Around the 19:30 mark on the video, Rushdie mentions the "perforated sheet" through which Aadam Aziz falls in love with Naseem. He says that in a way, that is how the book is constructed: in fragments. This is how we've seen the perforated sheet, as a metaphor for the fragmented vision of the world presented in the novel. "Nobody has "whole sight," he says, no one knows everything about the world. The narrator Saleem doesn't even know everything about the world he describes. But Rushdie adds that the fragments are "united by the imagination of the writer." So, though the world presented in Midnight's Children is fragmented, it is not random. The book does have its own internal logic, though maybe no one but Rushdie will understand all the allusions. Saleem's birth is mirrored by the birth of Aadam, the Ganesh-shaped child, a child born at the exact moment of Indian Emergency. The book is filled with transformations, doubles.
At the half-hour point in the video, Rushdie mentions that if a person marries into a new family, he or she is not a real member of the family until they know the stories of the family. That sort of highlights the oral history aspect to the novel. Saleem invites the reader into his family, telling us the stories. In this way, the stories are preserved. We try to endlessly analyze the text, but it's nice to think of it as just a simple guy telling his story so it's not forgotten.
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