In an ideal world, you could reunite the Pakistan-occupied part of Kashmir with the Indian-occupied part and restore the old borders. You could have both India and Pakistan agreeing to guarantee those borders, demilitarise the area, and to invest in it economically. In a sane world that would happen, but we don't live in a sane world.
Interpretation
The quote discusses the ideal resolution to the Kashmir conflict, acknowledging the unrealistic nature of such solutions in the current global context.
Salman Rushdie reflects on the complex geopolitical situation regarding Kashmir, suggesting an ideal resolution where the regions occupied by India and Pakistan can be reunified and demilitarized. He emphasizes the necessity for both nations to cooperate for economic investment, but ultimately recognizes the unfortunate reality that such an ideal scenario is improbable in today's world where sanity and rationality seem to be lacking.
In practice
During a peace conference, this quote can highlight the need for realistic approaches to conflict resolution.
I've been fascinated by Machiavelli since I was very young. I've always felt that he had a bad rap from history, and that he was actually a person quite unlike what we now think of as Machiavellian. He was a republican. He disliked totalitarian government.
Killing people because you don't like their ideas - it's a bad thing.
faith without doubt is addiction
I am clearly vulnerable to these more passionate and volatile unstable relationships. I am trying to not be so vulnerable.
In India, as elsewhere in our darkening world, religion is the poison in the blood. Where religion intervenes, mere innocence is no excuse. Yet we go on skating around this issue, speaking of religion in the fashionable language of 'respect.' What is there to respect in any of this, or in any of the crimes now being committed almost daily around the world in religion's dreaded name?
Reality is a question of perspective; the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems - but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible.
Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.
The faintest gleam of their lost memories glimmered for the briefest moment in their hearts.
The best interpreter of the law is custom.
One of the great privileges of having grown up in a middle-class literary English household, but having gone to school in the front lines in Southeast London, was that I became half-street-urchin and half-good-boy at home. I knew that dichotomy was possible.
A King (as such) is not a great man. He has great power, but it is not his own.
Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself.
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