Zafar Rushdie says of his famous dad (thanks, Shireen):

“All the beautiful women want to talk to Dad, so I stand close and bask in the sunlight. Beauty loves brains… [but] I’m not convinced he’s necessarily the best person to give relationship advice…” [Link]

As a software guy, may I pipe up and say that beauty most emphatically does not love brains — she loves celebrity

Zafar speaks about the fatwa, during which his dad wrote him Haroun and the Sea of Stories:

“It was really cool to be around these big guys with guns… I’d answer the phone and this voice would say: ‘We’ve got your number. We know where you are and we’re going to come and kill you’ . . . I lost my childhood innocence early…” [Link]

… [Zafar talked about] going to a prep school where some parents wanted the headmaster to expel him because they feared his presence endangered their children. “The headmaster bravely refused… The greatest side effect [of the fatwa] is my strong dislike of organised religion.” [Link]

He tells a funny story about being clowned in English class:

“I have always remembered a comment from one of my English teachers who joked about how he would never forget having to sit Salman Rushdie down at parents’ evening and explain his son was crap at English literature.” [Link]

Rushdie senior flatters his son’s blarney tongue. Where did he get that from:

“He’s absurdly charming - lethally, disgustingly charming. He has it like a weapon…” [Link]

He’s doted on Zafar:

For a full week, Mr. Rushdie and his son, Zafar, 20, who has not been in India since he was 4, roamed freely around many of the tourist sites of north India… “I just wanted to put myself back in the place and bring my son, Zafar. He was very keen to come…”

As Mr. Rushdie introduced his son to the intense smells and sounds and street life of India, he took him to the family’s peaceful ancestral property at Solan in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh. He said he hoped to turn the family home, Anees Villa, into a small writer’s colony if he could find someone to administer it…

The omnipresence of Coca-Cola ads made him hopeful, he said, that Thumbs Up — a local cola drink he despises — has been eclipsed…

“Boring people is the best way to regain normal life. I intend to bore India into submission.” [Link]

Here’s Rushdie with his younger son Milan, who looks very much like Harry Potter here: