Book of the Month: Becoming British, the Making of Mr Hai's Daughter (Yasmin Hai)

Becoming British, the Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter, is the memoir of Yasmin Hai, a journalist (and a television reporter in the past) of growing up in the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s.

Yasmin’s Hai’s father  went by the very impressive name of Syed Samsamul Hai. He was a Pakistani immigrant who arrived in Britain in the mid-1960s. Born in India before it was partitioned, Mr Hai went to the prestigious Aligarh University in Uttar Pradesh, India. While at Aligarh University Mr Hai, along with a few close friends, joined the Communist party of India and came to hold a view that only through Communism would the Indian people free themselves of the fetters of religion and poverty. When the British left and the country was partitioned, Mr Hai moved to the other side of the continent—Pakistan—which, you have to say, was probably not a very smart move, as he was vehemently opposed to the concept of a Muslim nation, the very basis of Pakistan. In Pakistan Mr Hai became a professor of English at a prestigious collage in Karachi. He also continued to dabble in politics and wrote polemics against religion. In the 1950s, the inevitable happened. The Communist party of which he was a member was banned and its leaders imprisoned. Mr. Hai went underground and lived in hiding for much of the 1950s before coming to England courtesy of the British immigration policy fuelled by labour shortage. He was well into his forties and a bachelor when he arrived in England. But he was well equipped with facts and figures which he thought would help him adjust to his adopted country: he knew all the words of the English national anthem, could reel off all the English national holidays, and—this was most important for him—knew inside out and back to front all the English sayings. He was in a progressive country (he thought) and wanted to be progressive himself. And to prove his progressiveness, he would go with a friend—an Indian Muslim who had married an Englishwoman (and not just any Englishwoman, but an educated woman with a Ph.D in English who taught at London University)—in the evenings to the local pub to have a drink. Nothing—not even the loud comments by White men in the pub who asked the ‘stupid Paki’ to give it a rest—would diminish Mr Hai’s enthusiasm for his adopted country. Then Mr Hai got married. His was an arranged marriage, to an educated woman (who had done MA in political science) from Pakistan, who, nevertheless, could not speak a word of English when she arrived in England. So Mr Hai began teaching her English. In due course Yasmin, their eldest child, was born, followed by two more children. Mr Hai was almost fifty when he became a father. He now turned his attention to his children and systematically went about making them model British citizens: operation English had begun.

The Hai family lived in a lower-middle class Asian ghetto in Wembley, London. Almost all of young Yasmin’s friends were Pakistani Muslims. But there was a difference. Mr Hai prohibited his children from going to Koran classes. He insisted that they speak in English all the time, even though it meant that their mother, who despite her husband’s efforts had not managed to become fully proficient in the language of her exile, had difficulty in communicating with her own children (he eventually decreed that the mother could speak in Urdu, a language the children understood, but they had to reply in English, a language, he reasoned, she understood). And they had to learn to use forks and knives while eating. He was also very keen that his children do well academically—here his job would appear to have been made easier, as his eldest daughter was a bright student. He did not believe in corporal punishment; instead he discussed issues with his children, hammering out at every opportunity his message: be like the English. In an incident, very touchingly narrated, teenage Yasmin truanted from her secondary school and went clubbing (during the day) with other Muslim girls from her lane to a Bahngra party, and while coming out of the club was spotted by one of the ‘aunties’ from her community, who promptly passed on the news to her parents. This is how Mr Hai chose to approach the issue when Yasmin returned home: ‘Asian party one day and next thing, you’ll be wanting to watch Bollywood filums and go to the mosque.’ When Yasmin protested that her friends were not like how he depicted them, that they were, like her, doing O levels, Mr Hai retorted, ‘What do you know? Underneath they are still steeped in religion. One day you will see.’ And finally, as his bolshy daughter began answering back, he concluded, smiling, ‘Our disagreement is what is commonly known as “generation gap”’.

Mr Hai’s prognostications about Yasmin’s friends would bear out. In the 1990s, one by one, almost all of her friends had had arranged marriages and embraced orthodox Islam, becoming devoutly religious. However, Mr Hai did not live to see his prophecies come true. In 1987, when his seventeen-year daughter was doing O levels, Mr Hai dropped dead of a heart attack. He was sixty-eight. In the second, much more sombre, part of the memoir Yasmin Hai describes how her mother and she (we do not get to know a lot about the younger siblings) came to terms with the sudden loss of the most important man in their lives. She also describes events, beginning with the Rushdie affair, that would come to have a profound effect on the way in which the West would come to view the community to which she belonged by birth, if not by practice. Yasmin enrolled to study politics at Manchester University, a decision her father, who was very interested in politics, would have wholeheartedly approved. For a while she moved back home with her family, but then, while her childhood friends were getting married, having babies, covering themselves in traditional Islamic scarves, and immersing themselves in the reading of Koran, she moved out and, over the next few years, worked on several programmes (including the Newsnight) and for many companies. In other words she lived the lifestyle of the modern, educated career woman in the twenty-first century many in the West would approve. Throughout this period she remained very close to her family and visited her mother—who had, after the sudden death of Mr Hai, rolled up her sleeves, pulled up her socks, and made all the necessary sartorial adjustments, to bring up her young children—who continued to live in Wembley. She was therefore a witness to the hardening stance and ultra-religious beliefs, which her childhood friends, with whom she had truanted from school to go to clubs, came to adopt. There were times when she was assailed by doubts about the path she had chosen, and envied her childhood friends for their certitudes; many a time she felt unaccountably angry at her dead father, and blamed him for her feelings of self-doubt and uncertainty, as she struggled to find her place in the multicultural, multiracial Britain. In the end, though, she continued on the path she had chosen for herself and persisted with her personal belief-system. As the memoir ends we learn that Yasmin Hai is happily married to a Jewish American man and, for the first time in the twenty years since he died, is planning to visit her father’s grave.

