Salman Rushdie bequeaths 'Midnight's Children' to film

His 1980 breakthrough novel, an attempt to convey an essence of India, reaches the screen in a form that tempts him to call it karma, 'if I believed in such things.'In the late 1970s, long before he penned "The Satanic Verses," before he sparked a global uproar between Islamic fundamentalists and free-speech advocates and became a marked man, before he turned into a celebrity man of letters who dates models and starlets, Salman Rushdie was just the failed author of a sci-fi fantasy.