Was that the glass ceiling shattering? As almost every pollster got the election mathematics wrong, British Prime Minister David Cameron was smiling as his party went through the roof! One very annoyed election strategist is the Australian, Lynton Crosby, who had been advising Mr Cameron. Mr Crosby is extremely upset with the pollsters who consistently showed a lower tally for the Tories. It must have made the ranks jittery, prior to the result.
He maintains that his own internal campaign showed the Tories winning anything between 306 to 333 seats. Struck at the “ineptitude” of the Labour campaign, Mr Crosby feels that all polling should be banned three weeks before the campaign as it has a negative impact. According to him pollsters have lost touch with the people... well, one really doesn’t see any remorseful psephologist begging forgiveness do we? Perhaps Mr Crosby is right, and psephology is just another form of entertainment.
One psephologist, however, Lord Paddy Ashdown had said he would eat his hat if the exit poll showing a Tory lead were correct. He didn’t do it and so, post-election he had to eat a chocolate hat on television!
But sadly, the Labour Party is now shambolic and leaderless. While Ed Miliband (in Rahul Gandhi style) jetted off for a holiday to introspect, the contenders for Labour’s top job have come out into the open. The one candidate, Chuka Umunna, who could have been the first among the black and ethnic community (as we are called!) to stand for Labour leadership, has already withdrawn from the race. There are reports that the shadow business secretary Umunna got a little rattled by the relentless media intrusion. It seems even his girlfriend’s family was doorstepped, including her grandmother who is over 100 years old! This has to be a new low — when the paparazzi don’t even spare the centenarians!
So now we wait with bated breath for a Labour leader to emerge. Actually don’t hold your breath. This might take years, even decades... The good thing about Mr Cameron’s new Cabinet, however, is that one-third of them are women, including at least two Asians — Sajid Javid and Priti Patel — with both of whom we had worked for the launch of the Mahatma Gandhi statue at Parliament Square. Both are young and hard working and I have no doubt that they will go a long way. The other positive side is that at least half of the Cabinet went to public schools and were not privately educated. This will help change the image of Mr Cameron’s Cabinet as being chosen from among the “white, posh” boys.
There’s nothing like a good foot-tapping musical revival of an old favourite film. It’s been over a decade since Gurinder Chadha’s hit film, Bend It Like Beckham, was made but it certainly hasn’t been forgotten. It was a thoughtful feature film about a young British Indian woman who is football-mad, much to the horror of her parents who would like her to follow proper Punjabi traditions, presumably a life where the girl sits quietly in a corner and says “haanji” to everything. But Jess Bharura (played wonderfully by Parminder Nagra) rebels, eventually leading to a very happy, if muddy, end.
Gurinder has decided to revive her play as a musical, and it’s always a challenge. The problem is that, usually, Bollywoodesque song-and-dance goes a little awry for British audiences. The musical has just opened this week with Natalie Dew in the lead role of Jess. Born in Malaysia to an Indian mother, Natalie grew up in Devon. So she can probably empathise with Jess... and the feeling of falling between two cultures.
One hopes that the accompanying songs will be good, as another Indian themed musical Beyond Bollywood has just been panned by critics and gone far beyond Broadway into thin air. Maybe Beyond Bollywood is about another confused foreign-born desi, Shaily, played by Ana Ilmi. The story — in which Shaily goes from Munich to India looking for her roots — is, in any case, fairly thin. But the really painful part is when she reaches India and decides to try out every form of Indian dance from bhangra to garba. That’s when some of the British critics completely collapsed — their endurance had been danced to a breaking point.
Undoubtedly, Bend It like Beckham has a stronger storyline and the film was very moving. But now, we have to see how well Gurinder has adapted it into a whole new medium. I shall give you my view as soon as I see it... but I have to say I am certainly looking forward to it.
And it is also that time of the year when the Jaipur Literature Festival arrives on the banks of the Thames. This year a mix of subjects from Mahatma Gandhi to rising expectations from India are being discussed by authors ranging from Rajdeep Sardesai to Swapan Dasgupta to Urvashi Butalia to Meghnad Desai to Tim Supple to Suhel Seth... and many, many more.
The longlist has been specially invited by JLF’s organisational triumvirate, William Dalrymple, Namita Gokhale and Sanjoy Roy. And so the Thames turns pink!
Kishwar Desai is an award-winning author