Becoming British, The Making of Mr Hai’s Daughter is a delightful, compassionate, humorous and utterly captivating portrait of the realities of modern day Britain from the eyes of a child of an immigrant. It is a family chronicle, a social history, and an oblique commentary on the politics of those times—all rolled into one, throwing into sharp relief the dilemmas and problems of identity young people of immigrant stock are faced with on a daily basis. Above all, it is a story of a man, who was in awe of what he clearly felt was a superior culture, was grateful for having been given the opportunity to live in this country, and who made strenuous efforts to assimilate. In this Mr. Hai was probably not very different from other immigrants who arrived in this country in the 1960s to fill the labour shortage in Britain. They were all aware that they had to make extra efforts to fit in; in their minds they were perennial outsiders who were expected to be eternally appreciative of and thankful (and many did feel that way) for the benefits of living in England. That perhaps was also the reason why the generation of Mr Hai was able to take the casual racism, to which it was routinely exposed, on the chin and move on. Where Mr Hai was probably different from many other Muslim men of his generation was that he was not a religious man; indeed he would appear to have formed a very clear view in his mind that religion was the source of all the strife in the world. Almost twenty years after his death, his daughter discovered a very old article Mr Hai had written in a Pakistani magazine in the 1950s. This is what he had written:

‘.  . . unless we remove the blinkers of ‘religion’ from our eyes, we cannot take an enlightened and correct view of our predicament. Religion may act as a channel between an individual and his creator, but it has no place in state ideology or politics. Religion always encourages dogma and it has always been an irrational force. It has always denied validity of human reason. It has tried to understand the world by intuition rather than experience. It has always stood for authority against the individual.’

Having always held these views, Mr Hai, an educated man, had little pangs of guilt about removing religion from the lives of his British family. It is interesting that he was a member of the Communist party in Pakistan; however, when he decided to leave the country, he chose to come to England, which, whatever you might say about her, was not a Communist—not even a Socialist—country. That Mr Hai chose to live there for the next twenty odd years, until his death, without any apparent regrets, is, one can say, a proof, if proof be needed, that it was the full bellies and not nuclear weapons that ultimately defeated Communism. Had he lived a bit longer, Mr Hai would have witnessed the collapse of Communism all over the world.

The difference, one guesses, between the men of Mr Hai’s generation and the men and women from the next generation was that the younger generation was not prepared to accept the pervading racism in the British society with the phlegmatism of the community elders. For them there were no reference points such as the less than salubrious conditions and the poverty and other iniquities of the countries of their parents’ origins in comparison with which the frequent racism to which they were subjected in Britain, while unpleasant, was bearable. They were born and bred in this country and had not known anything else. The feelings of anomie, one would imagine, were very acute for this generation, a crippling sense that they did not belong. It is perhaps not surprising that some or more of them sought refuge in the orthodox Islam, which probably served the dual purpose of providing an anchor in lives which were otherwise drifting and of being an up yours gesture to the mainstream community. I suspect that a significant proportion of the young Muslim women who have chosen to wear the head-scarf or even the black chador, is not necessarily repressed by a medieval religion as clamoured by the right-wing, crypto-racist, brigade; these women are making a socio-political statement. That Yasmin Hai did not choose to go down this route is primarily down to her strength of character and self-belief, but you can’t help feeling that the seeds were sown by her liberal, non-religious father. Operation English was a success after all. 

9 / 11: We Shall Never Forget

It can’t be very easy these days if you were a Muslim living in the West. If you are, say, brown skinned; have a name like, thinking at random, Osama; have a flowing beard; and if you were, say, travelling, wearing a flowing robe with a rucksack on your shoulder, muttering under your breath—if you were, say, a religiously minded individual—whatever it is that religiously minded Muslims mutter under their breath, in a London underground, you shouldn’t at all be surprised if the carriage you are travelling in is less crowded than others.

You would find yourself (if you were a browned skinned Osama) in this situation because in the last decade or so, a stereotype of Islam (and Muslims—the two are not the same, as far as my understanding goes; the former is a religion, the latter denotes the followers) seems to have taken shape in the Western psyche, which goes something along these lines: religious fanatics, misogynists, terrorists, barbarians, not willing to assimilate and adopt Western values (democracy, liberalism etc.), and potential Fifth Element.

Then there are other terms coined such as Islamists—I am not entirely sure the origin of this term; it may have been originated in the West to denote those Muslims who fit into some or more of the above identifiers. (Martin Amis tried to make this distinction in his intemperate outburst against Muslims a few years ago.)

