Our Shameless Media

 Our Shameless Media

My daughter used to love the Today Programme. Now she cringes when she listens. Her morning  listening pleasure is totally destroyed. After listening to the bilge manufactured by the programme to by-pass the Labour win in Batley and Spen, I am embarrassed for them. How do the newscasters, who I assume are well-trained professionals, deal with this level of smoke and mirrors? Have they no professional standards, no shame at what they are reduced to? Why not resign and do something honourable, such as making a huge noise at the footies?

  Once upon a time, not so long ago, we had a news landscape we could be proud of. There was no noticable obfuscation or bias. Now we have a small of group of well-dressed, well-coiffured men and women. trying to mislead a whole nation about the degree to which the present Tory Government is a national disaster. Come -on! A combination of Johnson, Hancock and Gove, with a few Cummingses and Goingses to twist the truth around, and stampede through our country?? I am nostalgic for Teresa May, though I am a confirmed left-of-left, Labour member, and will be all my life.

   I listened to all the news programmes today. No one had the courage to say that after predicting a 7 point advantage for Tories, they had lost Batley and Spens to Labour. In spite of that unspeakable Galloway diverting 22 percent of the vote his way. Do the Muslims in the constituency feel they can trust him? What does he want from all the damage he manages?

   Sky was marginally more professional than the BBC.  Our Bought By Conservatives channel that we all pay for.  Kay Burley was a star when she interviewd the Deputy Chair of the Conservative Party. Like a terrier she got her teeth well into the discussion and tossed the woman about like a wet rag. Well Done, Kay. 

   All the channels want to focus on the leadership discourse within the Labour party. So Labour wins a hard-fought election, I am jumping up and down in the room, chasing up my daughter, who joins me in the celebratory tea-and-toast, and the news is trying to concentrate on Keir's recent problems.

   I am a confirmed Corbynite. But I will be loyal to any Labour leader who is trying to walk the tight-rope that is Westminister politics. BBC tried very hard to make Diane Abbot to say something derogatory about Starmer. But Diane showed breeding and metal; she out-talked the BBC interviewer, who repeatedly tried to force her into a corner. Hats off Diane.

   Has Fox news bought BBC up? If so, may I have my share of the loot?

Our Animal Family

 

Our Animal Family

There is Boo-boo now. She is the one that looks like a fur scarf. Her fur is so long in places, my daughter has to cut it short in unmentionable areas of her body so that her poo is not hanging off her tail. The tail itself is a feather duster, which whisks briskly when she is angry. With a name like Boo-boo, what can you expect? She was already Boo-boo when she came to us.

Boo-boo is my daughter’s cat; pines when she is not at home. When I go past her, sleeping in the empty fruit-bowl or the laundry basket, she wails, asking me – what? I stroke her and talk to her gently and she lets me go. But her eyes are imploring. Where is my mom? she seems to ask.

All the animals in the house adore my daughter. No matter that all four of us in the house spoil them, it is my daughter they come looking for. That girl has some animal-witchcraft within her.

Then there is Pepper; the smart one. She does not have thick fur and actually has a working brain. Both the cats are now eleven years old and Pepper holds long conversations with us. She often sleeps on my legs, at the bottom of my bed; gets quite offended when I move my legs or turn over. Tells me off. Sometimes I find her near my pillow, like a child sleeping with mother. Rare times of magic!

Pepper is a wandering cat, whereas Boo-boo never leaves the compound. Neither has any time for our Jack Russel, Lily.  The little one in the photo, thin and long, is Keeri. She adopted us while I was on holiday in India. She was starving and distressed, so I took her in and brought her to England.

Keeri looked so like a mongoose, I called her Keeri, Malayalam for mongoose. Keeri knew how to love humans. She slept in my arm-pit and every night, she would wait downstairs till I was ready to go upstairs to bed. Following me ino our garden she would be running so fast, she couldn’t get her breaks on near the little oak tree and would go right up. She also wasa roamer.

