Mumbai expat back in Britain

The ennui of blogs that bash India

2011-12-07T17:28:00.005Z

I recently read a blog by a NRI (non resident Indian) living in the US bashing his homeland, India.

This particular blog has done the rounds of the Internet and Facebook, and sparked such debate that the New York Times, which originally published it, has been forced to do a story on the outraged responses to it. The blog can be found here http://india.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/why-i-left-india-again/

It is written by an NRI called Sumedh who first left India to live in the USA in 1996 and then returned 10 years later in 2006, seduced, he says, by a "Thomas Friedman India", presumably referring to the shiny urban India of call centres described in Friedman’s 2005 book, ‘The World is Flat’. Sumedh first moved to the US before ‘Shining India’ had emerged. Sitting in the US sipping a Starbucks, no doubt, he was clearly seduced by a new perception of India emerging as the next global superpower. He wanted to return to find that India, which in his view, was a more palatable version of the India he had left. He writes in his blog that he returned in 2006 prepared for an India that was “like the flight’s Indian vegetarian meal; visually familiar but viscerally alien…an India that offered global companies, continental food, international schools and domestic help.”

Bollywood films by the likes of Karan Johar no doubt helped build up this image of a fun, modern, funky, shiny clean India and newspaper articles in American media about the India growth story probably precipitated his decision. Of course the shiny India he had read about in the USA did exist – but only in five star hotels and urban centres – and another less successful, less organised but perhaps more endearing India was also still very much there, less reported on in the American media, one he had hoped had faded, but still very much in existence.

Two years and 10 months in to his stay in this New India, he decided he hated it, packed his bags and returned to the US and his blog is all about the reasons why he couldn’t stand New India. He blamed India for his inability to adapt to life there and not himself.

The blog was offensive to many people. One of his most maligning claims is that his stint in New India had made him inhuman and soulless; he claims it turned him into a smug person who, like all rich Indians (according to him), dehumanised the labour classes. He says he started to hate himself. He had “regressed,” he said. “I hated what I was becoming,” he wrote.

It is fallacious to think that a country can change you and make you become something else or a worse individual than you already were. It is a twisted logic. He became what he became because he chose to become that. Nothing stopped him becoming the next Mother Teresa, but he chose not to.

Here are some of the aspects of India which he said he hated in New India and were the reasons for his return to California in 2009:-

1) The maid system. He said that by the end of his stay he “probably spent more on pizza than [his] maid.” This comment alone demonstrates his complete lack of understanding of how India works and how he was, in an Occidental imperial way, trying to impose his Western viewpoint on the way India works. Anyone who has an ounce of understanding of India, appreciates it is part of the East, not West, and has its own way of functioning. (Everyone knows for example that Mumbai has a fantastically organised, but seemingly complex way (to the Western eye), of delivering packed lunches known as tiffins to workers; everyone knows that the washing at Dhobi Ghat is done in a more efficient manner than dry cleaners in the West could imagine but to the Western judgmental eye it appears chaotic, even though it is in fact highly efficient.) There is no global law that states that every country has to function how the US does. You do not judge a maid’s pay in India on her wages alone. It is far more complex than that, as is most of what happens in India.

For starters, to my knowledge there is no law in India which regulates the wages domestic workers earn or sets a minimum wage. They are part of the so-called disorganised sector. Therefore most Indians pay maids the going rate, whatever that is, after inquiring about it. The maids themselves generally set this rate in an informal manner by demanding specific wages when you try to employ them. No maid is forced to work for anyone and they refuse to work for you if you do not pay them what they want. But the compensation does not stop there. Everyone I know, gave their maid at least a month’s salary as a bonus at Diwali, with probably saris and sweets on top. Others gave bonuses at Christmas as well. Many Indian families I know regularly bought their maids clothes and always paid for their medical treatment. One Indian lady I know had to move to the US for a year and paid her maid an annual salary anyway even when she was in the US and the maid wasn’t even working for her - as a gesture of gratitude and loyalty. It is standard practice to increase the maid’s salary every year and most families let them take a month off to visit their village in May and still pay them!

I think it is extremely naïve of NRIs or expats to turn up in India, hear what the salary is, compare it to what a cleaner would get in the US or UK for the same hours and then brand it as slave labour. That is not how it works. In any case, there is a completely different cost of living in India compared to the US so you would not expect to pay a maid there the same wage. Yes, maids one day might join the organised sector of work, when minimum wages are set, but currently they are in the disorganised sector meaning they don’t pay income tax etc…The matter is not black and white and a maid’s pay cannot be compared to the price of a pizza. Yet, throughout his blog, Sumedh demonstrated a surprising Western superiority complex over the way India functions. He also referred to an incident when his friend’s children got amoebiasis (posh word for food poisoning) and he “thought” (note: did not even know) they got it from “the maid” so from that point onwards he and his wife “separated the dinnerware” the maid used. That is discrimination at the extreme! I don’t know any Indian employer of domestic staff who did that. My maid often used my cups and plates and I thought nothing of it. This writer is referring to what he did (that was discriminatory) and then inferring that all Indians do this. It is as absurd as an Indian moving to Britain and beating some men up outside a football match saying “ All Brits do this.”

2) He said that at one point his driver asked him for a Rs 500 loan (£6) to attend his grandmother’s funeral and he “brusquely” refused implying that all rich Indians “refused” loans to their drivers as well. “It only encourages them to ask for more; besides, they’re all liars,” he wrote, expressing his personal view of drivers, suggesting that was how all rich Indian felt about their staff. Wrong!. All the Indians and expats I know who had drivers regularly lent them money when required and this was considered part and parcel of hiring the driver. The driver received far more than a salary alone, with medical costs etc thrown in and the drivers wages were within the scale of things in India, quite good. Most of my friends were beholden to their drivers, rather than the other way round, usually leaving parties early so their drivers could get home to their families, giving them time off regularly and paying for them to attend funerals. To refuse a loan for that is simply disgusting and if it was me, I would not even expect the money to be repaid and would just give it.

3) He describes how he also had a road-rage incident:. “I verbally abused a hawker who was blocking the road. I’m not going to let bullock-cart India make my daughter late for her school admission test. The hawker glared but scampered away, the road cleared, and, as I walked back to my car, I saw something new and disturbing in my driver’s eyes: respect,” he wrote. The fact that his driver’s reaction to his violent outburst was mere surmise on his part, is bad enough. For all we know, the glint in his driver’s eye was anger towards him, not respect. But either way, to refer to a hawker as “bullock-cart India” is extreme discrimination and then to put his child’s school admission test above the right of the hawker to common courtesy says more about him than it does about India. I have seen road-rage incidents occasionally happen in the UK and in India but only by angry fired-up people. Not everyone engages in them. In India, I found most people to be impressively patient and it was patience that I learnt in India, rather than road-rage.

4) He also wrote about his ability to perfect “reflexive, addictive and tragically accurate placement of other Indians into bullock carts, scooters, airplanes and who knows what else”, the issue of “caste” and getting tips on “keeping his maid in her place.” It was, in short, grotesque. I never “kept my maid in her place” and nor did any Indian I know. My maid became my best friend, we discussed my love life and she grew to adore my cats. When I left India I gave her everything in my flat for free. But that is not unique – it is what every Indian does. I know of Indian children that have grown to love their maids like members of their family. Yes, there is a class system in India, like there is in the UK. But it is nowhere near as inhuman as Sumedh made out. And if he had wanted to write about that and how socially mobile or not the Indian class system was, his blog just skimmed over the surface and barely touched on it. That indeed might have made an interesting read. I would happily rather read a piece on caste and the class system in India based on interviews with maids, drivers and watchmen rather than the single view of an NRI with a Western mindset unable to integrate in India describing his ill-informed impression of the matter. The caste system is anyway almost a nebulous concept, talked about more in the West than it ever is in India. It has little relevance today as a) many Brahmins (once the highest caste) are now penniless and unemployed, like British aristocrats and b) many of the lower castes now benefit from positive discrimination in jobs and education.

I am sure I mixed with Indians of all castes and yet no one knew anyone’s caste, it was never discussed and it did not affect anyone’s promotion in the work place or entry to a club or anywhere. India is not that behind, thank you. The practice of untouchability in India was outlawed in 1950. It is, in my view, one of those subjects, like earthquakes and poverty that Westerners love to use when discussing India, to make themselves feel better.

Sumedh failed to say anything he liked about India or to show any deep insight into the workings of India, a massively diverse and complex country . All his blog did was prove how distant some NRIs are from their actual Indian roots, and how many of them have lost the connection completely and are now as native as the natives in the countries they have moved to.

A British NRI friend of mine was equally revolted by the NRI piece as me. “I could predict what we was going to write before I read it. This is the same old trite foreigners have been writing about India for the past 40 years and now the NRIs are doing it. I am an NRI and I love India and Britain. I am as happy having a chai at a chai stall as fine tea at the Taj or the Ritz. I can do both and enjoy both. I don’t understand what all the fuss is about,” he said. I met another NRI living in Germany the other day, a wise old man in his 80s. He said to me, "When you visit India you cannot go there expecting the same life as you have in England. You have to put all that aside and embrace India for what she has.” He was right. Similarly so does an Indian coming to Britain.

So, in my humble view, if you want to make comments on how awful another country is to live in, first survey a million residents living in it, then present the picture. Do not make sweeping statements based on your own single, subjective, non representative experience.

The ongoing struggle of the adivasis (tribal people) in India

2011-10-31T22:32:00.000Z

Swanky shopping malls, restaurants selling chocolate samosas, cafes promoting lattes and cinemas screening 3D films are what make up urban India today.

Riding on an unprecedented boom, more Indians than ever have got large disposable incomes and are willing to splash out on everything from washing machines to BlackBerries and sushi to Margaritas.

But while that is life in Indian cities, there is a completely different scene in the dense forests where nearly 100 million adivasi (tribal people) live. There, environmental destruction and bloodshed can be found, as India’s indigenous people are being displaced to make way for steel plants, roads, factories, mines and refineries.

Despite having followed a sustainable way of life for thousands of years farming, hunting and gathering, these tribes, the “refugees of India’s ‘progress’” as Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy describes them, face a bleak future. Many are engaged in battles to stop their land, lives and livelihoods being taken away because beneath their homes lie India’s richest natural resources, namely uranium, bauxite, limestone, coal, marble, and iron ore, worth millions of pounds. Meanwhile the ecosystem is getting destroyed as forests get bulldozed for profit from heavy industries to fuel the Indian dream.

Orissa has more than 50 per cent of India’s bauxite reserves, the raw material for aluminium, worth a staggering £2 billion.

But the fallout is everywhere. For example, 100 villagers from the Majhi Kondh tribe were displaced when a one million-tonne alumina refinery opened up in Lanjigarh in 2008.

The villagers were forced to leave their traditional mud huts and move into concrete resettlement colonies on the edge of the refinery. Now without land for grazing or forest produce, many have gone back to the hills.

“They had no means of making a living. They were sitting on concrete steps with nothing to do,” says Dr Jo Woodman, campaigner for Survival International, which successfully campaigned against proposals for a six-fold expansion of the Vedanta-owned refinery. The Ministry of Environment and Forest blocked the mining giant's plans in 2010.

40 Dongria Kondh from several villages blockaded the road to the proposed mine site, holding banners
© Lindsay Duffield/Survival

Kumpti Majhi, a member of the Majhi Kondh tribe, explains: “We do not need jobs or money. We want to live here as we used to, peacefully. If the mountain is there, we have water, clean air and fruit. There may be some development, I may benefit, but will my son and my grandson?”

Many do not possess paper titles for their ancestral land, so do not even get any compensation if resettled. Even if they do, the money is quickly spent and does not provide a sustainable source of income, Woodman says.

But Vedanta also hopes to mine bauxite at the nearby sacred Niyamgiri Hills. No villagers would be displaced if this open-pit mine went ahead. But Woodman says the mountain is perceived by the Dongria Kondh tribe as the seat of the gods and they do not want to “sell it”.

Dongria Kondh girl playing on a swing in the Niyamgiri Hills, India

“They graze animals on top of there, worship there, farm it and collect medicinal plants from it,” she says.

Although these plans were rejected in 2010 by the Ministry of Environment and Forests, the case has now gone to India’s Supreme Court.

However, Vedanta Aluminium Ltd claims it is improving the standard of living of the tribes. On its public blog, it writes the region will “stand to gain from infrastructure development including power, access to primary education, quality healthcare services, employment generation, diversification of the agrarian economy, thus accelerating the process of economic development.”

But Woodman says: “The Dongria tribe doesn’t want anything from these people. For a community like the Dongria you can’t compensate the deep spiritual connection they have to their land. They don’t want the mines to go ahead.”

Dongria Kondh boy Kalia stands in front of the Niyamgiri hill range.

As a result of total despair, many adivasis have, controversially, turned to the Maoists, an armed insurgency trying to overthrow the Indian state, for protection.

“The state government keeps giving the green light to take away their lands and their ability to resist under normal democratic means is fruitless,” Woodman explains. “The adivasis feel extremely frustrated which fuels the Maoist insurgency and is why a lot of Maoists are adivasis.”

Author of The God of Small Things Roy has also taken up the adivasi cause, claiming that India’s growth rate is built on “taking land from the poor.”

In her recent book, Broken Republic: Three Essays, published by Hamish Hamilton, she writes: “The armed struggle that has broken out in the heartland is not the first, but the very last option of a desperate people pushed to the very brink of existence.”

The Indian novelist, who has spent time with Maoist guerrillas in the forest, says: “When a posse of 800 policemen lay a cordon around a forest village at night and begin to burn houses and shoot people, will a hunger strike help? When people are being brutalised, what ‘better thing’ is there to do than fight back?”

But the violent conflict has so far caused more than 10,000 deaths on all sides with Maoists, civilians and the police all getting killed.

Approximately 27 per cent of India’s coal reserves are in Jharkhand, another state where mining is rife. Robert Wallis, an American photojournalist, ventured into Hazaribagh and Ranchi districts in 2006 and 2010 to witness first-hand the impact of open-cast mining on the adivasi way of life.

“As far as I was aware, the adivasis I spent time with had no connections with the Maoists," he says. "They were trying to use art as a means of resistance, and to preserve their traditional culture against the onslaught of mining.

“The western media always wants to talk about Shining India, that image that all Indians aspire to – being middle class, shopping malls and Tata cars,” explains Wallis.

“While this has been true for a minority of the population, it’s not for the majority, especially not for the adivasis who are suffering to enable Shining India to come to big cities. It is wreaking destruction on their lives,” he says.

His photos, which were shown at The School of Oriental and African Studies in London in 2011, include pictures of adivasis in their traditional mud or leaf homes, then in urban slums and resettlement camps, where they have been forcibly rehoused.

He describes the latter as "listless". They have "no connection with their environment anymore" and cannot continue their ancient traditions such as painting their mud homes or worshipping nature, he says.

Dispossessed of their homes and heritage and without work, they often ended up scavenging on the peripheries of mines, his captions state. One picture shows a couple from the Birhor tribe returning home having caught nothing as there are no animals to hunt owing to the destruction of the forest habitat.

"The result of these industrial projects is of no benefit to the tribal people as the electricity generated is going to places like Delhi and the iron ore is going to China" he adds.

"The whole landscape is changing," he says, explaining how one minute he photographed traditional tribal villages as of yet untouched by mining, the next he shot the remains of whole villages that had been wiped out and left crumbling on the edge of open-pit mines. He also saw roads dug through remnants of huge swathes of forest that had now vanished.

"My belief is that the only way India will really prosper if it protects its traditional way of life - some people may call adivasi life primitive, but it's sustainable," he adds.

“It’s not that we believe that the minerals should be left in the ground,” argues Woodman. “We appreciate these areas are rich in reserves and it’s inevitable India is going to want to extract them but it’s recognised international mining practise that you don’t proceed with a mine against the express wishes of the local community. The mining companies need to listen to the community and respect their wishes, rather than thrashing in and not doing any kind of proper consultation. Of course there is plenty of land that should have industrial development because it has been ruined for agriculture,” she says.

