The Swami's Visit

Quite often, what we mistake for our earliest memories are in fact our fathers' first camcorder outings. So I won't claim this as my own, but I do remember seeing, at least, a home video of a man known to my family as simply... the Swami.

The Swami, which is an honorific title, is a holy man who tours the world, staying for a few days at a time in Hindu homes. Since the South Asian Diaspora is amongst the furthest flung, the Swami is a very well travelled man.

In the home video he is shown praying in the flat above my parents' corner shop in Newport, Shropshire. Not his most glamourous gig, I imagine, but for us - my two sisters and I - he was an exotic visitor in our otherwise suburban lives.

In what is a particularly uncomfortable scene for me the Swami reaches down from his seat on the sofa to where we children are sat, at his feet, and strokes my head, like I were the cat to his Bond villain. Instead of purring, I stifle a laugh for what felt like an hour, but what the video reveals to have been only a few minutes.

For us, it was the highlight of the Swami's visit. We recounted the story to each other (though we were all there), each time its telling more exaggerated. "It was like I was his bowling ball!" I'd say, not realising how creepy that sounded.

***

When he returned, years later, we were in our teens and had moved house. As he climbed our driveway, I noticed a pair of Nike Air Jordans peeking out from underneath his orange robes. He looked up at the new house, much bigger than the last, a symbol of my parents' success, and declared it bad luck.

"Its shape," he said. "Is like the open mouth of a roaring lion."

I came out to help him with his bags, paused and looked up at the house as if it were a Magic Eye illusion. Maybe the lion would appear if I moved up close, fixed my eyes and stepped slowly back, I thought. But, however I looked at it, it was a new build, detached house with a separate garage joined by a granny annexe extension.

Once inside, he found our house more to his liking. Furniture draped in tarpaulin, at his request, so that when he sat he wouldn't come into contact with the seat. Water too, on his arrival, was poured into his mouth so that the glass didn't touch his lips. He plugged in his mobile phone to charge (it was the first I'd ever seen) and announced his final request - that he stay in my bedroom. As the youngest, he said, my room would be untouched by carnal desires. Good luck with that, buddy, I thought.

That evening, as we gathered in the lounge for a prayer session, we resumed our original positions: children (and mere mortals) to the floor, Swami perched on the covered sofa. This time, when he reached down to stroke my head, he found himself tangled in sticky spikes.

"Any questions?" he asked when we were done. "Anything you like."

It was quiet. I guess we thought if we asked any questions we'd only have to sit there, stifling laughter, for even longer. But it was awkward, so I raised my hand and scanned the room, looking for inspiration, my eyes landing on a painting of the avatar Krishna, in typical pose, playing a flute and dancing with women. Topless women, I'll add.

"Mr Swami?" I said.

"Swami," he corrected me.

"Swami, why's the Lord Krishna always surrounded by women?" I asked. I was fifteen, bear in mind, and if I could just have his secret...

"Sandeep," he said. "You mustn't ask questions of your religion. OK?"

OK. So his question, as to whether we had any questions, was a rhetorical question?

I was glad when he left. And as I helped him with his bags I thought that for a Swami, "free from all the senses", he sure had a lot of shit with him. Checking for his mobile phone, a dance I'd soon learn myself, he was on his way, off to chide more children and put them off the religion their parents so wanted them to embrace.

***

I was reminded of all of this when I went home for Diwali last weekend. It was a similar scene: the family gathered in the lounge for a prayer session on the Saturday evening, except we all sat on the floor this time. And perhaps because this made me feel like we were on the same level, I interrupted the prayer to ask why we didn't say it in English.

"I mean, no-one understands this," I said. I hadn't wanted to start a revolution, but the debate my question had sparked was turning into one.

"Can't you be a Hindu without speaking Hindi?" my sister asked.

"Yeah, why's the religion and the language so tied up?"

You can see that our line of questioning had matured since the Swami's visit, but even still it was upsetting mum. She finished the prayer, put away her books and went to the kitchen.

The next day, as I was packing to return to London, I came across a magazine in my old room. Though the Swami wasn't with us this Diwali he'd found his way onto the cover of Hinduism Today, which had pronounced him, "Hindu of the Year". I wondered how he'd earned the title. Fluent in Hindi? Unquestioning? Looking at the cover, he had a lot of bindis. Maybe that helped. I took a photo of the magazine and put away my camera. I'd been teaching myself photography and Diwali this year had turned into an ethnographic study.

