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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Dec 18, 2012 AT 07:16 IST
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Edited At: Dec 18, 2012 07:16 IST
It's all happening out there.
First, this year's Nobel prize winnder for literature, Mo Yan, declined to sign a petition -- endorsed by more than 130 other Nobel laureates -- asking for the release of Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace laureate. Mr Xiabao was sentenced to 11 years in prison back in 2009 for criticizing the Chinese government and calling for greater openness.
In a press conference in Stockholm a few days back, Mr Yan said while censorship should not stand in the way of the truth, defamation and rumours "should be censored."
"But," he added, "I also hope that censorship, per se, should have the highest principle".
"When I was taking my flight, going through the customs ... they also wanted to check me even taking off my belt and shoes. But I think these checks are necessary."
Refusing to elaborate further on the case of Liu, Mr Yan directed reporters to the comments he made shortly after winning the prize, when he said he hoped Liu would be freed, but said he had no plans to sign a petition calling for the activist's release. "I have always been independent. I like it that way. When someone forces me to do something, I don't do it," he said.
Mr Yan went on the expand on this theme in his Nobel lecture as well: 
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Dec 18, 2012 AT 07:16 IST, Edited At: Dec 18, 2012 07:16 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Nov 12, 2012 AT 20:15 IST
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Edited At: Nov 12, 2012 20:15 IST
Finally, 15 years after the literary feud between Salman Rushdie and John Le Carré erupted in the letters pages of the Guardian in 1997, the latter has told the London Times "that their mutual loathing has finally come to an end."
Back in 1997, Rushdie had accused Le Carré of promoting censorship and had gone on to characterise him as a "dunce" and a " pompous ass.'' Christopher Hitchens too had jumped in the exchange and said that Mr Le Carré 's conduct reminded him " that of a man who, having relieved himself in his own hat, makes haste to clamp the brimming chapeau on his head."
"Two rabid ayatollahs could not have done a better job. But will the friendship last?" Mr Le Carré had countered, pointing out that he was more concerned about saving lives than about Mr Rushdie's royalties, and that Mr Rushdie was ''self-canonizing'' and ''arrogant.''
Mr Rushdie was allowed the last word by the newspaper, and had gone on to say about Mr Le Carré: It's true I did call him a pompous ass, which I thought pretty mild in the circumstances. "Ignorant" and "semi-literate" are dunces' caps he has skilfully fitted on his own head.
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Nov 12, 2012 AT 20:15 IST, Edited At: Nov 12, 2012 20:15 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Nov 07, 2012 AT 23:06 IST
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Edited At: Nov 07, 2012 23:06 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Nov 07, 2012 AT 23:06 IST, Edited At: Nov 07, 2012 23:06 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Oct 22, 2012 AT 03:59 IST
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Edited At: Oct 22, 2012 03:59 IST
Ashok Malik in the Asian Age:
In April 1992, Mushirul Hasan, then pro-vice chancellor of Delhi’s Jamia Milia Islamia, gave an interview to Sunday magazine in which he called for lifting the ban on Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. “The banning of the book”, Mr Hasan said, “or any book for that matter, rarely helps. On the contrary, it lends the book greater notoriety”. The interview caused a storm. Students and teachers at Jamia protested. Mr Hasan was prevented from coming to work. When he attempted to do so after a prolonged period, he was beaten up. In reality, he had fallen victim to a Congress clique that wanted to “recapture” Jamia from academics allegedly affiliated to the CPI(M).
One of the Congress instigators was Mr Khurshid, then deputy minister for commerce. In The Book on Trial: Fundamentalism and Censorship in India, Girija Kumar writes: “(Khurshid) made the extraordinarily outrageous statement that the liberals like Prof Mushirul Hasan ‘should be willing to pay the price of a liberal’”. A CPI(M) statement of the time was categorical: “It is highly unfortunate that certain minority fundamentalist forces are being aided and abetted by certain Congress (I) leaders, including some ministers like Salman Khurshid”.