A few weeks ago I saw a Muslim woman on a bus I was travelling on, covered from head to toe in a black chador (the woman, not the bus; the bus was covered in dirt). As I tried to check out whether I could check out her ass, it struck me that it was precisely men like me that Muhammad probably had in mind when he decreed (would ‘suggested’ be a better word?) that women should hide their beauty behind a veil. The veil, Muhammad probably hoped (I hope I am not causing offence to anyone by daring to guess what the prophet hoped), would serve two purposes. The first is obvious. The veil would protect the woman from the dirty gaze of the lecher, although, come to think of it, would it, really? True, the lecher might not be able to check out vital statistics, but surely the woman would notice that she is being gazed at (I am pretty certain that they can see from behind veils, otherwise they would be bumping into lamp-posts all the time). (This assumption further assumes that women heartily disapprove of guys ogling them. A friend of mine recently returned from a weeklong holiday in Rome and declared disappointedly that Italian men of younger generation were nowhere as lewd as their fathers and grandfathers, because no one pawed her on the buses and no one spontaneously exclaimed ‘Carina!’ when she was walking on the streets. I felt it prudent not to point out to her (because I did not want to disappoint her further) that that was probably because she was 36 and they like them younger.)

Secondly (we are discussing, in case you have lost track, why Muhammad thought that a veil was a good idea), if the lecher had any sense in him he would realise the futility of leching and do something useful with his time (such as participating in the philosophical discussion of what is a just punishment for shoplifting: ASBO?, community service?, probation?, hand-chopping?). However, if the lecher happened to be living in the decadent and amoral Western society, there would be no pressure on him to change his infidel ways, as there would be plenty of infidel women displaying their goodies he could feast his eyes on.

Anyway, as it happened, the chador-clad woman and I got off at the same stop, and, funnily enough both entered the local mall (I swear I am not a stalker of chador-clad women). As it happened, I was behind the chador-clad woman, and walking—or should I say rolling along?— towards us in the opposite direction was a woman, pushing a pram in which was a squawking child, and three more children (some of whom, I hoped were hers), ranging in ages from two to six. The woman was not all that old, but the layers of make-up caked on her face were totally inadequate to conceal the toll taken by years of unhealthy living and eating habits, as was the top  (and pink bra) to conceal her mammaries. As she passed us, this fine specimen of British womanhood cleared her throat and shouted, ‘Oi Paki! Fuck off back. We don’t want you here.’ Then she walked on, her gut hanging over her leggings. The mall at that time was fairly crowded, and people walked on as if nothing had happened. This is something we Brits are very good at. We can give a master-class in how to present a poker face to the world. (This is not the only skill we have, it would appear. Last year I read a novel by the 2003 Nobel Laureate, J.M. Coetzee. The narrator of this novel remarks at one point: ‘There is a certain English manner that infuriates me, that infuriates many people, where the insults come coated in pretty words, like sugar on a pill.’ So it seems our other talent lies in pissing people off by the way we speak. When we think we are being euphemistic or polite when we criticise, there is a chance that others see us as two-faced faced hypocrites.)

I thought about the incidence when I read an article in the Guardian about a children’s colouring book recently published in America.

What is so special about a children’s colouring book you may wonder.

Well, this book, published by a company called Real Book Coloring Books, purports to tell children, in a graphic form, about the attack on the World Trade Centre and subsequent hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

The book, the company declares, is created with ‘integrity, reverence, respect, and does not shy away from truth’.

And what is the truth? The truth, as the publisher, one Wayne Bell, eloquently explained on American television, is:

‘19 terrorist hijackers that came over here under the leadership of a devil worshipper, Osama bin Laden, to murder our people.’

The narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s novel should approve of Wayne Bell. Whatever else Bell may be accused of he can’t be accused of coating his insults in pretty words. He cannot be accused of subtlety or decency either. Nor can he be accused of giving undue importance to logic in his arguments. According to Bell it is an incontrovertible, undeniable truth that Osama was a devil worshipper. How did Bell find out that Osama was a devil worshipper? Did the devil confirm in writing that Osama was his follower?

As the Guardian article shows, one of the pages of this book, entitled, unsurprisingly, ‘We Shall Never Forget’, shows Osama hiding behind a chador clad woman while a US Navy Seal aims his rifle at him. Osama looks as if he is having an acute attack of gastritis. It is not easy to figure out the expression on the face of the woman, who is spreading her arms, giving, in the process, a good impression of a bat, but my guess is that she is not alarmed (or not having gastritis).

What takes the biscuit is the text that runs with it. It goes like this:

‘Being the elusive character that he was, and after hiding out with his terrorist buddies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, American soldiers finally locate the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden.’

I don’t know to whom or to what the book, as the publishing company announced, is showing respect, but, if the above text is anything to go by, it is not showing much respect to grammar. The sentence, grammatically, is not just a car-crash, it is a multiple pile-up on a motorway.

In case the American children haven’t cottoned on to the message that Muslims are enemies of the state, the book goes on to inform:

‘Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE.’

Islamic Muslim extremists? Who are they? They are ‘crazy people’ (unlike, I suppose, the publishers of the colouring book who come across as paragons of sense and moderation—oops! I should be careful; it wouldn't do to sugar-coat my insults with figures of speech) who hate freedom and obviously think syllogistically: we hate freedom; Americans are free (or FREE); so we hate Americans.

It goes without saying that what happened in September 2001 at the World Trade Centre was horrible. It is also true that (as a Tibor Fischer character might say) that there is little point in tournamentizing miseries; but the way the American (and frequently British) media go on and on about the 9/11 is enough to turn all healthy stomachs: as if this is the ultimate tragedy—the mother of all tragedies—against which all others pale into insignificance. When I last checked, in the history of humankind, so far, only one country dropped atomic bombs on another country in the full knowledge that tens of thousands of civilians would be vaporised; and that was not any of the countries of ‘Islamic Muslim Extremists’. I do not think any Muslim countries napalmed Vietnam and brought untold miseries to its people. To the best of my knowledge not a single Muslim country has illegally invaded and destroyed another country, as the Americans and British did in Iraq. And, if you go back in time, you will discover that the first ‘concentration camps’ in a war were run by the British in the Boer War.

