as he spoke to TOI about his quixotic quest for truth . through imagination.
Rushdie’s work has, over the years, filled many universes, with an assortment of characters, cultural references, literary allusions, and absurdities of the contemporary world. But a Salman Rushdie novel isn’t usually what it appears to be on the surface. Quichote, the Booker Prize-winning author’s fourteenth novel—where he reimagined Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes’ classic Don Quixote to tell the story of an aging pharmaceutical salesman who sets out on a drive across America—a parodic of Cervantes There is much more to the famous novel than remodeling.
If Cervantes wrote about an old Spanish nobleman set to satirize the culture of his time, then at the heart of Rushdie’s playful Quichote—different from Quixote by four centuries—is “a breakdown of reality and living in a factual world.” People are very confused where there is truth and lies,” he said.
In an age when truth is doubted, answering responsibility for a writer’s imagination, whenever people ask him, he repeats his bare response, ‘Why do you make things up when the world is full of lies? Are you?’ “In many ways fiction is the opposite of falsehood. The purpose of literature is to assert what and who we are and as human beings gravitate towards truth whereas the purpose of lies is to obscure the truth. This is why historically authoritarian writers have has attacked,” said the 74-year-old writer, his tongue and sharp intellect.
The author who “feels like the product of the three cities he lives in — Mumbai, London and New York — calls himself “Bombay Boy”, who can’t help but reinvent Breach Candy, where he Grown up, his stories in all.
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