One day she went out and ended up splattered in the middle of the road in front of my home. We have not added to our cat-family since. I dream about a few more kittens but don't dare.

So, there you are. Except the pup. Lily, the Jack Russel does not really know whether she is dog, cat or human. The less said about her the better.

 The white working class child is educationally disdvantaged. Apparently the schools that they go to are being neglected. Now,we know that the black working classes, and the brown working classes, are equally disadvantaged (probably more). Furthermore, black and and browns get nowhere near the same access to justice or  jobs. Young black men are treated with little respect by the police -- they DO NOT get fair consideration. 

As for jobs, I should know. I came to the U K as an immigrant in 1974. I was grateful for the chance to work as a teacher. I was one of three graduate Mathematicians in a nineteen member Maths department. I loved my work. I thought I would get promoted eventually after a few years, when I had established my credentials, but that never happened. I watched people getting promoted over me, who did not know the new Maths being taught then; many would come to me at break to learn the Maths just before going in to teach. So I moved to Dagenham, where I was treated with much more professional respect. In Dagenham, black and brown teachers were a dime-a-dozen and the classrooms were multi-coloured I had found my niche.

I suspect black and brown school children do better than their educational environments would suggest because of the support they receive at home. It is relentless. I remember teaching Secondary School Maths to my daughter to get her a place in a boarding school in Suffolk. And now, my grand daughter has no choice but to perform when my daughter takes over her learning. We, black and brown, are all like that; we don't take education for granted. 

This is not totally about colour or class; it is about respect for learning, and the effort required by parents to make a success of it.

My Alter Ego

 

My alter ego from Keralam

Posted on July 6, 2020 by anandnair78

This is a blog about my very Indian other self. Actually Malayalee, (from Keralam, speaking  the local language, Malayalam) because I probably have less in common with people of some of the northern parts of India than with crazy Croydon, where I have lived  since the late nineties, with occasional forays into Keralam to recharge my other self.  I started this site in 2013 and never pursued it. But now, senility combined with Covid Lock-down,  and the remorseless tick-tock (Rushdie style) of seconds, minutes, hours, days… persuade me that I must get this going, if my granddaughter is to have any idea about her fractured beginnings.

At fifteen years, she has a room and bathroom of her own, you enter there at your peril — unless your sneak in to pick up the daily debris, while she sleeps the sleep of the innocent. In our house in Thalassery, in the north of Keralam, I ponder, five of us females, aged between seven and fifty-five, slept in the puja room. Ammamma, the eldest had a narrow bed, the rest slept on mats spread on the floor. It was a small room; when the mats were rolled out, there was no walking room, so you stepped over the others if you needed to get out. I did not qualify for a pillow at my age, graduating to one only on my wedding night. I wonder what my new, just unpacked husband thought when he found his wife constantly slipping down a notch, in the bed, to escape the pillow. It didn’t help that some kind souls had covered the nuptial bed in jasmine petals. JESUS WEPT!

Men were considered superior to us; they slept upstairs on beds and mattresses. Indeed, but for the beds upstairs, the house was mercifully devoid of furniture. My father had two chairs in his office in the corner of the veranda. His clients sat on a bench, which was not trustworthy, as it had uneven legs and tended to go up at one end, when a weight came down on the other. My father also had a big table and a Dutch glass-fronted almirah. The almirah contained his law books, with The Indian Penal Code occupying pride of place. He was a lawyer.

We had a Planter’s chair too on the veranda, on which I used to curl up and sleep, waiting for my father to pick me up and carry me up to bed, when I was still little. It was a lovely object, that chair, until you got close to it. Most of the wickerwork had torn off on the seat and you had to stick to one little Strip, which had a few strands left. And look out for those sharp bits of unravelled cane sticking out!

