rushdie: Unlike Rushdie, who writes regardless of consequences, some write to hide what they really think

An acquaintance of mine lately began a vicious marketing campaign towards me after he realised that I’ve my whisky topped up with cola. To be truthful to him, it was his ready-to-mingle single malt that I colaed. However I reminded him that it was my palate, my guidelines. Fairly unexpectedly, he was doubly offended after I advised him, on Independence Day too, that it is a free nation. ‘You might be free to behave, however be ready for the consquences,’ he mentioned, taking away my half-full glass that instantly turned half-empty.

Now, I am an accommodative chap. Which at the present time implies that I’ve robust likes and weak dislikes. So, in hindsight, maybe I ought to have simply gone together with the circulation and had the drink ‘on the rocks with a splash of water to launch the wonderful smoky aroma yada yada’. However how would I do know that my acquaintance – now ex-acquaintance – was going to be deeply offended by my mixing whisky with cola? In reality, not figuring out what could set off somebody to take offence is the place the issue lies.

Not like, say, Salman Rushdie, I’m not an enormous fan of free speech. Whereas actual writers have a tendency to offer themselves the job of jolting readers out of their consolation zones and presumptions, I’ve no intention of airing my views, opinions, ideas and beliefs. If the insurance coverage assessor Franz Kafka believed that ‘A guide have to be the axe for the frozen sea inside us,’ my inclination is in the direction of books and writings being the frozen chunks behind which one can disguise one’s ideas and emotions.

Would Rushdie, as an example, have skipped the Novel That Shan’t Be Named (NTSBN) and gone on straight to jot down the wonderful The Moor’s Final Sigh (1995) from Disgrace (1983) if he had realised the Salman Ruckus he would have created writing NTSBN? I doubt it.

I do not suppose Rushdie would have cared a flying-falling pair of djinns that NTSBN might probably evoke violent literary criticism that will see the novel’s Japanese translator murdered, its Italian translator stabbed a number of instances, its Norwegian writer shot thrice, its Turkish translator focused by a mob that set hearth to the resort wherein he was staying and thereby killing 37 individuals.

Oh, and Rushdie himself being stabbed a number of instances final week within the US – 34 years after the Rajiv Gandhi authorities banned NTSBN’s import in India (studying, possessing or downloading the novel stays authorized); 33 years after the Iranian state put a bounty on his head; and 24 years after Rushdie got here out of ‘hiding’ after Iran’s president mentioned that the Rushdie affair was ‘fully completed’ and its international minister mentioned that no motion could be taken to threaten the author’s life and nobody could be inspired to do the identical.

However, it seems, lots of people did not get the memo – or, extra accurately, threw the memo into the trash.

This may really be the right time for the Indian authorities, not an appeaser of Islamic fundamentalists who masquerade as extreme literary critics, to raise the import ban on NTSBN. It’s going to be a rightful present of energy towards mad, dangerous and harmful mullahs and their votaries like Jamia Urdu Aligarh chancellor Rafiq Zakaria, who in 1988, mentioned, ‘If Salman Rushdie says what he has written is fiction, then he’s a liar’ – a curious reversal of the standard accusation of made-up stuff being offered as details lately.

As for my newest venture, I’ve been honing my expertise in precognition — the follow of predicting the consequences of actions made well-known by Philip Okay Dick in his brief story ‘Minority Report,’ wherein the American state within the foreseeable future makes use of ‘precogs’ to sort out pre-crime – prison acts earlier than they happen. Until then, I shan’t write what I imagine, what I’ll suspect, or what I do know, lest somebody, someplace out of nowhere takes one thing I write or utter badly and units out to ‘cancel’ me, figuratively or actually.

As for having my whisky with cola and ingesting it too, I shall proceed to have it within the privateness of my very own firm and that of some trusted, amenable of us. In spite of everything, it is a free nation. Nonetheless.