I am currently reading a memoir entitled Four Girls from Berlin, of a Jewish American woman named Marianne Meyerhoff. The book tells the story of Meyerhoff’s mother, who fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s and came to America (the rest of the family was not so lucky) and her friendship with three other (non-Jewish) German girls which survived the war and the Holocaust. Inevitably the book describes, in unflinching detail, the atmosphere of hatred stoked up by the Nazis against the Jews, which, as the 1930s wore on, affected many Germans, who, until that period, had existed peacefully with the Jews. Meyerhoff’s mother (who, despite living in America for decades, could never master the ‘foreign tongue’ and preferred to speak in her native German) used a German word to describe what was happening in Germany at the time. ‘The Nazis took over,’ she said, ‘and we began to feel, in our bones, Gleichschaltung.’  

Meyerhoff requested her mother to translate Gleichschaltung into English. The mother had to consult her German-English dictionary and discovered that the word, like many other German words, packed in complicated concepts for which there was no equivalent word in English, and could be translated into it only by a long, train-car type, series of words. This was how Gleichschaltung was translated into English:

‘The forced and mindless joining in lockstep with the crowd.’

One hopes that the indecent, disrespectful (and agrammatical) children’s colouring book and its message—despite the protestations of the publishers—full of distortions, crude generalizations, lies and xenophobia, which tries to demonize a section of its society, are not a symptom of an underlying sick society. (There is always the possibility that the Guardian goes out of its way to ferret out fringe happenings and publishes them, which gives an opportunity to people like me to feel outraged about.)

Random Thoughts

                               Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Consensual (but hurried) Sex

The case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn is dismissed. DSK, as Strauss-Kahn is widely known in his native France, is let out of jail, literally and figuratively. The Manhattan prosecutors did not feel comfortable about going ahead with the prosecution as they had serious concerns about the credibility of Nafissatou Diallo, the woman at the centre of the sex scandal that cost Stauss-Kahn his job as the head of the IMF.

‘Our inability to believe the complainant beyond a reasonable doubt,’ said the Assistant District Attorney, the exotically named Joan (this is not the exotic part) Illuzzi-Orbon, as she formally recommended that the case be dismissed, ‘means, in good faith, that we could not ask the jury to do that.’

The much talked about DNA evidence, in the end, was ‘simply inconclusive’ according to prosecution lawyers, as all it confirmed was that ‘a hurried sexual encounter’ took place between Strauss-Kahn and Diallo.

Strauss-Kahn’s lawyer did not deny that he had had sex with the hotel maid (but maintained that it was consensual), which may well have been hurried sandwiched as it was between Strauss-Kahn phoning his millionaire wife (probably telling her how he missed her) and meeting with his daughter before he flew off to Europe to solve the weightier problems of world economy (where one hoped his brain and not his penis would do the thinking).

Diallo’s accusation that she was held hostage and was forced to have sex by the about-to-be-ex chief of the IMF suffered a serious blow when it was revealed that she had lied in her asylum application about being raped by soldiers in her native Guinea. She also changed her account of her activities after her encounter with Strauss-Kahn: initially she said that she ran out of the room and hid in the stair-well until the (alleged) rapist left. She changed this account subsequently and claimed that she went to the next room, cleaned it, and after that actually returned to Strauss-Kahn's room (where she claimed to have been held hostage and forced to perform sexual acts against her will, which made her cry non-stop for the next one month and gave nightmares) and cleaned it as well!. While one may applaud the maid's courage in returning to the scene of crime (as it were) as also her work ethics (not letting anything come in the way of her job), one doesn't have to be a hot-shot lawyer to figure out that this somewhat weakened her case. Finally, Diallo was also captured on tape, talking to a friend (who has had more jail sentences than you and I have had hot meals), and saying, ‘he [Strauss-Kahn] has a lot of money and I know what to do.’ This was refuted by Diallo’s lawyer, one Kenneth Thompson, who was mightily pissed off that the prosecution decided to drop all the charges against the Frenchman, although whether that was on account of the maid being denied justice (or his version of it) or he being denied fifteen minutes of fame (had the charges been pressed) was unclear. What was Thompson’s explanation? It was an error in translating the taped conversation. Diallo spoke in her native dialect called Fulani, which, we were invited to believe, is ‘one of the most complex in the world’. So what was Diallo saying to the jailbird? Thompson would have us believe that what the maid said was: ‘A man tried to rape me at my job. I did not know who he was.’ Quite how this sentence, even when spoken in one of the ‘most complex’ dialects in the world can be translated as ‘he [Strauss-Kahn] has a lot of money and I know what to do’ is beyond me (although on occasions I have come across instances when similar mistakes have been made even when both parties are speaking English, as in case of an erstwhile friend from my university days who was convinced that any woman who smiled at him and wished him  good morning (or afternoon of evening) was inviting him for a session of hot sex). If you believe that then (paraphrasing Harry S Truman) I am Hottentot. 

