Saturday, April 23, 2016
Buddha
I really like the connection that is made in the book between Buddha and Saleem. Buddha searched for his purpose and enlightenment for so long and has difficulty finding these factors. Saleem also knows that he has a larger purpose in life and he can't quite figure out what it is. Finally Buddha acquires this enlightenment that he has been searching for by meditating under a tree and realizing the Four Noble Truths. It also seems that Saleem reached a kind of enlightened state in a sense when his memory is wiped out by the bomb. He is then able to reinvent himself without the ties to his family and past. I found it to be a very interesting religious comparison.
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Rushdie definitely incorporates a lot of religions into his novel (Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism). I think this is definitely to show the real problems of India. It shows the diversity of India/Pakistan during the time the book was set. I think Rushdie also incorporates all these different religions to kind of bridge the gap between them. In other words, there was and still is so much conflict between religious groups, and I think Rushdie tries to show that we're not all that different. We're all still human in the end. Rushdie furthers this point by making Saleem sort of just disappears in the end, proving that so much conflict (between religions, ethnicities, or whatever it may be) will have very negative effects on the world.
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