Dongria Kondh children inherit their ancestor's jewellery at a young age, part of the history that ties them to their sacred homeland in the Niyamgiri hills: © Survival

The Indian Government is acutely aware of the ongoing crisis and is urgently trying to get it resolved. A subcommittee of The Ministry of Environment and Forests and the Ministry of Tribal affairs recently produced a detailed 284-page report, named 'Report of the National Committee on Forest Rights Act', ,which following a lengthy investigation into adivasi rights in forested areas of India.

The findings of the report, published in December 2010, matched what NGOs have been saying. It found that adivasis, 92 per cent of whom live in forests, had frequently been illegally removed from forest land without any verification or recognition of their rights, in violation of the Forest Rights Act 2006, which was enacted in 2007 through the Ministry of Tribal Affairs, to correct the historic injustice done to forest-dwelling communities, an oppression which commenced in colonial times.

The report also admitted that the rights of forest dwellers were indeed being ignored and tens of millions of them had been displaced from their homelands to make way for development projects such as mines, power plants, irrigation, dams and roads.

It said the Forest Rights Act had been frequently violated, despite directives from the Centre to the contrary. The report discovered that the forest dwellers were generally poor and illiterate, either unaware of or unable to negotiate their rights and so huge swathes of land were being passed over to industry "unchecked."

The report blamed complete confusion and chaos at a local administration level, blaming local officers for having no knowledge or understanding of the FRA Act. It called for "an urgent need for the involvement of human rights organisations" in the matter and called for swift action to enforce the Forest Rights Act was being implemented at a state level and for action to be taken against those who violated it and for roads, electricity and hospitals to be finally built in forest areas. © Naomi Canton 2011

India and China set to rule this century

2011-10-31T21:58:00.000Z

India and China are set to dominate in a new post-western world but “that did not necessarily mean that the USA and Europe have had it,” the last governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has said.

Patten, now Chancellor of Oxford University, made the remarks in a speech he gave at a recent alumni weekend, held by the university.

Chris Patten speaking at Oxford

Lord Patten of Barnes, famed for handing back the sovereignty of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China in 1997 marking the end of British rule, told the audience of Oxford alumni that there had been a major shift in the global balance of economic power and that India and China would dominate this century, creating a new global hierarchy dominated by the East.

In his speech, ‘What next? Surviving the 21^st century’, based on his namesake book, he spoke of a “fin de siècle” mood pervading America and Europe. But he said he did not accept that the world today was more dangerous than before, pointing out that at the time of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, which coincided with his first term as a student at Oxford University, “the world appeared to be teetering on the edge of nuclear Armageddon.” I don’t think that things are as dangerous today as that,” he added.

While the world knew what it needed to do in order to survive, at present it appeared to “lack the political leadership and international political capacity to rise to the challenge,” he claimed. “We know what needs to be done from the Middle East to climate change. We know the sorts of things the international community should be doing in order to find a sustainable solution,” he went on.

The former Conservative MP and European Commissioner warned that the world population, which increased fourfold in the 20th century, was set to increase from 6.9 billion by a further 2.1 billion by 2050 and the majority of that increase would be in very poor countries, most of which already faced political instability and considerable environmental stress. “The only rich country in the top 10 where population is increasing now is the USA,” he added.

Speaking at The Sheldonian Theatre, where Oxford’s matriculation and graduation ceremonies are held, Patten said we can expect to see an explosion of growth in the numbers of people living cities (which increased 13-fold in the past century), especially in China (where it’s reckoned a billion people will live in cities by 2050). He said we could also expect to see an increase in energy consumption which had already increased 13 fold in the past century because industrial output had increased 40 times and also increased water use (which had increased ninefold in the past century), including possible conflict over water resources between India and China in the future and increased carbon monoxide emissions (which had already increased 17 times in the past century.) All of this was “posing probably the biggest issue for diplomacy, arguably since [The Treaty of] Versailles,” he claimed.

He then spoke of the India growth story and visible power shift already taking place. India has several multinational companies with global brands against which other companies benchmark themselves like Tata, Reliance and Infosys, he said.

“India now invests more in the UK than the UK invests in India,” he added. He said by 2040 India would probably have the largest population in the world and Chinese pensioners would be the second largest.

China is currently the second largest economy in the world but, by the 2020s, China would overtake the USA to become the largest economy in the world, Patten said.

“It’s a world you can very properly describe as post western. Asia no longer has to define modernity in western terms,” he said.

But he pointed out that it was not all doom and gloom for Europe. While Europe currently had only had seven to 10 per cent of the world’s population, it still produced 21-22 per cent of the world’s output, he said.

“And there here are serious problems confronting both India and China,” Patten warned and then spoke of the “steady federalisation of the polity in India”.

He pointed out that Gujarat, where more than 1,000 people were killed in the 2002 communal riots, which accounts for just 5 per cent of India’s population, actually contributes 16 per cent of India’s output and 22 per cent of exports.

He also spoke of India suffering from “a criminalisation of politics”, “terrible levels of corruption” which “have raised questions right across the board about the nature of representative democracy in India and about the integrity of legislature, judiciary and bureaucracy."

“There are three Chief Justices in India today who face criminal charges,” he said. He said the country had “terrible infrastructure problems” and yet the country had “pockets of extraordinary prosperity and sophistication” surrounded by “terrible poverty and awful corruption.”

He then moved on to China. “China also faces huge problems despite its extraordinary economic achievements, with a 1600 per cent increase in its exports to America over the last 15 years, China faces, as does India, huge environmental challenges,” he said.

He said China faced the problem of how to rebalance its economy moving from substantial dependence on manufactured exports to greater investment in domestic infrastructure and greater encouragement of consumption. Despite a huge boom in exports, wages in China remain low. Wages in China, as a proportion of the economy, have fallen from approximately 53 per cent of GDP to less than 40 per cent. Patten also questioned how far China could open up its economy and embrace social and technological change, while keeping an iron grip on its politics.

He hinted that India and China may have to take centre stage not just economically but in global politics and international bodies and affairs too.

“With the US political system gridlocked and with Europe obsessed with its own problems, where will we look to for leadership?” he asked. He said bodies created in the 1940s such as the United Nations were falling to pieces and lacked “moral and political authority” and “ structures were needed” to deal with international cross border problems such as climate change and organised crime.

When considering whether leadership should come from Europe, the 67-year-old former student of Balliol College, who is also chairman of the BBC Trust, pointed out the currency union was falling apart because of the difficulties of running monetary policy with one hand and fiscal policy with another.

When asked about immigration, Patten, a Catholic, who oversaw the oversaw the Pope’s visit to Britain in September 2010, said that populations were falling fast in Europe, especially in Italy, Spain and Poland and the number of people in work supporting those in retirement was falling extremely fast. The consequences of rapidly ageing populations and lower fertility rates meant greater immigration would be required to provide jobs and services in Europe. But he warned Europe would see “some of the tensions” that arise when there is no rapid economic growth alongside mass immigration. He said immigration into Europe was also likely to increase owing to natural disasters elsewhere.

Responding to a question on why British schools weren’t concentrating on teaching Hindi and Mandarin in the light of his forecast, he replied, “My daughter learnt Hindi to appear in a Bollywood film,” referring to Alice Patten, who starred as struggling British filmmaker Sue McKinley in the hit Hindi movie Rang De Basanti. In an apparent attack on Britain’s youth, he added: “We need to teach them English first.”

The alumni weekend, named Meeting Minds – 21st century challenges, offered a packed three-day programme of more than 120 events for alumni.

Oxford academics from a range of departments delivered lectures showing how they were tackling a range of global challenges from population growth to increased energy consumption, climate change, lives spent on social networking sites, the science behind earthquakes and emerging infectious diseases.

A highlight was a ‘Mathematical Tour of Oxford’ by Professor Marcus du Sautoy, who had presented the BBC documentary ‘The Story of Maths’, which had revealed that Indians had made many of the key mathematical breakthroughs in the world before the West had and before Sir Isaac Newton was born, including inventing the zero, despite common misapprehensions that Maths was a Western invention. © Naomi Canton 2011

Who were the rioters, what motivated them and can India teach us a lesson?

2011-08-18T19:34:00.012+01:00

I could be psychic.

I wrote about the breakdown of the social fabric of British society in February 2009. That was before the current riots in England that have sent the media and government into a frenzy analysing the causes. See http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/expat-on-the-edge/2009/02/18/what-i-like-about-india/ Back then whilst living in India, I compared Indian teenagers to those in the UK and quickly spotted that those in India had aspirations and values, were far better behaved than their counterparts in the UK and the anti-social behaviour and gangs that blighted Britain’s streets did not exist in India. And bizarrely, in India there is barely a welfare state to speak of. Unlike in Britain.

I also wrote about the unhealthy dependency on the welfare state here in the UK. See http://naomicanton.blogspot.com/2010/10/huge-spending-cuts-right-way-forward.html. Within days of moving back to England from India I was immediately stunned at how how much Britons get from the state for free, compared to say, Indians in India: free homes, unemployment benefit, child benefit, free schools and much more. No one in India got any of this and yet India’s country’s economy was soaring, jobs were increasing, their family unit was intact and their teenagers well-behaved and ambitious, unlike ours. In India everyone had a job, even if menial. Meanwhile in Britain, foreigners (mainly from mainland Europe) worked in the cafes and hotels while the Brits took Jobseekers Allowance. And whinged.

Now we have just witnessed the England riots 2011, which were not dissimilar to the Paris Riots in 2005, 2007 and 2009. The core complaints of the rioters in both cases seemed to be that they were feeling left out, jobless, alienated and deprived. An “us “and “them” culture had emerged and a feeling the state had let them down.

Yet, why do Britons feel deprived and alienated when they live in Britain, one of the richest countries in the world? A country that millions of asylum seekers are still queuing up to enter…A country with a welfare state invented in 1911 and enhanced in the 1940s that other nations can only dream of?

Many British politicians deny poverty plays a role and are putting the riots down to a lack of discipline in schools and poor parenting, which has created a generation that would rather steal a plasma TV than save up for one. Given that the teachers who teach in British schools are highly trained, why are the schools in inner city areas so very bad? Why are they failing to instil any discipline in children?Many blame the laws in the UK which give too many rights to pupils and don’t allow teachers to punish them if they misbehave. Teachers daren’t discipline pupils for fear of getting abused by the parents. Has the British state school system failed? If it hasn’t, how come we have ended up with a generation of delinquents happy to riot and loot with no respect for their neighbourhoods? How come drug dealers are allowed to stand at the school gates? There is clearly a level of law-breaking in terms of gangs and drug dealing in and around inner city schools that society, schools, parents and the police have, till now, overlooked.

The national curriculum in British schools does not have enough relevance to modern Britain either. Employers say that when school-leavers apply for jobs they have no skills of use. Why don’t schools teach useful subjects such as how to do tax returns, how to be self-employed, how to make money from stocks and shares, how to write CVs and dress for interviews and so on?

The proliferation of gangs in inner city areas is also very much to blame. Mark Duggan, the black man whose death sparked the riots, was a member of one such gang. How did the British police let these gangs get so out of hand? Police have said that 25 per cent of those held after the disturbances are linked to gangs.

It is no coincidence Duggan came from Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, a council estate that was also the scene of violent riots in 1985 after a Caribbean woman was murdered there. That time the riots led to the death of a policeman, a death linked to the same gang Duggan was in. This time was it the rioters’ offspring rioting? The police had reason to believe Duggan, a crack cocaine dealer, was out to avenge a fellow gang member's murder on the night they had him under surveillance and shot him. London has seen 92 similar gang related murders in the last two years but none have made it to headline news.

High unemployment among black Afro Caribbean male youth is also clearly a factor in the riots. In an interview with the BBC back in January 2010, way before the current riots happened (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8468308.stm ) Jeremy Crook, director of the Black Training and Enterprise Group (BTEG), said part of the problem was there were very few black role models in Britain.

"Amongst black men, unemployment is about 20% - if a quarter of adult males don't work for 10-20 years, it doesn't give communities much aspiration, it demoralises and dissuades young people.

"They look to alternatives and get involved in gangs,” he said.

Almost half of black people aged between 16 and 24 were unemployed, at that time, compared with 20% of white people of the same age, the Institute for Public Policy Research then claimed.

When asked why the they did it, the rioters said “Because the Government has cut my EMA (Education Maintenance Allowance) or “I applied for a job at that electronics store and they didn’t reply to my email so now it’s payback time.” Hardly a justification.

Some politicians are blaming parents, not schools, but as one mother from a council estate told a TV channel last week: “We have no control of our children. They don’t even do what we tell them. If we say they are grounded they barge past us and go out the door. If we try and smack them they say ‘You are not allowed to touch us; that is what we are told us at school.'"

Many parents handed their children into police when they saw their pictures released as suspects in the riots, so it does seem to me that most parents did not condone the rioting.

But it is true that many parents are so busy working to earn enough money to live in the UK, they have no time for family life. Their kids are being brought up by X boxes, not people. Or rap music. In India the cost of living is lower and pressures are less great on average household incomes, plus there is the option of maid.

Single mums have faced a lot of flak in recent weeks too, being blamed for the riots with claims that young men are being denied a male role model instead joining a gang and taking on a gang master as a father figure. I have friends who are single mums who have raised fabulous children. But then again they are a) educated and b) do not live on sink estates. Those who tick both of the above boxes do appear to be producing badly-behaved children at an alarming rate, the girls of which are becoming teenage single mothers themselves. But is this to blame for the rioting?

I do not think we cannot blame women for being single as I’m sure many of them are single because their husband or boyfriend has got up and left them or died.

So in short, blame is being put on gang culture and rap music for glorifying violence, single mums for denying young men male role models, council estates, unemployed youth, poor discipline in schools, poor parenting, weak prison sentences that do not act as a deterrent, a lack of social mobility, the class system, public spending cuts, a lack of personal responsibility and lack of respect for the police, particularly following allegations of corruption in the phone hacking scandal.

Of all these youth unemployment, a lack of personal responsibility, gangs and the depressing life and culture of sink estates are to blame, in my view. These sink estates were originally built between the First and Second World Wars to rehouse people displaced in the slum clearance programmes. Many of these estates are now synonymous with violence, drunkenness, drug-dealing and gangs. The schools that serve them tend to have disruptive and underachieving pupils. There is a vicious spiral. No wonder this is the second riot at Broadwater Farm.

Prince Charles hit the nail on the head, when visiting riot-hit Hackney. He said national community service was the answer and pointed out extra-curricular activities were severely lacking at many secondary schools. ''Half the problem is that people join gangs because it's a cry for help and they're looking for a sense of belonging. Schools don't have enough extra-curricular activities now. There are not enough organised games or other kinds of activities. Young people need self-confidence; we have to motivate and encourage them and give them responsibility. You need to be exhausted and have that energy channelled into useful activities," he said.

Interestingly the young people he spoke to said, what everyone has been thinking, that they were given far too much, had far too many rights and not enough discipline. They expected things to be given to them without working; they needed to be made to want to work. The issue was schools, families and the environment in which they lived, not race or class, they said.

So what is the solution? Well, firstly, we can look at India. The difference between India and the UK is that:-

1) In India people know they have to get a job and go out and earn a living to survive. There is no welfare system to depend on.

2) The family unit is still cherished and single mothers frowned upon meaning most children are brought up in two parent families.

3) The education system is authoritarian and pupils have to respect teachers. Authority, parents and older people are respected and people live in fear of the police and being sent to prison. (Not the case in the UK).

Apart from that I think encouraging and allowing the police to use harsher tactics in dealing with riots (such as tear gas and plastic bullets) and making sentences for all crimes less lenient so that being put in the dock does act as a deterrent to youngsters, would help. Plus the prison experience should be made more uncomfortable and perhaps TVs and DVD players taken away. An Afro-Caribbean woman told a TV channel here: “In Africa the prisons are horrible and no one wants to go to prison. Here in Britain they are too nice and not a deterrent.”

Police should be allowed to ban head and face coverings at any public gathering and force the wearer to remove it whenever there is suspicion of a crime being committed. It is ludicrous we have looters allowed to go out with scarves tied round their faces and commit crimes.

