Before doing 'Midnight's Children,' I didn't really have a chance to explore my Indian side. The Indian side of my heritage was always present, but it did not particularly define my identity. Being English was more an identity-defining status. I was born and brought up in London. Yes, my father is Parsi.

I visit India at least once a year, though surrounding the making of 'Midnight's Children' I was there a lot more.

Midnight's Children' falls under the genre of post-colonial writing, and there is a range of writers like V.S. Naipaul and Salman who popularised it. 'Midnight's Children' was incredibly important in this canon.

For films, the process is that you work consistently and constantly for 3-4 months and then leave; whereas for a play, you prepare for about a month and then continue performing it for 5 to 6 months.

I studied physics at university, and I'm still a sucker for an experiment or scientific theory.

It takes a long time for a country to build a strong base in science, but only a short time to destroy it. Germany was a sad example. It was a world leader in the sciences for more than a century, until its science base was demolished during the Nazi era, and the country ceded its position to the United States.

Science is based on the possibility of objectivity, on the possibility of different people checking out for themselves the observations made by others. Without that possibility, there is no empirical principle capable of deciding between different arguments and theories.

Small science, which includes most research in the life sciences all over the world, is science directed usually by an individual senior scientist and a small team of junior associates, perhaps three, ten, fifteen, something in that order.