with the ruling authorities of the city, just make life easier for themselves, but we don't know. what we do know is soon afterward, he rechecked to those verses in bed the devil had appeared to him in the guise of the archangel and therefore these were satanic verses and should be expunged from the ground, which baker. poster why did you name your book, 1988 book, "the satanic verses"? >> guest: because it's about temptation. and i think that story in the islamic tradition is equivalent to the stories that existed in

every tradition about temptation of profits. in fact, he comes out of it quite well. he rejected and proceeds down his thick line. pr >> host:ov as you need to beacts provocative anime characters in your books, cabrillo and the? >> guest: no, it people can be cheaper without being blasphemous. it's a regular name. no, o but one part of the novel, whic takes place in the mind of somebody who was losing his faith and his sanity deals with the origins of the religion quite like islam. the older the religion, is not called mark. it certainly was to create ate revisionist if you like his sizd stories sized view of theeat origins of the great religion. and to look at the two questions

that the new idea faces, when io hemes into the world.d the ot one is the question of weakness and the other is the question of strength. when you're weak, with a compromise? when you try to souls untrue? a strong likelihood that you will be destroyed.nd you when you are strong, when you actually succeed in coming to power and so on, will you be generous and merciful or would be cruel and is?ess, t the question of weakness in question of strength, those are the questions that happen everyg time an idea comes into the expi world.n one of the big themes of the book is expressed in the and that's the story of the birth of this religion is ones ct of question the ayatollah khomeini causing him

to -- >> guest: well, it's difficult to know because as far as we know, he didn't see a copy of the book. of and he was lying on his death bed anyway. so -- and the book didn't exist in a farsi translation. so what seems to have happened is that somebody told him that various mullahs around the world were objecting to the book, and he just hijacked the protest. >> host: are you still under fatwa? this. >> guest: no. this hasn't really been a summit in my life -- subject in my life for a dozen years, frankly, unless i talk to journalists. >> host: in your nonfiction book of essays, "step across this line," you write about being under a fatwa, and you write: to live like this is to be humiliated every day. to live like this is to allow people, including your ex-wife, to call you a coward on the front page of the newspapers. such people would, no doubt, be

prepared to speak well of me at my funeral, but to live, to avoid assassination is a greater victory than to be murdered. only fanatics go looking for martyrdom. >> guest: well, certainly i'm not interested in that. one of the great things about being a writer is to look forward to a long life and to be able to, you know, to work this that life. one of the great things about this job is that there's no retirement age. and i certainly would have been very sad to have been cut off in my, in mid sentence, so to speak. >> host: at what point did you quit living under protection? >> guest: oh, you know, around the turn of the century, somewhere around 1999, 2000 is when it ended. >> host: salman rushdie, "midnight's children." what's that story about? >> guest: well, that's a story about my generation, really. that's to say i was born in june of 1947, and two months later in august of 1947 the british

empire and india came to an end at midnight, at midnight of august 14th and 15th, 1947. and this story suggests that the thousand, thousand and one children born in that hour, the first hour of independence, in some way acquire magical gifts, in some way represent the hope and potential of the newborn country. it's a way of, it's, obviously, a met fore call way of writing about the hope that was born at that moment which was my -- and as i say, it was my generation. and it's an interesting generation, i think, because it's the transitional generation, you know? this and the generation of transition is always fascinating because it's confused. you know, because the past continues to be the, continues to have an influence, and the future is beginning to be born. so certainly when i was growing up, as you can tell from my

accent, the british influence was still very present. you know, i went to a school in bombay which was a british mission foundation. the the cathedral school. -- it was the ca three drag school. and many of the teachers were irish or with english educations, and so my parents in that generation still thought the thing to do would be to send me to an english university, you know, to be educated. now, in india now i think there are changes there. i think there are parents like my parents might well want to send their children to american universities. they want to go to stanford and mit instead of oxford and cambridge. so that was a generation where the influence of the british was still there but waning, and the new, modern state was coming into being. and so we grew up in that, in that time of great change, and it's interesting to write about. >> host: and in your writing you identify yourself as a british writer and an indian writer.

>> guest: yeah, i mean, you know, basically, i'm a boy from bombay, you know? that's how i was born and raised, and that's where my family lived, and that's where i still have deep connections and roots and feel very much at home whenever i go there, you know? in the way that, you know, i think the place where you're a child is home in a way that nowhere else is, you know? and that was the place where as a child and a teenager. but, of course, i spent more of my life in england than anywhere else, and i'm a british citizen. it would be ridiculous not to think of one's self as a british writer. i've thought about a lot about migration, and i think now it's become so common praise in this -- common place that people have plural identities, that they feel allegiances to more than one thing. people can feel indian and british. people can feel, you know,

italian and american. people can feel cuban and american, you know? this sense of a plural identity is now one that millions and millions of i have. and i'm one of those. i always thought it was fascinating that in this age of the world the phenomenon of colossal mass migration has really changed our relationship to ourselves, the way in which we define and create ourselves. >> host: do you feel muslim? do you feel like you're from pakistan? >> guest: no. i'm not from pakistan. i mean, i never really lived there. >> host: you did not live there. >> guest: no. some of my family lived there, but like many families of indian-muslim origin, my family was divided at the partition of india and pakistan. roughly speaking 50/50. i had just about the same number of uncles, aunts and cousins in even. that, actually, also was good fortune to me as a writer. in my generation very few people really knew about pakistan, the

internal life of the country. and vice versa. very few pakistanis were able to have any real knowledge of india. and can each of them had kind of a demonized image of each other. for instance, when "midnight's children" came out, readers in pakistan said that it was really interesting to them to discover what contemporary india was like, and readers in india said the same thing about the pakistani parts of the book. you know, so it became a book that sort of interpreted or explained the partitioned countries to each other. but, no, i never felt pakistani. as for muslim, i mean, my family technically was an indian-muslim family, and parts of my family were very devout. my grandfather was a very devout muslim and spent his whole life praying five times a day, so on. my own family was very secularized, and i was brought up in be -- i mean, they were very cosmopolitan people, my parents.

and i'm not particularly observant to anything. the most islam that got into our house was that we didn't eat pig. that was it. and maybe once a year my father would take me to the eve prayers, sort of the equivalent of going to church on christmas day, you know, not bothering the rest of the year. so i was brought up like that in a very cosmopolitan environment in which around me were people of every conceivable religious background and even cultural background. many foreigners, you know, bombay's a very international city. so i grew up among christians and hindus and jews, farsis. we just decided as kids to have everybody's holidays because it gave us more holidays. [laughter] so when it was a big hindu holiday, we'd sell rate that. and when it was a muslim holiday, we'd celebrate that. it was very kind of ecumenical. >> host: what'd your parents do? >> guest: my mother was a

teacher when she was young, but she more or less stopped when she married my father and brought up four of us, three sisters and myself. my father, i think, was a frustrated scholar, you know? he was actually very much more knowledgeable than i about islamic history and had sudded it to an extent at university of cambridge and also studied english literature, so on. but his, he was an only child, and his father died when he was still relatively young, and so he had to take over the family business which was a textile business. and then he sold that around the time of partition, and after that was involved in property and so on. there was a point where he was very, very, very wealthy. when i was a little boy. and then he spent the rest of his life losing the money. [laughter] so, clearly, every business decision he made after the time when i was about 7 or 8 years old was calamitous.

and by the he died -- by the time he died at the age of 77, he had absolutely no money left. so what he did for a living was to lose his money. >> host: and where did he die, in bombay? this. >> guest: actually he died in catchy, pakistan. karachi, pakistan. >> host: , in fact, you write about taking the ferry regularly from bombay to karachi. >> guest: that's right. there were these two little rust bucket boats that used to ply up and down that coast. and, in fact, the distance in miles is quite small. it's sort of an overnight ride. and as i say, i had aunts and uncles living in karachi, so sometimes the family would go over to visit them. and i must say if you're a boy from bombay, karachi feels like a dump. sorry, karachi. >> host: where are your sisters living? >> guest: they're scattered all over the world. one's in england, one's in

america, and my youngest sister suddenly passed away. she had a heart attack quite young. >> host: what was the reaction to "midnight's children" when it came out in 1981? >> guest: it was extraordinary. i had parished one novel -- published one novel that did essentially nothing. this novel was wonderfully well received. the response from india was extraordinary. i mean, people felt very fond of it. it became a book that was very well loved in india, and that meant a lot to me because i wanted the people it was written about to feel it was truthful. and then it won prizes and became this colossal bestseller which i'd never expected. if you'd asked me what i'd hoped for, i thought, you know, a good

publish or, well received, and i thought if a few thousand people who are not related to me or personal friends end up buying it, that would be nice. it never struck me it'd be translated into, whatever it is, 43 languages. it was a transforming moment for me. >> host: and in the years hence it's won several awards. >> guest: quite a few, yes. it keeps piling up. >> host: is it your best selling book? >> guest: i don't know. i haven't counted. it's either that or "the satanic verses." i think it's a close thing. >> host: which of your books is your favorite? >> guest: the next one. [laughter] i don't know. i'm very proud of "midnight's children." and for different reasons i'm proud of other books. "the moor's last sigh," for example, is the only novel i had to write in what i thought was a condition of exile because in

those year, the '90s, i wasn't able to get a visa. i've always wanted to write insider books, and to have people in india feel that it was truthful as well, that felt n a way, more difficult than writing "midnight's children" because it was different from being away. >> host: why wouldn't india grant you a visa? >> guest: well, this is a question you have to ask the indian government. i guess in those years and the trouble around "satanic verses," they just didn't feel like enforcing the trouble. there was a period of around nine years or so when i couldn't go back to india. that was very tough, indeed. >> host: good afternoon and welcome to booktv's "in depth." this is our monthly program with one author and his or her body of work. this month we're honored to have salman rushdie as our guest. the phone numbers are up on the screen. if you'd like to participate,

202 is the area code. 7 37-0001 for those of you in the east and central time zones. if youly in the mountain or pacific time zones. 202-737-0002 is the number for you to dial. also you can send an e-mail at booktv. or send us a tweet, twitter.com/booktv. in one of your nonfiction essay collections you write that history is always ambiguous. facts are hard to establish, incapable of being given many meanings. reality is being built on our prejudices, misconceptions and ignorance as well as on our perceptiveness and knowledge. >> guest: i think each age writes the history of the past according to it own concerns, you know? and sometimes, i mean, i was a historian by, you know, that was

my university degree summit. subject. and one of the first things you learn when you study history is how contested it is. you know, it's not simply that there is, there is something happened that just was the case. people disagree radically about, about what happened and what it meant. and so history is a kind of argument in which people, historians as well as the participants, argue about its mean, you know? and quite interesting training that for a fiction writer, you know, to learn that the past is made up of shifting sands, that it's not rock solid. >> host: first call for salman rushdie comes from fairview, new jersey. go ahead, frank, with your question. >> caller: yeah, mr. rushty. >> hello. >> caller: yes, hi. you're one of my favorite authors. i'm curious about something. i'm a great novel reader, and i happen to be scanning amazon.com

the other day, and i found a title that intrigued me. i don't know if you've ever heard of it, i never did. it's called "slayer of the sacred cow." well, it turned out not to be about india. i never heard of the author, carl shapiro. i'm about three-quarters of the way through with it, and this is a fascinating book. i think you would greatly appreciate this story. it's about an atheist who hits the jackpot in the new york state lottery, and he's cast into the spotlight, and he becomes in conflict with the religious establishment. did you ever hear of it? >> guest: no, i've not heard of it at all, but i'll look it up now that you've mentioned it. yeah. i don't know what else to say about that really. >> host: i want to go back to "step across this line." i want to read you two quotes and get your reaction. this is from january 2000, terror verse is us -- versus security during the y2k worldwide hoo ha i guess we could call it. you write: for days the world

had been hearing about nothing but terrorism. the u.s. had spoken about the current boogieman's name, osama bin laden, to frighten us children. there were arrests with a man with bomb-making equipment found at the u.s./canada border, a group in jordan. seattle canceled its celebration. one of the leaders of a cult was released, and japan feared a terrorist atrocity. you go on to talk about some of the more incidents. and then in october 2001 you write: in making free societies safe -- safer from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. >> guest: i mean, i think it's interesting to me now that i was thinking about that, you know, before the events of september 11, 2001, because i do think that what's true about the world we now live in, you know, is that there is a necessary

conflict more or less every day between ideas of liberty and ideas of security. and i'm not saying that either side is badly motivated. both sides can be well mote said t -- motivated if security forces want to keep the country secure. and those who fight on behalf of liberty want to keep the society free. neither of these is a bad thing. but they often come into conflict when people feel that their liberties are being infringed by this or that security procedure. like these patdowns right now, you know? this and contrary wise, security people will feel that a wholly libertarian attitude could let people slip through the net we would not wish to slip through the net. and so that's the battle. and it seems to me that one of

the problems of the battle is that it's fought at a covert level, you know? that the issues of security is are very rarely made public. you know, there's -- much of it is kept secret, and decisions are made which are not, so to speak, democratically accountable. again, there are reasons for that. there are reasons why security sometimes needs to act in secret rather than in public. but if you're a believer in freedom, you know that accountability and freedom are quite closely connected, and to know what our leaders are doing is important if we're going to make sure that they don't do things they oughtn't do. so there is that battle, and i think it's right at the heart of every free society right now. and the question is which side -- you don't actually have to be on a side, but it seems to me that if you're going to err

in favor of one or the other, that my inclination would be to err in favor of liberty rather than security. one of the things, you know, i learned is that there is no such thing as total security. it simply doesn't exist. there are only levels of inskirt. insert. and what you want to do, of course, is make the insecurity level as low as you can, but there's no such thing as 100% secure. and if that's the grail that you're pursuing, you'll never reach it. i think it's better to live in a flee society and accept there are elements of risk you can't eradicate. >> host: when you hear the phrase war on terror, what do you think? >> guest: well, you know, i mean, i can see why it cropped up at the time, because of the attacks in america, in washington and in new york. it became too vague a term, and i think the problem is that the way in which that was pursue pursueed -- not just against

al-qaeda, not just against the al-qaeda/taliban state in afghanistan at the time, but broadening that out into iraq and so on -- made a lot of people feel that there was something wrong with that conceptually, something wrong with that idea. i remember president bush talking about, you know, eradicating evil, and it struck me that that might be a job beyond even the president of the united states. [laughter] it, evil, unfortunately, is a fact in human life just as much as good is. >> host: next call for sir rushdie comes from freeland, michigan. go ahead, glenn. >> caller: yes, sir. thank you very much, gentlemen. mr. rushdie, i'd like to get your take on something. i was watching the bbc international news or cnn or one of those during the time of the

trouble over the muhammad cartoons in this one of the scandinavian states. they were interviewing a representative of a muslim who -- i don't remember his name or the exact muslim group. he had an interesting take on it though. the interviewer was asking him don't muslims understand that in the west we have freedom, freedom of speech, free ec presentation and blah, blah, blah, and he pointed out an interesting contradiction that in some of these european states, for example, denying the holocaust saying the nazi holocaust didn't happen, for example, not only will it make you a public outcast, it's technically illegal in some of these places. so it's not like they have total freedom of speech at least in some of these european states.

