nato expels seven russian diplomats based at its brussels headquarters in the latest response to the nerve agent attack in britain. in an exclusive interview with the bbc, the niece of the poisoned former spy sergei skripal has spoken about the pain the attack caused her family. cricket australia has said only three players knew in advance about the ball tampering incident in south africa. its officials say tough sanctions will follow. and this video is trending on bbc.com. it's a wedding which didn't exactly go to plan. a barn owl was the ring—bearer and while it made it down the aisle, after its first landing on the best man, things go wrong. you can see the entire video at bbc.com. that's all from me now. stay with bbc world news. it's time for hardtalk.

welcome to hardtalk. i'm stephen sackur. globalisation is based on movement — of money, goods, ideas and people, across continents and national borders. in a world of glaring inequality, it has stirred a powerful backlash, manifested in the rise of nationalism and identity politics. and this clash of human impulses is fertile territory for my guest today, the pakistani novelist mohsin hamid. in his novels, he has explored cultural, economic and religious tensions between east and west, rich and poor. his latest book focuses on migration. why does it frighten so many of us? mohsin hamid, welcome to hardtalk. thank you. i want to start with this interesting idea of yours, that you, you say, are a mongrel through and through. what do you mean by being a mongrel? well, i was born in pakistan, i moved to california when i was three, back to pakistan at nine, america 18, london 30, and back to pakistan about nine years ago. and along the way, i have become a mixture of things. so i can't think of myself as just pakistani, orjust british, orjust american. i am a mixed up kind of creature, a hybrid, and that's what i mean by mongrel. it's a term that we tend to think of as kind of negative. yes, i mean, do you wear that badge with pride?

i do, i think it's something we should all wear with pride, because everybody is a mongrel, actually. we are descended from all sorts of people, and we have travelled and mixed through our ancestry, but also in our own lives. but it's such an interesting statement — everybody is a mongrel. because, of course, most people don't want to think of themselves as mongrels. indeed, the notion of belonging, having a clear identity, having a group, a tribe that is yours, that's something that seems today, in the 21st century, to be extraordinarily important to people. i think it is very important. i think that the sense of belonging to a group of people, having a connection to those people, is very important. but what happened some time ago was the people we actually had a connection to, our immediate, you know, family and clan, was replaced by this idea of the nation, the nationstate, which is kind of a fictitious connection. we don't really have a personal connection to most people of our nation. well, to you, maybe, but maybe not to most people.

i wonder, because of your rather special international upbringing, with a well—to—do family, who moved with you to america and then could afford to put you through us university, and you got a very good job — you know, you are a part of a sort of a global elite, which most people in most parts of the world are simply not part of. that's true, absolutely. that said, i mean, my childhood was spent trying to blend in with other people. so i was like a chameleon, you know, more pakistani in pakistan, more american in america. and as i got older, i began to be comfortable just being a bit of a misfit, a sort of a strange, semi—foreign creature. but, as i've become comfortable with this, what i find is how many other people find themselves feeling foreign. i think everybody feels foreign, actually. so, you know, the only gay child in a straight family feels foreign.

the only daughter with five brothers feels foreign. a poet in the engineering faculty feels a bit foreign. there's a sense each of us has of being a bit different, of not fitting in. just one more political thought about this notion of identity and belonging. it's a very interesting statement, which the british prime minister, theresa may, came out with not so long ago. she said, if you believe you're a citizen of the world, you're in fact a citizen of nowhere. you don't understand what the very word citizenship means. do you feel yourself, you know, with this mongrel idea of yours, to be a citizen of the world, rather than anywhere in particular? i think we can have multiple, overlapping citizenships. so i'm a citizen of london, in the sense that i used to live here and pay taxes here, i feel something to this place, a connection to this place. i'm also a british citizen, which to theresa may might make me a sort of a citizen of nowhere, because i am also pakistani. but it has a real meaning to me,

