Quote of the day by Salman Rushdie: “To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ...."

“To understand just one life you have to swallow the world ... do you wonder, then, that I was a heavy child?”

Explanation:  This quote has been borrowed from Salman Rushdie’s famous novel The Midnight Children and implies that to understand one single life, one needs to have a context of where they are coming from, the chaotic history of their nation and world around them.

In other words, a life is shaped by multiple forces around them, including cultural, political, personal and even global influences. Each event in the world has an impression on a life and every person carries an invisible heavy psychological and historical baggage on their back.

It also implies that no human being exists in complete isolation and there is an interconnectedness with the world outside. One cannot study a person without knowing what has been happening around them for years.

The author compares the character of Saleem to a heavy child because the small kid is literally carrying the history of his country, the emotional burden of his passed on fellowmen, all inside him. To understand a child, his behaviour, his psychological blueprint, one has to understand the social, political and situational circumstances amidst which they grew up in.

About the author  Salman Rushdie (born in 1947) is an Indian based British-American author whose works have been both influential and controversial.

Known for his sensitive religious and political writings, his work Midnight’s Children received recognition. However, another work The Satanic Verses landed as a controversial artwork which turned people against him. In 1989, some spiritual leaders in Iran had issued a fatwa against him (legal opinion) and other Muslim communities called his work blasphemous.

Recently in 2022, the author was attacked and seriously injured while he was on the stage at a literary event in New York.