Joel Kuortti, ed. <i>Critical Insights: Midnight’s Children<i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Salman Rushdie"s second novel Midnight's Children appeared in 1981 and changed the way in which the world looked at Indian writing in English for ever.It won the Booker Prize that year, the Booker of Bookers prize in 1993 and the award for the best all time Booker prize winners in 2008.In 2012, the Indo-Canadian film-maker Deepa Mehta made a film version of the book.Rushdie reportedly signed over the rights for the film for just one dollar.This book which re-wrote the recent history of nationalist and independent India in a magic realistic mode and in an unapologetically Indian variant of English, is thus still in readers" and now viewers" memories; so it"s not surprising that yet another collection of essays on this postcolonial classic should have been published, under the editorship of Joel Kuortti.This anthology is prefaced not just by the usual editorial preamble about the essays it contains, but also has a section called "The Book and Author" by Kuortti, that includes even a short biography of Rushdie beginning with his birth in Bombay, now called Mumbai, which was as we all have known for some time now, not on the stroke of the midnight hour of August 14, 1947.Rushdie"s early undistinguished career followed by the astounding success of Midnight's Children, the books that followed and then the troubled years of the fatwa find a mention here as do his marriages, divorces and children.However, going by the fact that such information is easily available online in the digital age, one wonders why it was included in this volume.Even more surprising, or not so surprising, is the fact that in the tradition of the "unreliable narrator" that Rushdie had called himself with reference to some of the historical events he had narrated in Midnight's Children ("Errata" 1992), Kuortti too distinguishes himself with at least three rather obvious errors.The first one is when he calls Rushdie an "NRI," in the context of his not being eligible for a Sahitya Akademi Award as he was "no longer residing in India -although he was still an NRI" (4-5).Rushdie was and is a British citizen and only those Indians who live and work abroad but continue to retain their Indian passports are NRIs (Non Resident Indians).Then on page 6, Kuortti refers to the All India Radio (AIR) as a "broadcasting company."AIR has been a Government of India owned organisation from 1936 onwards, although it had as its antecedent the Indian Broadcasting Company Ltd. (IBC) in 1927, which went into liquidation in 1930.However, a more crucial and unacceptable error is on pages 14-15 when Kuortti informs his readers that in Midnight's Children, the departing Englishman Methwold sells his eponymously named estate to Aadam Aziz, when it is to his son-in-law Ahmed Sinai (the putative father of Saleem
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".