RIFLE RANGE BOY

Midnight's Children (2012) It has been said that Salman Rushdie could not sell his movie to any studio. So, he finally sold its right to a company for $1 as it was a personal achievement for him - his 1981 Booker prize book being made into a movie. Almost a year after its release, Rushdie is yet to receive his $1! This story is a quasi-historical quasi-masala British-Canadian movie shot mainly in Sri Lanka, not Pakistan or India where the story happens, for fear of backlash for Hindu or Muslim communities. It tells a tale of a boy who was born on the stroke of midnight on the date India obtained Independence. It is a sort of a biography of his grandparents all the way down to his son with the history of India and the turmoil it went through the 20th century, from the serene lakes of Kashmir in 1917 through the blackest hour of  Emergency in 1977 in the background. The film had an impressive ensemble of famous Bollywood, Kollywood and even British-American actors - Rahul ...

The Moor's Last Sigh,  (1995) Salman Rushdie Ever since there was a bounty on his head, the desire to read his books increased. Even though I have not had the chance to lay my hands on the coveted book that attracted the world's attention to his work (Satanic Verses), I nevertheless managed to read more than 4 of his books. Just as his other books, his work is quite a hard read. The text is quite compact with loads of information that the readers have to digest. I had to take a break from reading this book to dwell into something less taxing to unwind. He, being an Indian lives up to the trademark of one, of being very verbose, expressive, long winded and not economical with his word. It is not that it is a bad thing. His indulgence in circumlocution and tangential talk illustrates his wide knowledge of things and his occasional swipe at things considered sacred to some. To drive his point into his flow of story, he brings in unrelated things like mythology, history and rel...