The truth of what really happened between Strauss-Kahn and Diallo in the luxury suit of the Manhattan hotel will never be known, as, at the end of the day, it is one person’s word against another’s. When Diallo claimed that Strauss-Kahn forced her to give him a blow-job she might have been telling the truth, or she might not. The point is: when you have a history of repeated lying for personal gains you are less likely to be believed when you make these accusations.  

It was also interesting to see the battle-lines being drawn along the racial lines. When Diallo decided to go public with her story (an indication, if any, that the case was going to be dismissed and her team had advised her—ill-advisedly—that she should come out all guns blazing, as it were, to destroy what remained of Strauss-Kahn’s reputation), she was flanked by an assortment of Blacks—the self proclaimed leaders, activists, lawyers, they all came out of the woodwork and flanked Diallo as she gave a public account of her side of the story, throwing, for good measure, accusations about race and politics. That was—as I told an ex after she broke three of my Queens CDs when we broke up—unnecessary.

So Strauss-Kahn has walked free, but it would be fair to assume that his political career is over. The man who was widely tipped to beat Nicholas Sarcozy in the French presidential election next year before the sex scandal exploded in his face, will wonder where it went wrong for him. He may even wonder whether it was the conspiracy of his political opponents (was it Sarcozy?. .  . no it must have been Putin, . . . wait a minute, it must be right wing nutters in the USA, and so on and so forth). However, if he is honest to himself—and he might not dare to be—he would realise that the thing that put paid to his presidential ambition was his insatiable libido. In vulgate:  if you take your d**k out when it should be in the trousers, sooner or later you will land in merde.

As for Diallo, she should take heart from at least one comment of the prosecution. ‘Diallo,’ the prosecution said had ‘ability to present fiction as fact with complete conviction.’ How about a career as a novelist (although, if she is going to write in her native Fulani she should hire a better translator)?

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                                  Eurozone Debt Crisis: We haven't See the Worst

I heard a stand-up comedian, a German stand-up comedian, no less, who makes a living in the UK, on Radio 4 the other day. He said that many Brits were going to Greece for holidays, purportedly to help the Greek economy. His advice? It is pointless going to Greece; the tourists should go to Germany as it is the Germans who are pouring money into what everyone knows is a lost cause. 

Trying to bring moribund economies of countries like Greece and Ireland is like bringing a corpse back to life. It has not been known to happen. Surely, the sensible thing to do is to accept that the case is hopeless, declare that the patient is dead, make funeral arrangements, and pick up the pieces of what is left of your life.

Anyone with more than a dozen functioning neurones would have seen that the Greeks and the Irish couldn't possibly live with the same currency as the Germans; they were never going to make up the yawning productivity gaps between them and the Germans. The Greeks probably managed to gain entry to Euro in the first place by fiddling their accounts.

The pillars that supported the Eurozone as a monetary entity were made of clay, and it should come as no surprise to anyone with a modicum of interest in the financial affairs of the world that it is all collapsing.

The Greeks (and the Irish and the Portuguese and the Italians and the Spanish) either don’t earn enough or they spend too much. Either way they are a burden which the Germans—by that I mean the German public and not the politicians—may not be prepared to bear for much longer.  (And before we Brits wrinkle our uppity noses at the Greeks, we would be well advised to take notice of what Ratan Tata, the chairman of the India-based Tata Group, which now owns the Jaguar and Land Rover, thought of the British work ethics. Tata, who flew to Britain for meetings, was unimpressed by the British managers who, he felt, did not compare favourably with their Indian counterparts. ‘It’s a work ethics issue,’ Tata was reported as saying, ‘no body is willing to go the extra mile, nobody.’ He was unhappy to see the employees leaving the work place even before their bosses; he felt they were lazy. We might make snide remarks about how Europe is different from India and how we work here differently from the sweat shops of India, but the truth is Tata is proposing to close some of the plants in Britain, which means thousands of jobs will go. And can you blame him? As Tata remarked, ‘When you are in crisis, if it means working till midnight, you’ll do it’, not clock off at 4.30 on a Friday to meet with your mates for a pint.)

The German (and the French) politicians have characteristically opted for the fudgy approach which, one might argue, is not dissimilar to how the Americans deal with the Indian reservations or the Australians with the Aboriginals—bunch of people that is never going to be productive and forever going to be dependent on the state largesse for survival.

This may be an acceptable solution to the politicians but it may not be acceptable to the German public. A time will come when the Germans will be faced with another decision time—are they going to bail out the Italians and the Spanish? Given the eye-watering levels of Italy’s public debt and the impossible demands it will put on the budget simply to refinance the debt, that day won’t be far.

It would be erroneous to dismiss the recent plummeting of the stock-markets (all the shares in my virtual portfolio have taken a hammering—what more proof do I need that times— they are a-changing, and not in a way I approve?) as the irrational behaviour of the markets. If one goes by the historical behaviours of the markets and their links to world economies, then one would have to conclude that stock-markets antedate the changes in the economies; in which case what is in store six to eight months down the line is not nice.

The world went into recession three years ago (in defiance of Gordon Brown’s assertion that he had personally abolished the boom and bust cycles). The hope that the recovery would be V shaped (rapid ascent out of recession) soon gave way to the realisation that it may be W shaped. Now, even the prediction of W shaped recovery seems overoptimistic and looks like the recovery is going to be L shaped—we are going to spend prolonged period in the trough.

