The world is things

The world is things is Shiva’s blunt answer to Saleem’s hope that the Midnight Children’s Conference can become a new principle of unity. In the argument between the boys, material inequality is not a distraction from politics but its ground: when people lack basic necessities, abstract appeals to fellowship and freedom cannot by themselves overcome the forces that divide them.

The Conference and its divisions

As the children grow, the Conference comes to mirror the larger society. Regional prejudice sets children from Maharashtra against Gujaratis, while fair-skinned northerners revile Dravidian children; religious rivalry and class divisions further fracture the group. Rich children resist sharing company with those they consider lowly, and Brahmin children feel uneasy about allowing their thoughts to meet those of untouchables. Poverty and Communism shape the outlook of the low-born, while personality clashes turn the children’s gathering into a contentious parliament.

Saleem recognizes these divisions as a defeat for the Conference’s promise. He urges the children not to let opposing interests and social categories separate them, and proposes that they become a third principle: something new that can move beyond the familiar alternatives. His appeal is both political and personal, an attempt to preserve the collective created by their shared birth-time against the separate pressures of their lives.

Shiva’s materialist rebuttal

Shiva rejects the possibility of a third way. He argues that society is governed by opposing material conditions—money and poverty, possession and lack, privilege and deprivation—and that things and the people who make them hold power. He points to powerful industrialists such as Birla and Tata, and to aid sent by America and Russia, while millions remain hungry. In his account, material security makes dreaming possible; deprivation leaves people to fight for what they lack.

The claim that the world is things therefore challenges Saleem’s emphasis on ideas, individual worth, love, and collective possibility. Shiva treats those appeals as insufficient against the force of material need. His position is not merely a personal insult directed at Saleem: it gives political form to the inequalities already dividing the Conference, and makes the children’s argument a miniature version of the conflicts around class, labor, and power.

The collapse of an ideal

Saleem continues to defend the idea that people can come together and become more than competing interests. But the exchange ends with Shiva dismissing that hope as sentimental, and Saleem is left crumbling as the children lose interest or turn back to their own lives. The Conference, once imagined as a durable community, increasingly resembles a childhood toy that cannot survive its members’ growing up.

The episode’s framing draws attention to the adult political language placed in children’s mouths. Saleem acknowledges that the children may not have debated these questions in those exact words—or perhaps in words at all—yet insists that adult conflicts had entered their thoughts. His retrospective account thus links the Conference’s failure to the wider social divisions its members inherit. The materialist challenge exposes the weakness of Saleem’s ideal, while the children’s divisions show how those conditions are reproduced within the very community meant to transcend them.