>> and therefore these should be satanic versuss which they should be expunged and they were. >> why did you dub your book the satanic versus. >> it's about temptation and i think that story in the islamic tradition is equivalent to the stories that existed every tradition about the temptation of prove if either. -- prophets and, in fact, he comes out of it quite well and he rejects and proceeds proceeds down his monothic life.

>> did you mean to be prophetic when you named the characters. >> you can call the name gabriel without being blasphemous it's a regular name. those that are losing his faith and his sanity deals with the origins of a religion quite like islam although the religion in the book is not called islam. the prophet is not called hamid and the location is not called mecca. i so it's distance in a dream sequence but the purpose certainly was to create a kind of revisionist if you would like historicalicized view of the origins of a great religion. and to look at the two questions that the new idea faces when it comes in the world. one is the question of weakness and the other is the question of strength. when you're weak, will you compromise? will you try to accommodate

yourself to people around you? or -- because if you don't, a strong likelihood is that you will be destroyed. and then when you're strong, when you actually succeed and come in to power and so on, will you be generousan and merciful will you be cruel and vindictive? so the question of weakness and the question of strength. those are the questions that happen every time about here comes in the world. one of the big themes in the book is expressed in the question how does newness enter into the world? and that's the story of the birth of this religion is one aspect of it. >> so of the 500 or so pages in satanic versus was -- >> as far as we know he didn't see a copy of the book.s and he was lying on his death bed anyway. and the book didn't exist in the

farsi translation and so what seems to have happened is somebody told him that various groups around the world objected. >> have you been under a fatwa. it hasn't been an issue in my world. the rest of the time i get around perfectly normally. >> in your nonfiction book of essays "step across this line," you write being under a fatwa and you you write to live like this is to feel demedian and little twists of humiliations accumulating around your heart. to live like this is to allow people including your ex-wife to call you a coward on the front line of -- the front page on 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. >> i'm not interested in that.

one of the great things of being a writer is to look forward to a long life and to be able to work in that life.ou one of the great things about this job is there's no retirement age. and i certainly would have been veryin sad to be cut off in midsentence so to speak. >> at what point did you quit living under protection? >> somewhere around the turn of the century, somewhere around 1999, 2000 is when it ended. >> salman rushdie, "midnight's children," what's that story about? >> well, that's a story about my generation, really. i mean, that's to say i was born in june of 1947. and two months later, in august, of 1947, the british empire in india came to an end. at midnight. at the midnight of august 14th and the 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 and in some way represent the hope and potential of the newborn country.un way obviously a metaphoricalt way of writing o the hope that was born at that moment, which was -- as i say was my generation. and it's an interesting generation, i think, because it's the transitional generationow. and the generation of transition is always fascinating because it's confused. because the past continues to be there, and continues to have an influence and the future is beginning to be born. 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. it was the cathedral school.

and many of the teachers were either english or with english educations and so on. and my parents in that generation still thought the would be to send me to an english university, you know, to be educated.it now in india now, i think there are changes this. i think parentsth like my paren might well want to send their children to american universities. they mighter well want to go to stanford and mit instead of oxford and cambridge. that was a generation where the influence of the british was still there but waiting. -- waning. 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. >> and in your writing, you identify yourselves as a british writer and an indian writer. >> i yeah, i think basically i'a boy from bombay. that's where 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.wh but, you know, in the way -- the place where you're a child is home in a way that nowhere else is. and that was the place where as a child and a teenager. o i spent more of my life in england than anywhere else. and i'm a british city. it would be ridiculous not to think of oneself as a british writer and i think one of the things i've written about a lot is the migration and what it does to it'sity. -- identity and it's common place in this age of migration that people have pleural identities and people can feel indian and british. people can feel, you know, italian and america. -- american. this sense of a plural identity is oneio that millions and millions of us have. and i'm one of those and i

always thought it's fascinating in this age of the world, the phenomenon of colossal mass migration, you know, has really changed our relationship to ourselves the way in which we define and create ourselves. >>stan do you feel like you're muslim or feel like from pakistan. >> i'm not from pakistan.ev i did not really live there. >> you did not live there. >> some of my family lived there. many families of muslim origin, my family was divided at the partition of india and pakistan. and roughly speaking, 50/50. i had just about the same number of uncles, aunts and cousins in each. and so actually that was good fortune to me as a writer. in my generation, very few people in india really knew about pakistan. the internal life of the country. and very -- and vice versa, very few pakistanis were able to have any real knowledge of india and

each of them had a demonized version. readers in pakistan said it was interesting to them to discover contemporary india was like and readers in india said the same thing about the pakistani parts of the book. and so it became a book that's been interpreted or explained the partition countries to each other. no, i never felt pakistani. as far as muslim my family technically an indian muslim family and some were very devout. my grandfather was a very devout muslim and went to the pilgrimage of mecca and spent his whole life praying five times a day and so on. my own family was very secularized. and i was brought up in -- they were very cosmopolitan people, my parents and not ticking 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

so the equivalent of going to church on christmas day. and so i was brought up like that in a very cosmopolitan in which around me were people of every conceivable religious background and even cultural background, many foreigners -- bombay is a very international city and soer i gw up amongst christians and hindus and jews and farsis and, you know -- we just decided as kids to have everybody's holidays. because it gave us more holidays. so when it was a big hindu holiday, we would celebrate that.gh and when it was a muslim holiday, you know, my non-muslim friends would celebrate that. >> what did your father do and what did your mother do? >> my mother was a teacher when she was young but she more or less stopped when she married my father and brought up, you know, four of us, my three sisters and .yself my father, i think, was a

frustrated mscholar, you know,e was actually very much more knowledgeable than ila islamic history and studied it to the extent at the university at cambridge and also studied english literature so on. but he was an only child and his father died when he was still relatively young. and so he had to take over the familyly business which was a tt business and then he sold that around the time of partition and after that was involved in property and so on in bombay. there was a point where he was very, very, very wealthy. but when i was a little boy. and then he spent the rest of his life losing the money. [laughter] >> so every business decision he made after the time when i was about 7 or 8 years old was calamitous and 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.

>> and where did he die in bombay. >> he actually died in karachi pakistan.ac >> in fact, one of your nonfiction essays you write about taking the ferry regularly from bombay to karachi? >> that's right.t there were these two little kind of rust bucket boatswo that use to go up and down that coast and, in fact, the distance in miles between bombay and karachi is that slow. it's an overnight ride. and as i say, you know, aunts and uncles living in karachi and so sometimes the family would go over and visit them. and i must say, if you're a boy from bombay, karachi feels like a dump. sorry, karachi. >> where are your sisters living? >> they are scattered all over the world. one of them is england. one is in america and my youngest sister sadly passed away.t she had a heart attack quite young. a >> what was the reaction to "midnight's children" when it came out in 1981? >> well, it was kind of extraordinary, you know?

at that point i was a completely unknown writer. i published one earlier novel that had done essentially nothing. this novel was -- well, first of all, it was wonderfully well received particularly. the response in india was just extraordinary. i mean, it was -- people felt very fond of it. it became a book that was very well lovedth. you know, in india and that meant a lot to me because i wanted -- i wanted the people it was written about to feel that it was truthful. and then it won prize and see became this colossal bestseller which i never expected. i mean, you know, if you asked me what i hoped for, i would have thought, you know, it got itself a good publisher and it was well received and i thought the few thousand people who are not related to me or personal friends end up buying it, that will be nice.wh it never struck me it was going

to become this multimillion copy, you know, phenomenon book translated in 40 languages. it was just an transforming and great moment for me. >> and in the years it's won a few awards. >> yeah, it keeps piling up. >> is it your bestselling book? >> i don't know. i haven't counted. i mean, it's either that or the satanic verses.e i think it's a close thing. >> which of your books is your favorite? >> the next one. i don't know. i'm very proud of them. and for different reasons i'm proud of other books. and it was the only novel i had to write in what i thought was a condition of exile in those years, in the '90s i was not able to go to india. i didn't get a visa and yet i always had a horror of writing books about indiaay and to writ

that book and to have people also in india really like it and feel that it was truthful as well, that's in a way more neglecting the next children because it was written from being away.gh >> why wouldn't india grant you a visa. >> well, this is a question you have to ask the indian government.ll i guess in thoseth years of the trouble around the satanic verses they didn't think it was worth the trouble that was the simplest answer and there was a period, nine years or so, when i couldn't go back to india and that was very tough indeed. >> 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.ie if you would like to participate in our conversation -- you can

also send an email at booktv@c-span.org or send us is tweet, twitter.com/booktv. in "imaginary homelands," one of your nonfiction essay collections, you write that history is always ambiguous. facts are hard to establish and capable of being given many meanings. reality is being built on our prejudices, must conceptions and our ignorance as well as our perceptiveness and knowledge. >> i think at each age writes the h history of the past according to its own concerns.g and sometimes -- i mean, i was a historian by the baghdad university, that was my university degree subject and one of the first things you learn when you study history is how contested it is. it's not simply that there is --

that there is something that happened that was just once in a case. people disagreed radically 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 meaning. and quite interesting training for a fiction writer, you know, to learn that the past is made up of shifting firms. it's not rock solid. >> first call for salman rushdie comes from fairview, new jersey. go ahead, frank, with your question.th >> caller: yeah. mr. rushdie, yes, hi. you're one of my favorite authors. i'm curious about something. i'm a great novel-reader. i happened to be scanning amazon.com yesterday and i found a title that intrigued me. i don't know if you ever heard i find. -- i never heard it. it's called slayer about the

sacred cow.ou i never heard of the author and carl sha-pio. i'm about three-quarters of it. it's a fascinating book. i think you would agreement party. it's about a atheist who hits th e jackpot in the new york state lottery and he becomes in conflict with the religious establishment. have you heard of it.hm >> i've not heard of it at all. i'll look it up now that you mentioned it. yeah. i don't know what else to say about that. >> 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 versus security during the y2k worldwide hooha i guess you could call it. you write for days the world had been hearing about nothing but terrorism.ad the u.s. had spoken about the current bogie man's name osama bin laden to fright us children.