and he gave other examples of that kind of thing. and what i'd like to ask you is do you think there is a double standard between the way -- when it comes to censorship and offending religions like that, is there a double standard between the way muslims are treated and jews and christians and other religions are treated? >> guest: no, i don't really because i think, you know, if you look just at the world of political cartooning rather than trying to bring in all these other issues, i think there's plenty of criticisms of the pope, you know? these days the catholic churches has certainly been the focus of a great deal of criticism in all sorts of ways. and i don't see anybody pulling their punches about that. you're right, i mean, the different countries draw the line about censorship in different places. i myself think it's understandable that germany and austria should have laws existence holocaust denial -- against holocaust denial, but i

still think it would be better to discredit people who try to deny that those atrocities rather than put them in jail. which can make them -- which can glorify them. but i think the question, the question of the political cartoon is simple. what would a respectful political cartoon look like? there's no such thing. the form itself is disrespectful. the purpose of the political cartoon ask to poke -- is to poke fun at people, to look at their weaknesses, their possiblies, things they're saying that you don't agree with and satirize them. so if we're going to have political cartoons, we just have to accept that's what they'll be like. >> host: you seem to enjoy writing about writing novels. and what is a novel. and how do you identify a novel. >> guest: well, you know, i think each of us who, who pursues this curious calling would answer that question quite differently, you know?

and that's one of the nice things about the form is its capaciousness. the fact that there are so many ways of approaching, of approaching it, you know? and in my case i think i've had two, i don't know almost contradictory impulses. one is the impulse to realism, and the other is the impulse to the fantastic, you know? this is the problem with the phrase magic realism. when people use it, they only hear magic. they don't hear realism, although the point about that kind of writing is that it tries to combine elements of the fantastic with elements of the realistic. and for me the fantastic is only interesting as a technique if it

sheds light upon something in the real world, you know, if it becomes a way of talking about the real world rather than -- i have no interest in escapist fiction. i have no interest in the kind of fantasy fiction that represents an escape from reality. >> host: harry potter? >> guest: well, harry potter is for kids, you know? and it's an adventure story, and it's a good one. i mean, i myself, i've been talking about grown-up books, but it seems to be fantasies away, just one of the ways of approaching the truth, you know? the non-naturalistic way of writing. to use an example from another form, if you think about painting, if you go in the museum of modern art in new york and have a look at vincent van gogh's painting of a starry night, we can agree it's a great painting, but it doesn't look anything like a starry night. if you go up and look at the sky on a clear night, it doesn't look like that painting. and if you take a photograph of it, it doesn't look like that

painting. and yet it's a great painting because it tells you something of the emotion and force and passion that can be engendered by looking at such a sky. and i guess that's the difference between a photograph and that expressionist painting, you know, is sort of what i'm saying about the difference between naturalistic writing and writing which breaks those rules in order to make a point, you know? this -- so but i think in the end the figure that matters most of all in the novel is the human being. you have to -- the human scale has to be the scale of the novel, you know? and the purpose of doing it is to look at how we are with each other and who we are to ourselves, you know? and how we go about our business of being in the world, you know? well or badly, courageously or timidly, you know, whether we love each other or dislike each other or, you know, what is human life like? that's the subject of the novel,

always has been. and how you come at that, you know, technically seems to me to be less important than to keep your eye on that prize. >> host: and in "imaginary homelands" you write: i do not believe that novels are trivial matters. the ones i care most about are those which attempt radical reformulations of language, form and ideas: >> guest: well, i mean, i've always had this view which, actually, some great writers who are friends of mine disagree with, that in order to create great art you have to go to some kind of edge, that it doesn't happen -- you know, if you want to innovate, if you want to do things that have not been done before and if you want to increase the sum total of what we can, know and feel and understand and, therefore, what

we can be, you need to go to the frontier and push it outwards. so, you know, those works of art which take those kinds of risk are the ones that i like the most. >> host: well, i want to get in to this e-mail because how you've mentioned a couple things here. and this is from patricia vanderbilt, and it's a little long, but i think it's worth reading. >> guest: sure. >> host: patricia writes that she's an english major in walla walla, washington. currently, she's studying abroad in india. salman rushdie is one of my favorite authors and one of the reasons why i chose to come to india. i have several questions for him. would salman rushdie, please, discuss the interplay between politics of the developing world and the genre of magical realism explored by authors such as himself and gabrielle mars ya marquez? be a type of literature more suited to nations of the developing word.

>> guest: well, certainly it has, it has found very fertile soil in those, in those parts of the world. but, i mean, there have been great practitioner of that kind of writing in european literature, you know, kafka and, indeed, in the literature of the united states in writers of the so-called fabulous movement of john barth and robert coover and others. so, you know, it's a thing that crops up everywhere. but it's true, i think, that in the so-called third world there's less of a, there's less of a buffer zone between private life and public life. you know, there's a -- the realities of the great public issues, politics -- not just politics, but poverty and corruption and religious dissension, so on and so on -- those issues come up again.

so the daily life of individuals is affected by those issues almost every day. there's almost no comfort zone, you know, around people. i think in the well-off parts of the world or the better-off parts of the world there's a kind of cocoon we can construct around ourselves, you know, which to an extend -- not completely, but to an extent -- insulates us from the storms of the public world. and, thus, can create the illusion that ord o their life is like that -- ordinary life is like that. i think what happens in these countries like india, like pakistan, like some of latin america is that because those, the storms of the public's fear attack you every day, constantly, it shows you that, actually, ordinary life is like that. so, and the literature that comes out of that is different, i guess. it's different because that safe, everyday illusion of

normality doesn't exist. and so you have to respond to reality, and if you like a more operatic way, more theatrical way. >> host: second question from patricia vanderbilt, could the author comment on the use of hindi in russian authors and why english is the main language of indian literature. >> guest: well, there'll be a lot of people in india who would give her an argument about that assertion. i mean, certainly, the very large literatures that exist in the other languages of india, you know, hindi is a great language in india. the south of india, languages like canada, and so, yeah, there's a very rich indian literature outside english. but i think what has happened, interestingly, in the last 30 years or so is an explosion of talent in many indian writing

in -- in indian writing in english. and that's something new. there always used to be a few fine writers in english coming out of india in generations before my own. there were writers like arch angel gibreel. gandhi. there's always been excellent yous -- writers, but now there's a cornucopia of them. there seem to be three more every week. and i think it's for a couple of reasons. one is that english is a sort of link you'll find all over indian. certainly amongst what you might call the novel-reading class. let's say people who have been educated at university. they're all able to read in english wherever they are in the country. and so an indian writer writing in english can be read anywhere in india whereas an indian writer writing in one of the regional languages is often

confined by that language to a region, you know? the great indian novelist and poet who won the nobel prize wrote in men goalie, and so many indians today are unaware of his work except in sometimes very poor translations whereas english goes everywhere. even just inside india it's a way for indian writers to be read around the country. and then, of course, there's the global power of the english language which allows those writers to move outside india and to be be read around the world. and that's, of course, attractive to writers to be able to have the wide audience in other countries. and so it means that a lot of very talented writers have moved towards the english language as a medium of expression. english, by the way, is now classified as one of the official languages of india, so it's not an un-indian language. >> host: back to patricia vanderbilt and her e-mail, what does sir rushdie consider to be

the most important work that he has written. >> guest: that i've written? >> host: yes, sir. >> guest: that's for other people to say. i think, actually, the best test of importance one that you can't really make in your lifetime. it has to do with your ability. you know, the great thing about the classics, i think, is that there's no book that survives 200 years by accident. not one. you know, if a book lasts longer than the writer's lifetime and then some, you know, it is always because it's a good book. always. bad books don't last. good books do. and if you write this kind of book, i mean, my kind of book, you are to an extent writing in the hope that you will have the book that the work will have a kind of posterity, you know? that it'll keep on being read long after you stop working, long after you're around. you know, my friend the british novelist martha danish once said what you hope to leave behind

you is a shelf of books. and you hope that those books will go on sitting on the shelves and people will pick them up long after you cease to be around. so i genuinely can't say the question of importance. i mean, i remember very distinguished elderly publisher telling me a story when i was a young kid about a german author who he had edited. very eminent, full of very high-brow egghead author who once wrote a children's book which turned out to be emil and the detectives which became his greatest classic. so having spent his entire life writing for adults, his immortality came from his one little children's book. and so you never know. it may be that these two books i've written for younger readers, luka and its predecessor, hah ruin and the sea of stories.

that'd be cool too. >> host: when and how did you become sir rushdie? >> guest: oh. the british honor system still uses these titles, but essentially it's a way of -- it's a lifetime achievement award is what it is. it's a way of saying when they say you get a knighthood for services to literature, it's a way of saying that a committee has considered the matter and has advised the government which advises the queen that a given writer has done work which is worthy of recognition. that's what it means. so, i mean, anybody would be pleased if you've been doing a job for more than 30 years for somebody, for your country, you know, to say that they consider it to be worth recognizing. and that doesn't get you anything else. doesn't get you a lance, doesn't get you a sword, doesn't get you a suit of armor. none of that. >> host: was there a ceremony or just a piece of paper? >> guest: yeah. there's a ceremony. you get to go to buckingham palace.

the whole thing, you get tapped on the shoulder with the sword. >> host: did you enjoy it? >> guest: yeah, of course. my children were along, they enjoyed it. it was a very nice day. >> host: very quickly, patricia vanderbilt once again. would you discuss the evolution of your own writing both in terms of themes and content and the writing process itself? >> guest: well, there's three hours right there. >> host: right. [laughter] >> guest: but just to say something about it, i mean, i think when i started out with "midnight's children" and "shame," the book that came after it, i was really trying to make some kind of reckoning with the world that i came from, the world of the subcontinent of india and pakistan, you know? and to try and respond to what that had meant in my life and to explore the characters and the themes that arose out of my knowledge of those e countrieses. countries. i felt that "the satanic verses"

was the third part of that process because it's other than the contentiousness we discussed earlier, it's primarily a novel about migration. it's about people coming from india and pakistan, making new lives in the west, and what are the effects of such a move on their lives and their characters and their way of seeing the world. it's really a novel about my i don'ts in london, most of it. and i felt that was the third part of the exploration of the things that had made me. you know, my knowledge of india, my knowledge of pakistan, and i too, of course, of a migrant who migrated from the east to the west. so those kinds of changes, they're not outside me, they're inside me. so that was, if you like, phase one, you know? and at some point in your writing life you always have to look for a second act. and it seemed to me or it has

come to seem to me that this kind of bouncing around the world that i've done, the fact that i've lived in many different parts of the world, gives me a way of approaching what i think is a very big subject these days which is a subject of how the world joins up. the world has become a very small place. and, you know, scientists use this phrase the butterfly effect, and if a butterfly flaps his wings in japan, you know, you feel the breeze in california. the world is very small, and we don't any longer live in, you know, our countries and cities are no longer neatly sealed off from one another. you know, all the little boxes open up into all the other little boxes. so i think it's a new phenomenon, you know? because the world didn't used to be like that. it used to be the case if you were setting a novel in, let's say, the american midwest, you really didn't have to think about anywhere else in the world. you just had to think about that part of the world and how life was for people there, you know? now global phenomena whether

political or economic or social can have a real impact even on that small mid midwestern town in terms of who comes to live there, in terms of whether people have jobs or don't have jobs, in terms of whether the country's at war and people are going to war from that town. so the largest subjects impact even the most small, intimate communities in a way that they didn't. and for me that's become more and more the subject. the subject is to find stories that explore the way, the unusual ways in which the world joins up now, you know? and in my novel "sal mar the clown," for instance, it begins with a murder that takes place in los angeles. and we discover in order to explain that murder, you have to go all the way across the world and understand events that took place in kashmir in the north of india. and that was a way of saying, of

saying that, but now events, even crimes, travel across continents. and in order to understand crime over there, you have to understand the reality over there. so i feel that that's become my subject more and more and not simply writing about the things that start that made me, which is how i started out. >> host: i want to thank patricia vanderbilt for that e-mail. move on to this tweet from matt harris. christopher hitchens extols your command of english literature. what is your take on his view of the dangers of religious conviction? the. >> guest: if we're going to say which gang anybody's in, then i'm much closer to the christopher hitchens/richard dawkins, sam harris group than anyone else. but all of us inside that group have somewhat different ways of coming at this subject.