But the problems are clearly even more complex. David Cameron has made the right decision to bring in Bill Bratton to advise on the gang problem and yes, a compulsory youth national community service, as suggested by Prince Charles is a great idea. Free parenting classes should be on offer to anyone that wants them, more money needs to be spent on youth services, and stricter discipline and punishments in schools is required as well.

But there is still one massive problem remaining....

Youth unemployment.

How that will ever get solved in recession-hit Britain is anyone’s guess. Who is going to create the jobs?

The Indian expat in Britain

2011-07-27T13:40:00.006+01:00

I have been meeting up with various Indian people in the UK since coming back to live in England. By Indian I mean Indian visitor or expat, not British Asian (or British Indian, as some prefer to be called, referring to British citizens of Indian heritage either born here or who started arriving in the 1950s.) Indeed about 20 years ago most British people’s only exposure to Indians in the UK was the immigrants who moved here en masse in the 50s, 60s and 70s and their offspring and their offspring’s offspring. Now with the wealth and skills set increasing in India, more Indians are coming to Britain to study Masters and MBAs and many of those are managing to find work and get employed here afterwards. Others are coming directly on highly skilled migrant work visas to work in sectors like IT with companies such as Infosys, Aviva on 2-3 year contracts. Many are already here as doctors and priests. This MBA/IT/highly-skilled set makes up a new genre of Indian you will find in British cities and towns, quite different to their counterpart, the British Asian. It’s funny because, having lived in Mumbai for more than 3 years, I can spot an Indian expat a mile off. They are distinctly quite different, in their accent, dress and behaviour, to a British Asian/Indian.

Meeting them is interesting for me. I'm curious to see, having been an expat, how well they adapt to the UK, or not; whether they integrate or not and watch the little faux pax or gaffes they unknowingly make that arise from cultural misunderstandings. I know I made many similar gaffes and faux pax in India. I also know, having lived overseas, that it is important to overlook those faux pax as they only arise from being raised in a different culture and society. They are never intentionally offensive. When I was in Mumbai I also made blunders, but, sadly, whereas some people overlooked them, others did not.

In Mumbai, some Indians were welcoming of expats and others were not. I know that some Indians made me feel really different. They did not include me in things, would not confide in me or gossip with me or would say really strange things to me. As a British woman I also had to fight stereotypes in India. I remember one Indian woman saying to me, “You know how all western women write about sex in their blogs and Indian woman bloggers don’t well..” I was furious. Since when did all western women write about sex in their blogs!! (I know I have touched on relationships, but still…) On another occasion an Indian woman said, “You know how all French people are manic depressives, well it’s because they are spoilt and have not had to endure the hardships Indians have, well….” Such sweeping generalisations spring from ignorance and I generally ignored the remarks. Similarly there was an element of Indians who had a post-colonial hangover. If I dared to criticise India, the response would be “So you want to rule us again?” Or “Why do you think your culture is superior to ours?” I didn’t. I may have been merely mentioning something or other that could be improved in India (like the fact drivers don’t stop at zebra crossings. They don’t in Rome either and I get equally annoyed there.) I can think of plenty of things that can be improved in England too. I don’t see why I have to continually praise a place. And I don’t. Some of the most interesting discussions with one’s friends can come from debating how to improve or solve social issues. If there were no social issues to solve, what would we discuss? Men and make-up? There was also a resistance among some Indians towards expats getting jobs in Mumbai. If you explained to them that the Indian diaspora was massive and millions of Indians had jobs overseas it made no difference. They were not overseas and didn’t care. Of course outside this stereotyping and prejudice were many very decent, intelligent, bright, spiritual, welcoming Indians who I thoroughly enjoyed meeting.

Expats take to India differently. There are some that ‘go native’ so to speak, refuse to mix with other expats, eat only at street food stalls and so on…There are others who refuse to mix with Indians , slag off India and are only seen at five star hotel brunches. I liked to be somewhere between the two extremes, with half Indian and half expat friends, semi integrated but making the occasional gaffe. One area I did struggle with was using the words, Sir or Madam. This to an English person is completely alien. To my knowledge, the UK, Sir is only used in the British Army and possibly when a commoner meets Royalty. Otherwise it might be used by a waitress in a very posh five star hotel in London to a customer. No one uses this as a form of respect for elders or people more experienced/powerful than you, as they do in India. I also could not bring myself to use the word thrice instead of three times or ride a moped without a helmet.

But now I am the local in my own country and seeing how the Indian expats get on intrigues me. I was out with an Indian friend the other day at the cinema. After buying the tickets he asked the ticket booth man if he had any change. When the man refused my friend blew his top at him. I was shocked as it is not acceptable to be that rude to someone selling tickets at a cinema. Then outside a Big Issue seller came to speak to me when I was with my friend and my friend said in a loud voice, “How dare you interrupt our conversation?” I was taken aback as, again, in England we would never speak so rudely to a Big Issue seller either. We know they are homeless and selling the Big Issue to make ends meet. But I guess my Indian friend treated him as though he was a rickshaw driver, day labourer or beggar who had come up and barged into our conversation, something unthinkable in India. They know their place in Indian society and probably would not dare. But England is far more egalitarian. The person selling Big Issue might be homeless today, but yesterday he may have been in a good job. The ticket booth man is probably studying a Masters or working as an actor. In India sadly the treatment of rickshaw drivers, waiters, maids and the like is not always the same as here and sometimes they are treated with immense disrsepect. I didn’t say anything at the time but decided if I met this Indian friend again and got to know him better I would mention it.

Another funny incident happened when I was with an Indian friend going out for a meal and I asked him what cuisine he wanted. “Something spicy” he said. This will pose problems in England where most food is not spicy and we eat a lot of French and Italian cuisine. I explained that left us with Bangladeshi or Mexican cuisine and there wasn’t a Mexican restaurant in the town where we were. He finally caved in and we went to a French restaurant. He was unable to comprehend the French menu. (The menus are always in French in French restaurant in the UK to add to the experience. For Brits they are pretty easy to decipher as we are used to it.) “What is canard?” he asked. “What is poulet?” He asked. Of course he spoke about 7 languages but French was not one of them. For the Brits French is pretty easy. Then the food came and whilst I raved about the food, he seemed unimpressed, probably similar to how I had reacted when an Indian once friend took me to a Rajasthani traditional restaurant in Gujarat where I couldn't get to grips with the unusual food at all. I exclaimed, “Isn’t French food just the best!” tucking into a rare steak with frites. “You know French food is the most gourmet in the world and yet I barely came across a single French restaurant in India,” I remarked. “There is a reason for that,” my Indian friend, who did not eat beef, said dryly.

Meanwhile the British friend I was with kept calling him middle-class. He was saying it to compliment him on how well-brought up and well-spoken he was, but the Indian kept merely smiling; this was the other meaning of the Indian smile and I knew it. I finally explained to my British friend that being called middle class in India isn’t seen as a great compliment– it’s basically seen there as what we describe as lower class here – you need to say upper middle class to refer to what my friend was trying to communicate…Middle-class in England conjures up Wimbledon, Henley, private education, four bedroomed-detached house, professional occupation, tennis, rugby, Berkshire etc…But in India it refers to the masses, not the upper echelons of society. It conjures up a very simple home and life in India. So this was another cross-cultural miscommunication, I figured. When I explained it to both of them, the Indian stopped the ear-to-ear grin and his shoulders seemed to relax. He admitted he had been baffled by the constant comment he was middle-class. “I just could not understand why you kept on telling me I was middle-class,” he said.

As we left the French restaurant we walked past a group of English woman. It was a cold night and they were all, without fail, in mini dresses or mini-skirts, which hung almost below their knicker lines, they had completely bare legs and stilettos. Some had tattoos; others had cigarettes dropping out of their mouths. Most were heavily made up. There were 100s of them all appearing from nowhere, heading for the local dodgy nightclub of the Home Counties town we were in. I was rather embarrassed by this sight and explained to my Indian friend that not all British woman dressed or behaved like this. I hadn’t seen anything like it myself for years. My female friends and I were more likely to be seen in a country pub in designer jeans and a T shirt than anywhere like this and we never dressed like that in the evenings. These women all looked like they had one intention in mind, and it is a sentence that is three words long. The Indian friend had no idea that what he had seen and experienced did not represent British women or indeed British society. If anything, it represented a segment of British society - one that would not be found at Cheltenham Ladies College or in the King’s Road, London or in a British law firm. “There is a different kind of English woman,” I started to explain as best I could. “Not all British women dress like this. I am different, for starters,” I said proud of my designer jeans and black top I was in, my stock ‘night out’ outfit, in fact. “Oh you mean the plain Jane!” he said confidently, in a thick Indian accent. I swallowed my anger, as did the British guy who was with me. I realised the Indian expat had no clue what the connotations of the phrase Plain Jane were. I have been called many things to date, but not till now, anyway plain. Anyway I forgave him, as you have to, if you want to befriend a foreigner in your homeland. It reminded me of when an Indian in Mumbai had said I looked well fed. I couldn’t have been more offended but he had said it with a big grin as though he was complimenting me and this Indian in England who said I was a plain Jane was also grinning from ear to ear. I fathomed that expats will make faux pax and social blunders in the mind of the locals, wherever they are, but ignoring them is the best thing to do. Apart from the plain Jane remark, we had had a great evening. The same with the guy I had gone to the cinema with. On both occasions we had discussed politics, culture, and society and exchanged ideas. In fact, the Indian expats had even been so kind as to decipher aspects of Indian society I had not been able to understand. What was the point of holding a social gaffe against them?

I guess what I have learnt from all this is - you have to be elastic – you have to be able to give and stretch your boundaries of acceptance and what is normal far more with a foreigners, than with the locals, and don’t expect them to integrate fully (why should they?) but the rewards will be worth it. You will get things from friendships with foreigners you can’t get from friendships with locals, so please be open-minded.

Arundhati Roy vs. New India

2011-06-21T00:03:00.009+01:00

Booker prize winning novelist Arundhati Roy’s book launch in India was disrupted by protestors recently. But in Britain recently she walked into a packed lecture theatre at the University of London to rapturous applause.

The 49-year-old, who has been accused of hating her homeland, arrived at The School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London several days ago with no star fanfare, dressed in a simple green sari. She mingled freely with guests queuing up to see her, before taking her seat at her first ever public lecture at the British university.

The controversial novelist-turned political activist was in the UK on a whirlwind publicity tour to promote the Adivasi resistance movement in India and her book, Broken Republic: Three Essays, published by Hamish Hamilton.

Arundhati Roy giving the lecture at SOAS in London recently

The previous week, she had appeared on Newsnight, a BBC current affairs programme watched by millions, in which she had informed the British public that the Indian economic success story was a “lie” because 80 million people in India were living on less than Rs 20 a day, there were more poor people living in India than in Africa, and that India’s growth rate was “built on taking land from the poor” and “vandalising India’s Constitution.”

As guests eagerly queued up for her free public forum, titled ‘Burning Ground: Mining, Adivasis and India's Civil War’, at the Brunei Gallery at SOAS on Sunday, two young people handed out leaflets advertising another UK lecture Roy had lined up in London later in the week – organised by a group that calls itself the International Campaign Against War on People of India. The A4 leaflet was titled ‘Stop the genocidal war against the tribal people of India.’ On its website the group claims it aims to “expose the Indian government's war on the people in India” and their attempts to “grab land and minerals” from areas where tribal people live.

“Before stepping up on to the stage I was asked whether I was nervous when I had to speak in front of large numbers of people. But now there is more fury in me and the nervousness went away a long time ago,” Roy bellowed to the SOAS lecture hall.

“I want you all to know that the Indian Government is going to deploy the army, spending US$45bn in central India to fight the poorest people in the world. This is what is about to happen,” she continued in a serious voice, pausing intermittently to lend her words even more power.

She then shifted into a sarcastic tone. “So, whenever you start thinking that India is such a bubbly, cuddly modern democracy, then please pay attention to this,” she said to the audience of predominantly postgraduates, students, NGO workers and academics.

The audience packed The Brunei Gallery

“This is a very old story, the old story of mining,” she said simplifying a complex matter into a few words. “The story of mining and environmental destruction,” she went on. “And of indigenous people.” Thus in sparse words she had evoked parallels with the California Gold Rush, the impact of mining on the Aborigines way of life in Australia and all the former colonial powers’ exploitation of resources.

Roy is furious about the decades-old Maoist insurgency in central and eastern India in which more than 6,000 people have lost their lives. Whilst it is an uprising that the prime minister of India has declared as “the single greatest threat to India’s internal security”, suggesting it is a greater threat to India than that of Jihadist terrorists from Pakistan, Roy has an entirely different perspective. She sees it as an unjust war against simple, poor Adivasis who are merely and rightfully resisting being displaced by large corporations for mining projects.

A video link was set up to stream her talk into another lecture theatre simultaneously as so many people had come to London listen to the famous novelist.

John Hollingsworth, Brunei Gallery Exhibitions Manager, had organised the public forum, with funding from a variety of organisations including The Gandhi Foundation. Despite being free, tickets had had to be reserved in advance and it was overbooked two weeks in advance. He said: “Initial interest was so high we could have filled the 300 seat Brunei Gallery three times over. It did not need much publicity as word of mouth spread very quickly.”

As for a reaction from the Indian Government to all the allegations, he said: “The Indian Government was invited to the opening of the exhibition and our first seminar to put their own point forward, but as far as we are aware, no representative was able to attend.”

Roy has been on a tirade against the Indian Government ever since she took up social causes such as opposing such as the Narmada Dam and supporting Kashmir’s independence, following the success of her first novel The God of Small Things, which won the Man Booker prize in 1997. In recent months her controversial campaign to garner support for the Maoists has intensified, a viewpoint that has led to fierce criticism in India, where she irks some of the burgeoning middle class. She was denounced by a few protesters as a ‘Murdabad’ at her latest book launch at the India Habitat Centre in Delhi recently.

She began her speech at SOAS talking about climate change, the state of the planet and declared the world was in crisis. “Just look at the plastic in the ocean and the state of the forests,” she said.

Arundhati Roy remained passionate throughout her speech

But before long she was attacking her homeland claiming India’s democracy was sham.

“India’s USP is that it is a democracy but unlike western nations, who when they were industrialising, were developing laws and codes of civil rights, India started colonising itself,” she said.

She then posed the question: “Are Maoists really Maoists since 95 per cent are Adivasi?”

Reading extracts from Broken Republic, she spoke about Adivasis being killed in what were “merely described as encounters by the Indian media” and that the atrocities being committed were blatantly “ignored by the Indian media.” According to her, more than 200 MOUs have been signed by the Indian government giving tribal land to corporations for industrial projects. She said more than 400,000 people were displaced and Rs700 billion spent to make way for The Commonwealth Games, which a lot of athletes and the Queen did not attend “to celebrate the British Empire.” She also spoke about protests by pavement dwellers and those displaced by Special Economic Zones that were ignored by the media. They have now become gangs of slaves moving from city to city building new India, which has no relevance to them, she declared.

Roy, who has even spent time with the Maoist guerrillas in the forest, said “I asked the women why they joined the guerrilla army and they said they had watched their sisters and mothers get raped. It’s not just about mining corporations, it’s about feudalism and casteism. They wanted to escape even the patriarchy of their own society,” she said, in a rare moment of criticism of patriarchal tribal societies. “India has some of the most extraordinary women in the world yet people commit female foeticide” she said. “This is a struggle for the whole world, it’s everyone’s struggle, not just India’s.

“Now we have the rich who look down on the poor thinking what are they doing drinking the water in our rivers and living in our forests?”

As for the legitimacy and morality of armed resistance, she was intransigent. “I have been accused of being a terrorist and a Marxist but someone has got to stop the violence. If you live in a forest village in a tribal area and 800 people come and burn down your village , what are you supposed to do? Declare a hunger strike? The politics of the non-violent struggle is an effective form of theatre but only if there is an audience. There is no audience in the forest. The hungry can’t go on a hunger strike. These people have nothing and it is not reported so they have no choice. What is happening in India is genocide and people have the right to resist by whatever means possible,” she said.