The Eurozone crisis will not go away. We did not really sort out all that crap the first time round; we just kicked it high up in the air; and now it’s falling again on our heads.

Posterity may well mark this as the period when the balance of power began to shift away from the West tot the East.      

London Riots, David Starkey and Racist Britain

‘Did you watch the Newsnight yesterday?’ John asked me. We were in a bistro of a railway station near John’s village, where I was visiting him last weekend. (Before you wrinkle your noses, let me tell you that the bistro came very highly recommended (OK, by John; and OK, primarily because it was cheap, but not only because of that; it was what I have often heard people describe as ‘good value for money’) for its selection of cakes.)

‘No, I didn’t. Should I have?’ I asked, examining the menu on the blackboard. My attention was immediately caught by the lemon drizzle cake, Victoria sponge cake, and ‘rich’ fruit cake.

‘David Starkey was on it and he created quite a kerfuffle,’ John said.

‘The gay historian?’

‘The very same, although I don’t know why you are bringing up his sexuality. You could have simply said historian,’ John said.

‘I have not used it as a term of abuse; it was a mere identifier in my mind,’ I said.

‘Do you happen to know another David Starkey who is also a historian but is not gay?’ John asked.

(This might be a good time to tell you something about John. He loves to argue and derives enormous pleasure from scoring petty points. He also likes to take a contrary position in an argument, and does not concern himself with trifles such as consistency and logic. Depending on my frame of mind, I find this tendency of his quaintly entertaining or maddeningly irritating. It sometimes has the effect of him getting sidetracked into non-essentials. It also means that in an argument it is difficult to pin him down to anything. One moment he is bawling about the genocide perpetrated by the Israeli forces in Gaza, the next minute he is berating you for calling the Chinese Asians. Woolly thinking is what I call it.)

‘I might as well ask you what the kerfuffle was about,’ I said, ‘I can see that you are itching to tell me.’

John then told me what the kerfuffle was about. I was informed that David Starkey was one of the panellists on Newsnight, along with another bloke called Owen Jones who has written a book about Chavs (but not, I was told, ridiculing them; the book is a passionate defence of the chavs and their chavy lifestyle; we are urged to understand why they are chavs and why they do chavy things; and we are pressed to feel guilty about it, as it is clearly the fault of non-chavs why chavs are chavs). In the programme Starkey said that Whites have become Blacks and—this is important to remember—not in an admiring way. He then spoke about the gang culture imported from the USA and the patois favoured by that sub-culture, which apparently is spoken by both Black and White youths who admire and imitate the violent subculture, according to Starkey; or as conveyed to me by John.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Are you saying; rather is Starkey saying; no that’s not strictly correct either; do you think Starkey is saying: it is bad enough that the Blacks are imitating the violent gun-totting subculture, but things have come to a very sorry pass if the Whites too are succumbing to that culture?’

‘You are missing the point,’ John said.

‘And the point is?’

‘Starkey is not racist.’ John said in a tone that suggested his patience was running out.

‘But I never called Starkey racist. I called him gay,’ I said.

‘But others are calling him that,’ John persisted. ‘That’s a bit rich coming from the champagne socialists who wouldn’t know a working class person if he slapped them in the face. They live in their posh houses in Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath, are privately educated, and go to Oxbridge. They do not care a jot about the working class or the Blacks, but are the first to get on their moral high-horse and wag their fingers when someone has the courage to say the obvious. Stop staring at her.’

The ‘her’ in question was a young waitress in the bistro with an ass of a size and shape you could have placed your lap-top on without any danger of it toppling. It was clear as daylight that her panties, from the panty-line visible from under her tight skirt, were totally inadequate to cover her glutei.

‘Would you agree,’ I asked John, ‘that men find visible panty-lines sexually arousing? If you do, would include yourself in the group of panty-liners-aroused men?’

‘What are you on about?’

I nodded in the direction of the derriere of the waitress who happened to be bending at that minute.

‘You pervert,’ John said. ‘She is young enough to be your daughter.’

‘Firstly, she looks to me to be in her early 20s. Which means I would have had to be fifteen when I fathered her, ‘I said. ‘Secondly, you have got to admit that it is very difficult not to notice an ass that size when it is moving about in the room. It is not as if you seek it out; it seeks you out. Thirdly, if Rupert Murdoch can marry a woman who is younger than his grandchildren, why can’t I look at the ass of waitress in a bistro? It’s not as if there is a lot to entertain me here. It’s either that or listening to you.’

‘But what do you think?’ John asked me.

‘About what?’

‘Starkey’s comments on the Newsnight you numbskull!’

‘Well,’ I chose my words carefully, ‘not having watched the original programme and having to depend on the notoriously unreliable witness such as you, I am not at all sure I can form a definite view about it. However, taking everything you have reported at its face value, this Starkey bloke was making sweeping generalizations.’

‘But was he wrong?’

‘In my experience sweeping generalizations often turn out to be incorrect.’

‘You can’t deny,’ John said ‘that in many youths belonging to the Afro-Caribbean community, violence is a way of life. The proportion of children growing up in single- parent families is disproportionately high in that community. You can’t deny that children growing up in two-parents families are more likely to achieve better grades in schools and less likely to turn to a life of crime.’

‘You keep on telling me what I can’t deny, when you must know that I can deny. What you mean is: I would be, in your opinion, wrong to deny whatever it is, in your view, I am denying,’ I felt I needed to clarify the semantics.

‘So you don’t deny?’ John asked.

