The Limits of Freedom of Speech and the Rushdie Episode — justicekatju.blogspot.in — Readability
just some things... i am not sure about.
For example, portraying Jesus Christ as a gay person may be acceptable in the West today, but to depict religious figures of Hinduism or Islam as gay would be totally unacceptable in India and may probably lead to religious riots and violence. This is because people in India are much more religious than in the West.
Some people describe Rushdie as a great writer because he has won the Booker Prize. In this connection, I wish to say that Literature Prizes are often a mystery. To give an example, out of the approximately 100 Nobel Prizes given for Literature till today, nobody even remembers the names of 80 or more winners, whereas many great writers were not given the prize. So winning the Booker Prize to my mind proves little. ‘Midnight’s Children’, for which Rushdie got the Booker Prize, is almost unreadable. It is difficult to understand what Rushdie is driving at. So the new criterion for good literature is that it should be unreadable!
Personal opinion.
One had expected a serious discussion on Indian writers like Kabir, Premchand, Sharat Chandra, Manto, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Ghalib, Faiz, etc. or foreign writers like Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac, Goethe, Schiller, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorki etc. But instead the total focus was on Rushdie. Discussion on good writers was marginalized.
Personal opinion.
never mind. the entire piece is bla bla bla.
just some things... i am not sure about.
For example, portraying Jesus Christ as a gay person may be acceptable in the West today, but to depict religious figures of Hinduism or Islam as gay would be totally unacceptable in India and may probably lead to religious riots and violence. This is because people in India are much more religious than in the West.
Some people describe Rushdie as a great writer because he has won the Booker Prize. In this connection, I wish to say that Literature Prizes are often a mystery. To give an example, out of the approximately 100 Nobel Prizes given for Literature till today, nobody even remembers the names of 80 or more winners, whereas many great writers were not given the prize. So winning the Booker Prize to my mind proves little. ‘Midnight’s Children’, for which Rushdie got the Booker Prize, is almost unreadable. It is difficult to understand what Rushdie is driving at. So the new criterion for good literature is that it should be unreadable!
Personal opinion.
One had expected a serious discussion on Indian writers like Kabir, Premchand, Sharat Chandra, Manto, Kazi Nazrul Islam, Ghalib, Faiz, etc. or foreign writers like Dickens, Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair, Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac, Goethe, Schiller, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Gorki etc. But instead the total focus was on Rushdie. Discussion on good writers was marginalized.
Personal opinion.
never mind. the entire piece is bla bla bla.