She fell short of commenting on the atrocities committed by Maoists in the so-called red corridor of central and eastern India where they are fighting the Indian army or of expressing any sympathy for victims of Maoist attacks, a subjective stance that continues to draws fierce criticism within some quarters in India.

Indeed, while the main target of the Maoist insurgents has been the police and the army, civilians have also been killed in the violent uprising that has seen trains hijacked, buses bombed, landmine attacks, ambushes, kidnappings and executions.

Felix Padel and Samarendra Das, authors of Out of This Earth: East Indian Adivasis and The Aluminium Cartel (2010), were also speakers.

On the far right is Felix Padel, a descendant of Charles Darwin

They have written a book that explores how the mining of bauxite to make aluminium is linked to corruption, international banks, the London Metal Exchange, multinational companies and the destruction of Adivasis communities.

Padel, a freelance British anthropologist, and great great grandson of Charles Darwin, has lived in India 30 years. He said that the Indian Government had “invented the Maoist as a bogeyman” to get public support behind attacks on Adivasis. “I see the war on Maoists as a war against tribal people,” he said, echoing Roy.

He spoke about how large well-known Indian corporate houses controlled the media and so when their steel or mining arms forcibly displaced Adivasis to start steel plants and mines in virgin forests, the media did not cover it. He even claimed major international bodies like The World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the UK Department for International Development, were tied up in the racket by giving loans for building roads and mine infrastructure and that “squeaky clean offices in London” were linked to the corruption.

“Many people do not know that a civil war is happening in India. This is the worst war that has ever taken place in India, especially because it’s directed against villagers who have been there for hundreds of years,” added Padel, who is married to an Adivasi woman and lives in a remote village in Orissa.

“Chattisgarh has become a hell on earth. The tribes are civilised in terms of law, the position of women and children. There is only one war in India that is similar to this and that is the Kalinga War when Emperor Ashoka attacked the state of Kalinga.”

The atmosphere changed when a member of the audience of Indian origin, grabbed the mike and read a question from a crumpled up piece of file paper, asking Roy why she was so negative about India and requesting her to list three things she liked about India.

The first man to ask a question attacked Arundhati Roy

As his lengthy criticism of Roy continued, a large number of the audience started booing and hissing him, but he continued unperturbed, dogged that he was on the right course. After listening patiently, Roy retorted that she was proud of “the resistance movement in India” and then talked about the “spirit and imagination of India” she was trying to protect. The next question was from another young man of Indian origin. He also was critical of Roy and wanted evidence the media was controlled by corporates and questioned Roy’s intractable stance India was a Hindu state. Roy replied that 95 per cent of profits of mainstream papers in India came from corporate adverts and that they would pull adverts if stories appeared that they did not like. All the wars

Arundhati Roy was unperturbed by criticism

against Adivasis were being waged in non-Hindu states, she claimed.

“India is a democracy but a democracy for a few people” she continued. “The day the Indian Constitution came into being was a dark day for Adivasis. Yet tribal people were there before India existed.”

The discussion then moved on to press censorship and the corruption of well-known international NGOs, ending with loud applause with most of the audience seemingly agreeing with Roy’s take on India’s civil war.

Outside the lecture hall guests looked around a two floor photo exhibition called A Disappearing World: Ancient Traditions Under Threat in Tribal India by Robert Wallis an American independent photojournalist based in the UK. Wallis had travelled to Jharkhand, one of the richest states in India in terms of minerals, and photographed Adivasi who he said were being displaced by large mining corporations that were moving into their forest homelands to extract coal and minerals such as coal, copper, iron ore and bauxalite.

The walls were filled with pictures of Adivasis first in their traditional mud or leaf homes, then in urban slums and resettlement camps, where he said they had been forcibly removed and rehoused to make way for open-cast mining of coal, iron ore and bauxite. In some pictures they were scavengers on the peripheries of mines. The captions sated they had been dispossessed of their homes and heritage and without work, ended up scavenging or working at salve labour rates amid dire conditions left them with respiratory diseases and tuberculosis. One picture showed a couple from the Birhar tribes with their hunting nets. A caption stated they were returning home having caught nothing as wildlife was disappearing and there were no animals to hunt owing to the destruction of the forest habitat.

Nearby people queued up for Broken Republic costing £18 (Rs1,400) a copy, while outside the Gallery, one of the young Indian origin men who had criticised Roy was smoking a cigarette continuing the debate outside with a friend. “It’s because of things like this,” he said pointing at his expensive blackberry and mobile phone, “that my generation is excited. New India is bringing us opportunities and things we never had before. She is seen as a joke in India. Very few people take her seriously.” He paused and dragged on his cigarette. “It’s just governance that is the problem.”

The eternal beauty of Tagore's writing reaches rural Britain

2011-05-29T20:46:00.011+01:00

The sun shone as I sat at a trendy hippyish café inside a beautiful grand county estate in Devon. I felt like I was at a similarly hedonistically intellectual event, the Jaipur Literature Festival, but I was, in fact at the Tagore Festival, which was being held, bizarrely not in Derby, Bradford, Southall or any other British Indian haunt, but rather in rural Devon.

About 2,000 people had descended on the new age town of Totnes (where I once went on a shiatsu course) earlier this month for The Tagore Festival, held to celebrate the 150^th anniversary of the famous Nobel prize winning Bengali writer and artist’s birth.

Auto rickshaws, creating the India vibe, plied festival goers up to the Dartington Hall Estate, a venue deliberately chosen because it was turned into a centre to promote arts, sustainability and social justice in 1925 inspired by Tagore, then friends with the owners, Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst, who had visited his famed Santiniketan in West Bengal, where Gandhi sent his children. The two men actually shared a lot of values but Tagore was not an ardent nationalist like the Father of the Nation.

Dartington Hall is a grand stately home inside a huge luscious estate in the county of Devon, not known for its Indian connections. For the festival, a huge elephant had been erected on the lawns, with garlands around it and a smell of curry wafted from tents erected to sell chai and samosas.

Intellectuals, hippies and middle-class families intermingled on the lawns as Indian fusion music pounded out from speakers.

Surprisingly, most of the delegates on the day I went were Caucasian and not Asian. I had thought it would be a draw for the British Asian community, but a bit like yoga, curry houses and Asian underground music, Tagore seems to have imprinted himself on the non-Asian British psyche possibly more than that of the psyche of the Indian origin community in the UK.

Like many young Indians, I too, had heard of, but never read Tagore. That is until I got to the exhibition where his poetry moved me. It was as powerful and enlightening as that of Shakespeare or Wordsworth. I was surprised it was not taught in every Indian school. My Indian friend informed me Tagore was taught in West Bengal but not, for example, in Maharashtra, which I found strange. To me, he was India’s Shakespeare – surely he should be on the national curriculum - or maybe there is someone better?

The festival consisted of a series of speeches by different speakers ranging from Deepak Chopra to Mark Tully and there was also an exhibition of Tagore and his relationship with Dartington Hall. This included genuine letters from Tagore to the Elmhirsts.

One of the most bizarre items on exhibit was a real grey wiry lock of the poet’s beard inside a plastic case. The grey hair had apparently been sent to Dartington upon Tagore’s death in 1941; his robe and hat that he had left there were also on display. This lock of beard, perfectly preserved, became a major taking point in the Indian press afterwards.

What impressed me somewhat more than that was how much of the community of Devon had been doing Tagore-related activities to celebrate Tagore’s enduring spirit. So, for example, students from nearby schools had created a Tagore sculpture trail made out of intricate carvings inspired by Tagore’s poems using oak grown on the estate and milled locally. There was also a bell made by a local sculptor in his name.

Five local schools had taken part in an all-day art workshop combining Tagore’s writing with art. It was heartening to see the Indian poet having such an influence on English schools and young people.

But most people on the day I went were there for Deepak Chopra’s two sessions which had queues stretching across the lawn.

After signing copies of his new (56th?) book, Chopra went on stage to give a speech.

“I do not know why but I felt good when I read his poems,” the qualified doctor and multi-millionaire author said, revealing he was 12 when he started reading the poems. “Sometimes in medicine you encounter death and there is solace in his poetry and it allowed me to transcend even the fear of death,” he said quoting from Tagore’s poetry.

I was not aware of the moment

When I first crossed the threshold of this life.

What was the power that made me open out into this vast mystery

like a bud in the forest at midnight!

When in the morning I looked upon the light

I felt in a moment that I was no stranger in this world,

that the inscrutable without name and form

had taken me in its arms in the form of my own mother.

Even so, in death the same unknown will appear as ever known to me.

And because I love this life,

I know I shall love death as well.

In a private interview with me before the speech, Chopra, a down-to-earth man who lacked the social pretensions one might expect from a millionaire, said: “Tagore has great relevance in the world today when you look at for example the ecological devastation happening all around us. “ He explained that Tagore believed the universe was inseparable from the stream of life running through our veins and Tagore would be very unhappy with the way the environment was being destroyed.

“I think Tagore would be disappointed with modern India, the fact that the country boasts about being an emerging superpower when it has more malnourished children than in Sub-Saharan Africa and politics is rife with corruption. 350 million Indians live in radical poverty,” he said. He said Tagore would want to see India pursue a more “authentic spirituality.” I asked him to elaborate. “ The spirituality there is the same old stuff that’s been recycled over 1000s of years from gurus to disciples, it’s very self-absorbed and not about helping others, nor is it practical, with some exceptions, it is very narcissistic,” he said.

He was critical of the lack of state support for Tagore in India. “He’s better known in south America than in India because India does not promote him at all. Very few people in India have read his works because India is on a race to conform yet he is as great as Shakespeare. India does not promote him at all. How many people know about this festival?” he asked rhetorically. It was indeed strange that the profile of Tagore, India’s only Nobel laureate in literature, was not higher.

Satish Kumar, a former Jain monk, who edits Resurgence magazine, and was the artistic director of the week-long event, also criticised the Indian Government for not supporting the British event. “The Indian Government did not support the festival,” he declared. “I asked them to pay for some Indian artists to come here and they would not so they did not come. Mark Tully came at his own expense. People in England know more about Bollywood than Tagore.”

He blamed it on the modern Indian growth story: aggressive pursuit of economic growth, above spiritual, personal or artistic growth.

“Tagore would not approve of the way the main thrust of India at the moment is economic growth and materialism, and that despite 60 years of Independence in India, millions of people there are without homes and food,” he said.

He added Tagore would be heartbroken with the whole world today, not just India. He was referring to the materialism and destruction of natural resources everywhere.

He added that Tagore could lift the spirit of the common man and was accessible to him. “He should be taught in every school. He is widely read in Bengali schools but not elsewhere,” he explained.

Kumar also gave a speech in which he spoke about the importance of “using our hands”, “our imagination, spirituality and creativity” and “working at a local level,” commenting that “that was religion,” and what Tagore advocated. “We should replace the three R’s, that is reading, writing and arithmetic, with the heart, hands and head, “ he commented: “We are all connected. Tagore is the Shakespeare of India because he touches the depths of the human soul and that is the gift of Shakespeare too. How to treat land, people and nature – all this can be found in his writings. He taught that the natural world is not just a source of economic wellbeing, but also spiritual wellbeing. For Tagore, God is not someone in the clouds; he is a divine presence in all living beings.”

I liked this concept and it reminded me of the essence of Shintoism. Kumar was very pleased with the turnout, despite the low attendance of British Asians: “It’s a people’s festival. Our aim is to popularise Tagore,” he said. "We have had people fly in from overseas."

But the one woman I spoke to sunbathing on the lawn, said she was there because of Kumar, not Tagore, or even Chopra. "I just love his magazine Resurgence and his thinking about everything in the world," she told me. "I am his soulmate. I came across his book in a second-hand bookshop. I had not heard of Tagore but I came because of Satish Kumar."

Amit Chaudhuri, author of five novels and who is a professor at the University of East Anglia, also gave a speech, in which he was critical of the English translation of Gitanjali, Tagore’s most famous work, saying it had a “semi mystical tone not present in the Bengali version” and the playfulness of Tagore’s writing in Bengali was lost in the translation, making the poems the property of “new-age people, spiritualists and Khali Gibran followers.

“He is not widely read in India and that is because he is a nightmare to translate and those who do translate him, do so with plenty of passion but not enough judiciousness. The common man does not have access to his writing, except in Bengali where it is popular kitsch culture,” he added derisively.

So while the literary world argued over what the real merits of Tagore were and why he isn't more of a success in today's society (unlike in 1913 when he was propagated as a literary genius) , I was left to mull over why the Indian and West Bengal governments had not jumped at the chance to promote their literary talent, the only Indian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, to the world.

Perhaps they are angry with Dartington Hall Trust for making a killing out of selling 12 rare Tagore paintings at Sotheby’s last year and not handing the paintings over to them for free. Or maybe they simply thought the Trust had enough money to put on the festival following the £1.5 m auction in June 2010.

One day in spring, a woman came

In my lonely woods,

In the lovely form of the Beloved.

Came, to give to my songs, melodies,

To give to my dreams, sweetness.

Suddenly a wild wave

Broke over my heart's shores

And drowned all language.

To my lips no name came,

She stood beneath the tree, turned,

Glanced at my face, made sad with pain,

And with quick steps, came and sat by me.

Taking my hands in hers, she said:

'You do not know me, nor I you--

I wonder how this could be?'

I said:

'We two shall build, a bridge for ever

Between two beings, each to the other unknown,

This eager wonder is at the heart of things.'

The cry that is in my heart is also the cry of her heart;

The thread with which she binds me binds her too.

Her have I sought everywhere,

Her have I worshipped within me,

Hidden in that worship she has sought me too.

Crossing the wide oceans, she came to steal my heart.

She forgot to return, having lost her own.

Her own charms play traitor to her,

She spreads her net, knowing not

Whether she will catch or be caught.

~Rabindranath Tagore

Finally my Indian cats leave quarantine

2011-02-06T16:33:00.008Z

Yesterday was the day my two Indian, or rather, Mumbai street cats left quarantine in Britain to enter their new home and start a new life in Somerset.
It was an emotional day.

I collected the cats from their quarantine pen in Britain where they have been staying since arriving from India

If you want to import animals from non EU countries, that still have rabies (such as India) into the UK, the cat or dog has to be put in a quarantine kennel for six months. There are a few exceptions, such as the USA and Hong Kong, but in the case of most non EU countries, including India, South Africa and Dubai, the British law currently states that the pet has to go into quarantine at the owner's expense. It is a derogation from EU law as usually Britain has to do whatever the EU does (and the EU does not have such strict regulations for importing animals) but somehow Defra has got consent not to follow the EU on this matter. The cost of putting my two cats into quarantine was £3,000 (Rs 2 Lakh Rs 20,000) and that excluded the cost of flights.

Some people are against quarantine as they believe, apart from being outdated, it is unpleasant for the animals and the owners. I guess if you look at humans, they arrive in airports every day carrying diseases, but they are not put into quarantine (unless they have swine flu!) Quarantine was introduced into Britain more than 100 years ago, so it is certainly an ancient law and science has certainly progressed since then. In fact, there are now blood tests which can prove an animal has been vaccinated against rabies, which most countries use, so one wonders why quarantine is still in place in Britain. Another problem is that the costs are very prohibitive so many people are tempted to smuggle their animals in via Dover into the UK inside their cars. Scores of animals are caught entering the UK this way, and their owners prosecuted, but I wonder how many more get through without ever being caught? That is a worrying thought.

A picture of the large quarantine pen with the door closed. This is where the two cats were kept.

In my case, the quarantine kennel staff did their best to make my cats' stay pleasant and there were plenty of toys and scratch boards inside their airy pen so I am very grateful. However, I don't think the cats especially enjoyed it. Being locked up, with the sounds of dogs barking nearby and random cats and people coming and going, without their owner present, was quite distressing. This of course would have happened in any kennel. Fortunately since they were Mumbai cats, they were fairly resilient and adapted quite quickly, often quicker than the other posh pedigree cats inside. It was funny because whenever I visited my older cat she would be thrilled to see me and then ignore me - to punish me for leaving her there, similar to the behaviour you might see from a woman in love with a man who was upset he went away too much. The younger cat, however, was very frightened at first and hid in a box all day, refusing to greet me at all. I had to buy a special infuser called Feliway to stimulate her to come out. It eventually worked as it imitated her own scent and spread her smell around the room.