For the rest, we sat on palakas and thadukkus , wooden stools and small grass-mats. These days, when I visit India, I see no stools or mats to sit on. The middle classes sit on sofas, while the poorer families sit on basic wooden chairs. Just as well considering the shape of my knees.

My Threadbare Kerala Home

 

MY THREAD-BARE KERALA HOME

Posted on July 12, 2020 by anandnair78

MY THREAD-BARE HOME

I rarely offer to empty the dishwasher as it requires bending and straightening up many times. There is no space in the cutlery drawer for all the armaments we accumulated over the last decade — it wasn’t too bad before that. Around 2007, my daughter returned to England from Kenya and I from India, bringing with us our households. So three households were now crammed into the small bachelor home of my long-suffering son. In the end, he bought a larger house, just to accommodate his unwieldy family.

When the spoons and forks spill over into the drawer, I remember our home in Thalassery. We had one metal spoon in the house, which was my father’s for use with his evening conjee. The rest of us had spoons made from the leaves of the Jack fruit tree. This was an adhoc arrangement. When conjee was served, one of us children would be instructed to pick a few jack leaves. This was no off-hand chore. The leaves had to be fresh but not too soft — they shouldn’t disintegrate in the hot conjee.  And they had to be shaped and held together by a piece of eerkili (spine of the palm leaf). I was never great at these feminine skills.

Once, my visiting aunt got so disgusted with my ineptitude, she asked me to go back to the jack tree and fetch better leaves. I had enough by then. I gave her my father’s precious spoon.

‘That thing that is sucked by all and sundry?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘I’d rather go hungry.’

This happy spoon-less state of affairs continued till I got married and went to Colombo to live with my in-laws. They were of a different ilk; I would call it faux-western. Proper china and a plenitude of spoons and forks and knives, not to mention sofas and sprung beds, and curtains in the windows. When I went home to India to have my first baby, I felt as though I could breathe again. I packed away my tooth brush and Colgate tooth-paste, and happily went back to an earlier oral hygiene — burnt husk on my index finger.

My husband threatened to visit after a few months. Now I would need to pander to a different food-protocol. He ate rice like the urban Ceylonese — with fork and spoon, the fork in the left hand, pushing food into the spoon in the right hand. And we,in Thalassery, had no forks or knives or spoons. The gofer was sent into town to bring back two spoons and two forks. He returned empty-handed. So I went hunting and unearthed some cutlery in a disused drawer in a small shop at the bus-stand.

‘From the time of the White Saives’ the shopkeeper said. ‘Who is this for, now?’ Emphasis on the NOW. I refrained from answering. The deal seemed almost a betrayal.

How far have the mighty fallen! My father grinned with great amusement, when I went home with my finds.

‘What are you going to do about the dry latrines?’ he asked. But that, as they say, is a whole other story.

At the back of my Retina

 

At the back of my Retina

Saris, magenta, indigo, saffron, emerald …, drying on a clothes-line, in bright sun, near a ‘dobhighat,’in Chennai; dark pink, silk umbrellas with silver trims, held over the image of Ganeshan at a temple festival, as the drums beat, the cymbals clash, and the elephants in the holy procession toss their ears;  the sindhooram powders for the dot on the forehead, in all the colours in creation, and some extra, displayed in front of an odds-and-ends shop in big bazaar in Thalassery; glass bangles shimmering in the sun, in a bangle-wallah’s basket; these are some of the colours of my childhood, and they survive in the back of my retina, to be called upon whenever I need a reminder of who I am.

  I recover this sense of belonging to my colourful past when I travel to India. During the months and years in between, the colours fade. When I come back to work in England after a summer in India, my colleagues are amused; they don’t quite know how to respond to this new Anand, who wears silk saris and chunky jewellery, as she swishes down the corridors. ‘Dressed up like a Christmas tree,’ one says, as I float past the classrooms, piles of books in hand. But it is all too much effort to be sustained as winter mornings get shorter, and I revert to my mongrel self.

