Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

What could have been a better way to start this journal than writing something about the booker of bookers? I am no literary critic and please don’t read this as a book review. But I am what most of you are… enthusiasts. So I would write in my capacity as an enthusiast.

Midnight’s Children was conceived by the author during his tour of India. He realized that he could right a book about the tumultuous post-independence India through this book. What made the whole idea interesting was a poetic simile between the protagonist Saleem Sinai and India. Just like a new born child, a newly born nation is full of potentials. This book is about how the fate of Saleem and his country was undone by it’s political class, the one’s with power and the one’s with greed.

“Nehru and Shastri have fully proved their mortality; but there are still plenty of others left, clutching Time in their mummified fingers and refusing to let go…….”

It is a scintillating story of Saleem from the time of India’s birth till sometime after the emergency of 1975. They say the style used by the author is “magical realism” and it’s true. The characters are well developed and the author has cleverly created a link between them. The dark and subtle humor never goes unnoticed. I especially liked the metaphors used by him to describe characters, especially the most controversial one…Ms Indira Gandhi.

“……who revealed to me that the country’s corrupt, ‘black’ economy had grown as large as the official, ‘white’ variety, which……Her hair parted in the centre, so that depending on which profile she presented, she resembled either a stout or an ermine……”

Not many authors can create such an influence on the reader. The book surly gives a fresh and I must add “mythical” perspective to the whole emergency issue, which I not only liked but also admired.

This book is a must read, Salman Rushdie has rightly been called as the person responsible for taking Indian writings to the world.