there were arrests with a man with you bomb-making equipment found at the u.s. canada border. seattle cancelled its celebration. one of the leaders cult was released in japan and feared a terrorist atrocity. and in october, 2001 you write, making free society safer from terrorism, our civil liberties will inevitably be compromised. >> 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 what's true about the world that we now live in 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 either side

is badly motivated. both sides can be well motivated. if the security forces want to keep the country secure. and those who fight on behalf of libertyep want to keep the sociy free.. none of these things are a bad thing. people live in conflict when they feel their liberties are at threat like these patdowns, you know.gh and security people will feel that of a wholly libertarian attitude could let people flip through the net whom we should 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 forced at a covert level. the issues of security are very rarely made public.

much of it is kept secret. and decisions are made which are not so to speak ever accountable. 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 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 that they ought not to do. so there is that battle and i think it's right at the heart of every free society. right now. is, you don't on actually havu'e to be on a side but it seems to me if you're going to be in favor of one of the other, my inclination would be to err in favor of liberty rather than -- one of the things, you know, i learned that there is no such thing as total security.le

it simply doesn't exist. there are only levels of insecurity. and what you want to do, of course, is to make the as low as you l can but there's no such thing as 100% security. and if that's the grail that you're pursuing, then you'll never reach it p. i think it's better to live in a free society and accept that there are elements of risk which you can't eradicate. >> you hear the phrase war on terror, what do you think?os >> well, you know, i think it was a kind of -- i mean, i can seeed why it cropped up at the time because of the attacks in america. a and in washington and in new york. it became too vague a term. and i think problem is that the way in which that was pursued -- 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 >> 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 or news or cnn or one of those. during the time of the trouble over mohammed cartoons in one of

the scandinavian states and they were representing a representative of a muslim group. 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 expression 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 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 in the way muslims are treated and jews and christians and other religions are treated? >> no, i don't really. because i think if you look at just at the world of political cartooning rather than trying to bring in all these others issues i think there's plenty of criticisms of the pope, you know, these days. where the catholic church has suddenly 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, the different countries draw the line about censorship in different places. i myself think it's understandable that germany and austria should have laws against holocaust denial but i still think it would be better if they didn't. it would be better to discredit people who try to deny those atrocities rather than put them in jail which can glorify them.

but i think the question of the political cartoon is simple. what would a respectal political cartoon look like? there's no such thing. the form itself is disrespectful. the purpose of the political cartoon is to poke fun at people. to look at people's weakness and to look at their foibles and to look at things that they're saying that you don't agree with them and satterize them and if we're going to have political cartoons we have to accept that's what they'll be like. >> you seem to enjoy writing about writing novels. and what is a novel and how do you identify a novel? >> well, i think each of us who pursue this political calling would answer that question differently. and that's one of the nice things about the is it's capaciousness. and the fact that there are so

many ways of approaching -- of approaching it. 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 go to the fantastic, you know? and this is the problem with the phrase magic realism and 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 -- rather than i have no

interest in escapist depiction and the fantasy fiction the escape of reality. >> harry potter? >> 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 fantasy is a way -- that's one of the ways of approaching the truth. you know, the nonnaturalisic way of writing. and 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 the starry night we can agree it's a great painting but it doesn't look like anything like a starry night. if you look up at the sky on a clear night it doesn't look like that painting and yet it's a great painting for starry night 'cause it tells you something of the emotion and the force and the passion that can be engendered by looking at such a sky.

and i guess that's the difference between photograph and that and an expressionist painting 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? but i think in the end, the 3yoe 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, 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 garcia marquez? is magical realism a type of literature more suited to nations of the developing world? >> well, certainly it has -- it has found very fertile soil nbc parts of the world. but -- i mean, there have been great practitioners of that kind

of writing in european literature that, you know, and indeed in the literature of the united states. and writers of the so-called fabulous movement of others so, you know, it's a thing that crops up everywhere. but it's true, i think, but in the so-called third world, there's less of a buffer zone between private life and public life. there's -- the realities of the great public issues, politics -- not just politics but poverty and corruption and religious dissension and so on and so on, those issues come up again so the daily lives 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 little cocoon that we can construct around ourselves. which to an extent not completely but to an extent insulates us of the storms of the public world. and thus can create the illusion 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 sphere attack you every day, constantly, it shows you that actually ordinary life is like that. and the literature that comes out of that is different, i guess. it's different because that safe every day illusion of normality doesn't exist and so you have to respond to reality and a more operatic way or theatrical way.

>> second question, could mr. rushdie comment on the use of the english language by indian authors and why hindi is the main language of indian film but english is the main language of indian literature? >> well, there are a lot of people in india who would give that argument of that assertion. certainly, the very large literatures that exist in the other languages of india, you know, hindi is a great literary language in india and so the east of india and so the south of india other languages. and so, yeah, there's a very rich indian literature outside of english. but i think what has happened interestingly in the last 30 years or so is an explosion of talent in indian writing in english and that is something new. that's to say there always used to be a few fine writers in english. coming out of india. in generations before my own,

you know, there were writers like anita or others. and so there's always been excellent writers but what there now is, a cornucopia. there's a whole -- there's hundreds of them. and i think it's for a couple of reasons. one is that english is a sort of anchor all over india certainly what you might call the novel reading class. let's say people who have been educated at university. they are 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. if an indian writer writes in the regional language, it's confined to that region. the great indian novelist and poet who won the nopel prize wrote in ban gori and many

indians today are unaware of his work except in very poor translations. whereas english goes everywhere. even inside india it's a way for indian writers to be read around the country and then, of course, there's just the global power of the english language which allows those writers to move outside of the india and to be read around the world and that's, of course, attractive for writers to be able to have a wide audience, an audience in other countries. and so it means 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 languages. it's one of the available indian languages. >> back to patricia vanderbilt and her email. what does mr. rushdie consider the most important work fiction or nonfiction that he's written. >> that i've written. >> yes, sir. >> importance is something other people have to say. and i think actually the best

test of importance is one that you can't really make in your lifetime. it has to do with durability. you know, the great thing about the classics, i think, is that there's no book that survives 200 years by accident. fought one. -- not one. 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, 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, but that it will be keep being read long after you stop working long after you're around. you know, my friend the british novelist what you hope to leave behind you is a shelf of books, you know, and you hope they will not stay on the shelves and people will pick them up after you cease being around.

i generally can't say the question of importance. i mean, i remember a very distinguished elderly publisher tell me a story when i was a young kid about a german author who he edited very emmett and highbrow egg head author who once wrote a children's book which turned out to be his greatest classic, eric kekner and his one morality came from one little children's book. it may be that these two book i've written for younger readers, maybe that's what will survive in which case that would be cool, too. >> when and how did you become sir rushdie? >> oh, well, i guess the british honor system still uses these titles.

it's a way -- it's a lifetime achievement award is what it is. it's a way of saying -- when they say you get a night night hood for services of literature, it's a way of saying that, you know, 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. and so anybody would be pleased if you've been doing a job for more than 30 years for somebody -- for your country that they consider it worth to be recognizing. it doesn't get you a lance, it doesn't get you a sword. it doesn't give you a suit of armor, none of that. >> was there a ceremony or a piece of paper? >> there's a ceremony. you get to go to buckingham palace. the whole thing. you get tapped on the shoulder with the sword. >> did you enjoy it. >> yes, i took my children along and they enjoyed it. >> very quickly, patricia

vanderbilt, would you discuss the evolution of your own writing both in terms of themes and content and the writing process itself. >> wow. well, there's three hours right there. >> right. >> 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. 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 countries. i felt that the sa-tanja verses was the third part of that process because other than the contentious links 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. we did that novel in england. and what are the effects on such a move on their lives and their characters and their way of seeing the world. it's really a novel about migrants in london. you know, 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 and pakistan. and i too am a migrant from the east to the west. and they are not outside me. they are inside me. that was if you would like phase one. at some point in your writing life you have to look for a second act and it seemed to me -- or it has come to seem to me the bouncing around the

world, gives me a way of approaching what i think is a very big subject these days and how the world joins up and the world has become a very small place. and, you know, scientists use this phrase about the butterfly flaps its wings in japan 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 and so i think it's a new phenomenon. you know, 'cause the world didn't used to be like that. it used to be the case that if you were setting a novel in the -- let's say in the american midwest, you didn't really have to think about anywhere else in the world. you just had to think of that part of the world and how life was for people there, you know. now, global phenomenon, whether political or economic or social can have a real impact even on that small 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 is at war and people are going to war in that town. so the larger subjects impact the most small intimate way communities in a way they didn't and to me it's more and more of the subject. the subject is define stories that explored a way, the unusual ways in which the world joins up now. and in my novel "shalimar and the clown," it takes place in california in los angeles. and in order to explain that murder you have to go all the way across the world to understand events that took place in kashmir in the north of india. and that was a way of saying -- of saying that, that now events even crimes, you know, travel across continents. and in order to understand a crime over this, you have to understand a reality over there. so i feel 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. >> i want to thank patricia vanderbilt for that email. 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 dangerous religious thought/delusion. >> i'm part of the hitchens gang. if we're going to say which gang anybody is 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 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 my business. 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 to change the way in which the society is it 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. >> butch in jackson, wyoming, thanks for holding. you're on with salman rushdie. please go ahead. >> caller: yes, mr. rushdie. you just about answered my question. on his philosophy of religion. >> uh-huh. >> caller: see, i look at

reality, we're throwing around a little piece of dust in the universe. >> yes. >> caller: and we are like little molecules that use religion as separation -- in fact, a cancer on society. and we bring this concept from the stone age almost. when people believe that the earth looks flat and we take their belief system and bring it to mores of society and accept it with no basis of fact, i'd just like to know what your concept of organized religion is? >> well, let me -- 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 god in the sky for whom -- for whom everything came.

