British newspapers are normally full of anger against the health service or the police. They mock the politicians whenever they can and send up the celebrities as fake and hypocritical. But let a foreigner criticise the country and you see national pride coming to the fore. Rashida Manjoo, a South African Law Professor and UN Special Rapporteur on violence against women has just toured UK and has concluded that we have a “Boys’ club sexist culture” with too many scantily clad women in advertisements, wolf whistles at women walking down the street and of course the (in)famous page 3 with nudes. One can hardly fault her observations. Parliament has just been in the news where women MPs complain of being leered at or harassed.
But that is not for a foreigner to say and especially a UN official from South Africa! Hell hath no fury like the British Press on its patriotic high horse. Her remarks have been called offensive, outrageous, bizarre.
She must have a point though. Indeed just recently someone put a picture of a woman eating her lunch on the tube on Facebook and it went viral. There is even a website “Women Who Eat on Tubes” poking fun at women. The idea was that women look ungainly seen eating in public. In answer to that, some women have been taking a special delight in going on tube en masse and eating somewhat undaintily to assert their right to do whatever they want.
Even more sensitive to “criticism” in the UK, has been the young President of North Korea Kim Jong Un. He had a well publicised haircut — short back and sides as it is called here — and wants his nation’s men to emulate it. There were photos of Kim in all the newspapers. Enterprising Mo Nabbach, a barbershop owner in the Ealing suburb of London put Kim’s picture in the shop window and offered a 15 per cent price cut if his customers asked for the Kim cut. Soon the tiny shop had diplomats from the North Korean embassy thumping through the door to order Mo to take the poster down as it was disrespectful of the Supreme Leader. When the embassy complained to the police they were told that no crime had been committed. But could this be grounds for chopping heads — and not hair — back in North Korea?
Meanwhile, Prince Charles the immediate heir to the throne is in the news. The latest was that he had told the novelist, Martin Amis, that he had no sympathy for Salman Rushdie’s plight when the Ayatollah had issued a fatwa against him for Satanic Verses. Charles thought the book was offensive and had insulted other people’s deepest convictions. The liberals were shocked but many who don’t like him were pleased with the Prince.
At the Almeida pub theatre in the Islington Borough of London, Prince Charles is the subject of a new play by Mike Bartlett which is like one of Shakespeare’s The Histories except it takes place in the future. King Charles III starts with death of the Queen and Charles ascending the throne. Then he takes a controversial decision and outrages the democratic public who insist that the Monarch cannot interfere in politics. Soon there is a conspiracy to make him abdicate, led by Kate who is portrayed as scheming and ambitious and William who is haunted by his mother Diana’s ghost telling him to avenge her. Lots of fun. Luckily royalty cannot sue commoners. So the playwright and the theatre are safe. I wonder though what would happen if someone tried something similar in India with you know who!
You may think it is only in India we have astrologers and fortune tellers. But here, too, the papers are agog with the Tetrad — the conjunction of four lunar eclipses with a blood red moon. The first one occurred only last week with the Red Moon being seen. There are three more such conjunctions of the moon and the earth, in October, next April and the last one being September next year. There is a perfectly good scientific explanation as to why the moon goes red. It has to do with refraction of sunlight through the earth’s shadow. Such tetrads are not unknown. A big one happened in 1493 but the last two in 1949 and 1967 coincided with Arab Israeli wars. So evangelists and Christian doom-mongers are at work prophesying the end of the world. Some say it is the Second Coming!
Talking of which David Cameron has just declared that he is an evangelical minded Christian and has felt the power of faith in healing. There are two elections this summer for European Parliament and for local councils. Since Tories need all the help they can get, Cameron should pray to the blood red moon!
…And OMG — Victoria Beckham is 40!
