Diary of Midnight’s children

16.08.11

[I was born with five hundred and others on the precise moment of India’s birth. Next day , i.e. on sixteenth August I received a letter from the ,then, PM Pandit Nehru, which congratulated me and said that my life will reflect India’s life. And now I think …]

Have sixty four years already passed? Where the time flies. I am old. … a tattered coat upon a stick… where palsy shakes a few , sad, last grey hairs, where youth grows pale and spectre-thin, and dies; where but to think is to be full of sorrow… but today I wont be egotist and self-cursing…

My sixty-fourth birthday went unnoticed. Because everyone was waiting eagerly for the next day, i.e. Today. Yesterday I wore black to support no…not Anna but my own long forgotten dream – to save my country. Optimism is a disease and even in my old age I was not spared. I will fight. …facing old age, Ulysses yearns to explore again…

I don’t know what the time will bring…

But I can smell , yes I do , its anger in the air… rising rising like blue flames burning like a midnight lamp

The Diary of Midnight's Children : Optimism is a Disease

" I do believe, that in spite of everything, people are still good at heart."
Dear Liria, even I held that for long ... but then I read that..."... optimism is a disease..." and dunno why I feel I was diseased till now. First, the disease of depression and then excess Optimism. Is there no other way to take things? Balance , but then in this maddening world where the balance is? 


This book , Midnight's Children , is no doubt a fascinating book. Mr. Rushdie has got his gifts and in it he exploited them at their best. But still its baffling... too much... it calls your attention , a literary nose ears eyes and then just punch you on your face and you feel it was just an another book but yes very fascinatingly told , to baffle you? Or the lines make a labyrinth? 


Well , I am looking forward to read some literary articles on the book. Specially on - Saleem and Women,  Saleem and History , The Ironies , The Paradoxes and Magic Realism...


No doubt I loved the technique and there are some lines which you just cant put off - for instance, 
"Love does not conquer all ... and optimism is a disease..."
"...I hear lies being spoken in the night, anything you want to be you can be, the greatest lie of all..."


And many more...


Rest for later.
Ciao...

The Diary of Midnight's Children : The Game

27-7-11

(I have really begun to doubt on the real-ness of time)

Feeling a deep sense of loss. What has been lost but? Some dice , some coin , some beads are missing… but to where have they gone? Diaries! my first friend in this world was a diary and others were those words and spaces captured in that diary… but here we will talk about games… didn’t I use to say, “The games that we always played…”

 

Snake and Ladders. He writes : “All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is just waiting around the corner, and for every snake, a ladder will compensate.”

Indeed an eternal truth, to which no explanation is requisite.

Two full pages without a full stop and first time I felt something sort of a liking for this narrative. Flowing, lucid, lyrical almost like chanting the sacred letters on beads… I felt like I am walking on silken road while reading the prose…

The Diary of Midnight's Children : in Fragments

(No date can be given because this draft was written in Fragments)



So our protagonist Saleem Sinai is not yet born. And we are around January 1947 , the most terrific year in the history of India. What a perfect time to be born.

"It seems like a day for big questions." ... Of course or why would I meet with a midnight tragedy , pause my writing work, resume again , fail again and now when I wake up I confront a big question. But leave that, here I must be in the circumference of the text. So the big the questions are -

Where the optimism is? If even time can be changed like this ("...clocks in Pakistan would run half an hour ahead of their Indian counterparts...") what's real anymore? And "what's real and what's true aren't necessarily the same."  Now no more about these questions.

The announcement of Saleem's birth saves one life. And then destiny takes Saleem's mother to a prophesy - a prophesy about Saleem's birth. Quite crudely , we come to know about Saleem Sinai. Something as the apparitions in Macbeth  had prophesied...

"He will have sons without having sons! He will be old before he is old! And he will die... before he is dead."

Well lets move on. There is this quote I had underlined : "My God... it seems that there are a million different things to love about every man." When Amina says this , I know what does she really mean. As her father , Ahmed Aziz , had once attempted to pray , she is attempting to love her husband. Its a nice way to love someone - love in bits. This way you would never fed up with the person and find  him anew every day. Only a woman can choose this way because a man always has more easy ways. But even when she tries to love his every part and action, what is surety that she would be able to love him in integrity? After all, "who... ever truly knows another human being completely?" In Adam Aziz's relationship with Naseem he had loved her (literally) in fragments and so could never be at peace with her when she came in his life in integrity. We think of fragments and are overjoyed that we are in love and yet we don't know who the person really is.

Anyway , one more typically Indian reference can be traced in the motif of 'nose'. These olfactory references are so powerful and obvious in the text that one can not ignore them. I guess would discuss them later.  

(to be continued...)

The Diary of Midnight's Children

“Please believe that I am falling apart.”

Quite impressive is the first sentence of the third chapter of Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie. But the following paragraph, specially the concluding lines explicating the science of ‘falling apart’, is what I would say pulls me back out of the text.

The book has a grand opening. And after the two pages you feel you have chosen a great book. And that’s not ironic. I loved when the protagonist’s grandfather (he is dwelling in the history of his past) meets an alteration in his faith in God. The whole incident is beautifully described and in somewhat filmy-graphic style.

 “. … And was knocked forever into the middle place, unable to worship a God in whose existence he could not wholly disbelieve. Permanent alteration: a hole.”

Such fragments are scattered all over the text but after all they remain fragments. In brief, Salman Rushdie seems to me the “Shobha De intellectualized”. The witty, adroit language and aphorisms* surely captivates a reader but this magic spell is unable to transform one.

However , this book seems more sensible and intellectual than many by Indian authors and of Indian context. Rushdie plays upon local words, phrases, attitudes and characters confidently and almost humorously. But I do not mean to examine the text critically just now --- I have only completed a half century, and Gosh six more are yet left.

Not a review but this time I intend to maintain a diary of Midnight’s Children. Primarily because this was an impulse and logically, because it’s a huge book and worth an attempt at critical analysis. This being the first post of this series, it may seem messy , unclear and digressing from the points but let us tolerate a bit and help to make it better.

A little overview and a bit of thought –

Saleem Sinai, the protagonist is not yet born. We meet his grandfather , Dr. Adam Aziz , a Germany return a skeptic, vulnerable fellow. He is shown to have lost his faith while hitting the stony frost ground and losing three drops of blood. Anyhow, It doesn’t convince. Losing a faith or even an alteration can occur if there is already a space and cause for that. Author’s choice for diction itself proves it:

“One Kashimiri morning in the early spring of 1915, my grandfather Adam Aziz hit his nose against a frost-hardened tussock of earth while attempting to pray.”  

This highlighted word emphasizes the fact that he was attempting and not actually whole-heartedly, devoutly praying. There is a great difference in ‘praying’ and ‘attempting to pray’.

The character sketch of Adam’s friend Tai and his wife Naseem is quite interesting, as they present the other side of Adam’s attitude. They are quite attached to the past and traditional beliefs. Such as, Naseem does not bother if the Maulvi teaches their children to hate non-Muslims because her only concern is that the children should be given the religious education and Tai despises Adam’s medical kit (leather-bag) and its instruments because they are the symbols of outside unknown world with its unknown maladies.

In the beginning , the story goes along with the story of India’s struggle for freedom. The Muslim perspective might contribute the second dimension to the history. Let us see that …

(to be continued...)