and my own view is, has to do with separating the public role of religion from the private role of religion. and it seems to me that, you know, if you are an individual of religious faith who draws from that strength and comfort and inspiration and whatever, that's -- i would say that's not by business, you know? that's your business. where it becomes my business is when that becomes, is when people use the religious faith as a way of trying to influence policy, trying to influence governments, trying o change the way in which the society as a whole moves. and at that point it becomes something that i would argue with. i think the private role of religion is a matter for individuals, and i don't even want to intrude on that. you know, the public role of religion is something that i have strong opinions about. >> host: butch in jackson, wyoming, thanks for holding. you're on with salman rushdie.

please, go ahead. >> caller: hello, mr. rushdie. you just about answered my question on your employees my of religion -- philosophy of religion. see, i look at reality in the sense that we're floating around a little piece of dust in the universe -- >> guest: yes. >> caller: and we have, like, little molecules that use religion as separation. it's like a cancer on society. and we bring this, this concept from the stone age almost. i mean, like when people believed that the earth was flat and we take their belief system and bring it in moral society and accept it with no basis of fact. i'd just like to know what your concept of organized religion is. >> guest: well, let me, i mean, let me respond to what you said, which is interesting. it seems to me that you're right that from the earliest times human beings came up with in

various different cultures, came up with the idea of a sky god, the idea of a good in the sky who, from whom, from whom everything came. and i think the reason why that became such a persistent idea in different parts of the world expressed through different religious structures was because it was a way of trying to answer two of the great questions of human life. one is the question of how we get here, how did we get here. and the other is the question of ethics, you know? now that we're here, how shall we live? and religions, all of them in their different ways, try to answer those two questions. they try to say -- the question of origins, where did we come from, and the question of morals, how should we behave. and, and it seems to me that i don't need religion's answers to that question, those questions. because in terms of where did we come from, every religion in the world is, quite simply, wrong.

we department -- you know, the world was not created by somebody who worked for six days and rested on is the seventh. that didn't happened. the hindus believe that the great proto-good did a great churn, and out of that came the constellations and the planets and the stars and so on. well, that didn't happen east. so these -- either. so these may be beautiful stories, i don't deny they're beautiful stories, but there's a difference between a beautiful story and a true story. the question of origins, it seems to me, we can look to, we can look to contemporary science and get much better answers about how we got here. as to how we should live, the great question of morals, i frankly don't feel like being told the answer to that by an ayatollah or a pope or a bishop. i'd prefer to struggle with my own ethics and my own morality and try and come up with answers that make sense to me as an individual. so it may well be that, i mean, that religion served a purpose

in the evolution of the human race in terms of giving it a sense, giving people a sense of who they were and be why they were on this, as you say, speck of rock in the middle of the universe. and the question of how they should live. it served a purpose. but it seems to me as we proceed into this millennium, that it would be better to work these things out for ourselves rather than look to religions to tell us how to behave. you write in the's cay in god we -- essay in god we trust -- i quite abruptly lost my faith. i recall it vividly: >> host: afterwards, to prove my newfound atheism, i bought myself a rather tasteless ham sandwich and so partook for the first time of the forbidden flesh of the swine. no thunder bolt arrived to strike me down. i remember feeling that my

survival confirmed the correctness of my new position. i did slightly regret the loss of paradise, toe, the islamic heaven -- though, the islamic heaven had seemed very appealing to my adolescent self. i expected to be provided for my personal pleasure with four beautiful female spirits untouched by man. the joys of the perfumed garden, it seemed a shame to have given them up. [laughter] >> guest: yeah. that's -- i was sort of having fun there, but it's true that, of course, the promise of paradise is a promise of eternal bliss, of various kinds. which, of course, is a very attractive promise. but i felt better after i ate that ham sandwich. [laughter] which actually was the first piece of ham i ever ate in my life. it tasted really good. >> host: our next call comes from yonkers, new york. go ahead, michael. >> caller: yes, mr. rushdie,

thank you very much for your talk. what i was interested in knowing whether or not you'll be in new york city for any book signings in the future, the near future? that's one of my questions. >> guest: yeah, i mean, i'm just coming to the end of a book tour. i did a few things in new york city a couple of weeks ago. i think there is one coming up next week, as a matter of fact, so you can have a look at the random house web site. it should tell you. >> caller: oh, yeah, thank you very much. di nearby d'souza was one time debating with hitchens about these things, and he brought up a very goopped point, and it -- good point, and it has reference to the last question you answered. he said, mr. hitchens, a lot of people don't realize that all the good benefits that they got from religion. you know, that this society is set up in this way. there are a lot of things that are not good. laws and everything. most of that came through religion. >> guest: well, as i say, i'm not going to argue christopher's

points of view. he's more than able to argue his own position. my own view, as i say, is that there can be private benefits, you know, to religious faith. it can be sustaining and nourishing and comforting and inspirational. my concern is about the public actions of religion. and no particular religion. if you look at the world these days, you see, clearly, things being done in the name of islam that one would object to. in india, a country where hinduism was never thought to be politically radical, there is now an extremely reprehensible radical, you know, and aggressive hinduism that's growing. i have strong reservations about the activities of christian politics in this country. and so it's not, i'm not singling out any particular religion here. i'm just saying when reapplication becomes a public political subject, then i have real problems with it. i don't so much have problems with it when it's a matter of

private observance. >> host: this is booktv's monthly program "in depth." our guest is salman rushdie. 737-0001 if you live in the east and central time zones, 737-0002 for those of you in mountain and pacific. send us a tweet, twitter.com/booktv. richard in wellington, florida, you're on with sal man salman rushdie. >> caller: excellent program. i would like to ask mr. rushdie this: given the huge commitment of the united states in troops and financially in afghanistan and the billions of dollars recently increased in both military and nonmilitary aid to pakistan, what are his thoughts on the apparently unrestricted ability of the taliban to operate from sanctuaries in this pakistan's -- in pakistan's

northwestern frontier district and the tribal areas to strike directly in to afghanistan including at american troops? >> guest: yeah. well, let me just preface my answer by saying let's remember that i'm a novelist here, you know? but i'm happy to talk about these matters, but my expertise on military strategy is about what you'd expect from the average novelist. having said that, i find it very worrying that the taliban can have such safe haven in pakistan, and it's quite clear that they can only do so because of the assistance they receive from at least elements of the pakistani state, probably the pakistani intelligence services. and it seems to me that as long as that persists, as long as that situation persists, then the conflict is not winnable. it just can't happen. it's in everyone's interest that

the pakistani leadership should understand that the taliban are their enemies, too, and that, frankly, if taliban were able to take up, take control of of pakistan -- which they might want to -- that would be a very bad state of affairs for the world. so the question is whether we can persuade the pakistanis to act properly against the taliban, and if they were to do that, then we have a chance of winning this particular battle. otherwise we don't. so i think it's really a big problem. i think many of the crucial props right now focus down on on to what's happening in the pakistan. >> host: what is on the cover of "luka and the fire of life," what is on this painting? this. >> guest: i've always wanted a flying carpet in a book, and i finally got one in. and not just any flying carpet, but the flying carpet which according to legend was the possession of king solomon, the

wise, who apparently had one. and it was not just a flying carpet, but it was a carpet that could change size. it could grow very, very large. it could grow to 60 miles by 60 miles, and you could transport armies on it, you know? this so very useful carpet. it would also come down to the size of an average household rug sock a very versatile carpet. and on this carpet we see this 12-year-old boy, luka, whose father, a storyteller, has fallen into a coma-like sleep and whose life maybe slipping away. and luka is trying to steal the fire of life itself and bring it back to save his father's life. and he is helped on that journey by figures you see on that cover. he has a couple of -- tear not exactly pets -- they're not exactly pets, they're more companions. he has a dog called bear, and he has a bear called dog. and they're escaped circus animals, but they become his

friends. and in the magic world they can talk, which is helpful too. and then there's this flame-haired beautiful girl who may actually be thousands of years old who is a princess of the world of magic. she's the sultana of ott whether everybody is extremely excessive and foul-mouthed, and she is the most excessive and foul-mouthed and rude of all of them. instead of being called the sultana, she's known as the insultana. anyway, it's her flying carpet given to her by king solomon, the wise. and she transports luka on that carpet quite a long way towards his goal. >> host: who is luka? >> guest: luka is, you know, well, he's based on my youngest son whose middle name is luka. he began to demand a book for himself to go with the book

haroun and the sea of stories. my two sons have an 18-year gap between them, so i came up with this story and very much the boy in the book whose father is a storyteller as is my son's father, the boy has all kinds of character traits which i deliberately modeled on my son. and to give just one example, left-handedness. my son, milan, is left-handed which is rather a surprise to us because there's no other left-handedness in my family we can trace, and yet he's very definitely left-handed, always has been. and, you know, if you brought up a left-handed kid, you can see that there are ways in which that's a difficulty in a right-handed world, you know? everything works the wrong way. so what i wanted to happen in the book for this left-handed boy to have these, if you like, these obstacles created by left-handedness. but as he goes on his quest, as

he comes closer to achieving his goal, the left-handedness becomes an advantage, so the thing that was a disadvantage becomes a gift, if you like. there are all sorts of ways in which -- my son has a dog called bear, so so that's where that came from. >> host: next call for salman rushdie from st. paul, minnesota. roger, hi. >> caller: yes, sir. three questions. the author paul, you have a similar background with him and themes are rather similar. what are your thoughts on his writing, and are you friends with him? secondly, it's difficult to call one sir paul by their first name, but you've been referred to as sir rushdie. >> guest: yes, it ought to be first name, but never mind. >> caller: and the final question is i seem to recall at some point you reconcerted to islam perhaps to get rid of the fatwa. has that changed since -- >> guest: well, let's answer

that one, first, because i've been answering that question for more than 20 years now. .. .. but it was a mistake and i've always said so -- and regret it. so that's that. and, yes, the third thing -- first of all, n i'm very happy to be fleeing but the sir goes with the first name. but these are just -- i mean,

these just english protocol and we don't to have worry about it. your first question -- >> host: about -- >> guest: well, we don't know each other very well. he's a bit older than i am and we don't have that similar a background. he grew up in trinidad in the west indies in a hindu family and i grew up in bombay, india from a middle eastern family and we're not like each other. i would say we're politically some distance apart. i think his political positions are -- to put it in its simplest more conservative. whereas mine might be more liberal. and as a writer, again, he's a writer who has been determinedly a realist all his life. and as we've been saying in this program, my writing tends to break those rules from time to time.

so i think we're, as artists very unlike each other. i mean, there are several of his books that i do admire particularly -- let's say his first three novels, his novels, the miss stick messur and others which i think is a great masterpiece by any great standards. i feel a darkening in his vision of the world, not his vision of the world so much as his vision of human character, you know, in his later work. he seems to have become -- he seems progressively to become less affectionate towards his characters, harsher towards them. and to my taste, that's less attractive in his writing. obviously, other people feel otherwise. you can't deny his ability, but i think we're, in fact, very unlike each other as writer. i've only in my life met him

three times and they have been perfectly cordial meetings because i think both of us recognize we are very different kinds of beasts. >> host: anwr in covina, california, you're on with salman rushdie, please go ahead. >> caller: hello, sir, how are you? >> guest: how are you? >> caller: i'm fine. i have two questions, have you ever regretted anything you wrote about the prophet mohammed but you did not regret because someone pressured you to do it? and my second question, i read the book about deepak chorpra and he's not muslim. can you answer me please? >> host: anwr, could you ask you a question, sir. if you read "the satanic verses"? >> caller: i did, a long time ago.