In the car on the way to the railway station I apologised to my mum for upsetting her the night before.

"That's okay, son," she said. "It just upset me, I suppose, that you're willing to teach yourself photography, but you seem uninterested in your own religion."

It didn't feel like my religion, I wanted to say. And the fact that I asked questions meant that I was interested.

But I didn't say anything. I didn't want an argument before I left, and I didn't really want a revolution. I'd had a great weekend, and I knew that when I got home and processed the photos I'd have the evidence in my hands. You just can't say that about religion.

"Mum," I said, as I got out of the car. "Why is Krishna always surrounded by topless women?"

My mum wound-up the car window and started the engine. I guess you can't say that either.

Coconut Boy

While other mums worry about their sons turning to drugs, getting their girlfriends pregnant or joining some sort of gang, mine is concerned with matters more spiritual. (Besides, I don't have a girlfriend, I'm a responsible member of an online community and I just turned down a line of coke because I had a "terrible blocked nose".) The way my mum sees it, the only road I'm heading down is the one clearly marked, 'Identity Crisis'.

"Coconut boy," she calls me. "Brown on the outside, white on the inside."

While there might, at least, be parts of me that resemble a coconut - brown, covered in hair and full of a white, milky fluid - at this time of the year, when my colour fades, it's quite easy to 'lose my roots' when they're not so etched onto my face in hues of burnt sienna, sepia and mahogany. I'm invited to fewer dinner parties, considered less effective as a token person of colour, and stopped far less by police men.

It takes just a two hour journey up north and one weekend with my family to bring that muddy colour back to my sweet cheeks and to remind me that my roots don't stop in Shropshire, but in a land far, far away, to which ex-pat relatives still squint and admire what remains of a changing culture.

I found out this morning that my cousin, a graduate from Kings College London, is in India to get married.
"That's crazy!" I said. "Has he even met her before?"
"Oh yeah," my mum replied, nonchalantly. "At the engagement party, I think."

He's my second cousin in as many years to go east to find the perfect Indian bride. Some send for the brides to come over to the UK. Others, like my cousin, get married in India with a view to bring their brides home once 'the paperwork' is ready.

On the one hand, I think it sort of represents a failure, as if the groom-to-be was no match made in heaven for the British Indian girls he would have seen on the arranged marriage circuit (which I like to imagine is like the selection process of American Idol; Simon Cowell as busty bride-to-be).

On the other hand, it's like the son or, more often, his parents, look to India for the 'old fashioned decency' quickly escaping British Indian girls. (It's being replaced by ambition, I'm pleased to report.)

What they don't know - or fail to see - is that the kind of girl that insists on a wedding register at the UK Border & Immigration Agency, is probably pretty ambitious. And that India is going through it's own (belated) sexual revolution (after ironically triggering western 'free love' movements of the 1960s and 1970s, with the rediscovery of its ancient culture of sexual liberalism).

The pursuit and purchase of the 'perfect Indian bride' might be more a case for Trading Standards than Border and Immigration control. Ambition and sexual liberalism is completely at odds with the requirements of my cousin, his parents and other British Indians who look to India for 'old fashioned decency', as impossible to attain as the 'impaling on a stake' position of one of its most old-fashioned texts, the Kama Sutra.

Nevertheless, I wish them luck. If I'm like a coconut, and life a box of chocolates, an arranged marriage is like a curry. It's hot, it's exotic, you can pick it up or have it delivered, but soon enough that shit's going to really hurt.

The Namesake is super, man

It's no secret that I saw Superman Returns six times last year (and that's not including DVD viewings). I own both Spider-man films, eagerly await the next, and have all but the Joel Schumacher Batman outings.

It's not that I particularly like men in tights, though some may suspect otherwise; or that I have a hero complex, any more than most men.

I suppose I identify with these stories that are, essentially, the stories of immigrants.

Sent from far away places, living with alter-egos, battling with the duality of identity - on the one hand plain and inconspicuous, on the other colourful and foreign - superheroes (powers aside) are your regular, run of the mill, second generation immigrants.