   There are compensations. There is no green like the green of England, I think, as I drive from Laindon to Brentwood to drop my boys off at school. And it is everywhere, with no respect shown to urban areas. The small parks, the spaces full of trees and hedges -- it is as though the creator spilt huge barrels of green without discretion, all over the place and it spread willy-nilly. My visiting American friend is envious of this plentiful green.

   This green is a green all its own. Not sure about the ‘pleasant’ whenever I come across that other unmentionable intrusion of colour into my daily life. It is bad manners for the non-white person to mention it, but I often wished one of my ‘liberal’ friends in the staffroom would pick up the cudgels on behalf of Mo, Prashar, and myself, the three ‘persons of colour’ in a staffroom of ninety others. Persons of colour, my foot. Are all the others colourless, like see-through, pink plastic?

   I was lucky – I spent half a lifetime in Sri Lanka, Africa and India, and garnered a whole backdrop of ‘other’ to prop me up, through sundry episodes, which threatened to diminish me. I also carried that green in my head, that blazing, vivid, forest-green of Africa. When I am homesick, it is not India I miss, but the little towns of West Africa. I remember the multi-coloured Garra cloth in the market, rolled out on makeshift wooden tables, the head scarves of women saying boo to the limitations of their lives, and the family of yellow birds that made their home on a tree in front of my first-floor flat in Makeni in Sierra Leone.

Grow Up, Labour.

GROW UP, LABOUR 

I have a whole history of losing -- elections, boy-friends, keys... Was it in 1951, India had its first general election? My father was a candidate for the Congress Party; no one else would consent to be comprehensively beaten by the Communists, who practically 'ruled' the Keralam country-side anyway. So the Party asked my father to sacrifice his pride -- and he did. ' You'll lose big time,' I said to him. And he smiled his lop-sided smile. 'Someone has to, and I have a thick hide, he said.' But I didn't. When the victorious Communists came in bus-loads and danced on the road in front of my house, I put my face down on my bed and cried.

  So, I have experience of losing elections, first hand. And, in this year when Covid is killing people, almost at random, all over the world, a British election is hardly of world-shaking importance. Yet, I felt devastated to see the massacre of the Labour Party, on the first day , when the results started coming out. Labour recovered a thin strip of ground the next day, but all I could hear was the right-wing press gloating. AND GLOATING. Today, two days later, they are still salivating.

   The Press is right-wing these days almost by definition. Look at BBC, the news in India, Fox in the U S A. Half a century ago, the press stood for the small man; today it is owned by the oligarchs. The sight of BBC kowtowing to the Far Right Tory Government is nauseating. What is the point of them? They might as well start interspersing news with Tory Ads, paid for by the Tory Party, and stop asking the Public to fund them.

   At the moment, the only news in this country is about the internal disagreements within Labour.  It's absolutely wonderful that the Tories are so fond of each other, despite the sleaze, the corruption and the lying!

   We could all just stop watching BBC. Many of the other news channels are also right-wing, but not disgustingly so. I see a spectrum with BBC at one end and Channel 4 at the other, 4 not sure where it wants to stand. I could also enjoy Channel 4 just to look at Jon Snow, but that too is going soon.

   The Left needs to mobilize. We need to get to the voter; it is useless merely whining as I am doing now. I am fed up -- have been for a long time -- of the in-fighting within Labour --  causing the mutual destruction of both ends. If they must tear each other's hair out, please let them find a quiet toilet to do it, PLEASE.

   McDonnel should stop cashing in on every mistake of the Labour Right. There are many. Both sides should sequester themselves in a large room, where smoking, getting drunk and fighting with paper aeroplanes, are allowed, and not come out till they have settled rules of conduct, and who tells what to the Press.

  They should hide till the white smoke of compromise and clarity of purpose comes out of the chimney.

 And, then I might do some door-stepping for them, again, in the next election.