>> host: and as a muslim, were you offended by it? >> caller: i did. i did offend it because i'm not too much rad left lane muslim. -- radical muslim. i'm a modern muslim. i like salman rushdie's books and i read a lot of his books but the only thing i have question ask him -- only when he wrote the book, you put this phrase in your book to become famous or to make money or to the world want to know you, that you're a writer, that i think in his own heart and honestly he say himself that he make a mistake but no one forced you to say -- >> guest: the answer -- >> host: thank you very much. >> guest: i don't think i made a mistake. maybe you should go back and read the book again. because i don't think that the book is what you describe it as. the purpose of fiction is to explore things in the context of

a novel. the character of the novel is substantially different from the prophet of the mohammed who is not called that name and so on. but you're right it's based on a different reading of the history of islam. and i think, frankly, one of the things that people need to get used to in any religious tradition is dissension within that tradition. people who have a different idea from the orthodox ideas. and that should be part of a conversation. it really should. it's true in every other religion and in islam people tend to react badly to it. but i absolutely have no regrets about the book. i'm very proud of the book. i haven't read deepak chopra's book so i can't comment on it. >> host: have you written a similar book christianity as you did on islam? if not, why would you not write a book critical of christianity or are you afraid of doing so? >> guest: no. look, this is, i think, based on

an old by now tedious misunderstanding of what kind of writer i am. i didn't write a book about islam. i wrote a book as we were saying about a novel about migrants coming from the indian subcontinent to live in the west. and it's their story. and one of their stories involves a vision -- visions that the character sees about the birth of religion. this is what we call fiction. i didn't write this -- if i want to insult people frankly i could do it mucher. i don't have to do it in five years of my life to create a work of art. the reason i haven't written about christianity it wasn't in my background. i wrote the novel which came out of what i knew best. and so i see no reason to write about christianity. for or against, you know, it's nothing to do with my interest. >> host: this tweet comes in from ricky. mr. rushdie, because you won't rank your books, how do you feel about roland barth's thinking on

the death of the author? >> guest: oh, that's interesting about the death of the author. it's one of those very influential ideas along with the whole movement of deconstruction and so on which seeks to minimize the role of the artist in his own work. that is to say, the idea of being that writers don't fully understand what they do. and that their work is the product of the times in which they live, the kind of cultural makeup in which they are born. and is in some way -- in some ways requires interpretation. their own vision of what they're doing is not necessarily something about which they can have full -- i think that's he's a very interesting thinker i

just don't agree with him and any decent writer that i know is extremely clear about why they're doing what they're doing. and does seem to have pretty much a good grasp of what it is that their work is aiming for, you know, whether that's of whoever it may be, i think to suggest that somehow texts are authorless, you know, text comes into being through the agency of the author, but the author is not fully the creator of those taxes, you know, but the culture is the creator of those texts to put it simply -- i mean, obviously -- there's an obviousness one could say, of course, we're all the creatures in the times in which we live, we're influenced by those times and it's well may be that we're not conscious of those influences but writers -- what writers do for a living is to examine themselves. the examined life is the life that the writer leads.

and writers do that to a degree far in excess of what you'd get in your weekly psychotherapy sessions, you know. so you spend every day sitting by yourself spending many hours trying to learn about yourself. and so i think in the end texts do have authors and the author is perfectly alive thank you not dead at all, certainly not this one. >> host: next call for salman rushdie, pennsylvania, lauren, you're on the air. hi. >> caller: hi. i'm very interested in knowing if mr. rushdie feels that he has some type of responsibility when he takes away himself from his writing and separates himself and his conduct. in his personal life, i feel some of his writings caused a lot of repercussions even though they were fictitious like the "the satanic verses." i think some people don't get that. that some of your writings are

fictitious and that's how the mindset should be regarding those writings. however, outside of that, in terms of your conduct in your everyday life and when you're dealing in coming to the united states and been on book tours, do you feel you have a responsibility to enhance or in an enlightened world in some way? and and i admire here and i think she's a humanitarian in the sense of what she's doing for kashmir. how she's -- the holocaust that's going on in kashmir to the forefront. thank you. >> that seems to be two separate questions. one is, of course, if you have any kind of opportunity to be if public and to express your ideas in public, you do have a responsibility, but the responsibility that you have is to be as truthful as possible about what those ideas are.

you know, i mean, i'm not here to convert you to a religion or to ask you to vote for a political party. i'm not trying to -- i'm not filling anything. what i'm trying to do is to since i'm asked, since i'm offered the platform is to speak as fully as i possible can about those ideas which have inspired my life's work. and i hope that's what readers or people interested in that work would wish on me. i mean, i think, you know, you -- i'm glad that you admire her. i admire some of her positions and not others. i myself is kashmiri. i've been writing about kashmir for most of my life and i think the term "holocaust" is not correct when you -- when you use it to describe kashmir. it might speak of somebody who objects who use authoritarians

of the kashmiri authorities. and what's actually happening in kashmir which i think that people in kashmir are caught against not one adversary but two. they are trapped on the one hand the authoritarian india authorities which she accurately talks about and the radical muslim groups coming from pakistan trying to impose upon them an idea of islam more radical, more conservative, more repressive than kashmiri islam has always been. kashmiri islam has been moderate and mystical and has not been the kind of radical arab islam that is now being brought, imported from the pakistan side. so you have a country in which the people of that country -- as i say i'm ethnically kashmiri so

i have some status to speak of this. have been caught in a classic rock in a hard place. you have an oppression coming from the border in pakistan and another oppression from india in another direction. and that's the truth of what's going. she stresses only the indian side of it, not the pakistani side of it. and i think that's a simplification of the situation. >> host: r. moline, stillwater, oklahoma, emails in. sir, would you explain your concept of cat stevens when he fell off the peace train was he pushed, a useful idiot or a true ideological rat bag? if for any reason have you the of you found yourselves at the same gate at the aim airport would you think he would try to throttle you or vice versa. >> guest: i don't think he would. he's an old guy. he's even older than me. so i think he would have a little trouble throttling me. there's a bit of me that's sad

about cat stevens because when i was a college student, i had a copy of tea for the tiller man and i don't deny his melodic gift and it's clear he wrote a number of very beautiful songs including peace train. but he hasn't been cat stevens for a long time. you know, he's become another person. his conversion has led him some very strange roads. and truthfully, i suspect this may be because he's not the brightest light bulb you would wish. he's not the smartest person you would ever encounter in your life. and maybe he was led astray by foolish people. that's not my business to speculate. what i know is that he's taken up a number of positions which i think are very problematic. and let's leave aside -- leave aside what he said about me and whether or not i should be, you know, killed, which he did

however much he wishes to deny it now because it's inconvenient for him now and bad for business. there's no question he said it not once many times on television and to the "new york times" and elsewhere and it's on the record but let's just leave that aside look what he says about other stuff. he's on the record in the last few years telling british journalist that he was in support of the stoning death penalties of women for adultery. he is the founder of an islamic school in britain whose own mission statement says that it seeks to bring about the subrogation of the whole world to islam. so never mind me. i'm happy to take myself out of the argument with cat stevens. but yousef islam -- he's dropped the islam now because i guess he thinks that's bad for business. he's just yousef like cher or madonna. you can man cher and madonna with a bit of a beard, that's who he is.

but he is not any longer that sweet person who enchanted many of us, including me as a young person. you know, he's now a person who i believe has genuinely problematic opinions. >> in "imaginary homelands," you write about essays in the 1980s about racism in britain. is it different? is it the same? >> guest: i think it's changed a lot what happened in england. and for a long time i had become really quite optimistic. the "the satanic verses" -- the longest central section of that novel so-called a city invisible but unseen and these migrant communities living in the midst in the white majority community. and the larger communities seems to in a way look away from him and pretend that they don't need attention. and one of the things i've

always remembered is the great sentence in death of a sauls many. -- salesman. attention must be made to this man. and i think what literature certainly is the business of paying attention. and one of the things i tried to do in that novel was to pay attention to a community that i thought was being neglected. and whose reality if you would like was being ignored. now, i think that changed. that was true i think of the period it was written, which is the mid-'80s 80s. -- mid-'80s. i think those communities are no longer invisible. they are much more of the mainstream life of britain, you know? i was feeling -- i must say quite optimistic about the decline of racial tension in the country. and then came the july bombings.

and a year later, the almost bombings, you know, the ones that didn't actually go off in and around the country. and that worried me a great deal and it worried me because of the enormous danger of a racist backlash caused by those things. and it worried me because of what they told me about -- about a continued presence inside england of a group which may be a small minority of muslims but a group, let's say, that rejects the values of the larger society and sees that larger society as being hostile to it. so if you like, they are still not maybe a city that's unseen but there's a town that's unseen and whose reality only bursts out onto the largest stage of acts of violence and that's distressing. and it's been distressing because i think in that kind of general situation the racial situation has improved in britain, i think. >> host: next call from salman rushdie comes from new york city, hubert, hi. >> caller: hello.

salman, what i wanted to ask you was, have you ever read genesis? >> guest: the book of? >> caller: genesis. >> guest: yes, i have, yes. >> caller: and what do you think about a claim that canaan was infected as a curse? >> guest: the truth is i don't take the book of genesis literally. what i think about the bible, the old testament is that it contains some of the most extraordinarily beautiful writing, particularly the king james bible. the authorized version. i see it as its best at acquiring a kind of poetry and at its worst like many books of being a little bit on the boring side. but i don't go there to learn about the world in which i live, i'm sorry. it's just not what i do. >> host: lance emails in.

mr. rushdie i enjoyed your talk in houston on friday. vladimir in the introduction to his lectures on literature writes that being a good writer requires imagination, memory, a dictionary and some commonsense. he also stresses that properly speaking one doesn't read a book but rather rereads it in order to appreciate it. my question, i enjoy literature and would like to enjoy a greater appreciation of what i read. what advice can you give on how to read? what constitutes a good novel, how you approach a novel, et cetera? >> guest: as a reader that's a very tough question actually. how to read is almost a tougher question than thousand write. -- than how to write. because how to write in a way is something which a writer doesn't have full control over. you could only be the writer that you are, you know, you can't choose to write in a way that's not your nature. the problem how to write is to find out what kind of writer you are. what's in your gift to do.

how to read, well, reading is a much more diverse activity than writing. you know, you can -- we could all read and enjoy, i hope, many, many different kinds of books, you know, we don't always have to read serious novels. we can read frivolous novels. we can read nonfiction. we can read science fiction, mystery novels, et cetera. we can read "people" magazine. you know, we don't -- that's to say, you know -- reading is a thing about which there's a gigantic spectrum of possibilities. so i think the answer is actually what we were saying before. the question is, attention. you know, i think to read with attention in an age which has attention deficit, you know, is a kind of -- maybe it's a dying art. i hope it's not. but i think it's suddenly would be very bad for people like me in it's a dying art. but if you're asking for a word of advice. i would just say that, i think

the whole thing is to pay attention. pay attention to what you're being -- to what you're reading. and see what it gives you. you know, and truthfully, not everything will give you stuff that you want. and i think you can also not feel at all embarrassed about telling yourself you're not enjoying this book, you're not getting it really and, you know, you'll go read something else. that's why the bookstores are full of books of all different -- of all kinds. go find the reading that brings you pleasure. reading is about pleasure. the reason people do it is to give themselves some kind of joy which may be inspiration. -- inspirational. it may be entertainment. whatever. find the stuff you like to read and to do that, experiment. it's good to experiment. it's good to try out all kinds of different stuff 'cause otherwise how are you going to find out, you know, where your interests lies? once you find it, follow your interest. that's what i would say. >> host: do you read any nonfiction? >> guest: yeah, and of late i've

found with my last couple novels, and not "luka and the fire of life" and it's got a fairytale fable that comes out of pure invention but the two novels i wrote, "the enchantress of florence" and "shalimar and the clown" are intensive novels and required me to read an enormous amount of nonfiction, you know, for the "the enchantress of florence," i had to really immerse myself in two different historical worlds, the world of the italian renaissance and more or less contemporary world of the empire in india and everywhere in between as well. the ottoman empire. and i needed to know all about that. when i wrote "shalimar and the clown," the book again ranges pretty widely from subject of kashmir we were talking about before, so it required me to -- you know, as i said, i come from there. i know quite a lot about it anyway. but to write a book, you need to know 100 times more than that, you know, just your ordinary general knowledge can give you a

starting point but it's nowhere near enough. so i immersed myself in that. but other parts of that book, the american character in that book is a character who starts out as a european and migrates to america. so it needed me to find out about the nazi period, strasburg in world war ii. and about what it's like to be an american diplomat in the modern world and so on. and i must say, i loved it. i loved to give myself a level of information about my subject, which allowed me to imagine things i otherwise couldn't have imagined, you know, and i thought it enriched my own work as a writer. >> host: in one of your books you wrote that imagination is a cartography of the mind. >> guest: well, i do think -- you have to understand the shape of your own mat. -- map. every writer has a different map and their journeys in their mind

go according to that internal cartography. the question i was talking about who has the widest ranging internal maps but sometimes people can make due with a very small part of the world. if you think of an american writer like william faulkner or eudora welty, flanary o'connor, they were able to take tiny corners of the world, you know, oxford, mississippi, in the case of faulkner and fictionalize it and find a lifetime's worth of depth and narrative and interest in that tiny postage stamp and from that tiny world he could create the universe and so you could do that too. >> host: are you a fan of faulkner? >> guest: yeah, i went to oxford simply to go visit his house. and was shown around the town by a local faulkner scholar who

pointed out the various settings of various other books. it was wonderful. >> host: did you happen to go to the grave and was there a bottle of jack daniels on the grave. >> guest: yes, there was, in fact i had anna very interesting day where i went to faulkner's home and grave and elvis presley's on the same day. graceland and roanoke on the same day. >> host: welcome to america. thomas dennis emails in do you feel there's a deep connection between solitude and creativity? >> guest: i do, yes, because i need solitude in order to make anything. i always envied those writers who can write in restaurants, you know, j.k. rowling wrote her first harry potter book while sitting in a cafe. i can't work when there's people talking around me or a juke box playing or whatever it might be.

i always enhaved poets who could go sit in a park under a tree and kibble. -- scribble. even bird song gets in the way. i do need a quiet place where i'm left alone for several hours a day. so in my case, yes. other writers manage to do it better. in more crowded settings but not me. >> host: oliver in santa ana, california. zblak mr. rushdie, are you concerned china has received superiority over india a democratic system, they have beautiful well planned cities, it's controlled its population. it has new infrastructure with tens of thousands of miles as an example. india, for example, is much poorer. it has a debilitated third world infrastructure system. it has a caste system. and the population is disastrously out of control. why is democracy superior?

why didn't india achieve what china did? >> guest: well, i think i'd rather be in india than china so let's put it that way. let's not be this negative about it. india is a wonderful place. and actually the idea that 1.2 billion people in a poor country could be passionately committed to the idea of democracy and have managed to sustain that now, you know, for more than 60 years is a real achievement. it's an imperfect democracy. but frankly what isn't? you know, if you look at the last couple of american elections you can see there was some imperfections in the democracy here. and the indian democracy are imperfect. there are abuses and errors in that democracy. but it is a democracy. and it's one that the masses of the people are passionately committed to. and would not allow to be overthrown. so one of the things that india has a real edge over china in,

is in the subject of freedom, you know, and that's not nothing. you're right to say that the economic achievements of india which is very considerable. there has been an economic revolution in the last 25, 30 years -- that those achievements are flawed because of how much of the country continues to live on or below the poverty line. i mean, i've argued repeatedly that in the end, that is a thing which creates an instability in the society. when there is such a colossal gulf between the wealthy and the rest. what has happened in india -- it used to be the case to put it very crudely that you had 10% of the country that was rich and 90% of the country that was bitterly poor. now you probably have -- there's been a middle class that has emerged. a well off middle class that has emerged due to this economic revival of the 20, 30 years so now you maybe have 30% of the country that's well off.