What I learnt from all this was that a cat is very attached to its owner, not to its physical home - thus exploding the myth that cats are attached to a place and not a person. During the period of my cats being in quarantine, even if I did not visit them for two weeks, they knew exactly who I was. When I took the cats out yesterday, they knew who I was. They never ever forgot.

Yesterday morning they arrived at their new country home, a world away from their previous home in Mumbai and quarantine.

I arrive home with the two cats

I introduced them to the garden first, in their cages, so they could see it.

One cat takes a look at the garden...She isn't allowed to go outside for a few weeks.

Dozens of birds were tweeting, country smells filled the air and they seemed ecstatic. This was like Paradise for them. Then I took them upstairs to my bedroom. They were astonished and curious and dashed around, sniffing every corner, opening every cupboard door and checking out the view from the window. After about an hour and a half, they had cottoned on to the fact this was their new home. The younger one, who usually hid in quarantine as as she was nervous, sat on my bed and stretched out on her back, waiting to be stroked on her tummy. I did and she started purring, for the first time ever since landing in England. She had not purred once in quarantine, no matter how much I stroked her on my visits. She was smart. She knew she was back with me and this was our home. She was in fact way smarter than I realised. That is why I dispute the belief that cats are attached to places, not people. My cats did not care this was not the Bandra flat. There were no signs of either of them missing their old lives, the hot weather of India, Mumbai, or even their quarantine kennel. They both had lived with me all their lives and now we were back together and that was all that seemed to count. They were most definitely attached to a person and not a place.

Little did they know there was a lot more to my house than the bedroom, but I was undertaking one step at a time. The next day they would get to see the conservatory. I needed them to feel secure, so that when I did eventually let them in the garden, they recognised the house as their home. Naturally they ignored the expensive scratch board I had bought, preferring to claw up the carpet and ignored the expensive cat bed, preferring my bed.

I put the radio on and settled down to do some work on my laptop. But before long the older cat had jumped onto my dressing table and kicked the cafetiere over, spilling coffee and granules all over the till then stain-free carpet. As soon as I had mopped that up, the younger cat jumped across my desk, spilling a half drunk cup of tea over my papers in her stride. I saw this just in time to rescue the laptop. Next the younger cat got a fetish for the roses in a vase on the window sill. As she bit and pulled at a stalk, the vase wobbled and the water and vase went flying.

Both cats check my bedroom out

Next the elder cat jumped up on the bookshelf, pushing the cordless phone and all the ornaments off.

This was just like having kids, it dawned on me, as I took away all the ornaments, vases and coffee mugs and redesigned my room in a cat-friendly manner. I should have done it before they arrived.

At night, I moved them into the conservatory. Since it is made up only of glass, they had a full view of the garden. I went to bed worried about them and set my alarm clock for 3am so I could go down and check on them. Rather than finding them asleep, I was shocked to find the elder cat frozen in a defensive aggressive position, with her fur all stuck up on end. Her tail had tripled its thickness and she looked frightened out of her mind. I realised she must have come face to face with a badger or fox through the glass. I stroked her and went back to sleep, setting my alarm clock for 7am so I could go and check on them again. As a result I felt exhausted this morning. There was so much more I needed to show them and teach them. It was just like having a new baby or toddler in the house and I felt just as exhausted as a new parent claims to.

In fact, for the first time ever, I started to appreciate how tired new parents must feel. Until now I had never quite understood the responsibilities my friends faced being a parent, since I was footloose and single myself. But now that had changed somewhat. I sometimes couldn't quite believe that a street cat and her daughter from Mumbai were now in my home. It seemed at once absurd and at once a miracle. "You should write a story about their lives and call it Slumcat Millionaire, " my Dad joked.

Exhausted

India's rich have been cheating country of billions, for six decades | The Asian Age

2010-12-01T17:29:00.000Z

India's rich have been cheating country of billions, for six decades The Asian Age

Social networking: are you addicted?

2010-11-21T22:47:00.010Z

Before going to see The Social Network, I was expecting it to be a film that somehow or other promoted Facebook. But the impact it had on me was quite the opposite.

Apart from falling in love with the underdog, Eduardo Saverin, I came away from the cinema convinced that I currently spent far too long on Facebook; that it was often a complete waste of time, which I could have been using to read a book/do callanetics/write a novel/attend a yoga class/whatever; moreover, far from being enjoyable, my time on Facebook was more often that not, an unsatisfying unpleasant experience.

Yet, it dawned on me that despite being unpleasant, it was also addictive, in the same way that coffee, nicotine, alpha male non-committal boyfriends, Twitter, and chocolate, can be addictive.

Whenever we get an addiction, it always seems to be for something that is a bit good for us, but also quite bad for us. When was the last time anyone got addicted to going to church, doing a tax return or eating apples, for example?

So, ironically the film, whether intentional or not, highlighted to me the potential pitfalls of Facebook, which I had till then, barely contemplated.

At the beginning of the film, (which is of course semi fiction), the lead character, Mark Zuckerberg, ends up getting dumped and then sidelined at college because he puts up pictures of girls and asks men to rate who is the prettiest. That concept ends up being the precursor to what we know as Facebook.

I too am finding that the bitchiness of the real world merges with Facebook nowadays. You have men trying to make ex girlfriends jealous by flirting with other girls online; you have something which I can only describe as ‘Facebook rage’ when someone posts a comment on their status that outrages others, and a huge argument ensues; you have people defriending you and you defriending others; you have ex’s new girlfriends spying on you and more.

In The Daily Telegraph recently, there was a story about how social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter are to blame for pupils’ poor grades. The story by Andy Bloxham can be seen here.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/8142721/Social-networking-teachers-blame-Facebook-and-Twitter-for-pupils-poor-grades.html

He refers to research that claims that children who spend too much of their time online are “finding it harder to concentrate in class, are permanently distracted and have shorter attention spans.”

The research also states that these children fail to complete their homework on time or to the standard required because they are in such a hurry to finish it at night and then go back online.

Many are even carrying smart phones to school, thus remaining connected to social networking sites during lessons.

I am extremely glad that Facebook was not around when I went to school. Back then we didn’t even have mobiles. I would get home from school and sit in my bedroom doing homework for four hours every night, with the only major distraction being the cat. I can’t imagine how distracting social networking sites and mobiles must be for school children today.

But it seems many adults too live in the virtual world, not the real world. There are people, I have discovered, who seem to be on Facebook day and night, constantly updating their status and commenting immediately on yours, the minute you post a comment up.

Immediately after watching the said film, I posted on my status that I had come to conclusion that much of what I did on Facebook was a complete waste of time. A friend responded that it depended on what I meant by “waste of time” as the only social interaction he ever had nowadays was on Facebook, as none of his friends met up for drinks anymore – those days were over, he wrote. The only fun he had with his friends was on Facebook, which was better than no contact, he stated.

I can say with conviction that any time I spend with friends in person far surpasses chats (or spats) on my status.

I have been examining people on Facebook recently and I have discovered there are two types of people: those who are on it all the time and those who are never on it. I am convinced that those never on it are having a far better social life than we realise. Just because they are not posting up pictures of themselves at parties looking like they are having the time of their lives, does not mean they are not at parties doing exactly that. When was the last time you took a camera to a party? I always forget mine, and if I remember it, am enjoying myself too much or have had too much white wine to remember to use it…It does seem as though many people deliberately take pictures with the sole purpose of being able to put them on Facebook to show others they are living an amazing life. But in reality, are they? Or is it all a charade?

As for Facebook rage, well this is similar to swimming pool lane rage when swimmers crash into each other or have blazing rows in the middle of British swimming pools, because one is too slow or fast.

Similarly, you can start to see really nasty sides of some so-called friends on Facebook – sides you never knew they had: snide comments, acid remarks and so on.

It might be that one person is making their opinion heard about a news item, or a book they’ve read and whatever they have said outrages another of their so-called friends so much, that a huge online row ensures…Hardly fun each time each person longs on to read abuse about them in their news feed.

I had an incident where I posted an innocuous opinion on someone else’s wall, really directed at that person, who was a friend and I knew would get it, only to get a friend of that person who I had never met, who held a different view on the subject to me, write acid remarks back.

We all have those friends in our list that write something crazy or controversial on our wall. And what I have found is the worst offenders are people who I’m not even friends with at all. But beware if you defriend someone. I recently took someone off, on this occasion, because we were not in touch, never emailing or phoning and I did not see why that person needed to be on my Facebook friends' list. The minute, literally the minute, I removed him/her, he/she send me a message asking why I had removed him/her as a friend. I have no idea how he/she knew, but presume he/she spotted his/her total number of friends had gone down. How do you reply to a question asking why you defriended someone? Are people not being too hypersensitive?

The other day my Dad asked me if he could remove me as a Facebook friend. I wasn’t the slightest bit bothered.
The reason he gave was that he had no interest in what I was doing and it annoyed him that I kept constantly coming up in his news feeds. Fair enough. I was the only one of his friends posting anything, so whenever he logged on, he was faced with a series of trivial posts about me or my cats.
If you are a boss, and an employee removes you, then fair play too. Why would anyone want their boss as Facebook friend? LinkedIn yes, Facebook, No. The point is you are not removing these people in real life, only on Facebook, so it means nothing.

Random characters also track you down from your past. Sometimes this is good, but sometimes not. An ex boyfriend from years ago, whom I have no interest in whatsoever, tracked me down on Facebook and asked me to meet him in London.

I was complaining about this to my Mum and she said if Facebook didn’t exist he would never have been able to find me. "Forget it. Don’t meet him," she advised. And I didn’t.

There are other curiosities too: I have some married male friends that do not state there are married on their status, in fact they don’t even state they are in a relationship, which I find odd. But equally I have married male friends who state they are married and yet are having affairs. There are also many men who have serious relationships with women, but still keep their relationship status up as single. Why is that?

Of course, Facebook has many advantages, not least helping people throw parties, without having to send formal invites; sharing good news with friends such as marriage, a new child, or a promotion; reconnecting with old friends you want to reconnect with; keeping up with the news and movements of friends in an increasingly busy world where people often live geographically apart. But for some people, it sucks up too much of their time at work and home. If it’s affecting your work, you can only hope your work firewalls it.

There is now a reocognised illness called Facebook Addiction Disorder. Those afflicted are so obsessed with their virtual activities that they are willing to forego their meals, sleep, responsibilities, work, friends and other leisure activities to be on the site. Many stay up all night to be on it and are connected 24 hours.

Below is an article about symptoms of Facebook addiction.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Symptoms-of-Facebook-Addiction&id=4136115
Having read that and a bit worried I might be on it too much, I have recently decided to detox and limit my time on Facebook to once a week.

Last night I made the decision and logged out.

Straight away I came out in a cold sweat. How was I going to remember anyone’s birthday? I can’t remember anyone’s except my own. What if it was someone’s birthday before this Saturday? My cold turkey began...but I resisted. Tomorrow I am buying a birthday book.

Huge Spending Cuts: the right way forward for Britain

2010-10-31T21:26:00.003Z

David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, recently unveiled a series of hefty cuts to public services and the welfare system in the UK. The news has dominated headlines here ever since.

The reason for the need for cuts is that the UK’s deficit is apparently at a record high (£180bn, same as that of Greece), something that everyone is blaming on the overspending of the former Labour Government.

For me, it has been amusing and bemusing watching this news (and sensational headlines) about the new “austerity drive", having just returned to live in England from Mumbai.

We were told by Cameron that the welfare budget was to be cut by £18bn. The total benefits being handed out to a single family are now being capped at £26,000 per year (a salary an Indian could only dream of and one that most Brits have to work five days a week to get.) Here in England, the people who receive these benefits don’t need to work and have all this money all handed to them in a cheque. Often they are perfectly healthy and able to work, but they simply don’t need to, since the Govenment benefits are on offer. We are hearing on the news now that there are families in London that have been getting £400 a week in housing benefit alone, living in homes in central London, that no ordinary working person could ever afford. Some families in London get £50,000 a year in housing benefit, more than double the average salary in the UK. And that is just their housing benefit! They cash in other benefits on top.

I don’t think India has a welfare budget, like the UK does. In the UK anyone that doesn’t feel like working, doesn’t have to, and can get £65 a week in Jobseeker’s Allowance from the Government just to stay at home and watch daytime TV.

Another change Cameron wants to bring out is to raise the age at which men and women can claim a state pension to 66 here. Again, I am not aware of a state pension in India, and the country seems to be ticking along quite nicely. Why? Because people there rely on their families, not the state. The French meanwhile, are torching cars over their state pension age going up to 62!

If an Indian were watching the British headlines, that I am watching, they would be simply aghast at the amount of "freebies" (or benefits) a Briton can get. We have Jobseeker's Allowance, Housing Benefit, a Carer’s Benefit (if you care for someone); free access to hospitals, medicines, treatments ; free schools; a cash allowance just for having a child; cash for fuel for pensioners; free bus passes; free school meals, all kinds of subsidies for the unemployed…the list goes on. Our income taxes are paying for all this. And now we are being told that as we are in too much debt, they all have to get cut.

While I agree some benefits are essential (free health and education, free fuel for pensioners, incapacity benefit for the genuinely sick or injured etc), some are not and too much of some is very much a very bad thing – as it creates a layer of society that simply never works and lives off the state. Plus it encourages fraud. There are thousands of people that obtain incapacity benefit through fraud - cases of people being caught out are forever being reported in national newspapers.

What no one has thought of is what about getting all these people to work! A motivation for that would be having no money. But by giving them so many benefits, right now that incentive is withdrawn from them.

Perhaps if these people went out and worked, they would not need to rely on the state. They could pay their own rent. Then the money we are ploughing into benefits could be used on defence and anti-terrorism instead.

Can you imagine if India had all these benefits? It would go bankrupt overnight. There would certainly be no maids or road labourers. No, they would all stay at home living off state benefits instead as there would be no incentive to work. No other country would have been able to find 1,000 labourers in a day to work on the Commonwealth Games stadiums for a pittance, as the Indian Government did shortly before the Games opened....

Other cuts Cameron has announced include:

The Foreign Office withdrawing its funding of the BBC World Service. This needs to be funded by the BBC now instead. Sounds like a good idea to me, since the BBC is funded by compulsory TV licenses that anyone with a TV has to pay for anyway. Not quite sure why the Foreign Office was ever funding it.

The Transport Budget needs to be cut by £1.1 bn meaning that commuters (read: hard-working people paying off mortgages) will be forced to shell out even more on rail fares, that are already exorbitant. I am totally against this, as apart from anything, it is hardly going to promote greener living, and will hit those on low incomes as well as on high incomes. This is a matter which England would do well to learn from India on. I am not sure if rail travel is subsidised there, but it is amazingly cheap, meaning that anyone in India can afford it. And accessible transport is a vital ingredient in anyone’s quality of life. I remember how in May all the maids and watchmen would flock to their villages on trains. In England such distances by rail are far too expensive for anyone other than a fat-cat investment banker.

The Arts Budget is going to be cut by 30 per cent too, which I am also against as the Arts (theatre, films, museums, creative writing, fine art etc) are the heart and soul of Britain, something the British are proud of and a major reason why tourists visit. Many of Britain’s theatres, museums and films are currently subsidised by the Government. One could argue though that these organisations could be more efficiently run if their belts were tightened and could look to be patronised by private business instead.

University fees look set to double by 2012 and will no longer be capped for British students at £3, 290, which I am also against. It would be better if the Government forced universities to forge better ties with industry and make their courses more vocational, in my view, than simply withdrawing subsidies.

The Schools and Health budget remain unaffected, which is good and The Queen is being forced to cut her spending by £6 million.

Bizarrely, despite all these cuts, Britain, in a huge philanthropic gesture, is going to increase its overseas aid by 40 per cent, we are told. This has raised a few eyebrows.