in terms of my sense of connection to this country, and my belief in abiding by the laws of this country, etc, voting when i'm here. i don't think you become a citizen of nowhere. i think the question is, really, can you be a citizen of more than one place? can you be a family with two parents, instead of one parent, as a child? i think you can. you can have multiple families that you belong to. your latest novel, exit west, it is a sort of an epic tale with fable elements to it, about a couple that fall in love, in a city which is never named, but let's say it sounds a bit like aleppo, in syria — a city which is pleasant, but falls into the most terrible war. these two young people get caught up in it, and they ultimately decide that their only hope of a decent future is to leave. you wrote it, as i understand it, while living in lahore. did you write it because you felt yourself in a city, lahore, in pakistan, which was almost as fragile, as vulnerable as a city like aleppo proved to be? i hope that lahore is not that

fragile, but i imagine people in kabul and aleppo and damascus and sarajevo also felt that their cities were not that fragile. what's changed for me is the plausibility of this disaster occurring in the place where i live has grown. i think it's grown for many people, in many places. and so the novel is born out of that kind of nightmare, something i hope will never happen. born out of fear, a visceral, personalfear. yes. ithink, you know, living in pakistan, again, i don't want to sort of contribute to a narrative that pakistan is going to decline and fall into chaos. i don't think it's likely to do so. i think it's likely to do the opposite. but it's possible that it could, and when you live in a place like that, there's a background fear that can occur, and for me, does occur, and so fiction is the way it takes shape. and it is a fundamentally bleak vision. i mean, you catalogue in so many interesting emotional and intimate ways the way in which war narrows down the life of all the people captured by it, in this city,

trapped in this city. and in the end, as i say, the two young people decide that escape is their only alternative. but the really interesting thing you do in this novel, because a lot of it is quite realistic, and evokes images from aleppo and mosul and elsewhere, but then what you do is you add this sort of fantastical element, where they discover a sort of magical doorway, that can transport them from the hell of war to a new life, first on a greek island, and then they make it to london. what's all this fabulous magic doorway about? well, sometimes i think we can get closer to emotional reality by bending other aspects that we think of as being real. so, yes, the doors that they travel through don't exist, according to physics as we know it. and yet we each carry around a small black rectangle in our pockets and our handbags which is a kind of portal — you know, the screen of our phones. the smartphone. yeah, through which our consciousness leaps forward from our body constantly.

we also know that if we wanted people to move very cheaply, they could. there's no technological reason why people can't move around the planet, maybe not instantaneously, but very, very easily. and so the doors, for me, are a combination of what technology is making our world feel like, the world where we are suddenly seeing, and mentally present wherever we wish to be, and a way to compress the next couple of centuries of human history into a very short period of time. and yet, i suppose, the reader wonders whether you're devaluing the sheer bravery, courage, and also the risk, that comes with actually escaping a war—torn city and trying to make a new life. because, whether it be syria or whether it be sub—saharan africa, those who choose to leave and try to reach the rich world, and usually it's europe, they are undertaking a terribly dangerous journey, either by sea or across mountains and desert, or maybe both. and your description of the migrant experience doesn't include that journey at all. yeah, absolutely.

i think that's... it's not my intention to minimise, or to say that it is not horrific, the way in which refugees and migrants are often forced to travel. it is horrific, and very frequently deadly. but what has happened is, by focusing so much on the journey of these people, we have created a different category of human being. those who have crossed the mediterranean on a small rubber dinghy or crawled underneath the barbed wire on the us—mexican border are different from us. we have made them into another category of person, and then this other category can be dealt with, i think, inhumanely. when you take away that part that makes them different, they are simply people who are in a place, and then left the place for another place, which every one of us has done,

even if it's just leaving our parents‘ houses to move out on our own. and so my attempt was not to devalue, de—emphasise that part of the story, but to establish a kind of similarity between migrant communities and every else. to make them seem less different. yeah, because at the end of the day, what i think we're encountering is not so much that there's a conflict between two kinds of feeling — the feeling of those who are fleeing dangerous geographies, and the feeling of those who are resisting the arrival of those geographies. i think, actually, the feelings are very similar. the idea of losing the place where you grew up can occur both because you change geographies, and it can occur because you are starting to feel foreign in a place where you yourself have grown up.

