Midnight's Children leaped generations: Rushdie

"The book has leaped the generations, which is wonderful for me. I feared it might just be a topical book about the birth of India and that it wouldn't endure.     

"The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated," Rushdie told 'The Guardian' in an interview published today, a day after Midnight's Children was declared the winner of the 'Best of the Booker' title.     

 

The Midnight's Children, which had won the Booker Prize in 1981, catapulted Rushdie to fame and enabled him to quit his job in an ad agency. In 1993, to celebrate Booker prize's 25th year, Midnight's Children was chosen as the 'Booker of the Bookers' and yesterday it scored a  hat-trick when it was declared as the 'Best of the Booker' Prize winner.     

Some critics including Neel Mukherjee in a Guardian blog poured scorn on the latest award to the book, suggesting it is worthless and typifies the British tendency to rank every last little thing by means of increasingly fatuous democratic votes.     

But 61-year-old Rushdie is pleased to win it. Since he was on a tour to promote his new novel, The Enchantress of Florence, in suburban Miami, Rushdie could not attend the award ceremony in  London. Instead his sons Zafar and Milan received the award yesterday.     

On the award, he said "What's especially gratifying is that more than 50 per cent of those who voted for Midnight's Children are under 35."