In his book, Kumar wonders why Sunday “interviewed a number of Muslim politicians and intellectuals on the subject of The Satanic Verses”. There was “much speculation about the reasons… to revive the dormant controversy”. In his report on the Jamia Milia incidents, Justice M.M. Ismail, who otherwise criticised Mr Hasan, too considered the Sunday article, Kumar writes, “as motivated, and ‘an attempt at deliberate adventure’”. Was the article calculated to provoke a reaction? Only the person who wrote it can clarify. It carried the by-line of Louise Fernandes.
Read the full article at the Asian Age: Khurshid & MaCaulay
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Oct 22, 2012 AT 03:59 IST, Edited At: Oct 22, 2012 03:59 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 19, 2012 AT 23:41 IST
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Edited At: Sep 19, 2012 23:41 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 19, 2012 AT 23:41 IST, Edited At: Sep 19, 2012 23:41 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 15, 2012 AT 16:16 IST
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Edited At: Sep 15, 2012 16:16 IST
Salman Rushdie to BBC Radio 4 Today on the recent protests in the Muslim world against a video clip posted on Youtube:
...means a number of things. In the case of Satanic Verses, it meant that we stood up for what needed to be defended and we managed to defend it. In a larger sense, it's more problematic. The events surrounding the Satanic Verses created a climate of fear that has not dissipated that makes it harder for books -- not even books critical of Islam -- books, anything about Islam, to be published.
This idea of respect, which is a code word for fear is something we have to overcome And I very much felt that what happened to me was a harbinger of many things that followed. And I think you can draw a direct line of connection from the entire Satanic Verses controversy to the 9/11 attacks, to the 7/7 attacks in England to what's happening today across the Muslim world -- this extraordinary thin-skinned, paranoid reaction to a piece of garbage, which any rational person would say, yes, that is a piece of garbage and we can ignore it...
Today presenter James Naughtie: You mean the film?
Salman Rushdie: ....this video or clip from an alleged film which may or may not exist. Any reasonable person would say, yes, that's crap, it's an ugly crap, and we should just dismiss it as unimportant and proceed with our day. But the idea that you react to that by holding an entire nation and its diplomatic representatives responsible, when they weren't remotely aware of, is ugly and wrong.
I think what we have to do is to insist -- all of us, all of us -- that the culture of this country is one of open discourse and the point about open discourse is that people will constantly say things you don't like. But if you can't defend the right of people to say things you don't like, then you don't believe in free speech. And often in the free speech lobby you find yourself defending things you detest. But you know there is no trick to defend stuff you agree with or stuff that particularly doesn't get up your nose. It's when somebody does something that you really despise and loathe, when somebody says something like that, that's when you discover if you believe in free speech.
And I think we do believe in free speech and maybe we need to stand up for it more clearly.
I think there is certain confusion. I think what happened in Libya -- the attack on the embassy, the killing of the ambassador -- may not have been related to this idiotic video but may have been a pre-planned Salafi attack, an indication of this is that the flag that was put out on the embassy in Libya is the flag that is very frequently used by Al-Qaeda. I think that's a different thing. I think that today is Friday and today across the Muslim world there is this absurdly hysterical protest about a piece of garbage that really needs to be named as such. And I think the Muslim world needs to learn that to react every single time to pathetic, deliberate provocation -- not even impressive provocation -- in this way, to believe that in the face of this minor, little pinprick that it is ok to attack property, to threaten people, maybe even take life, that is not acceptable. It is not acceptable, it is an ugly reaction and it needs to be named as ugly.
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Sep 15, 2012 AT 16:16 IST, Edited At: Sep 15, 2012 16:16 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Sep 11, 2012 AT 01:56 IST
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Edited At: Sep 11, 2012 01:56 IST
The New Yorker has a fascinating extract from Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie's memoirs of his days in hiding from Khomeini's fatwa. A short excerpt from that extract:
He needed a name, the police told him in Wales. His own name was useless; it was a name that could not be spoken, like Voldemort in the not yet written Harry Potter books. He could not rent a house with it, or register to vote, because to vote you needed to provide a home address and that, of course, was impossible. To protect his democratic right to free expression, he had to surrender his democratic right to choose his government...
“Probably better not to make it an Asian name,” Stan said. “People put two and two together sometimes.” So he was to give up his race as well. He would be an invisible man in whiteface.