and i think the reason why that became such a persistent idea in differing parts of the world expressed through different parts of the 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 did we get here and the other is the question of ethics. now that we're here how shall we live? and religion -- 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 it seems to me that i don't need religion's answers to those questions because in terms of where did we come from, every religion in the world is quite simply wrong. we didn't -- you know, the world was not created by somebody who worked for six days and rested on the seventh. that didn't happen. the hindus believe that the

great proto-god churned the great world out of the churn and that created the great planets. and they may be beautiful stories and i don't deny they are beautiful stories but there's a difference between a beautiful story and a true story. and the question of origins it seems to me we could look -- we could 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 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 for religions to tell us how to behave. >> in "imaginary homelands" you write in the essay in god we trust. god, satan, paradise and hell all vanished one day in my 15th year when i quite abruptly lost my faith. i recall it vividly. i was in school in england by then. the moment of awakening happened in fact during a latin lesson and 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 thunderbolt 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, though, the islamic heaven at least as i had come to

conceive it 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 perfume garden it seemed a shame to have given them up. >> yeah. 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 thing. but i felt better off to write that ham sandwich which actually was the first piece of ham i ever ate if my life. it tasted really good. >> our next call for salman rushdie comes from yonkers, new york, go ahead, michael. >> caller: yes, mr. rushdie. thank you very much. what i was interested in knowing was whether or not you'll be in new york city for any book signings in the future, in the near future? that's one of my questions.

>> yeah, i just -- 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 could have a look at the random house website. it should tell you. >> caller: thank you very much. denese dasua debathe hitchens and 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. but laws and everything. most of that came through reasonably. >> 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. if you had no particular religion and 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 in a country where hinduism was never thought to be a politically radical religion. 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. when religion 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. >> this is booktv's monthly program "in depth." our guest is salman rushdie.

you can send an email, booktv at c-span.org or send us is tweet at twitter.com/booktv. richard from wellington, florida, you're on with 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 of the unrestricted ability of the taliban to operate from sanctuaries in pakistan's northwestern frontier district and the tribal areas to strike directly in the afghanistan including at american troops? >> yeah.

well, let me just preface by answer -- by saying that just remember that i'm a novelist here, you know? but i'm happy to talk about these matters. but my expertise of military strategy is about what you would 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 pakistan intelligence. 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 the taliban were able to take up -- take

control 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 but otherwise we don't. so i think it's a really a big problem. i think many of the crucial problems of the world right now focus now into what's happening in pakistan. >> mr. rushdie, what is on the cover of "luka and the fire of life"? what is this painting? >> it's a beautiful cover. it's got a flying carpet on it for a start. i 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 was it 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 and so very useful carpet. it will also come down to the size of a average household rug so a very versatile carpet. and on this carpet we see this 12-year-old boy, luca, whose father the storyteller has fallen into a sort of coma-like sleep with life maybe slipping away and luca has journeyed into the world of magic to try and steal from it its most precious possession which is the fire of life itself. and bring it back to save his father's life and he's helped on that journey by figures you see on that cover. there's -- he has a couple of -- they're not exactly pets they are more examines. -- companions. he has a dog called bear and he has a bear called dog and 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 a land called ott which stands for over the top where everybody is extremely excessive and badly behaved and foulmouthed and rude. and she is the most excessive and foulmouthed and rude of all of them instead of being called the sultana she is known as the insultana because she's so good at insults. it's her flying carpet given to her by king solomon the wise and she transports luca on that carpet quite a long way towards his goal. >> who is luca? >> luca is, you know -- he's based on my son. my youngest song whose middle name is luca began to demand a book for himself a couple of years ago. to go with the book which i wrote for my older son 20 years ago. my two sons have a large gap. there's an 18-year age gap between them and 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 are deliberately modeled on my son and to just give one example, left handedness and my son is left hand which is a rather surprise to us because there's no other left handedness in my family that we can trace. and, yes, he's very definitely left handed and always has been. and 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. and what i wanted to happen in the book is for this left handed boy to have these, if you would like, these obstacles created by left handedness as he goes on his quest and he gets closer to achieve his goal the left handedness becomes a advantage and the thing that was a disadvantage becomes a gift, if you would like. there's all sorts of ways -- he actually has -- my son

appearance dog called bear so that's where that came from. >> next call for salman rushdie is st. paul. >> caller: you have a similar background and. what are your thoughts on his writing and are you friends with him? secondly, it's typically when one is knighted called sir or by their first name but you are referred to sir salman. >> it ought to be sir salman but never mind. >> caller: and the third question i seem to recall at some point you reconverted to islam perhaps to get rid of the fatwa. has that changed? >> caller: let's answer that question first and under a lot of pressure including political pressure and i made such a

remark and i almost immediately regret it and unsaid it a few weeks later and said it was a mistake and what i've been saying today. i'm not really a person of religious faith. and it was -- it was as you say the result of trying to solve a pretty terrible problem at the time. and something that i was being encouraged to do by all kinds of people including political figures. ... 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, never mind about the pharaoh and i'm very happy to play one. 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. we don't actually have that similar a background. he grew up in the west indies in a hindu family. a i grew up in that middle eastern family. in many ways we did not like each other. politically, some distance apart, his was a position of simpler and more conservative where mine might be more liberal. as a writer, he is a writer who has been determined a realist all his life. as we say on this program, i tend to break those rules from time to time. as artists we are unlike each other. there are several ways that i

admire particularly, his novels, and the house of transcendence. which i think is great by any standards. a life really darkening in his world. he seems to have become progressively less affectionate toward his characters, harsher toward them and to my taste that is less attractive in his writing. other people feel otherwise. you can't deny his ability but we are very unlike each other as writers. they have been perfectly cordial meetings but both of us recognize very different kind of

beasts. >> california, you are on with salman rushdie. >> caller: hello. two questions. one question is in all honesty have you ever regretted in anything you wrote about the profit mohammad or do you have no regard -- political figure forced you to address fat and second question is i recently read a book about the life of profit mohammad and it is a non 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 h satanic verses"? but not someone forced you to. >> host: thank you very much. >> guest: a don't think i made a mistake. i don't think that the book is privatized. what i think, as i said, the purpose of fiction is to explore things in the context of a novel. the character and the novel is substantially different from a profit mohammad. is based on a different reading

of history of islam. one of the things people need to get used to in any religious tradition is dissension within that tradition. people have a different idea from the orthodox idea. that to be part of a conversation. it really should. it is true of every other religion. in islam people react badly to it. i am very proud of the book. at don't know anything about oprah's book. >> stan says have you written a similar book on christianity as you did on islam? if not, why not? will you write a book critical of christianity or are you afraid of doing so? >> this is based on an old and tedious misunderstanding of what kind of writer of them. i didn't write a book about islam. i wrote a novel about migrants

from the west and it is their story and one of their stories involved a vision that the character sees about birth of religion. this is what we call fiction. if i want to insult people like to do it much faster. and don't spend five years of myself trying to create a work of art. i wrote a novel which came out of what i knew best sellers seen no reason to write about christianity. it is nothing to do with my interests. >> this tweet comes in from ricky. because you won't rank your books how do you feel about roland bart's thinking on the depth of the author? >> what is interesting is one of

those very influential ideas along with the movements of construction and so on which seeks to minimize the role of the artist in his own work, which is to say the idea being that writers don't understand what they do, that there work is the product of the times in which they live and the cultural makeup in which they form and is in some way required as substitution of their own vision of what they doing is not necessarily something about which they can have -- that is very interesting because a i don't agree with it. almost every writer that i know, decent writer that i know is extremely clear about what they're doing and does seem to have pretty much a good grasp of

what it is the there work is aiming for. whether it is paul rostrum or whoever it might be. to suggest that tax are authorless worse through the agency of the author where the author is not fully the creator of those texts but the culture is the creator of those texts, versus an obvious -- we are all creatures of the times in which we live. we are all influenced by those times and it may well be we are not fully conscious of those interests but writers, what writers do for a living is examine life, to write for writer leads. riders do that to a degree far in excess of what you getting

your weekly psychotherapy sessions. spend every day sitting by yourself spending many hours trying to learn about yourself. texts do have offers and the arthur is perfectly alive. >> next call for salman rushdie from pennsylvania. you are on the air. >> i'm interested in knowing if mr. rusty feels he has a responsibility when he takes himself away from his writing and separates himself from his conduct in his personal life, if his writing is in flames and even cause a lot of repercussions even though they were fictitious like the satanic versus. some people don't get that. some of your writings are fictitious and that is how the mind set should be. however, outside of that in terms of your conduct, your

everyday life when you're dealing with coming to the united states, do you feel you have a responsibility to and hence more enlightened world in some way? i think she is a humanitarian in terms of what she is doing, how she is bringing what is going on in kashmir to the forefront. thank you. >> that seems to be two separate questions. if you have any kind of opportunity to be in public and express your ideas in public you do have a responsibility to have to be as truthful as possible about what those ideas are. i am not here to convert you to a religion or ask you to vote

for a political party. i am not selling anything. what i am trying to do is speak as fully as i can about those ideas that have inspired my life's work. i hope that is what people interested would wish on me. i am glad that you admire her. i myself have been writing about this most of my life. i think the term holocaust is not correct when you use it to describe kashmir. somebody object strongly to the u.s. of a force against kashmir by the authorities. but the holocaust is an extermination program and that is not what happened. what is actually happening in

