Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars

Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars by Sonia Faleiro

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is a wonderfully engaging and elegantly written book that tells the story of Leela, a teenage bar dancer in Mumbai’s seedy, barely-concealed underworld of dance bars and prostitution.


I forgot that I was reading a work of non-fiction. The author has so skilfully crafted the story and the characters that you feel you know Leela intimately from the very first page. Later characters like Priya and the cleverly constructed Apsara are also brilliantly drawn.


Although the book covers a fairly short time span and is relatively short in length, this adds to the pace of the narrative, which was gripping throughout. Beautiful Thing is a page turner. The twist in the tale in Apsara’s story, in particular, was unexpected genius and the somewhat sudden and frustrating ending left me wanting more. If ever Faleiro was to produce a sequel I’d be eager to read it. Leela is a character that stays with you long after the final page. There are many questions that remain unanswered, many fears for Leela that remain unassuaged.

Faleiro is subtle in her revelation of the prejudices that exist within the world of the dancers themselves. While it would be easy to focus on the obvious injustices the dancers face in the outside world, Faleiro succeeds in highlighting the bigotries that consume Leela and her cohorts, revealing a moral hierarchy within an immoral world.

My one criticism about the book would be the use of long strings of Hindi, which had the tendency to disrupt the flow of the narrative rather than add to it. But this is minor. Faleiro has created an endearingly solid work that was five years in the making and is as beautiful as its title implies. Beautiful Thing is a sensitive, often shocking and moving insight into a world that most wouldn’t want to be a part of but one which we’re hooked on discovering more about, however uncomfortable it is. That’s the writer’s ultimate talent in producing this gem of a book.

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Goodreads review of Siddhartha Deb's latest book

The Beautiful and the Damned: Life in the New India by Siddhartha Deb

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


An intriguing journey through the India you don't see in the Incredible India mass tourism marketing. Deb goes behind the veneer of life in the New India and lays bare the contradictions that exist between the image and the reality. Told through the lives of five main characters, these well-researched and well-told stories together make up a narrative says more about 21st century India than anything I've read to date and in such a subtle and darkly comic way. Deftly constructed and thoroughly engaging, Siddhartha Deb's first foray into long form non-fiction is highly recommended.



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From SiP: Starkey doesn't think imitation is the finest form of flattery

Historian David Starkey looking very much like...?

From Stupidity is Painless:

Starkey and his peers live in a segregated world. A collective culture with people bound by economic circumstance where race once used to divide, is confusing to him. Whether you call his views racist or dismiss them asmerely  a ‘senior moment’, you have to call them plain ignorant and wrong.

 Read more.

An anthem for our times

In these times of global social and political unrest, here's a little gem of a tune to soothe fraught minds.

The fallout: Michael Gove and Harriet Harman sparring on Newsnight

Classic!

The Repatriate Generation

From Time magazine.

By Vivienne Walt

The oil-rich African nation of Chad has rampant corruption, unclean water, few tarred roads and patchy electricity. It ranks as the world's second most dysfunctional country, after Somalia, according to the 2011 Failed States Index of the Washington-based nonprofit Fund for Peace. In short, Chad seems a nightmare location for business — unless, that is, you are Papa Madiaw Ndiaye, 45, or Patrice Backer, 44, of Advanced Finance & Investment Group, a private-equity fund-management company in Dakar, Senegal, that has so far invested about $72 million in African financial institutions, agriculture and mining. Ndiaye, the fund's CEO and founder, and Backer, the chief operating officer, have been plotting how to get rich ever since they became best friends as freshmen at Harvard University and worked together at JPMorgan. Decades later, their most lucrative prospect last year was a bank in Chad. "It's like low-hanging fruit," says Ndiaye, describing the investment climate in Africa. "There is no competition. If you know what you're doing, it is a bonanza." 

Such bonanzas — opportunities in troubled places with huge needs — are increasingly being sought out by a fast-growing group: Africans who have returned home after years of living, working and studying in the West. Though still a small subculture, African executives who have abandoned high-flying careers on Wall Street, in the City of London and in other financial hubs are becoming a force across the continent, their impact far outstripping their numbers. By moving home, they and others are bucking the trend of generations of Africans who headed west in search of brighter prospects, better education and decent jobs — and stayed abroad for good. Millions of African families have been kept afloat for decades by remittances from relatives working abroad as everything from street cleaners to physicians. Now with economic prospects and, in some cases, political stability improving in Africa while both are declining in the West, some of those relatives have concluded they are better off back home. "There is a momentum among young, upwardly mobile people to come home," says Rolake Akinola, a Nigerian business analyst with years of work experience in London. "We call ourselves the Repatriate Generation." 

