Brown Girl In The Ring
The young pandit with that temple-ready white tilak was just starting to give me reasons why London is these days such a great place for an Indian male and lousy for Indian women. He announced them in a list of scenarios. One, Indian males in Britain like to marry girls from India. Two, many are leaving for opportunities in Canada and the United States. Three, they leave for jobs with multinationals in Gulf-like places. Four, they like to marry white women, in part to escape the usual prospect-measurement by a girl's family. That subtracts to too many women to too few men, the holy fellow explained, with the sense of a problem he could see but would not feel. He had been imported recently by a temple committed to offering marriage services, but wasn't as busy as he'd expected to be.
And if you ask me, it gets worse. Women regard the males still around as positioned at varying stages of insufferable. They're probably right; the men who gather around one another evening after club evening seem to offer no temptations. They look tired of women, retired from relationships. Indian Britain is coming to suffer from a huge mismatch of willing women and unavailable men. A coupling with India seems the natural solution; think just of the Republic Day parade of wasted libido.
Now the women, usually returnees to singlehood, have begun to haunt the clubs too. Revenge self-sufficiency is admirable, but it's a grim sort of thing. There isn't a sight quite as unhappy as a looking woman all dressed for anywhere to go, then to remain unnoticed. Or worse, make forward moves of the kind that tradition has maintained as male misfortune. I am considering launching an appeal to male readers of Outlook. Please at least visit and, as we like to say, oblige.
The Dictionary Of Losing
The English have made experience, too, count. Through long years England players have mastered nobility in walking out of arenas before most others, with a smile in the face of a fate they have known would be theirs. We go through a fever-recovery cycle every time. It should be possible to cheer players on the field, and also their early reunions with their families. Winning wouldn’t be tragic, but if we lose it will mean only that Team India takes familiar position as the Indian team again, and we can all get on with our lives.
Mercurial Freddie
At the start of World Cup cricket England has managed to remain a far more sober place than India. Of course it would like Flintoff to do something spectacular so everyone can start to call him Freddie again. Just as India craves the lost wonders of a chap named after a restaurant in Mumbai. But England is still only a place where cricket followers have a keen eye on their matches, not a nation tuned into a sense of destiny that India has become over the hitting of a ball with a flat stick.
This is normally understood as a genetic difference between our natural excitability and the stony stiffness the English are born into. But there is more to it. England has fought off frenzy at least partly by turning cricket into a betting game—and then not betting on England. The British have long known that you don’t need to own a horse to make money off it. Money is the best pill against anxious nationalism.
A Load Off His Mind
My friend Mr Sidhu still doesn’t know whether he will return to Ludhiana for good or not, but his doubts about this ought to be news. He’s just done with 40 years of loading at Heathrow, and he now talks of wanting to move back. "There is no life here," he said, whatever that said about the over part of his life. It would have been unkind to agree, but he was probably right. Loading and unloading, dressing only to do the weekly grocery, a son who had bettered dad by joining a courier company, and a daughter who wasn’t the way she should be all added up to unhappy, sadly not uncommon.
He has lived in Britain, but noticed it only peripherally. London has been just a hard currency place to visit India from. Only India gets him really talking, and these days the new India. His saala came visiting and shopped in pounds with, you know, an Indian credit card, and he drives a Ford smarter than his own in London. The malls in India made his suitcases sorry, he was no more a providing citizen from consumerland, he’d lost Santa status. All these years he’d been the nri, and now every Indian he knew was nri-like. Ludhiana was moving on to the fast road in fast cars. If India offers all this, why stay holed up any longer in some brown corner near Heathrow. But that India has made life better near Heathrow too. Sidhu told me he wanted to quickly meet some white guy, just any from his old workplace, to say for the joy of saying it that Tata had bought Corus, the company that was once British steel, you know.