In Mumbai, on the contrary, I saw barely any public services. The police and fire services aside (the former, which you may have to bribe, I am told), I can think of few public services, apart from road building that existed in India. To my knowledge, healthcare and education is not free for most people. (I think there are a few government-sponsored vernacular schools, but these tend to cater to the children of slumdwellers and the homeless, most of whom aspire to sending their kids somewhere better anyway. I am not aware of any free healthcare at all, as we have in the UK.) I don't remember going to any government-sponsored art galleries either, although Mani Bhavan, the highly inspirational Gandhi museum in Mumbai may have been free. Do you have to pay to go to the Jehangir Gallery? I can’t remember but I certainly don't remember seeing anyone collect the rubbish or sweep the streets. Oh, the army and defence - yes, there is a lot of money invested in that in India, for which we can be thankful. The army is very good (and the men super hot.) Airport security in India is unrivalled. But apart from defence, I am not especially aware of what public taxes in India are spent on. I don't think many Indians are either which is why there seems to be a national subversive attempt to not pay any taxes, or pay as little as possible. "All politicians are corrupt," is a comment often made in India. I do not agree with this as I have no evidence either way. Indeed the MP expenses scandal in the UK has exposed the "white-collar" corruption that exists in Britain.

And this is not the point. The point is that despite there being barely any public services in India, (and a hell of a lot of tax avoidance, which is not possible in the UK - the Inland Revenue catches everyone), Indian people do pretty well. Indians survive despite having none of the benefits on offer in the UK. One reason for this is that Indians depend much more on the family and themselves than the state. In my previous blog, Expat on the Edge, I touched on some of this: http://blogs.hindustantimes.com/expat-on-the-edge/2010/05/19/living-in-a-material-or-spiritual-mumbai/

Now, I am not for one minute advocating England axes everything and we end up like India where public services are woefully lacking; but there needs to be a happy medium between the two extremes. The worst part about Britain wasting so much money on benefits, is that there are plenty of jobs in the UK! Plenty of them. And imagine if half the money we currently ploughed into benefits was instead ploughed into more job creation and investment in British business!

At least in India there is a sense of and pride in working and saving. The ideology in India is that if you want something, you have to work for it and save to get it rather work out how to scam a benefit out of the government for it, or put it on a credit card. Perhaps a study should be done on the impact living in a society like India has on the individual and his attitude towards work, earning a living, his family, and his dependence on the state. It could reveal some interesting findings that Britain could learn from. Being born into a welfare state could perhaps not be particulalry good for the average individual.

I wonder if as we barge forward into the 21st Century, with all the globalisation and competitiveness that comes with that, whether the welfare state, such as the one Britain currently has, can afford to continue, or whether nations like Britain will have to change and learn from countries like India.

The reaction to the Commonwealth Games: a microcosm of general attitudes towards India?

2010-10-17T22:37:00.001+01:00

The British media ignored the shambles and fiasco of the Commonwealth Games 2010 in Delhi until two weeks before they were due to start, while the Indian media had been dutifully reporting on the impending disaster for months.
Then when the British media did start reporting on it, it became headline news for a solid 10 days. It was, in journalistic terms, a fantastic news story, and sometimes so comic, you wondered if the Indian officials behind the games, shouldn't just ditch it all in, and take a job at Mumbai's Comedy Store instead. Their mishaps, faux pas, errors, mismanagement, alleged corruption and bad luck seemed to almost be deliberate to keep the western media salivating for days. The CWG Committee was generating more column inches than any PR team could have dreamt of. Unfortunately though, it was not good PR for India, that had until then been the flavour of the month in the West owing to pity generated by the Mumbai attacks and adoration generated by Slumdog Millionaire. I wondered if the British media reluctance to report on the shambles in the first instance was an over-fawning upon India, because of a desire, prevalent in some western media, to "talk India up" and ignore its problems. Even David Cameron had ignored the CWG problems, apparent to everyone else, when he made his first charm offensive visit to India before the Games.

It was ironic that the Western media ignored the fiasco subject for months (that is June/July/August), when the Indian media was pulling the CWG commitee up for its alleged corruption, misuse of funds, and the sorry state of construction every day.
But as the Opening Ceremony got close, the western media could ignore it no more. Then suddently the stories flowed in, as though part of a cleverly drawn up media camnpaign, albeit offering negative coverage every day. Whether it was the faux pas at the inaugural show by Kalmadi saying Princess Diana had attended, or his next mistake stating the USA was a member of the Commonwealth, or reports that poisonous snakes were on their way, that dengue had arrived, and stray dogs were sleeping in the athletes' bedrooms, or that British swimmers had all came down with Delhi Belly, or that the athletes' village was described as "unfit for human habitatiion," all journalists, regadless of nationality, had a field day.

What then happened in the British media and on social networking sites like Facebook was a bizarre reaaction to the series of events that almost revealed people's suppressed attitudes towards the whole of India, like a old wound bursting open again.
On the one hand, there was the nationalist young Indian, furious at the negative coverage India was getting, venting anger about the Commonwealth's very existence, railing againt the British Raj and India's colonionial histrory, suggesting the Commonwealth was meaningless, offensive and should be scrapped.
This was an exchange on one Facebook page.

A: The CWG, is it a national shame or regional or even local?
B: Its a national shame....corruption at its peak.'It's not only a national shame, but the officials have nowhere to hide their face because this time everything is transparent about how the tax payers'' money is fooled around with.
C: Mumbai would have handled it better, or the Games should have been organised outside of Delhi's built-up areas. But hey we have more brutal things, such as grinding poverty, to be nationally ashamed of. The CMG are not even of Olympics standards, plus it's a legacy of colonisation.
D: I agree there are other issues but imagine those 'goras' lecturing us. Also,corruption exists even in the Western countries but only its not visible. What I want to say is, no action shall be taken against the culprits ar usual. But how long can we sit speechless or let out our anger through some social networking site! It won't work. Sometimes I wonder whether this democracy gifted to us by The British is a gift in disguise.
E: See after all it was much ado about nothing. yes they were some small matters of toilets leaking, etc. Indian media exaggerates, dont take them seriously folks... look at the latest news: Canada coming, Wales coming, Scotland coming, England coming... they were the ones who had delayed their arrival in Delhi. People down under have always been a spoil sport. Let them not come. It's the white folk who create problems. African nations never said they were delaying their departure, did they?

Then you had, some of the right-wing western media reporting in an almost xenophobic fashion and with relish, the disaster, day by day, as it unfolded, almost looking for more stories than there already were (was child labour being used to sweep the floors, for example, was a question lingering on their minds.)
As with Slumdog Millionaire, the problem with this kind of reporting is, one minute the media is all over a social issue, the next it is not. So while child labour may be a problem somwhere in India, it probably wasn't much of a problem at the CWG (correct me if I am wrong); yet real child labour, where it exists in India, no doubt, continues ignored.
Then you had the athletes saying how great India was and they coudn't wait to eat Tandooori Chicken, dismissing all the negative stories.
Then followed the story of the thousands of used condoms blocking the drains at the Games Village - filling Indian minds with more negative stereoptypes that all Westerners are loose.
There was something quite surreal and shocking too about watching these athletes in the skimpiest of outfits wander around with Indian workmen and peasants nearby...Then there were the less nationalist but nonetheless patriotic Indians, who still didn't get what all the noise was about.

"Great Opening Ceremony and "Great Ending" they tweeted. Nothing on what happened inbetween bothered them.
It went off well so all the CWG bashing needs to stop!say lets give the CMG a nice burial in Delhi and bury the colonial past with it , one tweeted.

As the lack of sale of tickets became apparent, I asked some Indian friends on my Facebook page, why they weren't going to it. The empty stadiums were making headline news in the UK again and this was something (unlike corruption and roofs caving in ) that they could do something about quickly - and resolve. If I was Indian and in India I would have got a bunch of friends together and gone there. Watching athletes perform to empty stadiums on TV was painful.
The response?

A: Do you really expect Indians to bother seeing Netball between Papua New Guinea and Bermuda when India-Aus are involved in a Cricket Test match? Heck - even if the cricket was not on - who would really want to go?who cares ??"
B: All i know is I am not travelling to delhi for next 2 weeks !
C: There is a general security paranoia - media hype! I'm not that into the idea anyhow. It's hardly exciting.
D: The tickets are too expensive.

Why were tickets too expensive? Was their price not researched? Why did loads of suited corporates from private companies not attend, as they do attend other sporting events like Wimbledon and Henley Regatta? Where were the tickets on sale? What will happen to all these stadiums now? Why were they built with such massive capacities, if there was no strategy to sell tickets or evidence100,000 tickets would be sold.
Even Delhi's beggars said the CWG were bad for business (read here http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/10/12/games-bad-for-beggars-business/) and tourism went down rather than up http://blogs.wsj.com/indiarealtime/2010/10/07/games-bbs-have-been-big-bust/
Yet the West was accused of India bashing by some.
Pix of some of the rooms in the Athletes'Village were circulated on the Internet. Some showed immaculate sparkling rooms, others showed dog footprints and dirty sinks, depending on who was circulating them, and what their view was.
At the end of it, there was a general sense among some Indians that the Games had not ben as disastrous as the media had made out.
"We pulled it off, it's not like it didn't happen at all," they said. It was likened to an Indian wedding, where everything falls into place at the end.
Some Indians decided the Games had been "an unqualified success"
But did everything fall into place?
Should Indians care more about the image of India in the world and the bad PR they got from this? Or not? Was it the "perfect Indian wedding?"
It seems to me that provided the Indian economy is growing at 7 per cent, many young Indians don't care what image the CWG gave out. I noticed in India a trait not to focus on the negative and to remain positive, to partake in self praise far more often than self criticism, to be happy with whatever the outcome was, provided it wasn't too dire (eg noone died), and to focus on the end result more than the process getting there; unlike in the West which is more obsessed with having everything going to plan, meeting deadlines and achieving perfection, as well as having a penchant for self-criticism, above self praise. On the one hand, the Indian attitude is dangerous as it can lead to a satisfaction with something substandard (eg a product or service esp in the context of outsourcing); on the other hand it is a more stress-free way to live.
Even during the terror attacks, I remember life in Bandra went on pretty much as before. The shop keeper in the corner shop carried on stacking shelves. What is it his problem if there is an attack in Churchgate?
Or maybe I am reading too much into this, and the CWG did not interest India because the word Commonwealth now repulses modern metro ambitious proud Indians.

London and Mumbai: overrated, overpriced and dirty...

2010-10-06T23:42:00.010+01:00

Everyone at the coach stop was a senior citizen, except me. Most were dressed like hicks. We were all embarking on a massive trip to London. For me it was my first trip to the big smoke, since returning from India. The queue of Somerset locals reminded me of the scene of strugglers queuing up to travel to Mumbai from places like Bihar.
Of course, "I" knew what London was "like", so had spent an entire day emptying my wardrobe looking for smart clothes, in an attempt not to look like a local yokel in the glitzy capital. I had several parties and dinner parties lined up and wanted to look 'the part.' After all, if there was one thing Mumbai had taught me, it was the importance of dressing smartly, dressing to the occasion, and well, in short, looking rich and glamorous. Those are the rules by which the Mumbai social set lives. Disobey them at your peril and expect to lose your confidence and feel like a wallflower at any social gathering. (I learnt this the hard way. It took me 2 years to learn that ripped jeans and T shirts do not go down well at page 3 parties in the city that never sleeps, but sequined black dresses and heels do. This is why the latter was my attire at my grand Mumbai leaving party:) I learnt the hard way that it was better not to show up at parties in Mumbai, than dress inappropriately. Of course, I also learnt that some of the most well-dressed people at these affairs, were financially bankrupt, immoral, having illicit affairs, unemployed, boring, rude you name it - but well-dressed they were.)

So, the coach left and we glided through the rolling hills of Somerset, with fields of sheep on either side.

I was still in my ''I love England mindset'' and so stared at the scenery and mulled on how happy I was to be in Somerset and how I wasn't missing the noisy honking chaos of Mumbai. The passenger in the seat next to me was rather fat squashing me somewhat. I also began to feel travel sick. Without wishing to offend her, I explained I may move seats as I felt ill, as we seemed to be sat above the wheel. A few minutes later, quite randomly, she asked: "Are you pregnant?" This was a case of the pot calling the kettle black, if ever there was one. "No!"I said. "Oh, I just thought you might be, given you said you felt sick," she said.

I soon moved (or should I say shifted?) to another seat. My sickness wore off and I spent the journey texting those friends, who I would be meeting, after spending such a long time in India.

After some time, the lush green trees suddenly looked dead, the houses were no longer picture postcard aesthetically-pleasing dreamlike cottages, with thatched roofs and fields for gardens, but rather ugly detached "London suburb" homes, with tiny gardens..and ugly cars .Some had no curtains; some had dark drapes across the windows as though disguising drug-growing dens inside; yobs suddenly appeared on the pavements (men with woollen hats stretching down over their foreheads, and in tracksuits, loitering on bikes - a species not found in Somerset); there was litter scattered across the pavement; bins were overflowing; the scene was no grey, rather than green; graffiti scarred the buildings; there was a sense of poverty. It was ugly. The accommodation looked substandard. Council flats appeared. People suddenly looked badly dressed. I looked in horror out of the coach window. Is this the country I had been so proud of in India and constantly compared to Mumbai? Is this the best England can manage to produce with its capital city? It was nothing like San Francisco.

The coach stopped at the London coach station. I had thought of having lunch there, but soon changed my mind as I went down the stairs into the shopping centre and saw a bunch of waifs and strays roaming around a cheap supermarket. I didn't like the look of the people and decided to head straight to Harrods. But I needed to use the Ladies' toilet. Cost of using the public toilet? 50 pence (Rs35)!! I was shocked. Although overpriced, I figured it would be safe and clean as the undesirables would never spend that much. I was right.

Next I stepped onto the tube. Unimpressive. Litter was scattered on the platform. To a newcomer (like me), the London Underground came across as old-fashioned, like something from the past century, and uncomfortable. The routes and lines still didn't allow you to make the journeys you wanted directly, instead forcing you to make changes. You walked so much between tube lines, you might as well have walked the whole distance. The yellow and green lines were still slow and useless. The brown line was still the best. On the tube, I looked around and there was an Asian man in a suit sat down, a group of Italians talking loudly and what seemed to be a bunch of foreigners everywhere. When foreigners come to England, is this what they see? Do they know there is a whole world of England out there, beyond this, beyond London? Probably not, because you get sucked in.

People sat or stood on the tube in absolute silence. I chuckled at the thought of how noisy the same train would be in Mumbai. In London everyone looked miserable, everyone was ignoring each other, and everyone seemed to hate their lives. No wonder. I got entranced in staring at people, imagining their lives but avoiding eye contact. Everyone was also badly dressed. One man got on, with skinny jeans, trainers, a green urban jacket and ipod earphones in his ears. He had deliberately dressed like a yob, to fit in. No one looked like this in Somerset.

We reached Knightsbrige and I walked straight to Harrods. A doorman said, "Hello, Ma'am," as I walked inside. "This is more like it," I mused. "I feel more at home." I was glad I had dressed to impress. India had taught me the Art of that. I looked ''the part"" and the Harrods staff recognised that. But straight away though I was told to leave my suitcase in Left Luggage at Harrods, and that I could not bring it into the store. The cost? ₤3 (Rs215). I had now spent ₤3.50 (Rs250) before even doing anything. My plan was to have lunch inside Harrods. After all, you only live once. But a coffee was ₤4 (Rs300) and a panini ₤15 (Rs 1,000). I figured that although I looked the part, I wasn't quite ready to be the part, and slipped outside to have lunch at a nearby trendy sandwich bar. The cappuccinos and sandwiches appeared to be the same prices, as they had been when I left for India. The varieties hadn't changed either. Weird. I sat outside, managing a sandwich, cappuccino and chocolate bar, for ₤5 (Rs 350) but did not feel comfortable. Immediately two waifs and strays appeared and hovered near a dustbin, opposite my table. I wondered if they were planning on mugging me. I ate my sandwich, clutching my bag between my knees. I never had to do this in Somerset, I thought.