The generation is a product of two colliding forces. The first is the global economic crisis of 2008, which resulted in millions of lost jobs in the U.S. and Europe and dampened employment prospects even for the best and the brightest. The other is the rocketing value of commodities, many of which are found in Africa. This has drawn new investment to the continent and pushed up growth. The upturn has been helped by deregulation in several countries, which has opened new industries to private investment, and also negotiations to end violent conflicts in places like Liberia and Rwanda. A report last year by McKinsey & Co. found that Africa's annual growth rate averaged 4.9% from 2000 to 2008 — more than twice the pace in the 1980s and '90s — and was likely to continue for some time as its middle class grows. Consumer spending on the continent could reach $1.4 trillion by 2020, the report claims. "If recent trends continue, Africa will play an increasingly important role in the global economy," it notes. 

Read more here.

Riots, racism and reporting: The Katrina Comparison

The leading article in yesterday’s Independent claimed that the English riots are Britain’s ‘Katrina moment.’ Others have drawn the comparison too. The media’s desperately trying to make sense of these unprecedented events. But having thought about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that the analogy to Katrina is deeply offensive to the people of New Orleans.

While I take the article’s point in terms of the potential impact of the riots, the comparing of the aftermath of a wholly natural disaster that was a life-and-death situation to that of what amounts to no more than common criminality and opportunism is unfortunate.

If there’s any comparison to be made to the aftermath of Katrina, it’s in the way in which the media reported both events. 

Just as displaced and marooned New Orleans blacks desperate for food were deemed ‘looters’ while whites were simply ‘foragers’, so too the English Defence League, racist thugs, were referred to as ‘groups protecting their communities’ without any analysis of their motivations. 

The BBC interview with Darcus Howe, in which the presenter was hell bent on painting the distinguished, veteran broadcaster as some kind of rude boy apologist for criminal disorder, is also a case in point.BBC Radio 5 Live didn’t cover itself in glory either. The tone of The Victoria Derbyshire Show, which went out live from Tottenham yesterday, was wholly questionable and revealed the presenter’s clear bias about who was to blame and why.

To their credit, those media you would expect to take this kind of line haven’t done as badly in their own reporting.

The Daily Mail and The Sun have sought to highlight the diversity of those involved in the criminality, across race, class and gender. Both papers have focussed on societal moral decay rather than pointing the finger at specific communities.

The McPherson Inquiry following the murder of Stephen Lawrence highlighted the extent of British institutional racism. At the time of its publication, I wrote an article for the British Journalism Review which argued that the media, as much as any other institution, needed to review its employment practices and its lack of diversity.

This week, it’s again been pointed out that the only time we see black people on British TV (such as on Newsnight and other news and current affairs programmes) is when something like this happens. Indeed. The media plays a large role in dictating how we see things. Until they make a concerted effort to balance the scales of representation – behind the scenes and in their overall output – we’ll still be talking about ten years’ from now, just as we are about the missed opportunities of the McPherson report.

Click below to watch the Darcus Howe stitch-up.

Why can't we face the famine?

Oh, what the starving masses of East Africa would give to trade their life-or-death existences for those with bigger problems, like not having the latest trainers, mobile phones or laptops to pose with! You get me doh! In the midst of the madness in England’s cities, let’s not forget that people with eminently more critical problems are on the brink of starvation. 

Aid agencies have been saying for weeks that international governments have not been forthcoming with the much-needed assistance to alleviate the suffering of millions in Kenya. While they’re happy to stump up the money for the markets, as we’ve seen time and again in the last two years, when it comes to the people who are so often the victims of the market it’s a completely different story. 

Though the anguish of the people in the aid camps is due, in large part, to war and corruption, that doesn’t let the West off the hook. It’s rarely the fault of the people at the bottom that countries without governments or those with fraudulent leaders are where they are. The worst drought the region has experienced in 60 years has the potential to claim the lives of 13 million, two million of whom are children, according to reports. Thirty thousand have already starved to death.

Events of the last few days, if not months, have shown that governments, like those they purport to govern can’t always be trusted to do the right thing. Individuals, and communities of individuals, need to step up to the plate and take ownership of these causes that, in the midst of a global recession, are likely to be met with much resistance. That doesn’t make them any less worthy.