but that still leaves 70% of the country in very bad shape. and, yes, many of the things that you mentioned, the caste system and so on contribute to that. nobody is saying it's a country without serious problems. but of all the countries in the region, every single one of the countries in the region has some kind of authoritarian regime. not just china, but pakistan -- every single country, burma. and to have in the middle of that world where liberty is circumscribed a gigantic country, the most -- i think it's actually overtaken china. the most populace country in the world one-sixth of the human race which is deeply committed to democratic values, let's celebrate that a little bit. >> host: ian in pennsylvania emails in, many in the west value literary freedom. yet, when your work was attacked it seems that you did not receive uniformly strong support from governments, media,

academia, et cetera. what is your perspective on that? >> guest: i'm writing a book about this. i'll come back in a couple of years and say more about it. the truth is at the level of ordinary people, you know, readers and writers, there was colossal support. colossal support. and so near to universal that i can almost remember the names of all the writers who were on the other side. 'cause there were so few of them. governments, of course, have all kinds of agendas of which freedom of speech is only one. you know, there were governments who were involved in trade negotiations with iran. germany, for example, was iran's number one trading partner in those days. denmark had an extremely important feta cheese export to iran. and japan, for example, produces no fuel and got all its oil from iran.

and all of these things became reasons for governments to drag their heels. and to back away a little bit, you know? this is just the reality of the world that we live in. but in the end, what happened is that there was a change of heart in this country at the time of the clinton administration. there was a change of heart in britain at the time of the election of the labour government, the blair government. and those governments together put a much greater effort behind resolving the issue. and as a result of it, it was quite speedily resolved. so, yes, it was long, long time coming. but i'm happy it came in the end. >> host: what was the iranian's government official statement, we neither endorse nor support -- we will neither endorse nor prohibit any movement to carry out the fatwa? >> guest: they said they would not allow any actions to take place.

but, you know, the truth is, in the end as we know in about diplomacy and we know rather better in the aftermath of all these leaks that have come out, that what is said in public is the tip of the iceberg. the question is what is agreed in private? and the thing that was agreed in private -- what is now a long time ago, a dozen years ago, was that they agreed to exist. they agreed to call the dogs off and that has been the case ever since. >> host: are you -- do you still look over your shoulder at all? >> guest: not really. as i say, it's not been an issue in my life since the turn of the century more or less. >> host: our guest on "in depth" is salman rushdie. we have an hour and a half left in our program. we're going to put the numbers up on the screen. 202-737-0001. if you live in the east and central time zones, 202-737-0002. you can send an email, booktv@c-span.org and you can send a treat,

twitter.com/booktv. here's a look at some of salman rushdie's influences. >> follow booktv on twitter. send us a tweet at booktv with your favorite booktv program from 2010. from now until december 10th, we will select one tweet per day at random to receive booktv shawag and the tweeted program will be included in our holiday schedule over the december 24th through 26th weekend. we look forward to seeing your favorite booktv programs from the last year. thank you for watching.

>> host: salman rushdie, who is gunta. >> guest: he's one or two of the greatest novelist. and he's the greatest german novelist who had the most remarkable life really in the sense that he grew up in germany at the time of the nazi period -- rule. in a family -- in a home which believed that the nazi lies were truths. and discovered at the end of world war ii, when he was interned briefly, that not only were the things he'd been told untrue, but that they were immoral. and kind of vile.

and this created in him a storm, a need to recreate his entire world view out of which has come some of the greatest literature of the 20th century. and i think certainly his novel of tim drum is the best novel ever written about nazism. i mean, about the world war -- about world war ii seen as he said from the losing side. i mean, of course there are great world war ii novels written right here, the naked and the dead, there are many. but from the german side, there's no question that's the most brilliant, black comic critique from the inside of what went wrong in germany. and since then, he's written a whole string of other novels. and is a winner of a nobel prize. and one of the writers that i always admired enormously. >> host: why is james joyce's ulysses one of your favorite novels? >> guest: well, just because

there are books that you read when you are young that just create kind of explosions in your mind 'cause they show you so much about the possibilities of literature. they show you that you can do this, you can do that. here's a way of doing things. here's another way of doing things. they are so bursting with innovation and originality that they are exciting. i think many people put off joyce because they think he's going to be very difficult. what they don't understand is that he's extremely funny. and that if you approach the books realizing you have an irish comedian telling you the story, and also quite simply one of the most magical users of the english language that there ever has been. then, you know, they open up to you. and for me, i go back and reread it every so often just to show me what i ought to be doing. >> host: you've written a book and you talk quite a bit in your nonfiction essays about movies. and you've written a book about a movie.

and in that book you wrote, when i first saw the wizard of oz it made a writer of me. >> guest: yeah, literally it did because i was maybe 10, 11 years old in bombay. i had never been in america and out of india and pakistan and i saw this movie in bombay and i went home and wrote a story called "over the rainbow" which was my first story and it was not about those characters. it was about a boy like me walking down the street of my hometown and seeing arching away from me on the sidewalk, not the end of the rainbow but the beginning of the rainbow, the rainbow arching up on the sky and the boy goes over the journey of the rainbow and meets all kinds of wonderful creatures who i forget mercifully. and when i finished writing it, my father took it to the office and got his secretary to type it up. and then he said, well, it's

very good and now what i'm going to do i'm going to look after it because otherwise you'll lose it and so he looked after it and he lost it. >> host: back to your phone calls with salman rushdie. temple, florida, john, hi. >> caller: yeah. my question -- thank you, salman, for your books and contribution to society. my first question is, you said you don't believe in the creation of the world in the six days. what are you believing as our origin? what do you also believe? -- believe in as so our guardianses and where do you think we will end. thank you again. >> host: john, is it important to you that -- to know -- what salman rushdie believes? >> caller: it is important to me because he seems to be broad minded. he gives this general concept of

not describing religion making it an individual thing which i think is very important because that's what we've done taking it and politicize it. he respects individual religions. >> guest: what i would say in answer to your question, the question of origins, i think, you know, modern science is making such extraordinary discoveries about the birth of the universe, about the origin of the universe that i look at that and i look at it in awe. when i look at this extraordinary -- not just the creation itself but on the level of our knowledge about it. and the fact that -- we don't know everything. it's quite true. we don't know everything. but we are finding out things about the birth of the universe. at the most extraordinary speed. and the subject of the big bang, the way inform these tiny particles exploded to create matter and the way in which that

matter then clumped to create larger lumps of matter which became stars and galaxies, it's just fascinating to me. and i think that big science as well as at the end of the spectrum, tiny science, the science of the subatom is some of the philosophically interesting material that we're finding out. and i go there. i go there to try and understand our origins. as far as ethics is concerned, the point about ethics, i think we are as human beings -- i think we're hardwired to have an ethical sense. i think -- i think, you know, the desire to understand right from wrong, to know good from evil, to know what is proper behavior as opposed to improper behavior, i think we are born wanting answers to those questions. and so we argue about them. the point about ethics and morals is that they are not set in stone. they change over time. you know, there were moments in the history of this country when it was considered that women were inferior and shouldn't

example have the vote at a later point that changed, you know, the way in which people think about themselves alters over time, the way people decide what is good and what is bad and it's an ongoing argument in any society and it's that argument that i'm interested in. that argument, i think, is actually the moral argument. you don't have to have eternal answers, you know, i don't actually believe in eternal answers and i believe in some eternal answers. thou shalt not kill is one of those. the whole ethics, the question of how we live together is a devolving things and i'm interested in that argument itself. >> host: does a novel or a good book have to have a hero? does have it to have a moral compass? >> guest: well, it doesn't have to have a hero. not in the age of the antihero.

but i do think -- well, again, i can only speak for myself. but i do think there is a moral inquiry involved in a novel. but when i mean an inquiry. i don't mean that it should preach. speaking as a reader, i don't want books to tell me how to think. i want books to encourage me to think. you know, and what you want most as a reader is for a book to create a world that you want to inhabit. and in that world, all kinds of questions come up. you know, if the book is any good it encourages you to explore those questions as you go through the story of the characters and see how they explore those questions. but i think it's about that. it's about exploration and inquiry. it's not about providing answers. you know, politicians and priests provide answers, novelists pry interesting questions. >> host: next call comes from sugarland, texas, allen, please

go ahead. >> caller: can you rank in order of importance the following literary awards, the nobel, the national book award, and the booker prize and secondly, what do you think of the writing of kazoo? >> guest: the second part is easier than the second part. i think they are a wonderful writer. i'm slightly biased because he's a good friend of mine and would kill me if i didn't say that and one of the things how he chose in midcareer to make such a big shift in the kind of writing he was doing. that he started out writing these very delicate, very precise novels of which the most famous one is the remains of the day which is made into a film. and then he suddenly shifted gear and started writing these bizarre fables such as his most recent book, "never let me go" which is quite unlike the books he first started out writing and

that took great creative courage for the position of success, "the remains of the day" was a great success to change the manner of writing and it shows his strong mindedness of his writing. i always thought that the best thing ever said about a literary prize was when the british writer kingsley amos won the booker prize. he said in his acceptance speech, i'll paraphrase him, i always despised it but i've completely changed my mind. prizes are things which are very nice when you win. no denying it. terrific when you win but they are not things to take too seriously all the time. all the prizes you mentioned are unbelievably distinguished. the difference between the nobel on the one hand and the national book award and the booker on the other is the latter two are given for individual books.

they are given to recognize the achievement of a particular title. whereas, the nobel is given for your lifetime's work. and in that sense, it's a wider arraigning applies it seems to recognize not just a particular success but a life in literature. and do they get it right sometimes and wrong sometimes. >> host: and, in fact, "midnight's children," not only won the booker award but it won the booker of booker's award which means what? >> guest: you know, it's a way of drawing attention to the prize. they did -- when the prize was 25 years old, in the early '90s, i guess, they asked panel of judges to decide which of the 25 winners, you know, was the best book. and they chose it i'm happy to say and when the priced reached its 40th anniversary, they did it again. but this time instead of with a

panel of judges, it was with popular vote where they asked people to vote in, it was an internet vote. and i'm happy to say that they chose "midnight's children" as the best of the first 40 years so that book keeps on winning things. >> host: this is an email from atlanta. mr. rushdie, thank you for your scholarship and your commitment to speaking and writing your mind in relation to religion. question, as you know, the people of iran have a government that is founded and is based on religion. what is your message to the young iranian generation and your views of their struggle? >> guest: well, i'm very impressed by their struggle is what i would say. i mean, i think they don't need a message from me. i think they have a message for us. and i think the message one sees from not just the young people of iran but the young people across the muslim world is that they don't want this conservative, limited culture

that is being imposed on them from above. and one can only hope that they succeed in changing it. because they are certainly courageous enough and they are certainly fighting for it. and as i say, you know, it's not my message to them. it's their message to us. they show us another face of islam which is modernizing and sophisticated and progressive and is trying very hard to be born. and it's facing terrible repression. and, of course, i support them and would encourage them. >> host: weren't you recently quoted as saying someone should drop a bunch of nintendos down on top of iran? >> guest: yes, that's what we call a joke. one of the things i learned about the world of the internet is never make a joke because the joke gets multiplied a thousand fold and then everybody thinks you're being serious. it was an off-the-cuff remark. one of the things i thought was that if you look at what happened in vietnam at the end of the vietnam war, the arrival

of american culture in vietnam in many ways american pop culture, you know, gap, nike, mcdonald's, starbucks, et cetera -- suddenly made people in vietnam be very pro-american after fighting this colossal war against america they suddenly became lovers of american thanks to american popular culture so it seemed to me that could be a technique you could use elsewhere. but it wasn't entirely serious. i don't really think the nintendo wii will liberate iran. >> host: phyllis from chevy chase maryland emails in, could mr. rushdie speak about his book "shalimar and the clown." some reviewers say it's autobiographical in parts due to his suffering under police protection. >> guest: you know, one of the problems i have is that every time i write a book, people say it's autobiographical. no matter how unlike me all the characters are.

and, in fact, "shalimar and the clown" i went to some lengths to make sure there was no character who could be associated with me. "shalimar and the clown" is not about me. it's about -- well, at the kernel of it we were talking about it earlier. the very tragic situation in the is really of kashmir which is as i say where my family originally came from. and it's a book about four people. it's a book about a young man who starts out as a member as a group of traveling players. falls in love with a girl who's also a member of the group. she is seduced by flash and runs off with the american ambassador when he comes to visit and she performs for him. always a mistake, girls. if possible, do not run off with the american ambassador. it will end badly. [laughter] >> guest: at a certain point that does end badly.

and this young man incensed and outraged by her betrayal changes and becomes much more violent and vengeful and becomes determined to be avenged on the ambassador many, many, many years later in the theme which actually begins the novel murders him. and so the novel begins with this murder and then seeks to explain it. tries to tell you what happened in the world to bring that crime about. i don't think i'm any of those people, you know. i'm not a young jihadist kashmiri nor am i the american ambassador and i'm certainly not the girl. so i don't think it's at all autobiographical but it's one of the books i've written that i'm most proud of. i think it's one of the darker books. i think actually that novel and my earlier novels "shame" about pakistan are probably the two darkest novels that i've written. but i think it's a really solid,

grounded novel that knows what it's talking about. and to blow my own trumpet i think achieves its goals reasonably well. it's a book i'm proud of. books don't always have to be bright. sometimes they can benefit from being dark. >> host: and rose in annapolis, maryland, emails in about "shalimar and the clown" also. some of your prose is pure poetry. i teach both and catch my breath sometimes when reading passages such as the following from "shalimar and the clown." she does a long quote beginning with our human tragedy is that we are unable to comprehend our experience. it slips through our fingers. we can't hold on to it. et cetera. but then she goes on to ask this question, when you construct your work, do you have passages such as this in mind and create a character for whom it would be >> guest: no. other way around. everything has to begin with

character and actually in the case of that novel, i began with this murder scene. i had this image of this murder scene. i didn't even know who the people were to begin with and i had to -- i had to understand who they were. and then really what happened in the novel was that those characters showed me how to tell their story. you know, and so everything -- everything begins with the characters. it's as we were saying earlier that the novel must retain the human scale. the human being is the form of the novel and it's a thing which moves the novel always. and i think i myself try not to write novels where the ideas are paramount and the people are merely, you know, if you like representatives of those ideas. you know, i like the ideas to grow organically out of the kind of people that i'm writing about. >> host: harry, from manassas, virginia, you're on with salman rushdie. please go ahead.