kashmir is the people of kashmir are caused not just against one another but trapped on the one hand by the authoritarian indian forces and on the other hand assaults by jihadists, radical muslim groups coming across the border to impose an idea of islam that is more radical, more conservative. more -- they have always been moderate and mystical and not the kind of radical islam now being imported. you have a country in which the people of that country -- i have some stake in it. caught between a classic rock and a hard place. you have an impression coming across the border in one

direction and another oppression coming from india. there is the truth of what is going on. she stresses only the indian side of it. that is a simplification of the situation. >> host: would you explain your concept of cat stevens? when he fell off of the peace train was the push? a useful idiot or true ideological red bag? if you found yourself in the same game at an airport do you think you would try to throttle him or vice versa? >> i don't think he would. he is an old guy. even older than me. there's a bit of me that is sad because when i was a college student i have a copy of tea for the man. i don't deny -- is clear he

wrote some beautiful songs including peace train. but he hasn't been going this for a long time. he has become another person. his conversion has led him down some very strange roads. truthfully this maybe because he is not the brightest light bulb you would wish. not the smartest person you ever encounter in your life. and maybe he was led astray by foolish people. what i know it is he has taken a number of positions which i think problematic. leave aside what he said about me and whether or not i should be killed which he did say hello for much wishes to deny now because it is inconvenient for him now. no question that he said on television and to the new york

times and it is on the record. look at what he says about others. he is on the record in the last few years as telling british journalists would support stunning death penalties for adultery. he is the founder of an islamic school in britain who is the mission statement says it seeks to bring about a subject to give it -- subjugation of the world to islam. i am happy to take myself out of the argument. now he has dropped to islam because that is bad for business. you can imagine madonna with the beard that is who he is. he is no longer the sweet barred who in charge of many of us including me -- he is not a

person who is genuinely problematic. >> host: in "imaginary homelands" you write about essays in the 1980s about racism in britain. is a different? is it the same? >> it has changed the lot. for long time i had become optimistic. the lotus and the section of "the satanic verses" -- it was a way of my saying here are these communities living in the midst of the white majority community. and the larger community looks away from them. pretends they don't need attention. one of those things i always remembered is the great sentence in deficit of and when he talks about will 11 saying attention must be paid to this man.

. what literature is about his businesses pay attention and one of the things i try to do is pay attention to a community that i thought was being neglected. that was being ignored. that was true of the period it was written. i think things got better. i felt those communities are no longer invisible communities but are much more powerful in the mainstream life. and i was feeling quite optimistic about the decline of racial tension in the country and then became the july bombings, and year later the almost bombings that didn't actually go off in and around the country and that worried me a great deal because of the

enormous danger of a racist backlash caused by that and because of what that told me about a continued presence in citing the end of a group which may be a small minority that reject the values of the larger society and see is the larger society as being hostile to. there is still a little town in there somewhere that is an seen in this reality in the largest asian acts of violence. that is distressing because in a general sense the racial situation has improved. >> host: next call for salman rushdie is from new york city. >> caller: have you ever read

genesis? >> caller: yes. >> what do you think about the claim that kane was infected as a curse? >> guest: and 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. i see as its best as a kind of poetry and edits worse like many books of being on the boring side but i don't go there to learn about the world in which i live. >> guest: lance e-mails i enjoy your talking houston. vladimir nabokov in his introduction to literature says being a good writer includes

imagination, and common-sense. he also stresses that properly speaking one doesn't read a book but reads it in order to appreciate it. my question, i into 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 and how you approach it? >> that is a very tough question. it is almost a tougher question then how to write. because how to write is something a writer doesn't have full control over. you can only be the writer that you are. you can't choose to write in a way that is not your nature so in a weather problem hard to write, what are your gifts to do? reading is a much more diverse activity than writing. we can all read and/or many

different kinds of books. we don't always have to read serious novels. we can read nonfiction or mystery or science-fiction etc.. we can read people magazine. reading is something about which there's a gigantic spectrum of possibilities. the answer is what we were saying before. the question is the tension. to read with attention in an age with attention deficit is maybe a dying art but i hope not. it would be bad for people like me if it were a dying art but if you are asking the, i would say that. the whole thing is pay attention to what you are reading. and see what it gives you and

truthfully not everything will give you stuff you want and you do not need to be embarrassed about telling yourself you're not enjoying this book or getting it and you will read something else. that is why bookstores are full of books of all kinds. reading is about pleasure. the reason people do is to give themselves some kind of gillette which may be inspirational or just entertainment. doesn't matter. the point it defines something you like to read and to do that experiment. it is good to experiment. you can try all kinds of different stuff but otherwise how you find out where your interests live? follow your interests. >> do you read any non-fiction? >> quite a lot. of late i found with my last couple novels were not so much because i got a fair retail fable that comes of pure

invention that two novels before that, a very research intensive novels. the required me to read an enormous amount of nonfiction. i really immersed myself in two historical world's. the renaissance and contemporary world in india. and everywhere in between as well. because book has a journey from one world to the other so are needed to know all about it. the game ranges from we were talking about before sort requires me to come from there and done a lot about anyway but to write a book you need to know a hundred times more than that. ordinary general knowledge can give you the start but nowhere near enough. so i embarrassed myself in that. the american character in my

book is a character who starts other european and migrates to america to find out about strasbourg in world war ii and the american diplomat in the modern world. and on most say i loved it. i love to give myself a level of information about my subjects which allowed me to imagine things i could not otherwise have imagined. and rich my own work as a writer. >> host: you wrote imagination is cartography of the minds. >> guest: you have to understand the shape of your own map. every writer has a different map and their journey in their mind goes according to fed and turtle cartography and the question of was talking about the widest

ranging internal of maps. sometimes people can make do with a very small kind of world. think about american writer, writers of the americans' self, favor able to take tiny quarters of the world, mississippi in the case of dr. and fictionalize it and find a lifetime's work of narrative and interest and from that tiny world create the universe so you can do is that way too. >> host: are you a fan of falkner? >> guest: yes. i was shown around by a local falkner scholar in various settings of various books. >> host: did you have to reserve a bottle of jack daniel's?

>> guest: yes. i went to that great and elvis presley's on the same day. >> host: thomas e-mails do you feel there is a deep connection between solitude and creativity? >> guest: i do because i need solitude in order to make anything. i always envied those riders who can write in restaurants. jake a rawlings said she wrote the first harry potter book while sitting in a cafe. i can't work when there are people talking around me or a jukebox playing. i always envied poets who could sit in a park under a tree and scribble. even bird song gets in my way.

i need a quiet place. in my case yes. other writers managed to do it better in more crowded settings but not me. >> host: oliver, high. >> caller: are you disturbed by china, totalitarian system has achieved superiority over india, democratic system? china has a much better gnp, well-planned cities, controlled its population, new infrastructure with tens of thousands of miles of road as an example. india is for, with a debilitated third world structure system with a cast system and population is disastrously out of control. why did india achieved what

china didn't? >> guest: india is a wonderful place. the idea that people in a poor country could be passionately committed to the idea of democracy, for 60 years, a real achievement but what is it? if you look at the last couple american elections, democracy here and indian democracy, but it is a democracy which the masses of the people are passionately committed to. and would not allow to be overthrown. won the thing that india has in real edge over china is the subject of freedom. that is not nothing. you are right that the economic

achievements of india, there has been an economic revolution but those achievements are flawed because of how much of the country continues to live below the poverty line. i argue repeatedly that in the end, that is a thing which creates instability in society. when there's such a colossal gulf between the wealthy and the rest. it used to be the case to put it crudely that you had 10% of the country bitterly poor. now you have a middle class that has emerged as a result of the last 20 or 40 years. so now you have 30% of the country is well off. 70% in very bad shape. many of the things you mentioned contribute to that. nobody is saying it is a country

without serious problems. of all the countries in the region every single one of the other countries in the region has some authoritarian regime. a gigantic country overtaken china, most populous country in the world the personal one 6 of the human race is deeply committed to the values. >> host: e n in pennsylvania. many in the west value literary freedom yet when you're work was attacked it seemed you did not receive uniformly strong support from government, media, etc.. what is your perspective? >> i am writing a book about this. the truth is the level of

ordinary people, readers and writers, there was colossal support. so near to universal high can almost remember the names of all the writers on the other side. there were a few. governments of course have all kinds of agendas of which freedom of speech is only one. there were governments involved in trade negotiations with iran. germany for example was iran's number one trading partner in those days, extremely important cheese exports to iran. japan for example produces no fuel and got all its oil from iran. all of these things became reasons for governments, to back

away a little bit. but in the end what happens is there was a change of heart at the time of the clinton administration. in britain at the time and those put greater effort around resolving the issue. it was a long time coming. >> host: what was the iranian government's official statement? we neither endorse nor supports -- nor prohibit any -- [talking over each other] >> guest: they would not allow actions to take place but in the end we know about diplomacy and the aftermath of all these leaks

that came out but what it said in public, the question is in private. what was agreed in private, they agreed to exist and that is the case. >> host: the look over your shoulder? >> guest: it is not an issue in my life. >> host: our guest is salman rushdie. we have an hour and a half left. we will put numbers on screen. 737-0001. those of you in the mountain and pacific, you can send a tweet, twitter.com/booktv. here is a look at some of salman rushdie's influences.

>> send us a week at booktv with your favorite booktv programs from 20 twin. we will select one tweet. day at random to receive the programs, included in our holiday schedule over the december 24th through 26, we look forward to seeing your favorite booktv programs, thank you for watching.

