New York, April 27 (EFEUSA) — The writer Salman Rushdie spoke today of the influence of film in his childhood in Bombay (India) and said the films, which taught him “almost as much as the books”, trained to be better readers.

In a lecture at New York University (NYU), under the festival PEN World Voices, which he founded, Rushdie said that thanks to the cinema children learn languages ​​as the “flashback” that allows them to then improve their reading comprehension when they find those same instruments in the literature.

Rushdie recalled, through conversation with Lila Azam Zanganeh writer, the first time he saw “The Wizard of Oz” and thought that this super production with so much color, songs and fantasy could well be a movie made in Bombay.

The author of “The Satanic Verses” does not like the term “Bollywood”. Prefers “Bombay films” because for him they were prior to the rest.

When I saw the tape of Judy Garland was 10 and went home and wrote a short story called “Over the rainbow” as the main theme of the film, but his father, who had kept it under the pretext that he did not would have a safe place, he lost.

“How could I like going to the cinema if the time that touched me between the late fifties and early seventies the least good movie that you could find in the film was” La Dolce Vita? “He said.

He explained that as a child lived in a very peaceful and more equitable than the current Bombay.

He spoke in this regard of the cities that no longer exist and their importance to people, especially expatriates and exiled.

“We think we can go home but the house no longer exists,” Rushdie, who despite reflection was said more interested in this than nostalgia said.