‘I am not saying that either. I don’t have to deny anything because a) I have not said anything either in support or against what you said with regard to Afro-Caribbean community; and b) I neither agree nor disagree with your observations because I have better things to do than forming my views about sections of the society from television programmes on which historians with a screw loose make controversial statements,’ I said.

‘Controversial does not mean wrong, though,’ John said.

Just then the waitress came to take our orders. My initial impression was that her breasts were perhaps not fuller but were of wide diameter and occupied considerable space on the chest wall. Down below one could sense the dark hollow of a deep naval. The young woman had a kind of provincial charm about her. As I looked at her bovine face, looking expectantly back at me, I could see the trajectory of her life which, in fullness of time, would take her from waiting at the station bistro to working in the kitchens of the local primary school; she would marry her childhood sweetheart who worked in the building trade, and produce 2-3 children along the way. I could just about see her taking her clothes off in 20 years’ time for a charity calendar—by that time one could safely assume her ass would have reached the dimensions that would easily support a desk top —but I could not see her going out rioting and putting a brick through a police vehicle.

‘You have such mouth-watering selection of cakes. I can’t make up my mind. What would you recommend?’ I asked the waitress.

The waitress reacted to the question as if her whole life up to then was but a wait for this moment.

‘I personally think the Victoria sponge cake is simply out of this world . . .’ (So is your ass, I thought) ‘. . . but the lemon drizzle cake is very yummy too.’

‘What about the rich fruit cake?’ I asked. ‘That looks delicious.’

‘Oh! That is very yummy.’ It was clear that the woman’s repertoire when it came to describing the edibility and desirability of cakes was somewhat limited. But then, if she had access to the kind of verbal fusillade David Starkey has she wouldn’t be serving cakes in a bistro of a provincial railway station.

‘What about the prune and date pie?’ I asked.

The waitress turned and looked at the pie. 'That is . . .' she paused to think. '.  . . Very yummy,’ she concluded.

‘They are all yummy, for Pete’s sake! Just order one of them. Tea for me.’ This was John.

‘What would you have, if you were ordering?’ I asked the waitress.

‘Oh . . .’ the waitress turned her head to the ceiling, pushed forth her chest, and inhaled deeply, the excitement of choosing between several cakes evidently being too much to bear . . . ‘they are all so yummy. I would eat all of them.’

‘I bet you would,’ I said, smiling.

‘Lemon drizzle cake for him,’ John intervened.

The waitress looked at me with questioningly.

‘Go on then,’ I said.

‘That’s one tea and a lemon drizzle cake. Would you like anything to drink, sir?’

‘How is your hot chocolate?’

‘It’s very yummy,’ the waitress said.

‘I see. Is it the type you get by inserting a sachet in the machine?’

The waitress became thoughtful. ‘I think,’ she said chewing on her pen, ‘it is machine-made, but I could check.’

‘Would you? Please?’

‘No problem, sir,’ the waitress said with a broad smile revealing a charming gap between her front teeth.

‘Oh for f**k’s sake! Tea for him,’ John said.

The waitress looked at me with raised eyebrows and shrugged her shoulder, a gesture I felt she should forego given what it did to the fleshy pouch under her chin. She then turned round and rolling her hips walked towards the kitchen.

‘If you have finished ogling at her,’ John continued petulantly, ‘can you tell me what is wrong about being controversial?’

‘Sorry. Are we still on the David Starkey business?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nothing wrong about being controversial, per se,’ I said. ‘But if you are going to say something which flies in the face of what everyone else thinks, or any sane person, at any rate, thinks, you should be prepared to take the flak.’

‘I don’t think there was anything racist in what Starkey said,’ John said.

‘My point stands,’ I said. ‘I was talking about sane persons.’

‘This is the problem with today’s Britain,’ John was getting a bit agitated now. From the corner of my eyes I saw a big group of locals entering the bistro, including an old man who was walking so slowly and gingerly, leaning on his Zimmer frame, that there was a possibility, I thought, that his heart would give out before he reached the table.

‘Would you not say that being brought up by both your parents is far more preferable to being brought up by a single parent? The problem with many Afro-Caribbean households is the absence of a father figure. A single mother is going to have difficulties in restraining a 16 year old boy intent on going out and creating trouble.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘that depends. In the households where you say the father is absent, it may be that in a significant proportion of cases the father is absent because he is in jail. In which case it might be argued that it is actually a good thing that the father is not around; he couldn’t be a good influence on the child. Also, you can’t deny that there are certain advantages of having children you haven’t brought up.’

‘What might they be?’

‘Well, if you are not involved in their upbringing, you don’t have to blame yourself for how they turn up. Also, you won’t be first person they will run to when they are in trouble.’

‘You have a genius for missing the point,’ John said, shaking his head.

‘You were the one going on about single-parent families in the Afro-Caribbean community being responsible for the London riots,’ I pointed out.

‘The point I am trying to make, which you are so diligently avoiding,’ John said, pressing his palms in front of him, as if squeezing them for inspiration, ‘is: a culture of violence, a culture that does not value anything, has become prevalent in certain sections of our society.’ He flicked open his android and continued: ‘Starkey was bang on target:

“a violent, nihilistic, gangster culture has become the fashion. And black and white, boy and girl, operate in this language together, this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that’s been intruded in England, and this is why so many of us have this sense of literally a foreign country.”

Tell me what is wrong with what Starkey said?’