>> host: salman rushdie, is gunter bent? >> guest: one of the great novelist. had the most remarkable life, a time of the nazi period of rule. in a home which believed that the nazi life's -- lives were truth. and discovered at the end of world war ii when he was in turn briefly, some of the things, that they were the moral. this created in him a storm, a need to recreate his entire

world view. his novels, the best novel ever written about nazism, about world war ii. there are great world war ii novels, in catch-22 or whatever there are many. that is from most brilliant black comic critique from the inside in germany. since then, a difficult string of other novels. one of the writers i always admired -- >> host: why is james joyce's ulysses one of your favorite novels? >> guest: there are books you read when you are young that just create explosions in your mind because they show you so much about the possibilities of

literature. how to do this or that or other things. they are so bursting with innovation and originality, many people, very difficult. is extremely funny. realizing personal the irish comedian and simply one of the users of the english-language, they open up and pre read it, show me what we're doing. >> host: you talk quite a bit, and in that book your right when i first saw "the wizard of oz" it a writer of me.

>> guest: i was 11 years old, and i went home and wrote a story, the story was not about those characters. walking streets of my home town, are edging away from me on the sidewalk but the beginning of the rainbow going into the sky, with steps cut into it. and multiple -- when i was finished writing it, got the secretary to tie but up, it is jerry good and i am going to look after it because he looked after it had lost it.

haj >> host: back to your phone calls, temple, florida. >> caller: my question, thank you for your books and contributions to society. my question is you said you don't believe in the creation of the world and six days. what do you believe in? what do you believe in as to -- where do you think we're going to? >> host: is it important to you to know what salman rushdie believes? >> caller: it is important because he seems to be broad minded. general concepts of not -- making it an individual thing which is very important because if we don't -- politicize it.

>> guest: in answer to your question of origin, modern science is making such extraordinary discoveries about the birth of the universe and the origin of the universe that i look at that, when i look at this, this extraordinary not just creation itself but the level of our knowledge about it, we don't know everything. that is quite true. but we are finding out things about the birth of the universe extraordinary speed. the subject of the big-name, way in which tiny particles exploded create matter ended the way that matter clumps to create larger lumps of matter and galaxies, it is fascinating to me.

i think science and the other end of the spectrum tiny signs of the subatomic is causing the most philosophically interesting material. i go there to try to understand our origin. the point of that, we are hard wired -- the desire to understand right and wrong people to know good from evil, proper behavior as opposed to improper behavior, or answers to those questions, we argue about it. they are not set in stone. there were moments in the history of this country whether it is considered that women were inferior and should vote, and got changed. the way in which people think about themselves, the way in

which people decide what is good or bad, is part of an ongoing argument and that argument i think is the moral argument. you don't have to have -- i don't believe in internal answers. on the question of ethics, is an evolve and change where we continue -- and is interested in the argument itself. >> host: does a novel or a good book have to have a hero or a moral compass? >> guest: doesn't have to have a hero. i do think i can only speak for myself that there is a moral

inquiry. i mean an inquiry. speaking as arrear, i wind books to encourage, what you want is the book to create a world that you want to and hebert and all kinds of questions come up. if the book is any good it encourages you to explore the answers to this question as you go through the story of the characters and see how they explore those questions. it is about exploration and inquiry, not providing answers. novelists provide interesting questions. >> host: next call from texas. >> caller: can you range in order of importance the following literary works. nobel, national book award and

booker prize and what you think of the riding -- >> guest: he is a good friend of mine and would kill me if i said he wasn't but one of the things i love about him is the way he chose in mid career to make such a shift in the kind of writing he was doing. a very delicate, precise novel which he is most famous for that was made into a film and suddenly shifted gears and started writing these bizarre phantasmagoric papers like his recent book never let me go which are quite unlike books he started writing. that took great courage. from the position of success to complete >> your manner of writing and

also shows mindful mess on the part of the writer. i have always thought the best thing said about the literary prize is when the british writer won the booker prize he said in his acceptance speech i always despised this prize but i just completely changed my mind. those are things that are nice when you win. terrific when you win. but not things to take too seriously. all the prizes you mentioned the distinguished. the difference between the nobel on the one hand and national book award on the other is they are given for individual books, given to recognize the achievements of a particular title. the nobel is given for your lifetime's work.

in that sense it is a wider range in price that seeks to recognize success and larger literature. they get it right and wrong. >> host: "midnight's children" won the booker award and the booker of booker's awards which means what? >> it is a way of drawing attention to the prize. when the prize was 25 years old in the early 90s they asked a panel of judges to decide which of the 25 winners was the best book and they chose "midnight's children" i am happy to say. and on the 40th anniversary they did it again but instead of with a panel of judges it was with -- internet vote. i am happy to say they chose it.

it is the best of the last 40 years. >> host: an e-mail from atlanta. thank you for your scholarship and commitment in relation to religion. as you know the people of iran have a government that is founded and based on religion. what is your message to the young iranian generation in your views of their struggle? >> guest: i am impressed by their struggle. they don't need a message from the. they have a message for us. the message one sees from just the young people of iran, young people across the muslim world is they don't want this conservative manipulative culture being imposed on them from above. one can only hope they succeed in changing it because they are

courageous enough and fighting for it. it is not my message to them. it is their message to us. another face of islam which is modernizing and sophisticated and progressive and trying very hard and facing terrible repression. of course of support them and encourage them. >> host: you were recently quoted as saying someone should drop a bunch of nintendos on top of iran. >> guest: >> host: that is what >> guest: that is will be college joke. other never make jokes because everyone thinks you are serious. one thing i thought was if you look at happened in vietnam at the end of the vietnam war the arrival of american culture in vietnam, in many ways american pop culture, 90, mcdonald's,

starbucks said lee made people in vietnam very pro american on top of a colossal work. it became -- thanks to american popular culture. seems to me that could be a technique used elsewhere. but it wasn't entirely serious. i don't really think the nintendo we will liberate iran. >> host: phyllis e-mails in cannes salman rushdie speak about his book which some say is autobiographical in parts due to his suffering. >> guest: one of the problems i have is a retired write a book people say it is autobiographical no matter how unlike me or the characters are. i went to some lengths to make sure there was no character who could be associated with me. it is not about me.

the colonel of it as leverage talking about earlier is a tragic situation in the valley of kashmir which is where my family originally came from. it is a book about four people. a young man who starts as a member of a group of traveling players who falls in love with a girl who is a member of the group. she is seduced and runs off with the american ambassador when the comes to visit and performs for him. do not run off with the american ambassador. that does end badly. is this young man, outraged by this betrayal changes and

becomes much more violent and vengeful and determined to be avenged. many years later in the scheme that began the novel, murders him. so from all 4 begins with this murder and seeks to explain it, tries to tell you what happened to bring that about. i don't think i am any of those people. i am not the jihadists or the american ambassador. i don't think it is a biographical but one of the books i am most proud of. it is one of the darker books than 9 earlier novels about pakistan. two darkest novels i have written -- it is a solid ground novel that knows what it is talking about and it achieves its goals reasonably well.

it is a book i am proud of. sometimes they benefit. >> host: rose in maryland also writes about that. some of your prose is pure poetry. i catch my book sometimes when reading passages such as the following the-we are unable to comprehend our experience which flows through our fingers and we can hold on to wind. she goes on to ask wind you construct your work do you have passages such as this in mind and create a character for whom it would be appropriate? >> guest: other way around. everything begins with character and in the case of that novel, i began with this legacy. i had an image of this murder

scene. i didn't even know who the people were. i had to understand who they were. and what happened in the novel is those characters showed me how to tell that story. so everything begins with the characters. as we were saying earlier the novel must retain the human scale. the human being is the form of the novel and the thing which moves the novel always. i myself tried not to write novels where the ideas are paramount and the people are merely representatives of those ideas. i like the idea is to grow out of the kind of people i am writing. >> host: harry in virginia, you are on with salman rushdie. are you not there? he is gone.

sorry about that. we will move on to arizona. >> caller: thanks for taking my call. it is really a privilege. c-span, we love you out here. my question for salman rushdie is how does one get a book published? i am a layperson and study the bible and find a lot of material for controversy. really dissecting it. it is what i have written a book about. how do i get a publisher or an agent? every time i look for them we don't accept unsolicited this, we don't accept unsolicited that. >> guest: they always say that. they don't mean it. you should and pay attention to that. what you should do is look through what they're are and look at the literary agencies or

small ones, maybe one located near to your own place of residence and send the book to the agent and see what response you get. whatever they say about unsolicited manuscripts, how else would they find new writers? they're always looking for writers. that is just a defense mechanism in case they don't like what you write. >> host: here's an e-mail from andrews. i was curious about homosexual in the book versus the ship captain. i can't remember there being any described in akbar's kingdom. not sure if i am remembering correctly. can you talk a bit about your treatment of the homosexuality? >> host: >> guest: i can remember myself. maybe there should have been. there was plenty of around. one of the things that was

interesting to me reading about renaissance florence was the male homosexuality increased in this period dramatically. so much so that the that city authorities began to fear for the future of the population. there were serious conversations between church and state, between the papacy and florence about what to do about the fact that the population of florence had the rise of homosexual hour. it was such an odd thing to discover in the literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, i wrote about that because i never heard about that. that is the way it find its way into the book. >> host: the title and description of the book lead one to believe that the enchantress is the pivotal character and her story is the main one.

in many ways akbar's stories and ruminations dominate more throughout the book. >> guest: that is true. the two major male characters in the east, the emperor of florence and in the west the philosopher. they are really the kind of engines for the book with their behavior and so on. those are very important to the book. but the princess from one world to the other is rich. she is the thing that bring those worlds together. without which these would be stories that didn't connect to each other. her choices and her state they are the central characters because they are the thing without which the book could not exist. her story is central in that sense. she is not the biggest character in the book. ..

