Word: bombay
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...absurdist nightmare, a story that all but defied the Western imagination. A middle-aged author, born in Bombay but for many years resident in London, writes a long, sardonic novel, by turns philosophical and comic and fantastic. In the book's opening scene, two middle-aged Indian actors fall 29,002 feet from a jetliner that has just been exploded by terrorists over the English Channel. They have an animated conversation as they hurtle toward earth; they land safely, but then their troubles begin anew. Along the way, the author writes about his schooling and young adulthood in Britain, about...
Practically nobody, however, has managed to touch the sensitive nerve of a vast section of mankind as effectively as Salman Rushdie. In Bombay seven prominent writers and intellectuals, all non-Muslims, declared in a joint statement, "The pain of scurrilous intrusion into the regions of the sacred is not felt by the so-called fundamentalists only, but is the common experience of the whole, besieged ((Muslim)) minority. While there can be rational opposition to their faith, there should be no outraging of it by obscenity and slander...
...talking about a book that doesn't exist," he said. "The book that is worth killing people for and burning flags for is not the book I wrote." As Rushdie saw it, his book "isn't actually about Islam, but about migration, metamorphosis, divided selves, love, death, London and Bombay." The sad irony, he said, is "that after working for five years to give voice and fictional flesh to the immigrant culture of which I am myself a member, I should see my book burned, largely unread, by the people it's about -- people who might find some pleasure...
...this hybrid creature," Rushdie said shortly before going into hiding. Most of his life has been spent as an outsider, an alien among local populations. He was born in Bombay in 1947, two months before the British pulled out of India; his parents were well-to-do Kashmiri Muslims and admirers of English customs and manners. Young Salman's religion and pale skin made him something of an anomaly in his native city...
...death sentence hanging over his head, Rushdie issues an apology but remains reviled by millions of Muslims. It is an extraordinary controversy, stretching from the dusty streets of the Middle East to the bookstores of America. -- What Muslims find blasphemous in The Satanic Verses. -- Salman Rushdie, born in Bombay, educated at Cambridge...