Wake up and smell the underclass

Old news on new ghettoes?
The CRE is waking up a tad late to the reality of Asian ghettoes in Britains cities.
The reality of the segregated life here was a shock to me when I arrived. To see how little Asians and White British communities mixed together. It seemed I had to make a choice, belong to one or the other. Each side with its own quasi-tribal behaviour, affiliations, attitude and accent. You couldn't hang with one set and sympathise with the other. Not any more. Not after 7/7.
Being an Asian in Britain is depressing. Bad enough that one is lumped together into an amorphous characterless entity titled Asian, where one ceases to be Indian/Pakistani/Hindu/Muslim/Brahmin etc., which labels actually meant something to one for most of one's life. It is worse that this amorphous lump is then damned unequivocally and without any exceptions, to being a community on a nosedive into slumlife. Worse too that the slum-dwellers, with by far more time on their hands, haunt most Asian website message boards, spewing obscenities and vitiating any sympathy people might have towards them.

UK Fast Becoming Racially Segregated Nation

- Vijay Dutt. London, September 19, 2005

Warning has been issued that Britain is in danger of developing into a "ghetto" state, a racially segregated nation with ethnic minorities, particularly Muslims and Blacks, living in ghettos cut off from the rest of the society.

Trevor Phillips, Chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, believes that a New Orleans like enclaves, " literal black holes into which nobody goes without fear and trepidation and nobody escapes undamaged" are inevitable. He says Muslim and Black ghettos are splitting cities.

He criticises the Government's Race Relations policy for promoting the acceptance of difference rather than upholding British values. " We are sleepwalking our way to segregation" and becoming strangers to each other and leaving communities to be marooned from the mainstream, Phillips says.

A report by the Institute of Public Policy Research revealed that with 1,147,905 new arrivals between 1991 and 2001 immigrants now make up 7.5 per cent of the population-one in 13 living here. A CRE research shows that most white people do not have a non-white friend while young Asian or Black have almost all Asian or Black friends.

The number of people of Pakistani heritage in ghettos, defined as areas with more than two-thirds of any one ethnic group, trebled between 1991 and 2001

Harriet Harman, the Constitutional Affairs minister, reflecting Phillips views also warned that some of Britain's black and poor communities were sinking into the same underclass exposed in the United States by Hurricane Katrina.

the Argumentative Indian

Argumentative Amartya

Early this August, Amartya Sen gave a talk in which he set out the positions he’s taken in his new book, The Argumentative Indian, one of the most profound and wide-ranging inquiries into the idea of India written in recent times.

Indians like to argue, he said, pointing to what he calls the “argumentative tradition”, an acceptance of plurality as the natural state of affairs, a long and robust tradition of heterodoxy, dissent, inquiry and analysis.

I had the good fortune of once interviewing professor Sen, this was before he won the Nobel Prize for Economics (the wide-ranging variety of my career often surprises even me, since I tend to forget past successes in light of present struggles). And I was struck by his modesty and accessibility to a relatively unknown rookie TV reporter. He chose to give me an interview rather than hold court at doddering old IIC. My employer had sneered at my ability at securing interviews with prominent people but thanks to Professor Sen, I was able to prove him wrong.

His latest book continues his tradition of revelation. I'll leave the objections to the argumentative pundits of India's many universities and diaspora. To me, it was an affirmation of what I thought about our great scholarly traditions, his fine logic gave these thoughts structure. His book reminded me of the many reasons I was once proud of Hindu tradition and thought:

- Aryabhatt: the ancient Indian mathematician of 476BC who postulated the Earth was round, calculated the value of Pi (to greater accuracy than Ptolemy), worked out the duration of the day at the poles and the heliocentric theory of Gravitation, among others. His work Aryabhattiya was translated into Latin in the 13th century.
- Gargi: a woman philosopher of ancient India (Vedic period 800BC) whose theories challenged the learned men of her day.
- Kashyapa or Kanada: propounded the Vaisheshika-Sutra (Peculiarity Aphorisms) the atomic theory of matter.

"In India I found a race of mortals
living upon the Earth, but not adhering to it.
Inhabiting cities, but not being fixed to them,
possessing everything but possessed by nothing".

- Apollonius Tyanaeus
(Greek Thinker and Traveller 1st Century AD)

To sum our past achievements up in one word (plurality) - and shroud it in dense terminology that is hard to debate - is the legacy of Academicians who fear the original Argumentative Indian. The Man (or Woman) on the street.

Sen also talks about the parable of the Kupamandaka (a favourite one of my grandfather too, incidentally, Bengali academicians being predictable in ttheir tastes). Kupamandaka (Sanskrit for Frog in the Well) who knows nothing about the outside world and this lack of knowledge is why he perishes.

Hmmmm, perhaps there are some Kupamandakas around here...

Of things Intangible but Precious and Quintessentially of this City

List continued!
What's Not To Like-II

8. Christopher Marlowe. Teeth bared in a smile, secretly a snarl, his true nature hidden behind a serene facade, this darling of the theatre was least what you'd expect of the author of a canonical work. For me, his writing made studying English Literature an adventure. Oh yes, I do declare I was in love with thee, Christopher Marlowe. Read his works here: Electronic Texts of Marlowe's Ouevre.
A man whose life was stranger than his fiction. Writer, Adventurer, Scholar, Spy. It brightens my day to see his lines quoted inside Tube trains (Faustus' soliloquy to Helen of Troy).
Was Marlowe Shakespeare? Read all about it in this somewhat scholarly rebuttal of the arguments of ye-of-little-faith.
Personally, he would still be a God to me had he written only Dr.Faustus.

The Djinns of Charivari

The first edition of Punch was published on July 17, 1841. Its founders, wood engraver Ebenezer Landells and writer Henry Mayhew, got the idea for the magazine from a satirical French paper, Charivari (indeed, the first issue was subtitled, "The London Charivari").

The Closure of Punch magazine in 2002 led to a brief spite of soul-searching amongst britain's literates. The keyword being brief. People were briefly panicked that the magazine so redolent of Englishness, of English wit and humour and independent thinking was now dead from neglect.


That was before Chavs with plastic bracelets and velour tracksuits overran the country. There is no more soul-searching. Now all that you find at the newsagents are "What Camera", "Which Cistern" and "Bratty Kids" type of magazines for a nation suffering from attention deficit disorder. The clever writing and edgy editorials are left to the minority of leading Newspapers and their supplements. Which is what makes the arm-spraining Sunday newspapers worth the weight-lifting trouble.

I'm no Amerophile but I'd rather read American Vogue than the brainless British version (90% fashion and shopping as if culture and lifestyle were no longer a modish concern), or The Washingtonian rather than London magazine (which is 90% real estate and 10% faff with no thought-provoking articles).

Charivari implies discord, a cacophonous mockery. I used to be enamoured of this word back when I wrote poetry by the reams and I wrote one called the Djinns of Charivari. Little did I know how prophetic that was. We are living at their mercy today. They have ripped intelligent thought and culture to shreds. Imagination really is dead, and so is curiosity. You see the results of this on the buses-- the empty-eyed, embittered and uninterested. No one ever directed their attention to what the world has to offer, or taught them how to live or to know good from bad. They trudge from chav homes to chav locals and back, pausing to urinate on the local heritage.