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 >> and hen you meet an actual person, and in the second half of the book i had to create hera as a beaver bl human being --of believable human. there are these male characters who also dominate. yothu know, i think that put the three together -- the character and the two historical figures of akhbar and machiavelli, that triangle is at the heart of the

book. >> host: a little less than an hour left with our guest this month, salman rushdie. rosa in california, good afternoon. >> caller: food afternoon, gentlemen. i was wondering, i was reed r reading -- reading a book, the ark of air rah rat, and be it seems like the cia have found the ark. would you consider it a fairy tale kind of thing or would you consider it factual in and,nd also, what is your a opinion ons global warming? there's so many strong pros for it and there's so many against abou what do you think about it?u thank you very much. >> guest: well, there's two very different questions. 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 tame. >> and so on. one of the very, very oldest texts we have in the world is the story whether 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 mighty n 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 the animals going in two by two and so on. i actually have been past mount air rat, and 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 boao in a flooded landscape floating along and running aground on that mountain because there's nothing else to run aground on.. 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.ue o i suspect it's just a con fablation, as i say, of many of the floor stories told over the years. global warming, yeah, i mean, there is global warming. is i think 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-hourth conversation on its own. but i certainly do not subscribe to n the view that global warmig is a kind of fiction and be, unfortunately, it's not so. >> host: pervez in connecticut, you're on with salman rushdie. >> caller: thank you for c-span, mr. rush rushdie, i'm a great fan of yours.

both of us were born at the same time, grew up near each other. have you been back to bomb boy, and if you have been back recently, what are your thoughts, views, etc.at p somewhat personal. >> guest: yes, i go back all the time. i was there beginning of the year. as you may have heard, we're 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, youor know, the world of that book.rex but, clearly, the city has changed guy gantically from the town that i grew up in. ver t very, very, very much bigger, as you know. and the weight of the city has moved from the, if you like, the kind of manhattan-like peninsula that used to be called bombay, and the city has spread enormously onto the mainland an

become, you know, ten time thees size. so i find myself now in my visits there having to learn the new city, you know?now having to learn the city that noatw exists as opposed to the city that i wrote about, that i knew about as a child.that it's very difficult because it is sprawling and immense. and in many ways a darker place, a more criminalizedded place, a place of more religious dissension than there used to b. in the past but still absoluteln fascinating. it is the great metropolis of india, and anybody who'sre interested inst cities -- whichi am, i 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 andan grown.ing and i'm doing my best to understand it. >> host: well, we had he mail from i want to pronounce this quickly -- jenadi -- and 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 i to know about the name changebu from bombay to mumbai. >> guest: to mum -- mumbai. well, basically, they came to power in bombay about 20 years ago a political party which one of it platforms is that it's, it strongly espouses the importance of the regional language. and it said that bombay was acoo colonial name, it was an english name and that the name should b. indianized. and so it used mumbai which hasa always been the name in the marachi language. the problem with this is is that other hindu languages never called it human boy, finish

mumbai. it also carries with it what inm my view is mythology because people, it was argued that the name mumbai came from a contraction of the name of aame local goddess, popular good december. -- 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 in to the hands of the british, that the it portuguese called it the beautiful bay, you know, and that the name bombay is a version of that portuguese name because it has a beautiful natural harbor, bombay, and can that'sth why it was named. and so it's -- you will find if you go to bombay that many people, like myself, still calll it bombay. and although the official name

has changed.in t in the same way, i suspect, if you were to go to what is nowyou called ho chi minh city you would find most people still call it saigon can. sometimes these new names don't catch on. >> host: this tweet, totally random. what did you think of slum dog million mare? was it worth the hype? >> guest: didn't like it. i could go into greater length. you know, i know lots of people liked it.wasn i thought that it wasn't to my t taste. i thought it wasn't a portrayalt of that world that i recognized as particularly interesting or truthful. >> host: next call, los angeles. joe, good afternoon.r >> caller: good afternoon. i wanted to follow up on your discussion of movies, and ithis believe i read online you did at article about what makes a good and bad film adaptation. >> guest: yeah.ed >> caller: i believe you liked the famous book that was madewa into a movie, so i wanted you to

discuss, you know, what makes ao good adaptation. i think you're also writing a screenplay yourself, what's the difference between writing a screenplay and a novel. finally menwell, what do you think about benwell so much? >> guest: all right, let's goen backwards. i'm attracted to surrealism as a form and the surrealist cinema r has got a pinnacle in him. first of all, many of the films are very, very funny. the discreet child of bourque boy see is a film whose entireup plot is about a group of people trying to have dinner and never succeeding in doing so. it makes all kinds of interesting social points alongl the way. i respond to the comedy and the fantasy. similarly, i mean, i find a vera similar although more operatic spirit in the films of feliniu

be those both were influential on me. i tried to go backwards, whats. were the earlier questions? >> host: hose is gone.. well, talking about changing a book into a movie. g >> guest: yeah, adaptation. >> host: the process.i me >> guest: the heart of it, i mean, i actually taught a course at emory university where i teach a bit in atlanta about this, and there clearly -- you know, there's a conventional wisdom of movies of great booksb aren't particularly good movies. but there are exceptions to this. i've been trying to enumerate and list those. for instance, john huston's film of the dead, james joyce's star story, is a fine film. the leopard from a great italian classic novel is at least as good as the novel. so i think you can find examples

where the translation has happened skillfully.n and i think it depends on two things. it depends on the film maker having a vision and, if you like, a film language which is the equal of the literary language of the book. and vis conty is such a great film maker, the way he uses the camera, the way he edits montages, scenes together is t equal, if you like, to the use i of language in a novel. and the other thing is the question of's essence. i think when you're adapting avs novel, your novels are usually much longer than screenplays. you have to really ask yourselfu very ruthless questions aboutel the essence of the novel. what is the story that crow musi tell -- that you must tell without which it would not be a true adaptation of that novel. and once you can boil your thinking down to that narrow strand, you have to rather

ruthlessly cut everything away t that is not that story.ally because these days people don't really like movies to be much longer than two hours unless they're by james cameron, andan two hours is 120 pages, you know? and "midnight's children" is a novel of over 600 pages.l to try and distill that down to 125 or whatever it is, you know, really means you have to be very severe with yourself in asking that question about what's essential. and if you can answer that satisfactorily then, yes, people will find the adaptationdapt satisfying. >> host: you're adapting it nowi when could we see that? >> guest: next year, i hope.ou i mean, the screenplay's done,>g we're or in the middle of casting, we're in preproduction. we're looking for locations, etc. and i would hope that we -- we don't have a green light yet quite, we're still looking for bits of the money, but i wouldts hope that 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 on john ford's the dead, and you also write quite a bit about theal movie "gandhi." >> guest: yeah. a little bit i think my views oy 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 it. one of the most moving things is 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 successfullyef defeated the british empire by being more holy than they were. that 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 thought the film just notr 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'sonr opinion in other revolutionary movements around the world. you know, certainly it's theha case that many of the south african fighters against apartheid said that they were very inspired by that film and through that film by the life o- gandhi. and the same is true for freedon fighters in various countries in south america and so on. so i think actually one has to say that that film has had a very beneficial influence.y and maybe i undervalued it. >> host: you didn't seem to take too kindly to the fact that bent kingsley and amy irving were a cast as leads in that movie. [laughter] >> guest: well, amy irving, fine, because there was an american photographer around. i know ben kingsley, and he's ae

wonderful actor and is, indeed, half indian. but, you know -- and also i thought he gave a remarkable performance.able i thought the problems i hadms h with the film were not so much -- i mean, there were obviously indian actors thatobvi could have done it, but he didto do it, and he did it very well. my problems were more to do wit its portrayal of the independence movement, you know, which i felt was sentimentalized a little bit. i mean, not in a hostile why. i think the film is clearly very sympathetic to the independencen movement in india. that's in a way that felt to me oversimplified. and, you know, what really happened in india was that gandhi's mystical rural ideas nt were, in a way, not the ideas that the newly-independent country took up. and nehru, his disciple who then became the first prime minister

of india, was a much morewa modernizing, technocratic figure who believed that for india to succeed it must move into the industrial age, you know in and, really, those are the ideas that the new country took on. so in a way the ghandian ideals, yes, people respecteo them as ideals, but they were not what happened, you know, in india. so in a way gandhi was left behind by the independence movement.hind having said that, as i say, my views about that film are a bitv more positive now than they were when i wrote that piece.>> >> host: and just to stick with "imaginary homelands," knewinn rue's daughter -- nehru's daughter, indira gandhi, what was your thoughts, your relationship? >> guest: indira gandhi strikes me as a tragic figure because, yes, she is the descendant of one of the great dynasties of the end -- indian independenceno

movement. her father was at the heart of the independence movement. she was a flawed figure. was very able in many ways, very brilliant woman in manyan ways, but the only time in the 63 years of indian independent history that there's been an attempt to is suspend democracy was when she was prime minister. she had been found guilty ofbeen electoral 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 '730ss when she -- '70s when she suspended democracy, arrested people, jailed political o opponents, and there were various puces, forced sterile sterilizations, things like that. so there was a period for people

like me who, as i was saying earlier, admire india for itsy f project of democracy and for it support of that project. those years, those authoritariae years were a terrible shock, ann they play an important part in the story of my novel, "midnight's children." and it was more in sorrow than a anger, really, because in many ways indira gandhi was a remarkable woman, but a rem remarkable woman with this flaw. and then, of course; wastr tragically murdered, and that was something i wrote about toot i said it doesn't matter how one might have opposed her politically in the past, but that murder was a catastrophe for india, a calamity and one we should mourn it, and i i did. >> host: we have about 4040 minutes left with our "in depth" guest, salman rushdie.ma 202 is the area code,737-0001 in the east and mountain time37-0