and so, if we can recognise that the sorrow of these two experiences is similar, we can get beyond the kind of fruitless notion of inevitable conflict between these two divisions. there's a phrase in the book where you describe the passage that they make from their war—torn home to a new life, which ends up being, for a long time in london, but then they actually make another move to california. the passage, you say, was both like dying and like being born. now, i'm interested in the juxtaposition of the two. because it says something about your own life, as well, when you lived in those different places, that yes, a huge amount of opportunity came your way, but there was also, always, a sense of sorrow and loss as well. there is — i mean, there is an emotional violence to moving that we often don't give enough consideration. and the echoes of that emotional violence can go — proceed through a lifetime and across generations. when, for example, if i were to leave pakistan again, my children every day play with their grandparents. let's say we were to move somewhere far away, and they were to see them once a week — once a year for a week. that relationship would,

in a sense, end. and there's an enormous sorrow to that ending. i think people do experience incredible senses of loss when they leave a place, and it's important to recognise that. when we say, what has this person done, what have they given up to be here? the answer is, when you say that of the refugee, the migrant, the answer is they have given up everything, and the emotional consequences of that are huge. and one interesting — it's only one, but one interesting element of how they try to maintain a memory of where they came from is actually the use of religion as a vehicle, and prayer as a way of reconnecting. and i'm particularly interested, because you, of course, are also the author of the reluctant fundamentalist, which looked at the relationship between the west and the muslim world, through the eyes of a young man

meeting an american, a young pakistani man. and in this book, you have another young man, saeed, who turns to prayer. and is your message that sometimes religion, in this case, the muslim religion, can be a means of trying to maintain an identity? well, certainly, it can be. i think that what's happened is that many... was it for you, by the way? religion as a way of maintaining my identity? i would say that, in a sense, i've been made conscious of muslims as a group because of how i am treated by other people. so when i arrived on the eurostar from paris in london recently, everybody walked off the train. we'd already been through immigration. i have a uk passport, but i was stopped by somebody and asked a whole bunch of questions, and i think it is to do with belonging to this group. so, yes, to a certain extent. and did that make you feel resentful, angry? did it actually, again, reinforce this feeling of being the other? yeah, it did those things. it made me sad more than those other feelings,

because i think that the uk has been better than many countries at not having this sort of sense of constant surveillance. is that one reason you left the united states after 9/11, because you found that you were being regarded as a potential threat? it wasn't the reason i left. i was living in london a couple of months before 9/11 happened. it is perhaps a reason i didn't go back after a year as i initially had planned to do. it was the george bush, the second george w bush administration and a lot of wars were starting and london felt very conducive as this kind of international hub of thinking, writing, people protesting the iraq war. i felt culturally, politically, in a sense, more at home in london in those days. and yet in the end, your life decision was to go back to pakistan, which brings us back to where we began this

conversation, with questions of identity and belonging. it is very interesting to me that despite everything you've said about the universality of the human experience and values, you, in the end, did what so many people want to do — you went home. absolutely, and i think what's important is i'm not somebody who is, in that sense, a rootless mongrel wandering the earth. although i think being such a person is a potentially wonderful person to be. no worse or better than any other kind of person. but i am somebody who is living in the same place i lived as a child, after having wandered in all these places. but in a sense, the reverse migration from the one which is the overbearing pre—occu pation of politicians in so much of the world. that is from the poor world to the rich world. you'd made it in the rich world, you'd had a great education, you'd became a consultant for mckinsey, which is a sort of a golden egg job, and then you decided to be a writer and had written best sellers. you were a success in new york, in london and yet, you then decided

you wanted to make your life in lahore, in pakistan, and i dare say many of your friends said you're crazy. yeah, i think some people thought it was a bit of a strange decision. but many people are doing this. what we're seeing is migration has always been a way for human beings to find something they're looking for. homo sapiens did not evolve on the british isles. people came here over many thousands and thousands of years and they keep coming. they don't necessarily stay. so people whose ancestors were in britain have moved on to america, california, whatnot, some of them might come back this way. i think we can migrate and return. this is where i struggle to keep up with you because it seems to me, when you talk about the migration of the future in which you say, and i am going to quote you here,