Meera Syal went as far as claiming that Superman himself was Indian in her comedy sketch show, Goodness Gracious Me. NHS glasses, kipper tie..? Where else, she asked, could a man run faster than a train?

It's another Mira (though spelt slightly differently - Mira Nair) that reminds us of this fact. And it's on a train that her new film, The Namesake, begins. It ends the same way and in-between fills its two and a bit hours with, what critic Mark Kermode calls, "issuetastic family drama."

This, from the film's synopsis:

When the the Ganguli family moves from Calcutta to New York, they embark upon a lifelong balancing act to meld into a new world without forgetting the old. Though parents Ashoke and Ashima long for the family and culture that enveloped them in India, they take great pride in the opportunities their sacrifices have afforded their children. Paradoxically, their son Gogol is torn between finding his own unique identity without losing his heritage. Even Gogol's name represents the family's journey into the unknown.

Though I might rather relate to the Super side of Superman, his alter-ego, and that of the unfortunately named Gogol Ganguli, strike a more notable resemblance.

In The Namesake, Gogol's experiences were very much like mine. I cringed watching him bring home a white girl to meet his parents, flinched as she put her hand on his during dinner and squirmed as she planted an awkward kiss on his father's cheek. We just don't do that, my mum says.

I wondered what it must have been like for her, being born in India, coming over to England as a child and raising children of her own - 'neither here nor there'.

I wondered how she must have felt when I, like Gogol, disappeared into the surrogate family of my girlfriend, my work and my country.

Like all second-generation immigrants, I suppose, Superman himself is torn between two cultures - taught to respect his Kryptonian heritage, whilst embracing his undeniable Americanism.

The actor who plays Gogol Ganguli (Kal Pen) was, incidentally, in Superman Returns. It was a non-speaking role... You notice these things when you watch a film several times!

The Namesake was brilliant. I urge you to see it at least once.

• The Namesake [Fox Searchlight]

Window shopping

I've always felt a sort of, I suppose, misguided affinity with the Irish. My dad told me when I was younger of the signs that would hang in shop windows - "no blacks, no dogs, no Irish." And I just imagined that the three would hang outside, on high streets, and peer into the windows of a country that hated them.

Of course, this was never really the case. Being hated is no foundation for a friendship. And the dogs didn't really give a shit.

Nevertheless, when I detected an Irish accent at the hairdressers' this morning I was pleasantly surprised to discover that it belonged to my new stylist. There aren't many Irish people in Shropshire. In fact, I know one other, and I think she puts it on anyway.

But this was the real thing. And, as we chatted, I thought to myself - if only there were a dog and a country that hated us the picture would be complete. I was quickly glad that there were neither.

Coloured people.

You wanna live like coloured people?

And this is what happens when you read the Daily Mail.

In the wake of the Big Brother racism row, distressed viewers are returning to a sense of normality and to discussing topics more typical of a reality TV show.

For the past week however the most distressed of viewers have been on the receiving end of the following arguments, surprised by the opinions of colleagues and co-workers, alarmed by their naiveté.

I do hope that these do not represent the views of most British people, but these are some of the arguments I actually heard last week.

• "I'm sick of white people being sidelined."
  Yeah, I suppose Black History Month is a bit much, isn't it? Really cuts into White History Year.
• "It's political correctness gone mad."
  I'm sorry, do you long for the time when we could tell one another to "f*** off back home"?
• "Oh, but it's okay for Jermaine to call Jackie 'white trash'?"
  No, Jermaine is not granted some sort of immunity from being racist on account of his being black. What he actually said was, "...they brought up the word 'white trash', and I don't want to bring that up. I wouldn't call her that, because she's a human being..."
• "But Jade can't be racist. She's mixed race."
  There's nothing in Jade's genetic make-up that excludes her from being racist. After all, I'm 100% me, and I hate myself a little bit.
• "I'm sick of people playing the race card."
  FYI: we don't like to, us darkies. If we gave you one you'd realise it's not that good a thing to have.

Death of a celebrity

In the eastern Indian city of Patna protesters are burning an effigy that is said to resemble the organisers of Channel 4's reality TV show, Celebrity Big Brother. It looks very much to me like a standard, two plank wooden frame, cloaked in a burning white salwar kameez. Now, I've met John de Mol, co-founder of Endemol, the production company behind the Big Brother franchise, and he is definitely a jeans/sports jacket kind of guy.