zones, 737-002, mountain andspan pacific. you can send a.on e-mail or a tweet, twitter.com booktv. justin in travers city, michigan. good afternoon.ello >> caller: hello.it honored to speak with you,and, mr. rushdie. and, peter, the interview with mitch cho kaku was excellent. la i watched it about three times,s and that leads me in to a question for sal man. when you listen to micchio or, know, read about physics, whatyo are your inner thoughts about how you would apply your, somewhat mystical mind to 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 twod get along better. jung's idea of synchronicities and the sort of -- just expand

on some of your personalsync philosophies about the nature of how dna and the universe built us to, you know, learn itself. >> guest: yeah. well, you know, the interesting question i was -- we were touching on this a little earlier, the question of what physics showing us about ourselves. and as i said, i think some of the 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, andim 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 parols like -- and the other thing, gigantic physics, the scale of the universe it.what and what is very interesting tot me is if you look at the structure of the subatom, it begins to resemble the structure of the universe. whe when you go in to the world ofer the very, very tiny, what youhat see is something that looks like the very, very immense. and i find that to be beautiful for a start. i and, you know, i almost became a physicist. a i was supposed to be a yo physicist. when i was a younger student, my best subjects, actually, were math and physics. t and the plan for me was that i was going to be a physicist, and then i jumped ship and went oveh tote the arts and became, and became a writer. [laughter]an 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 anduo where we came from and how wew came to be, how the universe came to be. to because i think in a way humanle life is -- 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 whichy itself is in the provinces of the universe, you know? we are hicksville here. we may think we live in grand cities and so on. we actually live in thethe boondocks of the universe. and so to look at the creation of the universe from a nonhuman-centric way is a more truthful way to look at t. a

we're just a bi-blow, the main action is somewhere else. and i think that's humbling, you know? it allows us to feel our reale s place in the scheme of things is not really as great as we might think it is. and that's not a bad thing to think, not bad to have a kind of of humbling perspective and and knowledge that the universe actually doesn't care about us. the universe is proceeding as i should, and it has a remarkablyn low degree of interest on what r 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. that could be valuable. >> host: california, david. hi. >> caller: thank you very much for taking my call. mr. rushdie, i could do anothere three hours, please. [laughter] please tell me, how'shris christopher hitchens doing, you,

friend, and also what you met,ht and what do you guys talk abouto when you getu together? thank you very much for takingmy my call. >> guest: well, thank you. christopher is, you know, he's a fighter, christopher, and, you know, i don't, i don't, i don'te deny that he's facing one hell of a fight. but he is, you know, he's in there battling, and we all are wishing him the very best. i notice that he is unstoppable. last week he went to toronto to debate tony blair about re religion, and as i gather it wow 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 the common like ian mckuen and

martin amos. 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 of 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 makh it such as, oh, you know, theg 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, catch

22, we invented hitch 22 as thet title that didn't quite make it which he then went on to use ash the title of his own memoir. >> host: tim valentine e-mailsis in from heaviertown, f pennsylvania, i enjoy your children's imaginative musings quite a bit. why do you live in america, and what is america's near and be longer-term cultural and political future battlefields vis-a-vis the new world economi. order? >> guest: whoa. an [laughter] let me answer the first bit of the question. first ofe all, i have a sense ae 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 the east of america. [laughter] and i say that, the serious part of that is that i've always felt that i owe allegiance to cities morean t 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 urbanion creature where my sense ofa affiliation is more to a city than to a nation, you know? and i remember coming to new york as a very young man in my v 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 yorkhe n underground of those days, warhol, the velvet understood ground, you know, that new yorkd 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, yol know, 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? kn one of the things about the future is that none of us knowsg

and i've, i fez i've had a lit -- i guess i've had a little trouble in my life with prophets.r fr as a result, i'm not applying for the job. >> host: mr. hitchens writes in this hitch 32 about going through the american citizenshie program. is that something you're interested in doing? >> guest: i've been thinking about it, yeah. i don't wish to give up my british citizenship because thae 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 supported me and defended me in that way. but dual nationality, they allow it i nowadays, so we'll see. >> host: as a british citizen,s are you always an indian citizen as wellsome. >> guest: yeah. india for a long time did not a allow dual nationality. you had to give up your indian citizenship, which i did andad

always felt sad about that.ey h but now they have created a new category, basically, to try and bring back -- the indianeryw diaspora, you know, is everywhere and is actually very successful, and i think the indian authorities want to bring that back towards india, so nowa 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 p.e.n. and other writers' organizations, your concern for a vibrant literature arena is a given. what isn't a given is that a new religion is now waging war, some have coined this as a mindset of perfect market globalization. i would call it a combination of deception, self-deceit that has made for a particularly potent form of fraud when embedded in academia endorsed by think tanks, promoted by media.

including things like the imf, the world bank, etc. >> guest: this is an gue anti-globalization question. >> host: i'm not going toost: interpret, i'll let you do that. >> guest: i assume. i mean, that's as far as i can see it. you know, here's the thing. it seems to me that we have to,t to an extent we have to live in the age we live in.we we can't expect that time will show roll backwards. and the world is globalized. the world is multicultural. it's not going to cease to be. those things, however critical we may with 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 said the question is not globalization perat se. the question is how much social injustice is there as a consequence of globalization,

youyo know, and how can you worn to minimize the social injustice that often is a consequence of a globalized economy? and that's sort of my interestik because i think we doily in this shrunken world, and whatever we may feel about its rights andrih 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 todegl degloballize, that's just how it now is. so the question is how to fighto for social justice in thatco context, and i think that's ae 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. 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.my i know in the program just earlier you talked a little bitt about, about china as well as,in you know, the authoritarianuest regimes there. so the question i have is if you have religion and china officially does not encourage religion, if you have a religion, it does provide al sense of moral compass for people to, to, you know,kn calibrate their actions on. and do you not think that that t would help, you know, bringing freedom to those regimes?he w and the second question is with regard to bomb pay, i just read a before bombay i just read a bi recent article that a billionaire built a 27-story building in the midst of slums, so what is your opinion on that? >> guest: yeah, yeah. well, look, the question about o whether religion brings freedom in a tyrannical setting, i mean, you can obviously see that call

thol schism -- catholicism became an organizing force in, for example, poland against the soviet union. there's no question that that solidarity movement was inspired by the catholic faith of many of it leaders and by the support of the polish pope. so of course there are timesal 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,ives ranging from commune is to industrialists grouped behind the figure of khomeini because they thought that was a 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 questionsome. >> the 27-story -- >> oh, the building, yes, yes.os one of thet: richest men in inde has built this gigantic buildinu which, i mean, it may be 27it m stories, but actually the floors are so high, 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, park, and let's not ft that's for his cars. he has a lot of cars. [laughter] well, first of all, there's an almost an element of comedyab about that kind of hubris. and, of course, i mean, thes obvious comparisons to this colossal, flaunting of wealthri

right in the near vicinity of the largest slum in asia speaksn for itself, you know? and what can you say? it's something maybe someone y should write a story about. so maybe one of these days i'lle get my fingers on that house. it's -- i mean, i see it as a kind of comic ab dudty but, of course, with a dark side which,i has to do with a kind of very public shrug of the shouldersule 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 surprish i had come across a government a could support. it was a disorienting realization. i had spent my entire life as a writer in opposition and had, indeed, conceived the writer'ss role as including the functiongi of antagonist to the state.i

>> 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 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, so on, people who build p 63-story buildings to house their motor cars. you know, i think that's beneficial opposition. ha no, what happened in my visit to nicaragua in the mid '80s was fo 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 statess and its allies, the so-calledal 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 unite, how pro-american people were in nicaragua. instance, they were on accessed with major league payable, and youul could -- anybody in nicaragua from the president downwards could tell you every nicaraguan citizen, person of origin who had gone into a major league baseball team. they were obsessed with american literature. they read walt whitman, they read mary ann moore, east side side -- ezra pound, you know? thishi was a country that just u a tiny little shift in the s mental attitude of this countryi in those cold war days could have been made an ally instead

of a foe, you know? but because many those days of the soviet union andth the cold war and these different blocs that were believed to exist, yow know, america's backyard, the soviet atmosphere -- sphere of influence, because nicaragua wae seen as being too close to cuba which was too close to theto soviet union, that meant it was an enemy, and it was treated as such. and when you -- i mean, i met quite a lot of the sandinista leadership, and some of them i didn't rook at all, and some of them i thought were rather likable, you know? rat and it was of a composite leadership of many differentip o kind of opposition that this hao been to the dictatorship.f some of them were marxist, some were western-style liberals, you know? and i think it's quite an uneasy coalition.oa but it seemed quite obvious that they were trying to do the best theyto could. in a situation of colossal

impoverishment.d si but what has happened since then with the fall of the sandinista, is in a way the situation's worse now than it was then. but also some of those sandinista leaders, this particular the then-president and now again president daniel ortega, have revealed themselves to be -- to put it mildly -- very unlikable. so i think, you know, on ave t revisitation one would have to be much more critical of him personally, though not of the sandinista movement as a whole, i think. >> host: south ozone park, new york, doreen. >> caller: thank you, mr. rushdie, i love "satanic verses." me. >> guest: oh, thank you. >> caller: were you influenced at allgy gulliver's travels, and since you were in bridget jones' diary, what are you feelings about pride and prejudice? >> guest: oh, all right. gulliver's travels is one of myh favorite books. i think the 18th century of theo