"i imagine that centuries hence when people are finally free to move as they please around our planet, they'll look back at our moment now and wonderjust as we wonder about those who kept slaves, how people who seemed so modern could do such cruel things to their fellow human beings like caging them up as animals." your implication being, we'll reach this sort of heavenly moment where migration is just completely normal, acceptable, easy and accessible to everybody on this planet. i put it to you that flies in the face of everything about the human condition and human history. well, i think human history and human condition is a march towards greater equality. until recently, the idea that black people would be slaves in the southern part of america 150 years ago was accepted as common wisdom. the idea that women were inferior to men or that gay people shouldn't have the same rights as straight people,

that religious people and atheists should have fundamentally different rights. all these things have changed, dark and light skins. but what hasn't changed, and we can say in 2018 that we can see the strains of nationalism and populism and building fences and borders and fortifications. today, we can say that there is something about all of human history where, yes, there are constant movements of people. usually invasions which involve violence and those movements of people generally have involved epic amounts of killing and bloodshed. i don't think they have, i don't think that's true. look at the history of north america, south america, central asia. almost any geographical part of the world is full of such stories. yes, i mean, there has been violence associated with migration, but it isn't necessarily the case. in north america, there was a kind of genocide where the free colombian population of america was effectively wiped out by those who came in. but, you know, i have brown skin because for tens of thousands of years, lighter skinned people have come into the darker skinned

parts of the indian subcontinent where i live and that they didn't actually massacre each other and result in just lighter skinned people surviving. they stuck around and inter—mixed. and most of human history, i think, is like that. it is not genocide after genocide. frequently, i think most often, it is that we don't engage in genocide, which is why we're shocked by genocide. ijust wonder and i alluded to this earlier, whether you would acknowledge that your rather optimistic view of where humanity is going, particularly on this question of migration and the intermingling of peoples, is reflective of having a rather gilded life. i think probably it is, in my case. but that said, i think there are two very strong reasons to believe that it is going to happen. one reason is the pressure of migration is going to become enormous. if we are truly going to resist it, we will no longer be able to simply outsource to libya and turkey the job of preventing migrants, we will have to actively kill the people who want to come.

to erect very violent barriers. we will have to catch those who get through. those who try to help those who get through. we will begin to... you are saying there is no middle ground? there is no control that is possible in a humanitarian way? well, there never has been. when have people stopped moving? we've always moved, it is the nature of humanity. we've never stopped moving and been confined to geographies in this way. also, the population of africa was a small fraction of europe's 50 years ago. it will be several multiples of europe 50 years hence. and as climate change occurs, people are going to move. what are we going to do? one is we won't have the stomach, i hope, to inflict the atrocities and to create the totalitarian societies that will resist this. but secondly, we actually need to think about ourselves as humans and less divided in the sense of nations and tribes to solve the most pressing problems we face.

climate change cannot be solved by countries thinking of national self interest. the issue of migration i don't think will be addressed in this way. but also, the most important issue is how we will regulate and manage technology. we are on the verge of giving birth to intelligent machines that can think. how are we going to regulate this? how will we share the benefits? they could potentially create great surpluses, but if they accrue to just one dozen trillionaires in california and the rest of us lose ourjobs, it is not going to be a very pleasant planet. i think all of this stuff requires a more human thinking. and there you sit in pakistan today. i want to end by coming back to your current life in pakistan. you've left california, where as you just said, so many of the developments in tech are coming from and you are now living in a country where there are 200 million people, many of whom are living in poverty. and you have said very recently of your life in pakistan, "these are disheartening times. i feel more depressed now than i have for a long time

