If You Have Children You Worry About

I Used To Write A Monthly Column For The 'new York Times' Syndicate. But I Stopped Because I Found It Really Hard To Have One Extreme Opinion A Month. I Don't Know How These Columnists Have Two Or Three Ideas A Week; I Was Having Difficulty Having 12 Things To Say A Year.

One Of The Reasons My Name Is Rushdie Is That My Father Was An Admirer Of Ibn Rush'd, The 12th Century Arab Philosopher Known As Averroes In The West. In His Time, He Was Making The Non-literalist Case For Interpreting The Koran.

The Muslim Population In India Is, Largely Speaking, Not Radicalised. From The Beginning, They Were Always Very Secular-minded.

Our Human Tragedy Is That We Are Unable To Comprehend Our Experience, It Slips Through Our Fingers, We Can't Hold On To It, And The More Time Passes, The Harder It Gets...my Father Said That The Natural World Gave Us Explanations To Compensate For The Meanings We Could Not Grasp. The Slant Of The Cold Sunlight On A Winter Pine, The Music Of Water, An Oar Cutting The Lake And The Flight Of Birds, The Mountains' Nobility , The Silence Of The Silence. We Are Given Life But Must Accept That It Is Unattainable And Rejoice In What Can Be Held In The Eye, The Memory, The Mind.

Hyperrealism Can Create An Atmosphere Of Surrealism Because Nobody Sees The World In Such Detail.