>> guest: hello, hello. he's not there. >> host: harry, are you not there? nope, he is gone. sorry about that. we will move on to bullhead^city, arizona. >> caller: hi, gentlemen. thanks for taking my call. it's really a privilege. c-span, we love you out here. and my question for salman is this, how does one get a book published -- i'm a layperson who studied the bible and find a lot of -- a lot of material for controversy. and really dissecting it and it's what i've written a book about. how do i get a publisher or an agent -- every time i go online and look for them we don't unsolicited this and that. >> guest: they always say that. they always say that. they don't mean it. what i would -- [laughter] >> guest: that's just a first line of defense. you shouldn't pay any attention to that.

i think what you should do is look through the various guides that there are and look at the sort of -- the big literary agencies or maybe even a small one or maybe one that's located near or two your own place of residence and send the book. send the book to the agent and see what kind of response you get. whatever they say about unsolicited manuscripts, that's nonsense. how else would agents find new writers? they are always looking for writers and that's just a defense mechanism in case they don't like what you write. >> host: we haven't discussed this book, "the enchantress of florence." here's an email, question one, i was curious about the homosexuality in the book, first the ship captain and then the sodomy in florence. i can't remember any described in akbar's kingdom. i wonder why. could you talk a bit about your treatment of the homosexuality in the book? >> guest: well, i can't -- i truthly can't remember if there's any in the indian part.

but if there isn't, maybe there should have been. there certainly was plenty of it around. one of the things i think that was very interesting to me reading doing the research about renaissance florence was that the male homosexuality increased dramatically in this period so much so that the city authorities began to fear for the future of the population. and there were serious conversations between the church and the state, between the groups about homosexuality and it was was in the literature of the 15th and 16th centuries and i would like to write about that and i never heard that it was so. and that's the way it found its way into the book.

>> host: second question, the title and the description of the book lead one to believe that the enchantress is the pivotal character. that her story is the main one in many ways akbar's story and his ruminations dominate throughout the book? >> guest: i think it's true. that the two major male characters in the book in the east, the emperor and in the west the philosopher machiavelli are the engines of the book. their thoughts and their behavior and so on, throws very, very important in the book. but the girl, the principal says who journeys from one world to the other is the bridge. she's the thing that brings those worlds together. without which these would be stories that didn't connect to each other. you know, so her choices and her fate -- they are the sense of the narrative because they are the thing without which the world of the book couldn't

exist. and so her story is central in that sense. she's is not by any means the biggest character in the book. i think in terms of -- actually in terms of who get most pages, you know, interestingly for the first half of the book, she almost doesn't appear in her own right. she's a story other people tell, you know, many people tell stories about her. but we don't actually meet her until about halfway of the book and one of the challenges of the book was to have a figure who you first present as kind of a legend, as a kind of fable. everybody has a story about her and clearly many of those stories are exaggerated and made up and so on and you meet the actual person and in the second half of the book i had to create her as a believable human being. and so she is in many ways -- she is very much at the heart of the book. but there are these male characters who also dominate. and i think put those three together, the character of akbar

and the two historical figures of akbar and machiavelli and the completely made-up figure of the princess, the enchantress, that triangle, if you like is at the heart of the book. ... >> caller: and also, what is your opinion on global warming? there seems -- there's so many strong pros for it, and there's so many against it. what do you think about it? thank you very much. >> guest: well, those two very

different questions. [laughter] well, the story of the flood is a story which exists in many, many cultures. the story of noah is one version of that story. there are earlier versions of that story that are found in the literature of mess poe mesopotao on. one of the very, very old oest texts we have in the -- oldest texts we have in the world is a story which comes out of mesopotamia in a period long before the creation of the old testament. and there is a flood story in that. so, clearly, human beings have created stories about, about mighty floods. and no doubt those were based in truth at some point. whether the story of noah specifically -- i don't think we have to take literally the animals going in two by two and so on.

i actually have been past mount air rat, and can one of the things that's interesting about it is it's a mountain that stands up in the middle of an otherwise flat plain. so you can easily imagine a boat in a flooded landscape floating along and running aground on that mountain. so in that sense it's a very well located mountain for the story. i have no idea whether the story's true or not. i suspect it's just a con gablation -- con gaplation. global warming, yeah, there is global warming. go and ask a polar icecap, it'll tell you whether there's global warming or not. and it's extremely worrying, you know? i think that's, i mean, again, that's a whole three-hour conversation on its own. but i certainly do not subscribe to the view that global warming is a kind of fiction. and, unfortunately, it's not so.

>> host: pervez in connecticut, you're on with salman rushdie. >> caller: thank you for c-span. mr. rushdie, i'm a great fan of yours. both of us were born around the same time, grew up not many miles from each other in bombay. have you been back to bombay since, and if you were to go back or have been back recently, what are your thoughts, views etc. somewhat personal. >> guest: well, i go back all the time, yes. i mean, i was there beginning of the year, earlier this year. and as you may have heard, we are in the middle of trying to make a movie of "midnight's children." and, of course, a lot of that is set in bombay, so that was another reason for going back to reexplore the world of that book. but, clearly, the city has changed eye gantically from the town that i grew up in. it's very, very much bigger, as you know. and not only that, the weight of the city has moved from the, if

you like, the kind of manhattan-like peninsula that used to be the city which is now called bombay, used to be called bombay, and the city has spread enormously onto the mainland and become, you know, ten times the size. so i find myself now in my visits there having to learn the new city, you know? having to learn the city that now exists as opposed to the city that i wrote about that i knew about as a child. and that's, i mean, it's very difficult because it is sprawling and immense. and in in many ways a darker place, a more criminalized place, a place of more religious dissension than there used to be in the past. but still absolutely fascinating. i mean, it is the great metropolis of india, and anybody who's interested in cities -- which i am, i've thought of myself as an urban novelist, you know, as a writer of the city -- it's absolutely fascinating to see how bombay has changed and grown. and i'm doing my best to understand it.

>> host: well, we have this e-mail from i want to pronounce this correctly -- i just butchered the name. >> guest: okay. >> host: i attended your last book presentation in cambridge on november 29th, which i enjoyed. but this person wants to know about the name change from bombay to mumbai. >> guest: well, all right. the reason for the change is, basically, they there came to power about 20 years ago a political party which one of its platforms is it strongly espouses the importance of the regional language. and it said that bombay was a colonial name, it was an english name and that the name should be indianized. so it used mumbai which has always been the name in the ma ramp chi language. and i just said that's what you

have to call it now. the problem with this is that other indian languages, hindi also spoken in bombay, never called it mumbai. always called it bombay. so it's a way of privileging the name used in one language over the names used in another. and it also carries with it what, in my view, is a et of mythology -- set of mythology. it was argued that the name mumbai came from a contraction of the name of a local goddess. and it seems probable that that's not so. it seems more likely that the portuguese who were the original colonizers of that part of india before it passed into the hands of the british, that the portuguese called it the beautiful bay. and that the name bombay is a version of that portuguese name. because it has a beautiful natural harbor, bombay, and

that's why it was named. so it's -- you will find if you go to bombay that many people, like myself, still call it bombay. and although the official name has changed. in the same way, i suspect, if you were to go to what is now calls ho chi minh city, you would find most people still call it saigon. sometimes these new names don't catch on. >> host: this tweet from sharius: totally random. what did youty of slum -- you think of "slumdog millionaire"? was it worth the hype? >> guest: didn't like it. [laughter] i know lots of people liked it. i thought that it wasn't to my taste. i thought it wasn't a portrayal of that world that i recognized as particularly interesting or truthful. >> host: next call, los angeles. joe, good afternoon. >> caller: good afternoon. i wanted to follow up on your discussion of movies, and i believe i read online -- i may

have gotten this wrong -- you did an article about what makes a good and bad film adaptation. >> guest: yeah. >> caller: i believe you liked one eastern european book that was made into a movie, so i wanted you to discuss like, you know, what makes a good adaptation. i think you're also writing a screenplay yourself, what's the difference between writing a screenplay and a novel. what you like about benwell so much. >> guest: all right, let's go backwards. the cinema of benwell is that i'm attracted to surrealism as a form, and the surrealist cinema has a pinnacle in him. first of all, many of the films are very, very funny. the discreet child of biewrnlg boy see is about a group of people trying to have dinner and never succeeding in doing so, and it's largely comic in the manner although makes all kinds of interesting social points along the way.

i respond to the comedy and fantasy of benwell. similarly, i find a very similar although more operatic spirit in the films of my linney. and those both were influential on me. i tried to go backwards. what were the earlier questions? >> host: he is gone. well, talking about the changing a book into a movie. >> guest: oh, yeah, adaptation. >> host: the process. >> guest: i mean, i think the heart of it, i mean, i actually taught a course at emory university where i teach a bit in atlanta about this topic of adaptation. there clearly are, you know, there's a conventional wisdom that movies of great books aren't particularly good movies. but there are exceptions to this, and i've been trying to enumerate and list those. i think, for instance, john huston's film the dead is a fine film. i i have vis conty's film of the

leopard from a great italian classical novel is at least as good as the novel. so i think, you know, you can find examples where the translation has happened skillfully. and i think it depends on two things. it depend on the film maker having a vision, if you like, a film language which is the equal of the literary language of the book. and visconti's such a great film maker. the way he uses the camera, the way he montages scenes together is equal, if you like, to the use of language in a novel. and the other thing is the question of essence. i think when you're writing a -- when you're adapting a novel, novels are usually much longer than screenplays. you have to really ask yourself very ruthless questions about the essence of the novel and what is the story that you must tell without which it would not be a truthful adaptation of that

novel. and once you can boil, distill your thinking down to that narrow strand, you then have to rather ruthlessly cut away everything that is not that story, you know? because these days people don't really like movies to be much longer than two hours, you know, unless they're by james cameron. and two hours is 120 pages, you know? "midnight's children," which i'm adapting, is a novel of over 600 pages, you know? to try and distill that down to 125 or whatever it is, you know, really means that you have to be very severe with yourself in asking that question about what's essential. and if you can answer that satisfactorily, yes, people will find the adaptation satisfying. >> host: you're adapting it now, when could we see that? >> guest: next year i hope. the screenplay's done, we're in the middle of casting -- we're in the middle of preproduction, we're looking for locations,

etc. i would hope -- we don't have a green light yet quite, we're still looking for bits of money, but i would hope we'll be able to film during the course of next year. >> host: and in "imaginary homelands," if people want to read your thoughts on the dead, you've got an essay in there on john ford's "the dead," and you also write quite a bit about the movie "gandhi." >> guest: yeah. i think a little bit my views on that film have changed since i wrote that essay. i remember when i saw the film. i mean, in many ways it's a grand epic film, very visually attractive and with extraordinary sequences in there. the mass kerr, for example, is one of the most moving things in the film. i worried about it at the time in that it seemed to cast gandhi as a kind of saint figure. and to suggest that he successfully defeated the british empire by being more holy than they were whereas the

truth is that gandhi was a very, very shrewd political operator, and he defeated the british not by being holier than they were, but by being smarter than they were. and i felt the film just got the wrong emphasis about that. but one of the things that's really interesting about that movie and, indeed, about gandhi himself is how inspiring it's been in other revolutionary movements around the world. that, you know, certainly it's the case that many of the south african fighters against apartheid said that they were very inspired by that film and threw that fill -- through that film by the life of gandhi. and the same is true for freedom fighters in various countries in south america and so on. so i think one actually has to say that film has had a very beneficial influence, and maybe i undervalued it. >> host: you didn't seem to take too kindly to the fact that ben

kingsley and amy be irving were cast as leads in that movie. [laughter] >> guest: amy irving, fine. ben kingsley, i know him and he's a wonderful actor and is, indeed, half indian. also i think he gave a remarkable performance. the problems i had with the film were not so much -- there, obviously, weren't too many actors that could are done it. he did it very well. my problems were more to do with its portrayal of the independence movement, you know, which i felt was sentimentalized a little bit. and, i mean, not in a hostile way. i think the film is, clearly, very sympathetic to the independence movement in india. but in a way that felt to me oversimplified. and, you know, what really happened in india is that gandhi's mystical rural ideas

were, in a way, not the ideas that the newly-independent country took up. and his disciple who became the first prime minister of india was a much more technocratic figure who believed india move into the industrial age, you know? those are the ideas that the new country took on. so in a way the ghandian ideals, yes, people respect them as ideals, but they would not. what happened in india? so in a way government is left behind. having said that, as i say, my views about that film were a bit more positive now than they were when i wrote that piece. >> host: and just to stick with "imaginary homelands" nehru's daughter, inn deer rah gandhi, you've written several essays -- you wrote several essays about her as well. what was your thoughts, your relationship? >> guest: well, you know, she

strikes me as a tragic figure because, yes, she is the descendant of one of the great dynasties of the indian independence movement. you know, her father was the first prime minister, his father was also very important figure in the development of the indian national congress which became at the the heart of the independence movement. she was a flawed figure. she was very able in many ways, very brilliant woman in many ways. but the only time in the 63 years of indian independent history that there's been an attempt to suspend democracy was when she was prime minister. she had been found guilty of malpractice. she had been asked to step down, and instead she declared what was called emergency rule. there was this period known as the emergency. in the mid '70s when she suspended democracy, arrested people, jailed political opponents, and there were

various abuses, forced sterilizations, things like that. and it was a period in which for people like me who, as i was saying earlier in this conversation, admire india classally for its project of democracy and for its support of that project, that those years, those authoritarian years were a terrible shock. and they play an important part in the story of my novel, "midnight's children." and it was more in sorrow than anger, really, because in many ways indira gandhi was a remarkable woman. but a remarkable woman with this flaw. and then, of course, was tragically murdered, and that was something i wrote about too. i said, it doesn't matter how one might have opposed her politically in the past, but that murder was a catastrophe for india and a calamity, and one we should mourn it, and i did.