about the political direction of my country", because the question has become who is muslim enough and after 70 years of nationhood, the answer appears to be nobody is muslim enough. for all of your optimism about what humanity can achieve and the values that we all idealise, actually, your own home, you seem to think, is in very profound trouble. it's in trouble, but i think it can get out of that trouble. it is important for us to begin to articulate optimistic visions of politics, the future, culture, because what we are facing right now is the dominance of nostalgic pessimistic visions. if you are pessimistic about our ability to have a more equal world, you tend to think it's a good idea to make america great again. well, quite — thanks for putting that phrase in. ijust noted down donald trump's first tweet of 2018 which was directed at pakistan. "$33 billion that we've given them and they've given us nothing but lies and deceit, taking our leaders for fools, giving safe haven to the terrorists we are hunting for in afghanistan." again, seems to me that right now you are living in a part

of the world that, given the messages being sent by donald trump and the current american administration, is going to be a cockpit of tension and trouble. yes, but what we're seeing is an older generation that has migrated to becoming older, it's in power right now. and disproportionately, they want these kind of barriers. but younger americans disproportionately did not vote for donald trump and younger british did not vote for brexit. younger people are much more comfortable with the kind of openness i'm talking about. this is how civilisation evolves. it's not that we suddenly become enlightened. it's that the older generation, people like us who have more closed—minded views, eventually die. we each achieve the great brexit in the sky. and then the younger people who are left, who are still here will take us into domains we can't imagine, including people moving around the world in a way that today we think of as very strange. you are one of the most optimistic people i've ever met!

well, i'm a dad. you know, it's sort of myjob to be optimistic, but also it's very important because pessimism at this moment is feeding political reactionary thinking. we have to end there, mohsin hamid. thank you very much for being on hardtalk. thank you. hello. temperatures on the way down in the lead up to the easter weekend. low pressure close by. so it is looking unsettled. some rain around in the day ahead from this first area of low pressure, there has been some uncertainty about how far north the wet weather is going to get. still a little bit about that.

south wales, southern england most likely to see wet weather, but it may push further north to parts of wales and the midlands into east anglia as the day goes on, getting some showers, a chance of a bit of sleet and wet snow out of this, on the hills into the west of these areas as we go through the afternoon. much of northern england, northern ireland and scotland will have variable cloud, sunny spells and a few showers around, longer spells of rain in the northern islands into shetland. single figure temperatures. that's the big difference across south parts of the uk compared with tuesday. some spots reached as high as 16 celsius. the chill will be around on wednesday night under clearing skies, most of the showers still around on wednesday evening will die away and that means clear skies will be widespread frost settling going into thursday morning. it does mean is thursday begins it will be chilly, but there will be a fair amount of sunshine around, but then we are watching another area of low pressure coming in from the south—west.

a bit slower, but it will at least have some showers, some longer spells of rain but at least showers pushing into south—west england, wales and to parts of northern ireland too. gradually on thursday, edging a little bit further north—east. ahead of that, you are likely to see some dry weather and some sunshine of a fairly pleasant day. there is a weather front working in northern scotland with outbreaks of rain, sleet and snow around here, it'll feel quite cold. little bit milder, those eastern areas have seen the sunshine during thursday and those heavy showers wales and the south—west edging into the midlands, parts of south—east england, continuing to feed northwards during thursday night into good friday. low pressure very much in evidence during good friday. there will be bands of showers pushing north across the uk but there will be gaps between them, we might get to see some sunshine, but for the most part it's single figure temperatures. that is how we are going into the easter weekend. temperatures on the cool side of average. not cold, but cool for the time of year. it is low pressure so there will be wet weather at times, a risk of snow on northern hills,

but it won't be wet all the time. there will be drier, sunny moments, quite pleasant in the spring sunshine. looking like a decent day on sunday. mild by monday, particularly into england and wales. that is your forecast. this is newsday on the bbc. i'm rico hizon in singapore. the headlines: chinese state media confirms kimjong—un did visit beijing for talks this week. nato expels seven russian diplomats over the spy poisoning in britain. moscow calls it part of a containment policy. this is about containing russia. creating problems for russia. i'm sharanjit leyl in london. also in the programme: cricket australia says only three players knew about plans to cheat against south africa, but big questions remain. a floating sunshield for the great barrier reef. the inventor tells us it could save one of the world's natural treasures.