I took the android from John. ‘Here,’ I said, 'is what is wrong with what Starkey said. He says:

“What’s happened is that a substantial section of the chavs . . . have become black. The whites have become black."' 

John looked a bit shifty. ‘Starkey is not a politician. He does not have to be politically correct all the time. He does not have to pander to the sentiments of everyone.’

‘Agreed. But there is a difference between being politically incorrect and being plain wrong and obnoxious. If you read what he says in totality what he seems to be saying that the ‘gangster, nihilistic culture' is some sort of deadly viral disease which the oh-so-good Whites have caught from the despicable Blacks. If only these criminal Blacks were not amongst us to corrupt the White youth, things would be all right. That’s what he is implying. Which sounds like total bollocks to me.’

‘Are you suggesting that the gangster, gun culture with its lingo was not imported into this country by Blacks? OK not all of them, but by a subsection of them. Indeed Starkey clarifies what he means by Whites have become Black. Only the blinkered lefties would not see it.’

‘So what exactly is your or Starkey’s point? Even if what he is saying is true, the question, which he neglects to answer, is: why has a subsection of Blacks begun identifying with that culture? And why have the Whites—or a sub-section of them—begun to feel attracted towards it? Also, I am not sure that everyone involved in these riots, in all the cities and towns where the riots took place, was a member of the gangster culture. Not all thugs and criminals play gangster rap and speak in Jamaican patois.’

The waitress returned carrying on a tray tea and lemon drizzle cake. ‘Here we go,’ she said, putting the tray on the table. Enjoy your pudding.’ She straightened up. ‘Is there anything you’d need?’ Yes, I'd need to dip my spoon in your pudding and waggle it about. I tried to steer away my thoughts from sex. ‘That looks delicious, thank you.’ She gave me her gap-toothed smile again and, walked away, her behind shivering.

‘How do natives in these parts entertain themselves?’ I asked turning towards John. ‘I mean, there can’t be much going on here to keep them occupied constructively all of the time. The pleasures of bestiality or injecting each other with pig serum ought to wear thin after a while. It has got to be sex in the loft of the barn, rolling about in hay.’

John gave no indication that he had heard me. ‘I would much rather listen to Starkey than to that hypocritical bitch Emily Maitlis. What has she got common with the people of Croydon? Has she gone even a mile south to the river? When I was in Cambridge, I did not meet anyone who spoke in a Croydon accent?’ He said.   

John grew up in Croydon, and although he no longer lives there—because like anyone who had any capacity he got the hell out of Croydon at the earliest opportunity—he feels a special bond towards Croydon, although it is difficult for me to fathom whether he has nostalgia for the place itself or for the people who live there.

‘Emily Maitlis may not have anything common with people of Croydon, but neither does David Starkey. At least she does not demonise people of Croydon or the Brothers. And you did not hear anyone with Croydon accent in Cambridge because most of them think University and education are towns in India which they have no desire to visit. And the few like you who did, hid the accent because they were ashamed of it. Nothing wrong in that; I'd be ashamed of that accent. Finally, I ask you this question, and think carefully before you answer: whom would you rather have sex with given a chance: Maitlis or Starkey?’

‘If you could pull your mind away from sex, difficult as it is for you, you would be astonished to know that the BBC did not send a single reporter to Croydon while it burned. They sent 437 reporters to Beijing Olympics, but not a single reporter bothered to take a mini-cab to go to Croydon when streets were being razed and even the police were running for cover. If you ask me why the riots occurred, I’d say that because no one cares about Croydon,’ John finished with a theatrical flourish.

‘May be no mini-cab driver was prepared to drive down to Croydon; have you considered that possibility? It would have to be a suicidal mini-cab driver to agree to drive to Croydon. Also, given a choice where would you rather be: Beijing where China was hosting the greatest show on earth; or Croydon which is a shithole? Seems like a no-brainer to me. I wouldn’t go to Croydon even when there are no riots—why, you got out of it at the first opportunity—I am not going to risk my neck when gun totting gangsters speaking Jamaican patois are marauding through the city centre, although I should clarify that it is the guns and not the patois that frighten me. Also, I don’t think that the looters were going round Croydon thinking ‘the BBC doesn’t care about us; I know what I am going to do; I am going to set high-street shops on fire; only then the world will know about the unbearable pain of my existence.’ They were going round the high street thinking ‘I am going to take home a plasma screen and not going to pay for it.’

‘So that’s your take on it? The rioters were looters, full stop. You don’t feel the need to figure out how things have come to this pass in our society?’ John asked.

‘The rioters were looters. This was not a political movement; there was no civil disorder. These guys—I use the word guys in a gender neutral way; it is possible that there were many women amongst the looters—were simply out to create trouble, cause mayhem, and help themselves to that which they did not have but fervently desired. They could not afford it, so they looted it opportunistically. It was greed.’

‘And what is your solution?’

‘I don’t have a solution. I am not a politician or a charity-mugger or an academic or a gay historian. I don’t need to come up with a solution. In any case, there is no solution. This country is going to the dogs and there is nothing anyone can do about it. I’d rather spend such time as is left thinking about that big-assed waitress, talking of whom I think you should tip her generously.’

‘Why the f**k should I tip her? You were the one ogling at her fat t*ts.’

‘I thought you were the one who cared about the working classes. She may even have a family in Croydon.’

‘Not enough to give her a tip,’ John said; and we got up to leave the bistro.