‘We didn’t throw things at each other…’

Writing about a writer is difficult, and writing about the author of a book that changed the literary landscape forever is nothing short of terrifying. Happily, Salman Rushdie is remarkably easy to talk to and extremely matter-of-fact about the alchemy that creates those dizzying staircases of words on which he takes the reader on magic, swirling trips.

So there we were on blistery, bright afternoon in Bangalore with actor Shriya Saran, director Deepa Mehta and super-articulate Salman talking about the film version of his adamantly unfilmable baap of Bookers, Midnight’s Children.

 “Really easy, I just took out chunks,” Salman says with a laugh. “The script began at more than double the length. The first version was 250 pages, which was obviously ridiculous. It would have been a four-and-a-half-hour film! It was just a process of finding what was essential and what was not. The novel is deliberately digressional. I think some of the stories are quite interesting, but in a movie you have to find that true line that will grab you at the beginning,” he says.

About the collaboration, Salman says with a laugh, “We didn’t throw things at each other; it is difficult to throw things from New York to Toronto! It was oddly civilised. We would disagree, but then we would just argue it out.” “It was always about the film,” adds Deepa. “It wasn’t about the ego.”

Salman admits to the challenge of presenting magic realism on screen. “In a film that basically looks naturalistic, how do you integrate magic into the real world without it looking stupid? The effects were some of the hardest things to get right.”

A case of the book being the canvas of the mind while a film is on a canvas of celluloid. “Film, in general, has a problem with interiority,” Salman says. “Film is all ‘do’. You have to understand the interior life through exterior action. Here is something that is happening inside the character’s head. How do you represent that?”

The film has done the festival circuit, and Salman talks of “two of the funniest comments we heard. There was this person who said, ‘it is like Forrest Gump with brown people! I wanted to say this book was written a long time before Forrest Gump, so maybe Forrest Gump is like Midnight’s Children with white people! And someone else compared it to X-Men — you know people with magical powers!”

The author admits to enjoying his new space — promoting a film rather than a novel. “The fun thing is other people can do some of the talking! I spent most of my life sitting in a room with myself, scribbling. Suddenly to be working with other people was a very new and nice thing for me. After all these years of writing novels, I have been working on three projects, and none of them has been a novel — my book which is non-fiction, the screen play, and I am in the relatively early stage of developing a TV series. I am now sort of itching to get back into the room by myself.”

About the TV series he is working on, Salman says: “It is a bit of science fiction and a bit of politics and very, very weird. Weird is what does best in cable television drama. Nobody wants another police detective story. But a detective who is a serial killer in his spare time is good. I guess they came to me because they thought here is somebody who can do weird!”

The film has several languages, including “Kashmiri, Punjabi, Bhojpuri, some Hindi and some English”, says Salman. “There is a scene at the end of the Bangladesh war where the Pakistani general has to surrender to his Indian counterpart. In that generation, they’d all have gone to Sandhurst, and would be whiskey-soda guys, speaking whiskey-soda English—‘bad show old sport’ kind of thing. While the film is primarily in English, it is adulterated with other languages.”

Subtitles, Salman says “are not a problem anymore, thanks to Slumdog Millionaire. It showed the American distributors that subtitles don’t matter. Where possible, the subtitles are very close, if not exactly like the dialogue in the novel. So it was another way of having the flavour of the novel in writing on screen. When the Kashmiri boatman says ‘that is a nose to start a family on’, he is saying it in Kashmiri, but the subtitles use the actual line from the book.”

 Harper's government claims the revamped law will enhance property ownership and economic growth in designated Aboriginal lands that are hurting economically. Of course, the methods they want to employ are based on the same philosophy that has oppressed native people since Europeans first arrived on American shores and First Nations people have not been consulted with in the whole ramming through of Bill C-45 in the Canadian Parliament.

They want to ease federal regulations to make it easier for big corporations and (compliant?) Canadian provincial governments to promote economic growth, but based on rules that pay no attention to sustainability, that trample native fishing rights, and that are based on artificial map boundaries that bear no relation to the fragile reality of ecosystems.

What's also so disturbing about what's happening in Canada is that those in power are, once again, pitting native Aboriginal groups against each other in the quest to achieve goals that most certainly are not focused on the welfare of those First Nations people. Of course, this tried and true strategy has worked throughout the ages when the powerful seek to take from the less powerful. Keep them impoverished, then promise them good-paying jobs and thriving, rich communities if they just...allow a corporation to come in and rape the landscape. Be really nice to the tribal people based upstream and "share" the riches from the minerals or oil extracted there, but ignore those that are downstream and who will be (literally) pissed on when polluted waters kill their fish and destroy their drinking water.

And that brings us to another typical aspect of this proposal in Ottawa. It's one that is very familiar here in the U.S. Neoliberal policies are completely wedded to, and happily ever after with, the practice of displacement of costs.

The Harper government wants to give more power to Provincial governments by weakening federal environmental regulations, which is the same game that's been played for decades by right-wingers here in the United States. Promise the high-paying jobs in one community and to hell with the town...or province...or other country...and any ecosystems that are downstream. Play them off against each other and laugh all the way to the bank while the planet dies and those that you exploit are fighting amongst themselves. All the while, get the compliant, mainstream media to play your tune to the masses and keep them ill-informed, distracted, and divided.

The divide and conquer approach by the powers-that-be has been applied repeatedly throughout the world so corporate interests benefit economically at the expense of the environment and poorer people (the 99%, in their world view). Here in the U.S., this strategy is currently in overdrive with the Keystone pipeline issue, pitting small farmers, environmentalists, tribal people, and others against labor unions. It's also happening with mountaintop removal in West Virginia and other states, and with the proposed "coal trains" that are intended to ship mountains of coal to China by ferrying the material across the west- and Pacific-coast states to various ports. Locals who are desperate for work in an economy that is being held hostage by corporate interests and their puppets in the U.S. government are pitted against others who are adversely affected by that economic development that benefits the first group.

As Idle No More and other grassroots movements such as Occupy Wall Street emphasize again, it's all about an economic/political system with "values" that do not focus on the future or the common good, but only on short-term gain (for a few). These movements remind that if those in power prioritized sustainability and renewable energy resources, for instance, that we would all benefit. The planet can be protected and sustainable jobs created as well. But the few who benefit massively from the predominant, neoliberal model would be deprived of their massive, short-term profits, especially those in the extraction industries.

Therefore, in the instance of Bill C-45 and the native people in Canada, the latter must be forced to speak the English of that economic system, ostensibly for their own good. It's just another example of the same old arrogance and paternalism of the western European model that's always been shoved down the throats of native people.

The Idle No More effort is also a stark reminder that no country is immune from the ravages of the neoliberal, corporate global rule model. For many progressives in the United States, for instance, Canada has been perceived as the "kinder, gentler" nation, where the common good has always been recognized as an essential part of the culture. This is the land where draft evaders could flee the U.S. during the Vietnam War and many fantasized about moving to during years of the far-right swing under George W. Bush.

Apparently, that's no longer the case, under Harper. This became clear when Canada began shipping back Iraq war evaders and is more apparent now with the Harper government's policies that display contempt for anything "environmental."

Maybe that's a good thing. So now the global emperor is even more without clothes and a wake-up call has been issued to us all. While the powers-that-be want to tear down boundary lines for the purposes of their making big profits, such as through "free" trade deals, they don't want to extend that philosophy to the 99% if it means environmental protections or labor rights. And they most certainly don't want movements such as Idle No More to begin transcending the boundaries that they have established to keep us all divided and conquered.