Midnight's septuagenarians

Saleem, nearly thirty-one-years old, puts on display the many personal artefacts and feelings and notions and nicknames and omens that are his inheritance

As independent India turns 74, so do the children of midnight, and in particular, one loveable snot-nosed baldy. Saleem Sinai, the cucumber-nosed narrator of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, who, by being born on the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947, finds himself “mysteriously handcuffed to history” — a newly-liberated country and a new-born baby share a birthday that causes interferences and entanglements in each other’s fates. 

What are the stories that septuagenarian Saleem might tell, were he to recount events now? Would he be able to view the septuagenarian democracy’s politics, its traumas, its unrequited dreams through his grandfather Aadam