Unfortunately, many people don’t like to feel that they’re giving, especially to causes they have no natural affinity with. They’ll happily buy a charity single featuring their favourite artists without sparing a thought for the real reason they’re being asked to part with their cash. But that doesn’t matter. Whatever the reason people part with their cash, it’s the cash that counts. We can all take inspiration from the 11-year-old boy from Ghana who’s determined to raise an ambitious $13 million for famine victims in his school holidays and has so far raised a laudable £300. Compare Andrew Andasi to another 11-year-old who appeared in a London court this morning on riot burglary charges and it really is a telling story.

We need to come up with creative ways to raise funds for those in need, whether they’re our next door neighbours, as in the case of the donations that have been made to those displaced in English riot areas, or whether they’re further away. I don’t have the answers but the debate is necessary. That being the case, all contributions in the form of ideas are welcome. Actual donations can be made here.

Cry, the beloved country: Why London's burning

What was Allied Carpets, a georgraphic landmark in Tottenham, destroyed

I can't tell you how it feels to watch London implode from the distance (and sanctuary) of abroad. Not only my hometown but my home boroughs have been destroyed by the mindless thuggery initially fuelled by legitimate concerns. My daily London life stretches from Enfield in the north through Tottenham to Hackney and Tower Hamlets in the east. All have been the scene of senseless, destructive violence and looting.

But what I can tell you is that it’s been both interesting and sickening to watch how the news of the riots has been reported abroad, and how it’s been presented as a race war of unruly black youths – the implication being ‘immigrant’ youths – against the British authorities.

What is true is that there’s a real problem with urban youth. And ‘urban’ isn’t being used as a euphemism for ‘black’ as is so often the case. Inner city youths today have extremely limited ambitions. There’s an undeniable culture of low aspiration. Their whole world consists of the boundaries of their borough and, perhaps, slightly beyond. And, unfortunately, the opportunities that exist within that borough are often few and far between. So, they retreat into the community, speak in tongues using a bastardised street language that won’t help them get a job and withdraw into a world in which the only rule of law is that of the streets. They’ve taken the worst from rap music, upon which much blame has (somewhat rightly) been heaped, while ignoring the message that rappers always aspired to transcend their circumstances through their music not stay in them. Add to this the chasm that exists between the politicians and the people and you have an incendiary situation, the flames of which will be fanned indefinitely if serious measures to extinguish them aren’t taken.

The political divide

People don't trust politicians. And no one has trusted this Coalition since it was hastily cobbled together just over a year ago. Three days of rioting highlight what’s long been obvious. MPs are nowhere to be seen in the darkness of night but are all over the place when the illumination of flashbulbs and television cameras appear: holding brooms aloft in Clapham to be seen to lead the clean-up charge, showing solidarity with the police whose salaries and numbers they’re irrationally cutting and fronting press conferences where more questions are asked than are ever answered. Outside of these photo opps, these politicians are invisible in the communities they’re supposed to be serving.

When I was growing up, our local MP, Rhodes Boyson, a Conservative (Brent North), knew every family on our street by name. We’d regularly see him in the local community (not just at election time) and he’d stop and greet us and chat and it was all very cordial and genuine. Even the neighbouring MPs - at the time Ken Livingstone (Brent East) and Paul Boateng (Brent South) - were always around, on the ground, highly visible and ready to talk to the people they represented.

But when was the last time Boris Johnson, David Cameron or Theresa May was seen walking the streets of Tottenham, talking to people and listening to their opinions, gauging their concerns?

This week, I heard that a friend was on the train with David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham. She asked him to talk to a young man she was mentoring, who was also on the train and slightly in awe of the MP. She said he declined.

The BBC reported a Hackney resident as saying: "When you've got bankers taking their bonuses and MP's taking money off people like me for their moats, and their chateaus and their castles, this is the result." This is no excuse for criminal behaviour. But the gulf between politicians and the people has become almost unbreachable. 

They just don’t get it

Hearing politicians pontificating on TV saying that parents should know where their kids are and get them off the street shows just how out of touch they are. The parents already know where the kids are because they're looting the city with their kids. The parents are part of the problem, not the immediate solution. Worklessness is endemic in parts of London. Generational joblessness has been bequeathed from father to son and mother to daughter. By calling on parents to get their kids off the streets reveals massive ignorance on the politicians’ part.