He thought of writers he loved and tried combinations of their names. Vladimir Joyce. Marcel Beckett. Franz Sterne. He made lists of such combinations, but all of them sounded ridiculous. Then he found one that did not. He wrote down, side by side, the first names of Conrad and Chekhov, and there it was, his name for the next eleven years. Joseph Anton....
He had spent his life naming fictional characters. Now, by naming himself, he had turned himself into a sort of fictional character as well. Conrad Chekhov wouldn’t have worked. But Joseph Anton was someone who might exist. Who now did exist. Conrad, the translingual creator of wanderers, of voyagers into the heart of darkness, of secret agents in a world of killers and bombs, and of at least one immortal coward, hiding from his shame; and Chekhov, the master of loneliness and of melancholy, of the beauty of an old world destroyed, like the trees in a cherry orchard, by the brutality of the new, Chekhov, whose “Three Sisters” believed that real life was elsewhere and yearned eternally for a Moscow to which they could not return: these were his godfathers now. It was Conrad who gave him the motto to which he clung, as if to a lifeline, in the long years that followed. In the now unacceptably titled “The Nigger of the Narcissus,” the hero, a sailor named James Wait, stricken with tuberculosis on a long sea voyage, is asked by a fellow-sailor why he came aboard, knowing that he was unwell. “I must live till I die—mustn’t I?” Wait replies.
In his present circumstances, the question felt like a command. “Joseph Anton,” he told himself, “you must live till you die.”
***
Read the full extract here
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Sep 11, 2012 AT 01:56 IST, Edited At: Sep 11, 2012 01:56 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Apr 11, 2012 AT 01:46 IST
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Edited At: Apr 11, 2012 01:46 IST
Salman Rushdie on Twitter:
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Apr 11, 2012 AT 01:46 IST, Edited At: Apr 11, 2012 01:46 IST
POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Mar 09, 2012 AT 18:30 IST
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Edited At: Mar 09, 2012 18:30 IST
"Hullabaloo Over Satanic Verses" was made by Gita Sahgal for the documentary series 'Bandung File' in 1989. Commissioned by Channel Four. Via Salil Tripathi on Facebook
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POSTED BY Sundeep
ON Mar 09, 2012 AT 18:30 IST, Edited At: Mar 09, 2012 18:30 IST
POSTED BY Buzz
ON Feb 06, 2012 AT 22:01 IST
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Edited At: Feb 06, 2012 22:01 IST
Amitav Ghosh on his blog:
I have never attended the Jaipur Literary Festival; nor does a visit loom in the foreseeable future. This is largely (but not wholly) because I have no taste for tamashas. Although unusual, this aversion is by no means unknown in the Indian subcontinent. I know of many writers and readers who share it, and I suspect that most of us were drawn to the world of books precisely because it provided an island of quiet within the din of tamasha-stan.
My own inclinations make it difficult for me to understand why Salman Rushdie is so drawn to this festival. But each to their own and I recognize that I am in a tiny minority. The great majority of writers seem to want to go and anyone who does should certainly be able to. It is appalling that Rushie was prevented from attending and I am wholly in agreement with those who believe that this bodes very ill indeed for the future of free expression in India...
As a child I was drawn to books because they were a refuge from a world that seemed to be at war with the very idea of an inner life. That world has become today exponentially more noisy, crowded and intrusive than ever before. Public life in India is now a whirling continuum that seamlessly unites cricket, politics and Bollywood. Each domain leaks into the other and the major figures are all closely linked. It is no coincidence that many of these elements are also much in evidence at book festivals. The intention evidently is to make the book world another link in the tightly joined whirligig of Cripollywood. It is easy to see the attractions of this, especially for writers who are striving to bring their work to public notice. But there is a price to pay: we need to remind ourselves that Bollywood movies are routinely re-edited to accommodate protests of various kinds. Recent incidents in Jaipur and in Kolkata, where Taslima Nasreen was also prevented from participating in a festival, suggest that Indian publishing will have to adapt its practices to those of the film industry if it is to pitch its tent beside the three-ring circus of the tamasha culture.
Read the full blogpost on Amitav Ghosh's blog: Festivals and Freedom
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POSTED BY Buzz
ON Feb 06, 2012 AT 22:01 IST, Edited At: Feb 06, 2012 22:01 IST
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