In the passage from Pg. 292-3 in which Saleem is becoming aware that his Midnight Children’s Conference is becoming tainted by prejudices which leak from parents into children and seem to obliterate the compassion, curiosity, and innocence a child is supposed to have. It seems to me that the irony or joke here is that kids are presumably acting with adult prejudices when it could just as easily be that prejudices are essentially child-like to begin with. In this situation adults may be portrayed here as overgrown children.
Much of the passage also focuses on Saleem as a kind of humanitarian who believes in the potential of the individual to overcome the dualities that are found throughout society. He wants to create a “third space” so to speak, outside of duality – duality being the thing that most alienates one thing/person/idea from another. Also, Saleem, in a way, shows himself to be a “dreamer,” believing in the power of ideas over the power of things. In this sense, Saleem could also be seen as a kind of spiritual figure, who rejects the material/physical/temporal world. There’s also the clear impression that the Conference, and what Saleem is arguing for, are part of a political discourse. It seems that Saleem’s position calls attention to or satirizes “the plea for reason” or “doing things for the greater good” within the context of a democracy.
Saleem’s ideas are confronted (or at least contrasted) by Shiva’s opposing beliefs in the inherent and inescapable dualities of life, that there is nothing more to living than providing for oneself, and that people are nothing more than things.
This passage could also be a metaphor for human nature in general seen through the emerging yin and yang of Saleem’s mind as he comes of age or representative of self-confidence/self-belief versus self-doubt. This interpretation would probably be more applicable to Saleem the Narrator since his perspective is more removed and thus would be one that encompasses both sides of the argument.
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