A classic example of the lax parenting that exists in some communities is this: One day, while walking through Edmonton, a young (white) mother was out with her two infant children, one in a pram and the other, a toddler, walking beside her. Out of nowhere, this woman launched into a foul-mouthed tirade against the elder child saying: ‘Come here you f*&!ng c@nt. I told you to stay near me, you b@st@rd!’ Her son was no more than four years old. What hope for that child?

The failure of regeneration

Millions of pounds have been poured into regenerating poor communities in the hope that economic investment will produce a human capital return. But when the majority of the investment is in the form of Bettfreds, Ladbrokes and knock-off KFC chicken-and-chip shops the prospects for urban renewal aren’t quite as good as the multimillion budgets and fancy architectural designs make out. Since leaving Edmonton twelve months ago, I’ve noticed over time the complete decimation of the high street. Where once shops competed for business, they now sit empty. And instead of using the vacant space for community projects at a time when libraries across the borough are being shut down, the empty shops serve to remind the community that they’re not worth investing in. When even the pound shops won’t come, you know you that the powers-that-be see people like you as ten-a-penny, worthless.

The class war

This from my friend Athena in relation to the audio of young female rioters boasting about their criminal activities:

I think there is an anti-intellectualism movement in the working class youth of today and this audio is an example of it. Rather than have aspirations to improve oneself through education or work, they aspire to destroy others and bring others to their level. It’s a combination of entitlement and jealousy. There is no connection between work ethic and success - they believe everyone has inherited wealth, rather than worked for it. It's probably New Labour’s fault. Bad schooling, lack of discipline, lowering of academic expectations, materialism etc.

Also, imagine the parents of these girls and what they must have learnt from them. The parents are probably giving them a negative message e.g. they think they're poor because of society, and not because of a lack of discipline/education/manners/class etc. So rather than teaching them to have ambition, they say "this is your lot, live with it". So the kids riot because they think they have nothing to lose.

I would say these girls are quite typical of low income youth in this country. So many of these kids don't have life/work skills by the time they are 18 they are worthless to society, so society is worthless to them.

A woman leaps from a burning building into the arms of police officers in Surrey Street, Croydon. Photograph: Amy Weston/WENN.com

Ed said it best

On a visit to Peckham, Labour leader Ed Miliband said what the government is afraid to admit. "The issue of deeper underlying causes of some of the activity that we have seen, of why people indulge in this criminal behaviour, is something that, of course, needs to be looked at," he says. "We need to look at issues of parenting, issues of aspiration, issues of prospects for people, but there can never be any excuse for the kinds of things we have seen."

There is no excuse for the wanton violence on the streets of the great city that is London, my home. But politicians must recognise their role in creating the conditions for mayhem if not the mayhem itself. It’s not just the cuts. It’s the rhetoric. Multiculturalism hasn't failed. This is nothing to do with multiculturalism and everything to do with opportunistic criminality and class. To deny that would be to deny the fundamental facts at work. And that, too, would be criminal.

Watch the clip below for a more eloquent voice of reason.

Faster than the Eurostar: London to Brussels direct

Word on the street

This appeared overnight and was spotted and photographed by my eagle-eyed colleague this morning on the streets of Brussels, 'the capital of Europe.'

A bright idea from a Bellray

The wonderful Bellrays

Justin, the really cool guitarist from the California band The Bellrays, came up with this great suggestion yesterday over a delicious dinner home cooked by our very own dynamic diva, Dorrie D.

As a voracious reader who’s on the road a lot, Justin’s become a big fan of the Kindle (or, rather, Barnes and Noble’s version of the Kindle, the NOOK). He told me that the Los Angeles Public Library, of which he’s a member, loans books digitally just as they do physically. The books are downloaded onto your device and are available to read for a specified period, say, three weeks, after which time the book becomes inaccessible from your reader. Presumably, you can renew the books just as you would in the real world.

I’ve been thinking about how I can incorporate new forms of publishing, e.g. e-books and digital devices into the library and this is a great idea. Users will also be able to borrow books digitally therefore being allowed to take them off the premises (dependent, of course, on them having a digital device of their own in the first place). On a side note, I’m currently considering options for bulk purchase and distribution with partners. All ideas welcome but thanks, Justin, for this one.

Check out The Bellrays (motto: Soul is the teacher, Punk is the preacher) at www.thebellrays.com.