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NRI model, Padma Lakshmi divorce
British author Salman Rushdie
London, July 02, 2007
Ravinder Sodhi
British author Salman Rushdie, 60, well known for his novel "The
Satanic Verses," which hurted many Muslims and sparked
death threats that forced him to live in hiding for nine years,
has agreed to divorce Padma Lakshmi, 37, because of her desire to
end their marriage. In 1989, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini,
Iran's religious leader, called on Muslims to kill Rushdie.
They were married in 2004 and she was his fourth wife and they
had no children.
 Salman
Rushdie:
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay, India, to a middle-class
Moslem family. His paternal grandfather was an Urdu poet, and his
father a Cambridge-educated businessman.
- At the age of fourteen Rushdie was sent to Rugby School in England.
- In 1964 Rushdie's parents moved to Karachi, Pakistan, joining
reluctantly the Muslim exodus - during these years there was a
war between India and Pakistan, and the choosing of sides and
divided loyalties burdened Rushdie heavily.
- Rushdie continued his studies at King's College, Cambridge,
where he read history. After graduating in 1968 he worked for
a time in television in Pakistan.
- He was an actor in a theatre group at the Oval House in Kennington
and from 1971 to 1981 he worked intermittently as a freelance
advertising copywriter for Ogilvy and Mather and Charles Barker.
- Anglo-Indian novelist, who uses in his works tales from various
genres - fantasy, mythology, religion, oral tradition. Rushdie's
narrative technique has connected his books to magic realism,
which includes such English-language authors as Peter Carey, Angela
Carter, E.L. Doctorow, John Fowles, Mark Helprin or Emma Tennant.
- Salman Rushdie was condemned to death by the former Iranian
spiritual leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini on February 14, 1989,
after publishing SATANIC VERSES.
- Naguib Mahfouz, the winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature,
criticized Khomeini for 'intellectual terrorism' but changed his
view later and said that Rushdie did not have 'the right to insult
anything, especially a prophet or anything considered holy.' The
Nobel writer V.S. Naipaul described Khomeini's fatwa as "an
extreme form of literary criticism."
- Rushdie became popular again when he was selected for knighthood
by Britain's Queen Elizabeth. From this news, Muslims in Iran
and Pakistan became very angry again.
- In 1981, his second novel, "Midnight's Children,"
a magic-realist exploration of Indian history, won the Booker
Prize.
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