>> host: we have about 40 minutes left with our "in depth" guest, salman rushdie. 202 is the area code, 737-000 is in the east and central time zones, 737-0002 mountain and pacific time zones. you can send an e-mail, booktv@cspan.org, or a tweet. twitter.com/booktv. justin in travers city, michigan. good afternoon. >> caller: hello. honored to speak with you, mr. rushdie. and, peter, the interview with michio kaku was excellent. i watched it about three times, and that leads me into a question for sal man. when you listen to mitch cho or, you know, read about physics, what are your inner thoughts about how you would apply your somewhat mystical mind to, you know, philosophy and the nature of reality? sometimes when i think about you and christopher hitchens, i think about the rivalry between freud and jung, although you two

get along better. jung, his idea of these meaningful coincidences which he alternatived sin co-- he termed synchronicities, just expand on some of your personal philosophies about the nature of how dna and the universe built us to, you know, learn about itself. >> guest: yeah. well, you know, the interesting question i was -- we were touching on this a little earlier, the question of what physics is showing us about ourselves. and as i said, i think some of them, that science at that level is beginning to almost take the place that used to be occupied by philosophy. you know, philosophy is the inquiry into what human beings are. it seems to me that physics is beginning to occupy that ground in a rather brilliant way. and i'm very, very interested to know what we're being taught. and as i say, it seems to me the interest is at the two opposite

extremes of physics. the very tiny physics which shows us what happens in the subatomic world where there exist all these wonderfully-named particles like charm, and the other thing, gigantic physics. the scale of the universe itself. and what is very interesting to me is if you look, actually, at the structure of the subatom, it begins to, amazingly, resemble the structure of the universe. that when you go into the world of the very, very tiny, what you see is something that looks like the very, very immense. and i find that to be beautiful for a start. and, you know, i almost became a physicist. i was supposed to be a physicist. when i was a younger student, i was very -- my best subjects, actually, were math and physics. and the plan for me is that i was going to be a physicist.

and then i jumped ship. [laughter] i went over to the arts and became, and became a writer. and i've always somewhat regretted that lost possibility, you know, the road not taken. and so i've remained as a layman fascinated by what physics is telling us about ourselves and where we came from and how we came to be, how the universe came to be. pause i think in a way human life -- because i think in a way human life, we can talk about that later, but the human life is such a small aspect of the creation of the universe. you know, we're just this tiny little dot, you know, on the third rock from the sun which is a secondary magnitude star in the provinces of a galaxy which itself is in the provinces of the universe, you know? we are hicksville here, you know? we may think we live in grand cities and so on. we actually live in the boondocks. of the universe.

and so to look at the creation of the universe from a non-human centric way a more truthful way to look at it, you know? we're just a biblow, you know? the main action is somewhere else. and i think that's humbling, you know? i think it allows us to feel our real place in the scheme of things is not really as great as we might think it is. and that's not bad thing to think, not bad to have a kind of humbling perspective and knowledge that the universe actually doesn't care about us. the universe is proceeding as it should, and it has a remarkably low degree of interest on what these creatures crawling around on this water planet are up to. so i'm interested in what that teaches us about ourselves. it teaches us maybe a useful modesty, you know? i think that could be valuable. >> host: california, david.

hi. >> caller: thank you very much for taking my call. mr. rushdie, i could do another three hours, please. please tell me how christopher hitchens' doing, your friend, and also how you met, and what do you guys talk about when you get together? thank you very much for taking my call. >> guest: well, thank you. christopher is, you know, he's a fighter, christopher. you know, i don't, i don't, i don't deny that he's facing one hell of a fight. but he is, you know, he's many there battling, and we all are wishing him the very best. i notice that he is unstoppable, it was last week that he went to toronto to debate tony blair about religion, and as i gather it won the popular vote at the end of the debate by two to one. so ill as he is, he's still able to fight his corner. we've known each other for a very, very long time.

i think we first, actually, met one day at the notting hill carnival in london. that was lost in the mists of time. we have a lot of friends in common like ian mckuen, and we've all sort of more or less grown up together. christopher is also one of the funniest people that i know, and as a result it's always a great comic joy to spend time with him. we have certain competitions such as which of us is able better to recite the complete lyrics of bob dylan which he, i think, claims he wins. and there have also been some games we've invented. i can tell you one of them which, unfortunately, is like introducing a computer virus into your mind, but i will do this. it's a game of titles of books and movies that don't quite make it such as, oh, you know, the big gatsby, a farewell to

weapons, for whom the bell rings, mr. zhivago. and, of course, the book that we invented as an alternative title for joseph heller's novel, we invented hitch 22 as the title that didn't quite make it which he then went on to use as the title of his own memoir. [laughter] >> host: tim valentine e-mails in from halvetown, pennsylvania, i enjoy your children's imaginative musings quite a bit. why do you live in america, and what is america's near and longer-term cultural and political future battlefields vis-a-vis is new world economic order? >> guest: whoa. [laughter] let me answer the first bit of the question. first of all, i have a sense that i don't live in america, i live in new york city. [laughter] which is related to america, you know? it's an independent state to be east of america. to the east of america. and i say that, the serious part

of that is that i've always felt that i owe allegiance to cities more than to countries. i always felt a real sense of connection to bombay, then to london and now to new york. i think i am just this urban creature where my sense of affiliation is more to the city than to a nation. you know? and i remember coming to new york as a very young man in my early 20s and just being blown away by it, just loving it, you know? and this was the new york of the, i guess of the new york underground of those days, warhol, the velvet underground, you know, that new york. and a different city than it is now. in many ways, you know, more violent, dirtier but enormous fun. and i always thought to myself as a young man that one of these days i want to come here and see what it's like to live here. and i finally made it about 12 years ago and not planning to leave anytime soon.

so it's just worked out very well for me. as i suspected, it's a very good fit for me. i don't know about the future. you know, one of the things about the future is that none of us knows. and i've, i guess, i've had a little trouble in my life with prophets. as a result, i'm not applying for the job. >> host: your friend, mr. hitchens, writes in hitch 22 about his going through the american citizenship process. is that something you're interested in doing? >> guest: uh-huh. i've been thinking about it, yeah. i don't wish to give up my british citizenship because i think, you know, that was a country that did a lot for me when i needed it, and i wouldn't wish to cease to be a citizen of a country that defended and supported me in that way. but, you know, your nationality they allow it nowadays, so we'll see. >> host: as a british citizen, are you always an indian citizen as well? >> guest: india for a long time

did not allow dual nationality. if you were going to become a british citizen as i did by naturalization, you had to give up your indian citizenship. which i did and always felt sad about. but now they have created a new category, basically, to try and bring back the indian diaspora is, you know, everywhere and is actually very successful, and i think the indian authorities want to bring that back towards india. so now they've created a new category called overseas citizen of india. and i am now an overseas citizen of india. >> host: robert from las vegas e-mails in: being involved with pen and other writers' organizations, your concerns for a vibrant literature arena is a given:

>> host: including things like the imf, the world bank, etc. >> guest: this is an anti-globalization question. >> host: i'm not going to interpret, i'll let you do that. >> guest: i assume. that's as far as i can see it. you know, here's the thing. it seems to me that to an extent we have to live in the age we live in. we can't expect that time will somehow roll backwards. and the world is globalized. the world is multichurl. mull chi cultural. it's not going to cease to be those things however critical we may be of those things. they're not going to unhappen, you know? so the question, and i think this is a thing which, for instance, the indian philosopher and writer who won the nobel

prize for economics, he says the question is not globalization per se. the question is how much social injustice is there as a consequence of globalization, you know, and how can you work to minimize the social injustice that often is a consequence of a globalized economy? and that's sort of my interest. because i think we do live in this shrunken world, and whatever we may feel about its rights and wrongs, this is the world we're going to have to live in. so the question is how do we fight within that context. we can't make it not happen. the world is not going to degloballize, that's just how it now is. so the question is how to fight for social justice in that context, and i think that's a better way to phrase the argument. >> host: next call for salman rushdie, sterling, virginia. go ahead. >> caller: hi. i have a question for mr. rushdie. it's actually in two parts.

>> host: okay. >> caller: the first one is really about change and freedom in authoritarian regimes and the role of religion there. and i know we -- in the program and thanks very much for taking my call, first of all -- i know in the program just earlier you talked a little bit about, about china as well as, you know, the authoritarian regimes there. so the question i have is, if you have religion and china officially does not encourage religion, if you have religion, it does provide a sense of moral compass for people to, to, you know, calibrate their actions on. and do you not think that that would help, you know, bring freedom to those regimes? the and the we second question s with regard to bombay. i just read a recent article that a billionaire built a 27-story building in the midst

of slums, so what is your opinion on that? >> guest: yeah. well, look, the question about whether religion brings freedom this aty ran call setting, i mean, you can obviously see that catholicism of became an organizing force in, for example, poland against the soviet union. there's no question that that solidarity, the solidarity movement was inspired by the catholic faith of many of its leaders and by the support of the polish pope. so of course there are times when that happens, but there's also a danger. remember that in iran at the time of the shah all political forces ranging from the extreme left to the conservatives, ranging from communists to industrialists grouped behind the figure of khomeini because they thought that was way of unifying their campaign against the tyranny of the shah. and we know that the khomeini

revolution which thought it was using religion as a figurehead in order to create a free society rather rapidly discovered that religion was going to impose a tyranny at least the equal of the shah's and maybe, and maybe worse than it, you know? so it's a two-edged sword. it's a two-edged sword. what was the second question? it was -- >> host: the 27-story -- >> guest: oh, the building. >> host: -- skyscraper. >> guest: one of the richest men in india has built this gigantic building. it may be 27 stories, but actually the ceiling heights are so high that it's the equivalent of a 63-story skyscraper. and that's his personal residence. and as i understand it, the bottom ten floors or so are a car park. and let's not forget that's for his cars. he has a lot of cars. well, first of all, there's almost an element of comedy

about that kind of hubris. and, of course, i mean, the obvious comparisons to this colossal flaunting of wealth right in the near vicinity of the largest slum in asia, i mean, it speaks for itself, you know? this -- sw what can you say -- and what can you say? someone should write a story about it. maybe one of these days i'll get my hands on that house. i see it as a comic absurdity but, of course, with a dark side that has to do with a very public shrug of the shoulders about the plight of other people, the flaunting of personal wealth, and that's too bad. >> host: in "the jaguar's smile," which we haven't talked about yet: for the first time in my life i realized with surprise i had come across a government i could support. it was a disorienting

realization. i had spent my entire life as a writer in opposition and had, indeed, conceived the writer's role as including the function of antagonist to the state. >> guest: yeah. i do think that's, in general, i think that's true. in general i think the old saying that the intellectual, the artist is there to speak truth to power, i mean, i do think that's a good formulation, you know? and i do think there's a natural adversarial relationship between writers, journalists, thinkers, commentators on the one hand and politicians, generals, you know princes of industry, people who build 63-story buildings to house their motor cars, you know, i think that's beneficial opposition. no, what happened in my visit to nicaragua in the mid '80s was that i felt a deep sympathy for

this tiny little country whose total population is smaller than that of the tristate area around new york city. being subjected to this war of attrition and colossal economic pressure by the united states and its allies, the so-called contra forces. and one of the things that puzzled me was how easy it would have been, it seemed to me after visiting nicaragua, to have made that country an ally of the united states. how pro-american people were in nicaragua. for instance, they were obsessed with major league baseball. and you could, anybody in nicaragua from the president downwards could tell you every nicaraguan citizen -- person of nicaraguan origin who had gone to a major league baseball team. they were obsessed with american literature. they read walt whitman, they read ezra pound, you know?

