Saleem Sinai a nation's history. His life and his experiences in the novel are inseparable from the events taking place around him and so he truly becomes a child of history. A "Times of India" review calls Saleem the most loved of Rushdie's many characters despite, or perhaps because of, his being "the snot-nosed, cucumber-nosed know-all narrator of "Midnight’s Children", whose life swings between exultation and suffering, for he has been 'handcuffed to history', a coupling determined by his time of birth, midnight on August 15, 1947, when 'clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting'". India's national newspaper "The Hindu" noted the success
Salman Rushdie at the last minute after the government pressured the festival to stop it. Rushdie returned to India to address a conference in Delhi on 16 March 2012. In 2010 Anwar al-Awlaki published an Al-Qaeda hit list in "Inspire" magazine, including Rushdie along with other figures claimed to have insulted Islam, including Ayaan Hirsi Ali, cartoonist Lars Vilks and three "Jyllands-Posten" staff members: Kurt Westergaard, Carsten Juste, and Flemming Rose. The list was later expanded to include Stéphane "Charb" Charbonnier, who was murdered in a terror attack on "Charlie Hebdo" in Paris, along with 11 other people. After the attack, Al-Qaeda