english novel contains some of the greatest masterpieces in english language literature, and the fact that those books have remained so popular, gulliver's travels, robinson crew sew is a great testament to how they havo transcended the moment in which they were written to go on bein books of value in the present i day. i don't know whether i wasgu directly influenced by gulliver's travels, but it's one of the books that i dearly loved, so i wouldn't beand surprised. and the other question was about pride and prejudice. well, yes, glad you mentioned my important career move to have a small role in bridget jones' diary. now we're talking about serious things.ean, and i was in that movie simply because helen fielding who wrote the original book is an old friend of mine and called me up, and i think her exact words were, how would you like to makf

a fool of yourself? so i agreed and proceeded to doo so. i'm a big fan of pride and prejudice. i think jane austen is and wonderful writer. i do feel it gets adapted to the movies too often. there seems to be a new adaptation of pride and prejudice for film or for television almost every day.i i mean, every year. and i think we could give it a rest. givere mr. darcy a rest. let him remain within the covers ofs the book, and let the bennet sisters do their business, you know, in words. se we don't need to see anotherse bunch of actors being these people. i've seen more adaptations ofejd 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.we well, i hi it's originally -- i think it's originally the italian marxist antonio gramsci

who talked about a transitional phase in which he says the oldcn refuses to die, and the new cannot be born. and be he says in that there ariseth a whole variety, a large variety of morbid symptoms. and i think, you know, he wass talking about a moment when he wanted a certain kind of revolution, you know, whichappe obviously didn't happen. but i think it's true that what happens -- we live in a time of. colossal change, i mean, closepi colossald,. very rapid, very radical change. technological change, political change, social change. and that's dizzying sometimes,e the speed of change.and and i think everybody finds itow sometimes almost alarming how quickly things are changing andg they seem to be getting out of our control, you know? so and so there are, of course,se,

conservative forces -- i don't mean politically conservative, i mean forces that don't want that rapid, that rapidity of changeap and try toid hold on to the word as it has been. you know?ha and so you have this tension between the outgoing world and the incoming world, you know? and that can create a lot of tensions. it can createol political tensions, social tensions, economic tensions, culturals tensions. and i think that's probably the truest description of the time in which we live. truer than republican/democrat, you know, truer than capitalist/communist. forget those categories, 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 ofe us who resist the change. you know? and that seems to me to be oneto of the great central tensions in our society.o yo

>> host: do you write every dayn and what are you working on currently? >> guest: i try to. not right now because a bookkn tour take over your life.riti 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 a 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 boow length form whether fictional oo nonfictional is the marathon. i know many people who are screen writers, playrights who say that it's actually beneficial to go away, rock yourself up for -- lock yourself up for a couple of weeks and write the play in very intense burst. and i could see that, i could see that would work.ust having just written drafts of a screenplay myself, i could see that it's better to do it that way.r to

but a novel or nonfiction book you just have to be in a rhythm, to a little bit every day, chip away the words, chip away the pages, you know?an and otherwise it doesn't get done. to it has to be done that way. what am i doing now? well, now that i finished the screenplay, i thought that i i would finally write a memoir,, sort of autobiography having acquired the curse of antere interesting life. i thought i would finally tell that story. i always knew that i would. 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 a story you'll want to tell. and what happened was that i had a very strong instinct not to

tell it until i had sufficientui instance -- distance from it. i wanted to be able to approacht it rationally, objectively rather than emotionally or vengefully. i don't want to write it to getw 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 of secondary importance. what's importantan is to explore and tell the story of this. rather unusual event that f happened in myou life. and i find that in order to tell that story, i sort of have to go backwards and tell the wholew story of who i was and how i became that person, you know? and not just i i but, of course, members of my family and friends. in the end, you have to approach it more or less like a novel because for it to be interestine 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 storyu a

you want to know.an otherwise they're not interesting.'s a and so in the end even though it's a true story, you need to approach it as a novelist approaches a story by creating the characters, making them vivid, making them sympathetic or not sympathetic but interesting and then showing whatti happened to them.show because i think my instinct is that for general readers what's valuable is not -- i mean, yes, is the politics, yes, there are the themes of culturl 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 will be like to bo that person in those shoes going through such an experience, you know? and i think to tell 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 it's a novel about me. >> host: does it have a name,os: and when can we expect it?

>> guest: i'm trying to finishnt it.my i've written -- my guesstimateae is that i've written about a quarter of the story. tha i'm hoping that if i keep up th rhythm, you know,yo that i can e finish it by the end of nextt of year. that's sort of what i've said to the publishers, i'll try and deliver it by the end of the year, so they would publish itg, whenever they want to in 2012, i guess. it does have a name, but i'm not telling you. [laughter] >> host: well, salman rushdie over the years w has written bis 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 "ten across the line --book step aross the line -- across the w line." diane in walnut creek,u're california, thank you for holding on. you're on with salman rushdie. >> caller: well, i'm so happy to be on with him and to speak to him. lot

mr. rushdie, you caused a lot oy anxiety those bad years, and i'm so happy for you that they're over. >> guest: thank you. >> host: i've just finished hitch 22, and now i have to worry about christopher.: ye will you give him my and tell him there are many of us outre here that are plugging for him. >> guest: i will do. h. >> caller: 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? >> guest: i'm a great admirer, i have to say.have 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 withes great clarity and vividness and, you know, i think he's a wonderful writer. >> host: mike powell, rushton, virginia.inia 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?re he gets in our minds, doesn't he? >> guest: okay. yes, it's wonderful to have aay chance to talk about shakespeare, and he's quite right, mike, there's shakespeare, and then there's everyone else. one of the things that i think is -- i mean, there's so much to say about shakespeare, so let me just say one thing. one thing 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, but that's how it begins. it's also a political narrative about intrigues in the danish court including rebelside. it's also a love story between two rather mentally disturbed lovers. it's also, in part, a comedy.

the rosenkranz sections are clearly composed comically as showed in the play about those 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 differentffer kinds of story and put them all in the same story, and it works. the trick is you have to be snake spear. [laughter] before shakespeare. i but even if you're not, it shows us we can write these kind of books which don't have to be just romances or just historical novels or just ghost stories or just political novels. they can be all of those at once be you find a way to do it. and i think that's a thing thato i've tried to learn from that to write books that are many thingn not just one thing.

but i think part of that comes fromom the permission that willm shakespeare gave us to write like that, you know? wri and i think all of us who follow him are indebted for that, for that gift.t >> host: what advice would you give to those of us who have attempted shakespeare, yet have trouble with the language of thh time? >> 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, yousp know, its use of metaphore and be even its vocabulary canfr 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 and it's because they come alivp in performance. and so my view is don't -- i mean, have few of us -- very new new -- very few of us sit around and read plays. pl i think exactly the same is true of shakespeare. the shakespearean performanceeas reveals his mysteries. a good production of shakespeare is clear, is clear. we noaa they're talking about. >> host: hartford, connecticut. you're onle with salman rushdie. >> caller: hi, mr. rushdie, howi are you? i'm from pakistan, i have three questions/comments for you. do youin have any comments on india/pakistan relations and, third, what is your mother's

tongue? ear >> guest: yeah, i've been to india a lot. because of coming from an indian-muslim spanish, and be what coi think about thethat relations between india andy pakistan, we know they're very bad, those relations, and 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. it was 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 inam a battle against terrorism.ag and at the same time sponsors terrorist groups which make,

which carry out terrorist attacks against its neighbor. and i think it's perfect legitimate of india to demand -- and not just india, of all of us -- that if pakistan really wishes to convince india it is 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 pack stab perhaps -- pakistan perhaps were trying to diffuse 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 peaceher. 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.an 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.m. >> guest: well, you know, i don'tyo know -- i mean, i don'ta know the rights and wrongs of w the arrest warrant, youa know? it's easy to believe that somebody's after him and trying to, and trying to, you know, frame him. anybody with even a moderate degree of paranoia could believe ha that was true. that that was true. but i don't know, is the truth.

interpol, presumably, takes seriously the issuing of arrest warrants, and all i can say is we have to wait and see about that. about the issues of the wikileaks revelations, i mean, i would say as a note of cautionn that it's important for all countries to be able to sometimes do things in private, you know?now? that without any kind of secret diplomacy many things could noty 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 matter more than source protection and if you start revealing certain kinds of raw data, people thatou you might not wish to would be willing to work out where theyat came from, and people can start dying. i mean, there's no question. if a source is compromised, the source gets killed very often.ed so there's that. and i think that's an important caveat. having said that, of course, there's something very delightful about watching oure'

leaders with their pants down. and i think, actually, it's not the american government that comes the worse out of this ---i the worst out of this in terms of the leaks that have come out so far. w goodness knows what's still to h come. but the people who really come out badly are the leaders of the air ash world. you know, the thing that was revealed about. how every single arab country has been beggingn the united states to attack iran, every single one. the syrians, all of them, please, please, please, go and take them out, you know?m and you know perfectly well thak if united states had agreed to do that what they would be asked do by every country in the arab world, all those countries would uniformly and immediately have condemned it. they would have said, how daree you s attack our muslim brother. after begging for it, you know.? >> and so i think the hypocrisy of the arab leadership is one of the most pleasurable discoveries about this. but i do have a concern, i do

have a concern about the safety of intelligence personnel, of covert operatives and is so on. and i think that's a genuine concern. h >> host: david in costa mesa, california. please, go ahead. >> caller: thank you very much. mr. rushdie, if you had a chance to sit down with is secretary of state clinton and the object was to overcome the tyrannical theocracy in persian anda establish a secular representative government, what factors and what steps would you suggest considering overt or covert pressure sanctions, economic developments and theen interest interests of the women's movement, the union movement and the students in persian? >> guest: well, look, again, let me just reiterate that i'm whatt we call a novelist and that it may not be that my diplomatic philosophyhy is the most sophisticated in the world because i'm a