I swiftly returned to Harrods, one of the few places, I felt comfortable in London. The staff were all dressed smartly and looked clean and immaculate, as they do at five stars in Mumbai. They all called me Maám . I felt at home. It was a Mumbai five star experience on offer here in London. I bought something expensive in the cosmetics section. The lady offered me a Harrods loyalty card. Of course, why not? I looked the part. I wandered around the Food Hall for hours, marvelling at what was on display, things I had never seen in India. I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I used the luxury toilets, and of course, there were fine perfumes to sample, and a foreign-looking lady inside who washed your hands for you, or got your a paper towel. This was just like the Taj in Colaba! I sprayed Guilty by Gucci on. The five stars in Mumbai had been fabulous and it was great to be able to experience that here, again, I mused. I visited the memorial to Diana and Dodi by the Egyptian escalator. There was a Dubai-esque feel to the place. Grotty London was a world away. In the same way that when in five stars in Mumbai, grotty Mumbai is a world away.

It dawned on me that the two cities had a lot in common: they were both where locals and foreigners flocked to make money, pursue careers or get fame. But neither city was attractive, both were grotty, and neither represented the soul of the country at large. I understood now why some of my Indian friends preferred to live in Chandigarh, Ahmedabad or Pune, rather than Mumbai. And in the same way overpopulation of Mumbai, was ruining it, so is the overpopulation of London ruining it. In Mumbai there had been open areas of rubbish, where people simply dumped rubbish, which stray animals then fed from. Dustbins barely existed. In London, they did, but litter was strewn across pavements. There were no stray dogs in London, but plenty of stray pigoens picking at litter and feral-looking people. The buildings in the suburbs of Mumbai, such as in Bandra and Andheri, were far from aesthetically-pleasing and often substandard quality inside with monsoon leaks, revolting furniture, no water and peeling paint.
Similarly houses in London were nowhere near the same quality as those new homes you find outside the capital. Yet you pay through the nose to live in both cities.
Of course, south Mumbai has many visual architectural exceptions, as do touristy parts of central London. But the suburbs in both cities visually, at least, leave a lot to be desired. In Mumbai you have unalluring slums. In London you have unattractive council estates.
Both cities have their selling points - such as nightlife, men, food and culture. That was what I planned to check out in London next. But already I could understand why Londoners raved about Mumbai so much. There wasn't much difference between the two cities, unlike comparing say either to Somerset. Even the laissez-faire attitude, found in Mumbai, was there in London.
"You write in your blog that London is grotty, and we Londoners will just laugh. We know it's like that and we like it," my London friend said.

Britain Glorious Britain

2010-09-23T17:29:00.000+01:00

(....were it not for the whining Brits)

Cardinal Walter Kaspar may have remarked that Heathrow made him think of England as a Third World Country, ahead of Pope Benedict’s visit to Britain. "England today is a secularised and pluralist country. When you land at Heathrow airport, you sometimes think you've landed in a Third World country," he was quoted as saying to a German magazine before the Pope’s grand arrival. Then mysteriously following the controversy in Britain that followed his insult, the senior papal advisor pulled out of the Pope’s trip, citing illness. (!)

Well, I could not disagree with what he said more.

A typical English high street

England is certainly First World. When I landed at Heathrow, after three years in India, I marvelled at the modernity, cleanliness and organisation of the airport. Everything looked new and everything worked. I felt immensely relieved to be holding a British passport and able to walk through immigration without a queue, heightened by the fact I had had a priority pass, having (accidentally) flown business class. Hundreds of foreigners meanwhile queued at the long line of immigration officer desks. I had always been one of that lot whenever I had landed in India or the USA. But not so anymore! Yippee.

I was glad I had not lost my British citizenship from living in India (imagine if that had happened?!) Now I was so excited to be home, even if the sky was grey. My parents were waiting at the arrivals section for me, having driven up from Somerset to greet me. As always when they met me off flights from India, my mum was carrying a thick coat, and this time, a pair of shoes. “Mum, we have shoes in India. We are not all ascetics. Did you think I was going to land barefoot?” I asked sarcastically. We put my stuff in the car and I entertained them all the way home about my nightmares leaving, how I had to give away most of my stuff, and discard it at the airport, the cats, the 11^th hour upgrade to business class, and so on.

As usual my parents didn’t really have many or any questions about India, but that was to be expected: they rarely had questions about anywhere I travelled (as a general rule British people are spectacularly uninterested in wherever you travel and it’s a social taboo to bore them with the details, and certainly not to even start on photos).

So, I gazed at the uncrowded roads, that only had cars speeding down on (not rickshaws, mopeds, motorbikes and cabs crashing into one another), the clean perfectly drawn white lines on the edges of each grey tarmac lane, the lack of people wandering or sitting on the streets - and it didn’t bore me. For once, I liked England; for once I liked the peacefulness and organised state of things.

Another typical scene

A typical empty street (outside London)

The chaos of India had entranced me at first. I think most tourists are bewitched upon seeing flower and fish sellers sat on the pavement, child beggars tearing at their trousers and homeless people living in tents on the pavement. Forget the fact it is an indication of poverty, tourists find it fascinating and even take pictures of it on digital cameras. These are the scenes, often described as “colourful” by novice writers. I too was seduced it all at first, but it eventually, that lost its appeal after three years. Until then England had lost its appeal and I had found India fascinating. Now I found England fascinating. Maybe I was looking at England through an Indian person's eyes. I found the English pavement and tarmac interesting; the way people crossed the road in England interesting; the plethora of dyed hair on women intrigued me; so did puffin crossings. You see, maybe that is what being an expat does - it makes you appreciate your own country more. After some time in India, despite initially seeking adventure, excitement and chaos, I started to want quietness and normality. India had, at the end, started to feel like a dream. Back sat in my bedroom in Somerset felt like reality again. Or maybe comparing my 250 square foot flat in Mumbai to Somerset was not a correct comparison. A studio flat in Brixton may have been a better one. Maybe then my Indian eyes would have preferred Bandra.

For now, having lived in India for 3 years, I was really appreciating the peace and organisation of England (for the first time!) I no longer needed to go to bhangra nights and study Hindi, to get a virtual link to the country I had fallen in love with as a 19-year-old backpacker. I was finally able to feel English and be English. I could now imagine going to Henley Regatta once more, or playing tennis, picking blackberries, or eating strawberries and cream.

India had cured me. Of something.

(Herein lies a reason why India is considered spiritual. It teaches us foreigners lessons, lessons we didn’t even know we needed to learn.)

The good old English pub and familiar Tudor buildings

I no longer hated typical English pubs. How long would this fascination with my birth place last, I wondered.

I could sense my Dad was nervous as to how long I might stay in his house, where he had a computer that was ‘his’, an armchair in the sitting room that was ‘his’ and a life, set up with hobbies and classes at specific times, in a set routine, that was ‘his.’

The next few days were very busy as my parents were celebrating their Ruby wedding anniversary soon after I arrived – one of the reasons I had flown back at that time. I had always thought that it was only in India that people could afford caterers. To me, the general rule had always been that whatever there was a servant or labourer for in India, in England it was done DIY. No one has a cook, driver or a maid in England, for example (save the Queen). And generally at dinner parties and house parties, we cater ourselves.

But my Mum proved me wrong on the occasion of her 40^th wedding anniversary and hired a catering company, at massive cost (which I later discovered, was at my expense too.). So, in the week leading up to the big 100-guest event, we had a large marquee van arrive to put up the marquee, caterers, florists, you name it. It was like a scene from Four Weddings and a Funeral.

I was especially pleased when I noticed that the men putting up the marquee were all young and good-looking. I remembered that rule, which is in The Rules, which states you should always look your best, even at Tesco. So, I took off my pyjamas and put on some make-up and made them cups of tea every hour.

The marquee

Then next came the wine delivery van. I have never ever unloaded and carried so many boxes of wine in my life. The van man sad he had never had such a large order before either. Boxes and boxes of 12 bottle crates of red and white wine filled up our kitchen. Lifting them compensated for me not doing arm weights in the gym for two weeks.

My Dad suddenly panicked we did not have enough fridges to cool the white wine in. (We have three American sized fridges and one wine fridge.)

My Dad then investigated hiring a fridge. Cost: 500 pounds per day.

“In India they just put them in wheelie bins of ice,” I said helpfully.

I informed him he had over-ordered on the wine, as our house looked like a wine warehouse. He nodded, but it was too late. I remembered that golden rule for a successful party: get the guests drunk. So, I guessed, we always had that option to fall back on.

A few days before the Big Day, I decided that since so many good-looking marquee men were around, since I was in my 30s and unmarried, and since my Mum had been harassing me to do it for ages, it was time to get my hair highlighted. This was something I had resisted my whole life, proud of having “natural blond hair like the woman in the Timotei Ad.”

But now all my friends who had highlighted or dyed blond hair (equals most of my friends) were married. I was not. There was a missing link, a disconnect. Perhaps, I figured, older and wiser, perhaps it was time I did dye it. After all my eyebrows and arm hair were blond, so it would look pretty natural anyway wouldn’t it? My mum agreed to pay the 100 pounds cost as she had been asking me to do it for 10 years, and I had till now, refused.

The catering company came on the party day and overtook our kitchen. I was busy helping with the seating plan (doing emergency changes as the disorganised people dropped out last minute) and it was all ‘go’.

My Dad then kindly informed me this was my “surrogate wedding.” By that he meant that since I had not got married, my mum and he had decided to splash the money they had been saving for my wedding, on their ruby wedding party – and that they did. We had champagne and canapés in the garden, followed by a sit down meal and speeches in the marquee. Hence, it was done at my expenseJ

The fact I had flown back two non pedigree Indian cats to Britain was one of the main topics of conversation at the event…The news even split the guests. While some found it cute, and gazed at the cat pix on my mobile phones, others said: “Do not tell me how much it cost you as I will find it a disgusting waste of money!”

The Indian non pedigree cat

In the evening we had a barn dance.

The barn dance

In case you don’t know what a barn dance is, it is a ritual, popular in the countryside of Britain, alongside green wellies and Barbours, whereby a caller shrieks into a microphone, while a band plays country music in the background, and people, of all ages, dance with different partners (not their own) a kind of folk dance. Although it originates in America, it is to me, quintessentially British.

The following day we had a barbecue and salads on the lawn.

Life in England was fun. Real fun. And in the countryside it was truly fabulous. This was not a Third World Country, no way – Mr Kaspar, I thought, as I drank sparkling wine and ate grilled Salmon kebabs, with chicken and hamburgers in a white marquee.

Of course, not everyone agreed. Or at least, my Dad and other men engaged in talk of the ‘recession’.

“I just can’t see this country ever getting out of debt. It’s too far in,” one said. “Yes, it’s the worst it’s ever been. It’s a disaster,” another said.

“What is wrong with you?” I would say. “This country is amazing and has everything, everything you can dream of. There is nowhere like it in the world,” But they couldn’t see that. They had not lived overseas like me. They could not see that Britain was in far better shape than in 2007 when I left. It was like someone becoming fat in three years, and noone noticing apart from the person that had been away. I could see that a fight was on my hands to prove to the British that they were not in recession.

A typical street in the UK

Oh, why are the English so gloomy and negative? The Indians, on the contrary, are far more positive and happy.

Anyway the party was a success. The best part being that no one (including my sister) noticed that I had highlighted my hair….They all presumed that was how it had become in the heat of sunny India. Ha Ha.

It had been worth it, not just for that, but in a few days time, the marquee men were to be returning to pull down the marquee.

The Indian cats' big adventure

2010-09-06T11:13:00.005+01:00

A week before my cats were due to fly from Mumbai to London, my worst fear was realised: I came down with fever, diarrhoea and vomiting.
The diarrhoea was, in fact, green. Loss of appetite was unsurprising.
That same day the freight forwarding agent, that I had been forced to employ, to fly two non pedigree Indian felines back to England (since cats are only allowed to fly as cargo to the UK) rang me and said he required a load of original documents, even though I had scanned in dozens the week before.

I could barely move. I spent the previous three days in bed, unable to eat. I could not think of a single person I could ask who would be prepared to carry the documents to his office for me, and was certainly not going to trust a courier company with them, so I sank into a low point, wondering if I had any ‘real’ friends in Mumbai.
Yes, I had plenty that wanted to meet in a café or a bar for a glass of wine. But who would voluntarily do some work for me? I rang a Bandra friend, who had a car, to see if he would at least drive me to the guy’s office, so that if I had ‘an emergency on the way’ (read: diarrhoea) he could stop the vehicle; since a regular cab driver may not get it if I started waving my hands wildly. But my car-owning ‘friend’ did not answer my calls or texts.
Next my maid showed up. Every day when I was sick, her first concern had been my health the minute she walked in the door. She offered to accompany me to see her doctor. It dawned on me, that apart from my cats, she was my only real friend.

I told her my latest dilemma and we agreed I had no option but to go myself, despite my ill health. Together we packed four loo rolls and towels for the event of ‘an accident’ in the cab, and off I went…scared.

But luckily God was on my side as the cab driver a) spoke English and b) was unfazed when I told him my predicament (that I may vomit or have diarrhoea in his vehicle.) In fact, I have always found in India that whenever things go really wrong and reach their lowest point, suddenly there will always be a silver lining. And there was. So, I reached the office ‘sans’ accident and the cab driver, clearly feeling for me, gave me his number and told me he would pick me up later. I felt less like the world was caving in all at once.

After several hours of signing forms in the cramped hot freight forwarding office, I felt faint, having not eaten for three days, so bought a mini Five Star bar from a dusty roadside stall outside.
Ten minutes after eating it the same bar reappeared in vomit all over the freight forwarding office bathroom. I was amazed at how much sick a tiny chocolate bar could produce.
The office had a water shortage (as did several parts of the Mumbai suburbs at that time) and there was no running water from the tap. Wrenching at the sight of my own sick, and feeling embarrassed to have ruined the office’s only bathroom, I promptly left.
Outside I rang the cab driver who said he would be an hour, so I took a rickshaw to a nearby five star hotel. As always with Indian five stars, you are treated like God, even though you may be pale, have fever, vomiting and have not have eaten for a week.
The fact I was carrying two large cat carriers did not faze the poshly-dressed doormen either. I glided to the hotel bar, pretending I was Julia Roberts, and sat down, hoping no one would realise I may vomit any second.
Despite the waitresses attempts at suggesting I order a special creamy mocktail, I went for a lime soda. “I am a tad under the weather, and can’t really handle a mocktail,” I said in the biggest understatement of the year. After barely sipping a fifth of the Rs200 drink, the cab driver rang me to say he was outside. I glided to the Ladies. 10 times the amount I had consumed of lime soda suddenly appeared as vomit across the five star hotel’s Ladies’ toilet. Wrenching at the sight again, I left the hotel and got in the cab. My godlike driver drove the cat carriers and me home.

By the time the day of the cats’ flight came, my infection had cleared up owing to a powerful drug called Orni-O …But the bureaucratic marathon was far from over. Despite having spent weeks filling in forms, photographing the cats, getting vet certificates and letters and scanning them all, in, nothing appeared to be ready and everything still appeared to be chaotic.

Getting ready to fly

I reached the freight office and for the 100th time the cats had to get weighed and measured, more documents needed sorting, before we arrived Nightmare on Elm Street 13 aka Mumbai cargo complex. This is a dark, scary, noisy place. Thirty men immediately surrounded the two cat carriers plonked in a wheelbarrow and me.
“To them, what you are doing is like putting two cockroaches in a cage and taking them back to England,” a helpful English friend had told me.

The flight cost Rs 50,000 and the quarantine at least four times that…”Would you spend that amount on a human?” an Indian friend had asked me earlier that week. “No,” I had said.
And I had meant it… Well, not unless the human meant as much to me as my cats. Would my Indian friend spend that on a random human? Unlikely.
My English friends were equally bemused at the cost. But do I judge them on what they spend their money on? Like skiing holidays… No. My cats are priceless. A value cannot be put on them.

I did not sedate the cats, despite several Mumbai vets recommending this. The customs official was nastier than expected…He told me to open both cages and let the cats out in the middle of the open cargo complex, with planes taking off and vehicles moving everywhere. I refused, pointing out the cats may escape as they were scared stiff. He would not budge. In a naïve moment of exhaustion and anger, I said “Do you realise I am a journalist?” He replied: “ I don’t care where you work” and our relationship soured even further. I quickly realised that comment had not been the best move, and there was every chance the cats may not get on the plane, a point reinforced when my freight forwarding agent helpfully informed me that the previous night a dog flying to America had not been allowed to board as at the last minute as the customs official had deemed the cage to be too small.