this was of a country which could -- this was a country which could just by a tiny little shift in the mental attitude of this country in those cold war days could have been made an ally instead of a foe, you know? but because in those days of the soviet union and the cold war and these different blocs that were believed to exist, you know, america's backyard, the soviets' sphere of influence, because nicaragua was seen as being too close to cuba which was too close to the soviet union, that meant it was an enemy. and it was treated as such s. and when you -- i mean, i met quite a lot of the sandinista leadership, and some of them i didn't look at all, and some of them i thought were rather likable. and it wasn't a composite leadership of many different kinds of opposition that there had been to the dictatorship. some of them were marxists, some of them were western-style

liberals, you know? and i think it was quite an uneasy coalition. but it seemed quite obvious that they were trying to do the best they could in a situation of colossal impoverishment. now, what has happened since then with the fall of the sandinistas is that, in a way, the situation's worse now than it was then. but also, some of those sandinista leaders in particular the then-president and now again president daniel ortega, have revealed themselves to be very, to put it mildly, very unlikable. so i think, you know, on a revisitation one would have to be much more critical of him personally though not of the movement as a whole, i think. >> host: next call for salman rushdie, south ozone park, new york. doreen, go ahead. iraq? thank you for speaking to me. were you influenced at all by gulliver's travels, and since you were in the film bridget

jones' diary, what are your feelings about pride and prejudice? >> guest: all right, oh. well, all right. you know, gulliver's travels is one of my favorite books. i think that the 18th century of the english novel contains some of the greatest masterpieces in english language literature. and the fact that those books have remained so popular, gulliver's travelses, robinson cruesoe is a great testament to how they have gone on to be books of value in the present day. i mean, i don't know whether i was directly influenced by gulliver's travels, writing that book or writing "the satanic verses," but it's a book that's much in my mind, it's one of the books that i dearly love, so i wouldn't be vised. and the other question was about pride and prejudice. yes, i did have -- glad you mentioned my important career move to have a small role in bridget jones' diary. now we're talking about serious things. and, i mean, i was in that movie

simply because helen fielding who wrote the original book is an old friend of mine and called me up. i think her exact words were how would you like to make a fool of yourself? and so i agreed and proceeded to do so o. i'm a big fan of pride and prejudice. i think jane austen is a wonderful writer. i do feel it gets adapted to the movies too often. you know, there seems to be a new adaptation of pride and prejudice for film or for television almost every day. i mean, every year. and i think we could give it a rest. give mr. darcy a rest. let him remain within the covers of the book and let the bennett sisters do their business, you know, in words. we don't need to see another bunch of actors being these people. i've seen more adaptations of pride and prejudice than i care for. >> host: in several of your books, i've come across a phrasing, and i'm going to

paraphrase a little bit, but you've written for the new to be born, the old must die. >> guest: yeah. well, it's -- i think originally it's the italian marxist antonio gram shi who talked about a transitional phase in which he says the old refuses to die, and the new cannot be born. and he says, in that there arise a large variety of morbid symptoms. and i think, you know, he was talking about a moment when he wanted a certain kind of revolution. you know, which, obviously, didn't happen. but i think it's true that what happens at -- we live in a time of colossal change. i mean, colossal, very rapid, very radical change. technological change, political change, social change. and that's dizzying sometimes, the speed of change. and i think everybody finds it

sometimes almost alarming how quickly things are changing, and they seem to be getting out of our control, you know? and so there is, there are, of course, conservative forces. i don't mean politically conservative, i mean forces that don't want that rapid, that rapidity of change and try to hold on to the world as it has been, you know? and is so you have this tension -- and so you have this tension between the outgoing world and the incoming world. and that can create a lot of tensions, can create political tensions, social tensions, economic tensions, cultural tensions, you know? and i think that's probably the truest description of the time in which we live. you know, truer than republican/democrat. you know, truer than capitalist/communist. forget those category, you know? we just live in a time of revolution. we live in a time when the world is changing almost out of recognition.

and there are those of us who embrace the change and those of us who resist the change. you know? this and that -- and that seems to me to be one of the great central tensions in our society. >> host: do you write every day, and what are you working on currently? >> guest: i try to write -- i mean, not right now was the book tour take over your life, you know? but normally i do think writing books is a question of rhythm, you know? i think in a way it's like running a marathon. you have to kind of get into a stride pattern and just eat up the miles, you know? otherwise you don't, i mean, it's not like being a sprinter, you know? and i think the novel of the various literary forms, the book-length form whether fictional or nonfictional is the marathon, you know? this i know many people who are screenwriters, play wrights who say that it's actually beneficial to go away, lock yourself up for a couple of weeks and write the play or the screenplay in a very intense

burst. and i can see that. i can see that that would work. i mean, having just written drafts of a screenplay myself, i could see that it goes like that. it's better to do it that way. but a novel or nonfiction book you just have to be in a rhythm, do a little bit every day, chip away the words, chip away the pages, you know? and otherwise it doesn't get done. it has to be done that way. what am i doing now? well, now that i've finished the screenplay, i thought that i would finally write a memoir, sort of an autobiography of having a quiet curse of an interesting life. i thought i would finally tell that story. i always knew that i would. i mean, even when i was going through the worst moments of what happened after "the satanic verses," there was a little, you know, novelistic, journalistic bird sitting on my shoulder whispering in my ear, good story. [laughter] and i think if you have that,

your natural instinct is to look for and to respond to good stories. if that happens to you, you know that at some point that's the story you'll want to tell. and what happened was that i had a very strong instinct not to tell it until i had sufficient distance from it. you know, i wanted to be able to approach it rationally, objectively rather than emotionally or vennfully or whatever. i don't want to write it to get even with anyone, you know? i don't want to write it to settle scores or to tell the world who didn't behave well or whatever. that's all very secondary importance. what's important is to explore and tell the story of this rather unusual event that happened in my life. and i've found that in order to tell that story, i sort of have to go backwards and tell the whole story of who i was and how i became that person, you know? and not just i but, of course, members of my family and friends and so on. because i think for -- in the end you have to approach it more

or less like a normal. because for it to be interesting to readers, the characters have to be alive on the page, you know? you have to find on the page characters that you're interested in and whose story you want to know. you know? otherwise you're not interested. and so in the end even though it's a true story, you need to approach it as a novelist approaches the story, by creating the characters, making them vivid, making them sympathetic or not sympathetic, but interesting, and then showing what happened to them. because i think my instinct is that for general readers what's valuable is not -- i mean, yes, there is the politics, yes, there are the themes of cultural conflict and all that and, yes, i will have to explore those and will do so. but i think the thing that's most interesting is just the human story. what would it have been like to be that person in those shoes going through such an experience, you know? and i think telling the human

story is what will allow it to make a connection with readers and that's, in the end, a novelistic enterprise. you know, so you have to write it like a novel; except that it's a novel about me. >> host: does it have a name, and when can we expect it? this. >> guest: i'm trying to finish it. my guesstimate is that i've written about a quarter of the story. i'm hoping that if i keep up the rhythm, you know, that i can finish it by the end of next year. that's sort of what i've said to the publishers is i'll try and deliver it by the end of next year so that when they would publish it whenever they want to in the year following, so in 2012, i guess. it does have a name, but i'm not telling you. [laughter] >> host: well, salman rushdie over the years has written bits and pieces about the fatwa and all that, all the 1990s. if you want to pick up some of his nonfiction essays, you can read "step across the line "or "marge their homelands," two books that are full of nonfiction essays. diane in walnut creek,

california, thank you for hanging on. you're on with salman rushdie. >> caller: well, i'm so happy to be on with him and to speak with him. mr. rushdie, you caused a lot of anxiety those bad years, and i'm so happy that they're over, so happy for you that they're over. >> guest: thank you. >> caller: and i've just finished "hitch 22" and now i have to worry about christopher. >> guest: yes. >> caller: will you give him my best and tell him there are many of us out here plugging for him. >> guest: i will do. >> caller: and i want to ask you because of your remarks about mrs. nehru, i wanted to ask you about a fellow countryman's book, "a fine balance." what do you think of that book? this. >> guest: i'm a great admirer, i have to say. i think "fine balance," "such a long journey," they're remarkable novels, and given that we have the same hometown, i mean, he writes about it with great clarity and vividness and, you know, i think he's a wonderful writer.

>> host: mike powell in virginia, i believe that when it comes to writing, there is shakespeare and then there is everyone else. >> guest: yes. >> host: would you please talk about shakespeare? he gets in this our minds, doesn't he? >> guest: well, you know -- okay. yes, it's wonderful to have a chance to talk about shakespeare, and he's quite right. there's shakespeare, and then there's everyone else. one of the things that i think -- i mean, there's so much to say about shakespeare, so let me just say one thing. one of the things that i think is a great gift that shakespeare gives to all of us who follow him is his demonstration that a story doesn't have to be one thing, it can be many things at once. that's to say if you look at, let's say, hamlet. hamlet is a ghost story. that's how it begins. it's also a political narrative about intrigue in the danish

court. it's also a love story. between two rather mentally disturbed lovers. it's also, in parking lots, a comedy. the rosenkranz sections are clearly composed comically as was showed in the play about the characters. so there's four or five different kinds of play there. there's comedy, history, tragedy and the supernatural. and romance. , right? and he showed that that's fine. you can write five different kinds of story, put them all in the same story, and it works. the trick is you have to be shakespeare. but even if you're not, it shows us that we can write these kind of books which don't have to be just romances or just historical normals or just ghost stories or just political novels. they can be all of those at once

if you find a way to do it. and i think that's a thing that i've tried to learn from that to write books that are many things, not just one thing. but i think part of that comes from the permission that william shakespeare gave us to write like that. and all of us who follow him are indebted for that gift. >> host: what advice would you give to those of us who have attempted shakespeare, yet have trouble with the language of the time? this. >> guest: i think don't read it, watch it performed. the thing about shakespeare is the extraordinary thing that happens when those plays are performed, you know, the way they come to life and the way they seem absolutely contemporary. and, yes, the words on the page can be difficult because the language of 400 years ago is not the language we now speak. and, you know, its use of metaphors and its vocabulary can

be very different. but the plays, i mean, he was a real actor's playright. he was a working playright. he ran the most successful theater in london, and his plays were the most popular plays of their time. and it's because they come alive in performance. and so my view is don't, i mean, very few of us sit around these days and read plays. you know, you don't read the works of david -- [inaudible] you know? you go to watch his new play. and i think exactly the same is true of shakespeare. that the shakespearean performance reveals his mysteries. a good production of shakespeare is clear, it's clear. we know what they're talking about. >> host: hartford, connecticut. go ahead, you're on with salman rushdie. >> caller: hi, mr. rushdie, how are you? >> guest: i'm good. >> caller: i'm from pakistan. my question, three questions for you, do you have any comments on

indian/pakistan relations. second, have you ever been to pakistan, and be third, what has your mother done? >> guest: well, yeah, i've been pakistan a lot as we've been saying in the earlier parts of the program. because of coming from an indian-muslim family, that's -- which i still speak. and what do i think about the relations between india and pakistan? well, we know that they are very bad, those relations. and, well, to take only one instance, the attacks in bombay a couple of years ago, not even two years ago by terrorist groups that were, clearly, based or had their point of origin in pakistan were a tragic demonstration of the fact that pakistan tries to have it both ways. it tries to, on the one hand,

say to america that it is america's ally in a battle against terrorism. and at the same time sponsors terrorist groups which make, which carry out attacks against its neighbor. and i think it's perfectly legitimate of india to demand that -- and not just of india, but of all of us -- to demand that if pakistan really wishes to con vibs us that it is against terrorism and it is an ally in the fight against terrorism, it has to stop supporting terrorist groups. every single one of those boys who came across and killed so many people in bombay came from pakistan. and that's not acceptable, you know? and, unfortunately, until that happened there were indications that india, certainly, and pakistan perhaps were trying to defuse techs between the two of them -- tensions between the two of them. in the last 10, 15 years, there

have been some encouraging meetings between leaders from the two countries. and i think the people of the countries would want that. i mean, i have no doubt that the people of pakistan, like the people of india, would want the two countries to be at peace with each other. but the precondition for it must be that pakistan ceases to harbor terrorist groups which it launches against indian targets. has to stop. and until that happens, there really can't be a good relation between the countries. >> host: this tweet comes in from emanuel. what are your opinions on wikileaks, julian assange and the interpol arrest warrant for him. >> guest: well, you know, i don't know -- i mean, i don't know the rights and wrongs of the arrest warrant, you know? it's easy to, it's ease i -- easy to believe that somebody's after him and trying to, you

know, frame him. anybody with even a moderate degree of paranoia could believe that that was true. but i don't know, is the truth. i mean, interpoll presumely takes -- interpol presumably takes seriously the issue of arrest warrants, and all i can say is we have to wait and' about that -- see about that. about the wikileaks revelations, i would say as a note of caution that it's important for all countries to be able to sometimes do things in private. you know? without any kind of secret diplomacy, many things could not happen that we might wish to happen. so there is a problem there. also i know from my small involvement with intelligence sources that nothing matters more than source protection. and that if you start revealing certain kinds of raw data, people that you might not wish to would be able to work out where that came from, and people can start dying. i mean, there's no question.

if sowrs is compromised, the source gets killed very often. o there's that. and i think that that's an important caveat. having said that, of course, there's something very delightful about watching our leaders with their pants down. [laughter] and i think, actually, it's not the american government that comes the worst out of this. i think that -- in terms of the leak that have come out so far. goodness knows what tease still to come -- what's still to come. but the people who really come out badly are the leaders of the arab world. it was revealed how every single arab country has been begging the united states to attack iran. every single one, the saudis, the syrians, all of them. please, please, please, will you go and take them out? and you know perfectly well that if united states had agreed to do that, what they were being asked to do by every arab country in the world, all those countries would have uniformly and immediately condemned it. they would have said how dare

you attack our muslim brothers. after begging for it, you know? so i think the hypocrisy of the arab leadership is one of the most pleasurable discoveries about this. but i do have are a concern, i do have a concern about the safety of intelligence personnel, of covert operatives and so on. and i think that's a genuine concern. >> host: david in cose that mesa, california. please go ahead. >> caller: thank you very much. mr. rushdie, if you had a chance to sit down with secretary of state clinton and the object was to overcome the tyrannical three ogg rah si in persia and establish a secular representative government, what factors and what steps would you suggest considering overt or covert pressure sanctions, economic developments and the interest of the women's movement, the union movement and the students in persia? >> guest: well, look, again, let me just reiterate that i'mha