There was no vet present and no animal handler to hold my cats, and there was every chance they would escape. But with little option, I unwired the cages and lifted them both out.
Luckily they were so frightened, all they wanted to do was jump back in the cage.
Next the customs official demanded a funnel to feed water to the cats. Naturally, we didn’t have one.
Where anyone would get a funnel from at 10pm near Mumbai cargo complex was beyond me. But miraculously, it was possible. The agent sent off some boy and he returned with a funnel round his neck.

Several hours later, after the customs official had leafed through all my documents, and scared me and my agent as much as possible, claiming documents were missing then magically finding them, I was told to leave.

Needless to say I did not got to bed but stayed up all night tracking the flight on the web.

At 5am I rang Heathrow and, using my journalistic skills, managed to get through to the exact people who collect animals from planes…Amazingly my cats were expected!…. At 7.30am I rang again and the cats had landed. “Are they alive?” I asked. “ I think so,” the man said. My heart skipped a beat. “Please check.” I heard his feet patter off. Silence. He retuned “Yeah, they are alive.”…”Do they need feeding? Are they ok?” Silence followed apart from the patter of his feet. “They look alright to me.”

Hours later, an email arrived. “Your cats have reached the quarantine kennels,” is all it said. I nearly fell off my chair. I rang up the kennels straight away from India. “Are they covered in urine? Are they starving?

“No, they are fine.”

“It’s a miracle. How did they get there in one piece?”

“We didn’t expect anything less. We do this every day,” she said. “Goodbye.”

Sleep-deprived, I collapsed on a heap on my bed in my Bandra flat. “Its normally the pet owners that require sedating more than the pets,” the freight forwarding agent had told me. He was right.

If you need any kind of advice on flying pets overseas, please put your question in the comments section and I will be happy to reply.

A frightened cat knowing something is up

Not leaving in style

2010-08-24T16:26:00.001+01:00

I am convinced my mother has been praying in the village Catholic church every week since I moved to Mumbai, asking God to get me to come home.
Not that she has anything against India, but she is my mother, and wanted me back.

When I left England, I kind of anticipated I would stay three years, with a back-up plan to stay longer, if I really fell in love with the place (or with any person), or less if I hated it. So, I did stay three years. My British friends had all placed various bets on how long I would stay at my London leaving party, so I guess one of them has, err won.

After umming and ahhing and changing my mind about whether to come back, or not, I finally decided to in July, against the advice of everyone in India, but matching the advice of my mother and several friends in England. The ousting of Labour, and David Cameron coming into power with the Lib Dems, kind of influenced my decision, as I was pretty sure England would get back on its feet with a new Government in place. That combined with missing my favourite supermarkets in England (read: Waitrose, Tesco and Sainsbury's) and the vast array of food products I can get here, as well as missing the advanced infrastructure in England, the NHS, ambulances, more comfortable trains, higher quality accommodation, drinkable tap water, more polite taxi drivers, more efficient police and overall better quality of life, kind of spurred the decision on, with some divine intervention too, it seems.

I also felt I had given India what I could, at this stage of my life, written all the stories I wanted to, and India too had given me back what I had wanted - allowed me to experience its vast diverse self (read: cuisines, languge, tribes, religions, races), and taught me that the country has a rich culture and history that takes years to unravel, but that will always be unique and steadfast and from which the West can learn a lot.

The end of an era

I will miss the fantastic nightlife in Mumbai, the year-round T-shirt weather, my Indian friends, the great social life, endless parties, vast array of soft drinks, Indian dress, Indian food, the fantastic cinema-culture, Indian theatre, the cafe culture, the work-place culture (read: daily cakes) the beaches, the roof-top bars and so on..

But for me, it was time to move on to the next phase. There are hardened British expats in Mumbai, who will never leave...they often retain very negative impressions of England...I was not one of those...I feel as though it is more the Mumbai expats from London that feel they have 'little to return to' in England, whereas people from outside London, like me, tend to have better quality lives here and so there is ''a lot to return for."
However, when I had dreamt of leaving, I had imagined I would have several huge parties, and spend my last few days meeting friends, and going for walks in my favourite places, like Juhu beach. But it was not to be. I have noticed that every expat that leaves India leaves disastrously and I kind of did too.

I had a few days off work before my final departure, and managed to come down with fever, vomiting and diarrhoea. This seriously curtailed my ability to pack, or rather clear out my flat and I was reluctant to see a doctor, as I had had a few bad experiences, being ripped off. One Mumbai doctor, who is recommended by the British High Commission, had on a previous occasion, made me pay Rs 800 for an appointment, when every Indian who went to him paid Rs 300, and he did not diagnose me, or offer any medicine, and was plain rude. Another at a private hospital had told me to have Rs 10,000 of blood tests, which I did not do, as I felt it was unneccessary...(This is one good thing about the NHS as they are reluctant to make you have blood tests unless you really need them..In Mumbai it seems to be what every doctor wants you to do..they have lost the ability to diagnose you from your symptoms or using their gut instinct. This is prevalent in the US too where healthcare is privatised).

Anyway, luckily an Indian friend's dad who is a top notch doctor, diagnosed me on the phone without charge and I got the Orni-O drug that slowly cleared up the infection, but it heavily delayed my packing. While friends did not stop calling me, asking me to "meet them"I was faced with the prospect of clearing out my flat. Stupidly, I had not sent anything by freight. Bin liners piled up outside my flat and every day the recycling man came to collect them. He paid me Rs100 to Rs 150 each time and took 10 to 20 bin liners of everything from newspapers to old clothes. I quite liked this system. In the UK you would have to pay for a skip to come to your house, or you would have to pay an extortionate fee to dump it at a landfill site. There in Mumbai, someone was paying me to take away my rubbish.

A world apart - that was Mumbai

I gave most kitchen items to my maid, as well as my TV. Other valuable items I gave to friends that wanted them. I cannot understand why expats hold sales of their items, when there are so many people you can give them to...Seems really selfish, especially after living in India, when watchmen and maids could make use of these items. I felt really glad that eveyrthing was going to a good use. The only problem was I had more items than even I realised..

I lost all in interest in having a leaving party, as I had bank accounts to close, bills to pay and kgs of stuff to sort through. Luckily a friend agreed to host a leaving party for me for close friends, which was very generous. Luckily none gave me a leaving present, as it would have ended up with the recycling man.

As D-Day grew close and I realised I had more items than even I realised and so on the day I was meant to be leaving my flat, I was surrounded by boxes and bin liners. My friend dropped round and nearly fainted. She tried to help me, but most of the work (sifting through stuff and working out what to throw, what to give away, and what to keep), only I could do. My landlord gave me an extra night to sort it all out...I stayed up all night...and just met the 8am deadline of handing over the keys, then shifted 100kgs to a hotel...

So, my ideal leaving scenario of sipping cocktails on my last night overlooking Mumbai beach were dashed. I again stayed up all night, and ended up leaving tonnes of stuff in my room for the hotel staff.
Then utterly sleep-deprived with a friend, I shifted 60kgs to the airport. My plan? Hoping they wouldn't notice. But dressed in a raincoat and a fleece to "lessen the luggage," they did.

Looking rather ridiculous, I was singled out straight away as someone over the luggage allowance before anyone weighed it. The airlines man even grabbed my hand luggage, which weighed 15kgs. "It's bad enough you have 60 kgs of check-in luggage but 15 gs of hand luggage when you are meant to have 7kgs takes the biscuit. Go and get rid of some," he said.

The line about leaving India after living here three years didn't wash; in fact it seemed to exacerbate his desire to charge me extra..So,.I shoved all my cat's toys into my raincoat pockets, handed a load of stuff to a friend outside the airport, then got stung with Rs 8,000 excess baggage (= £117)...

Feeling like shit, exhausted and drained, and upset to have left half my life in Mumbai, I ran to security as I was about to miss my flight..

As I boarded the aircraft, looking ridiculous in a raincaoat stuffed with toy catnip mice, and feeling very depressed, the airline official suddenly said: "You have been upgraded, máam." He then took a biro and changed my seat number. My final flight home was business class.
"I would have dressed differently, had I known, " I said, wiping the sweat off my face.
"What would you like to drink," I was asked after sitting down on my horizontal bed. "Dom Perignon,"I replied...I guess in the same way weddings never go as you fantasised, nor does leaving India.

Getting ready to leave India

2010-08-16T22:21:00.000+01:00

Noone has ever written a book on when to stop being an expat and when to repatriate home. There is nothing documented on it anywhere (apart from one chat forum on one website - more later), but plenty has been written about how to 'become' an expat in the first place and leave the shores of rainy England for some hot aspirational land, such as Spain or Dubai. You can read up on how to pack your stuff, and adapt to a new culture, how to dress conservatively and fit in to your new work place, but nobody tells you when to leave or how to leave.....
So, when the idea entered my head of 'returning' to England after three years working as a journalist at Hindustan Times, I had noone to turn to, noone to discuss it with. I felt very isolated. My Indian friends all sounded horrified at the mere mention I might leave, and my expat friends rebuffed the idea, telling me I was crazy , citing statistics about the recession in the UK, reminding me how much I loved India, pointing out what a fascinating job I had, how many Mumbai friends I had, and so on...and informing me I would never find a job in the UK.But a seed of desire to return to England had been planted in me and it just grew and grew....I couldn't quite explain to anyone why I wanted to go back.
"You are going back to get married?" my Indian colleagues would say. Knowing that that would be a valid reason why they might repatriate home to India, I said "Yes" just to appease them. But it couldn't be further from the truth. If anything, I have ex's I am still very fond of here in Mumbai.
So, I surfed the Net, as I do for every dilemma in my life, in the hope the answeres would be found, but nothing on how and when to return to England came up, apart from one forum on one website, that I stumbled across that was dedicated to expats 'leaving' their respective countries. My eyes scanned it with hunger looking for a clue, any clue as to when is the right time to leave, does one set up a job in England before leaving, how easy is it to find a job from a foreign country in England, do employers like returned expats? How easy will it be to readjust to England now that I speak a semi Indian dialect of English, and street Hindi? The answers were barely there...Most people on this Forum were whinging Brits in Australia, who, it seemed, hated Australia and were fantasising about aspects of English society, of grocery items, or shops, that they missed, but were too scared to return as they had sold homes/emigrated to Oz 15 years ago, and so were using the forum to vent their frustrations and share their dilemmas. I was surprised as I have several friends who have emigrated to Oz from England, who love it...Anyway, the discovery that I wasn't the only expat in the world thinking of going home with no particular reason to, at least made me feel better....I have seen many expats come and go to India...Many leave suddenly, without any leaving party, some fall ill, others have problems in their job...I didn't want to be one of those..I wanted to leave in style. I wasn't sure if I should leave...In fact, everyone was telling me to stay....but destiny had its own plans....

Getting my cats out

2010-08-16T22:07:00.002+01:00

I found her in a cardboard box in my Society building a week after I moved into my flat in Bandra. She
was a newly-born black and white kitten with two black and white siblings. There was no sign of a mother.

My cat as a newly born kitten living in the compound

At that time, I did not realise kittens were born to strays on every street corner of Mumbai, and thought it was unusual. I tried to call the SPCA (equiv of RSPCA) hoping they would send someone to rescue the kittens, but they only spoke Hindi and slammed the phone down; I told my watchmen - gesticulating in broken Hindi - but they just looked through me; I told the poor cleaning lady who collects rubbish and occasionally throws water over the communal floors - she spat on the ground. No one seemed interested. Finally an ugly brown cat that looked like it was full of worms turned up and the commnal cleaner told me this was the mother. I shoved her in the box, and rather disinterestedly she licked the kittens.

The mother cat fed her when she was a stray in the society

After I started feeding this worm-ridden hardened stray, she took more interest in the kittens, as she smartly linked food with hanging out with her offspring. This meant the kittens were at least getting breast milk. After two of the kittens died (one from worms, the other from being paralysed by a child in the Society who threw it in the air like a tennis ball when I made a short trip to London), I rescued the final one, and she moved into my apartment. I kept the door open to see if she wanted to go back to her mother. She didn't. That night the mother left the Society and never returned. In fact initially I thought I had rescued the kitten, but it soon became clear, as the loneliness of living by myself in a city like Mumbai, and having to navigate my way through the rather terrifying P 3 party scene, as well as make friends, took hold, that she had indeed rescued me. After some time she became my best friend, and was the thing/animal I would think of all day long and who I could not wait to see after work. In fact I used to phone my maid three times a day and ask her how my kitten was. (Had Sunday lunch with some family friends at the weekend, one of whom is a counsellor. He told me that it was common for people to 'project' feelings and value on to objects (eg photos and paintings) or animals, that to others had no value at all...and this reflected íssues the person was grappling with. So maybe, I projected a 'roommate' onto her, as that is what she became. Maybe, I should not have lived alone...)

My kitten plays with random items discarded in the compound

Anyway, she soon went on heat and got a boyfriend. The stray worm-ridden black tom cat would come up every night to see her. I fed him as well, afer all I had to be hospitable...it was her boyfriend after all. I planned to get her sterilised, but the vet went on holiday. I waited till he got back, but by that time she was pregnant. I had caught her having sex with the black stray on numerous occasions so it came as no surprise. After growing incredibly fat, and looking like she would never pop, she finally gave birth to three kittens one Easter Saturday. I found a home for one with an American expat, one died a few weeks after being paralaysed following a fall from the 6th floor, and one was left, so I kept the remaining kitten and mother, as they were able to keep each other company.

A year ago, I started thinking about what to do with the cats if I were to leave India...My vet said to me: "If you had two children and had to leave India, would you consider leaving them behind? No. Well, these cats are your children."

I was pretty sure anyway that, had I put up a poster saying: "Adult cats available for adoption", I would have had no response. In fact, once I sent an email to all the animal charities, saying "Cat wanted for adoption", (this was before the mother gave birth, at a time that I wanted to get her a companion) and my phone did not stop ringing for three days, some people even turned up outside my apartment block with kittens in hand without an appointment. I did not take any as I was so freaked out by the overwhleming response .

From my various involvements with animal charities, and the animal hospital in Mumbai, I soon realised that they were all inundated with 'dumped unwanted pets.' I did not want to become another like that. If the cat I rescued and her daughter were to stay in India, they would have to have a good home. But there clearly is and was no demand for domestic shorthaired Indian cats (read: stray or as my Dad says feral cats) in Mumbai. The only pet people seemed to have in Maximum City were pedigree dogs. Cats were not kept as pets. So, I had to take on the vet's view, which was, regardless of the cost, I had to fly the cats to England, and then pay for them to go in quarantine for 6 months...if I ever left India

I had absolutely no idea what was required, but knew, that being India, it would be complex, and possibly impossible to fathom. And it was.

With no idea where to start, I took a cab to the air cargo complex at Mumbai airport a year ago, with a plan of visiting the airline offices inside who dealt with cargo. I wandered inside and was promptly jumped on by security and walked to a room, where I was searched. Then , since noone spoke English I was marched to the office of the head of cargo, or similar. An Indian bureacrat who staff referrred to rather over-politely as 'Sir' was inside. Papers were stacked everywhere and timid men queued outside to see him. I was taken straight inside. I explained to him that I had two Indian cats I may want to take out of the country. "These are Indian cats!" he bellowed. "You are not allowed to take India cats out of India." That seemed like an absurd statement to make, since if I did not take them with me, where would they go? Be put back on the streets? I made a mental note that, if anyone ever asked me I would not say the cats were Indian. After all, who was to know!

He then muttered on about how complex it was and apart from a million other things, that I would need to get clearance from a single doctor, based most conveninetly in Navi Mumbai, who didn't have a phone or address and was only open three days a week, and I couldn't make appointments with and who would only issue a certificate six days before the flight...without which the cats couldn't fly..It was more complex than getting a work permit or a passport it seemed... And that was only the beginning of the labyrinth awaiting me..

The stray kitten I rescued as an adult cat