Some four thousand miles west and Patna's favourite Bollywood actress, Shilpa Shetty, sits under the surveillance of de Mol's creation - the Big Brother house - caught by the lens of 36 surveillance cameras and the attention of the world's media.

Shetty, 31, is the unwitting subject of a racism row. Her treatment by fellow housemates has generated a record 30,000 viewer complaints and has sparked a national debate on bullying, class and race.

Whether you think her tormentors are racist or not, Shetty has been on the receiving end of some sort of sinister bigotry. And its origins, whether in cultural ignorance, jealousy or arrogance, is a story that needs to be talked about: it is the story of racism in this country.

The name calling, the back stabbing, the bitching, is not unusual in a television show of this nature. But it has become a vehicle for an issue that is as uncomfortable to discuss as the show is to watch.

Does Big Brother reflect society? And if so, are we a racist nation?

Shetty's biggest opponent in the Big Brother house is former contestant Jade Goody, who left series three in 2002, nominated by the public, denounced by the British tabloid press and met with a crowd of booing protesters. Since, she has returned to television, relauched her career and amassed a not inconsiderable fortune.

It's interesting, as a subplot to this series of Big Brother, that we may be witnessing a turning of the tide against the post-Heat notion of celebrity; that we are fed up with what is being celebrated; that it is no longer intelligence, artistry and achievement.

It is predicted that Jade will be the next contestant to leave the Big Brother house. When she does I suspect she will be met with another booing crowd, and that we may see another burning effigy.

Borat. And mixing with the wrong crowd.

I went to see Borat for the second time yesterday. But I don't imagine it'll become the multiple viewing experience Superman Returns was. In fact, the first time I went to see it I didn't see it at all. I made the mistake of going on an Orange Wednesday, when mobile phone customers get two-for-one cinema tickets, saw the enormous queue of Borat fans, turned around and walked home.

I was put off, not exactly by the size of the crowd, but by its components. And that sounds like a terribly snobby thing to say. But, to quote the Onion, stereotypes are a real time saver, and just a glance at the crowd revealed a group of people probably unable to separate the irony from the racism, misogyny and anti-semitism of Borat.

The genius of Sacha Baron Cohen's creation is that it makes its point by seemingly embracing these bigoted ideas, turning the mirror on its subjects and making us question the boundaries of humour. When I finally saw the film yesterday I found that my stereotyping was spot on, that the crowd, which I'd tried to avoid by going to the matinee, asked no questions of its humour, instead erupted into hysterical laughter without the slightest delay.

I was, and not for the first time in Shrewsbury, immersed in a crowd with whom I shared little in common. And it made me feel as uneasy as Borat's tasteless gags. If you don't see these as satire, I thought, you are essentially laughing at racism, misogyny and anti-semitism. Were these people, I thought, looking at the crowd, the ones accusing me of terrorism? Calling me "über-gay"?

Is it good satire? It is occasionally. I liked when he lambasted people who deserved to be lambasted (and not just because I like to use the word 'lambast'). The frat boys in the Winnebago were truly horrible racist, sexist bastards. The scene in which Borat fearlessly strides into a Texan rodeo ring and loudly praises his hosts' "War of Terror" to wild applause is brilliantly surreal. But picking on shopkeepers by smashing their cheap antiques or presenting Atlanta folk with a bag of his after-dinner poo is just bullying one step up from Jeremy Beadle.

Is Borat funny? Yes, it is, and fine TV. And perhaps that's how it could have been better enjoyed, on the small screen and with like minded people, with whom I could have been sure to share the joke. But yesterday, I think, I was sitting in the wrong crowd.

• Stereotypes Are A Real Timesaver, The Onion

Baby Brown

Nannying has had its fair share of bad PR. British au pair, Louise Woodward and her murder trial did little for its image; so too did Jude Law when he, rather bizarrely, cheated on his fiancée, Sienna Miller with his children’s nanny. Then, of course, there was the Robin Williams film, Mrs Doubtfire, in which the profession is depicted as an opportunity for some cross-dressing, gender bending, slapstick humour. (“My first day as a woman and I am already having hot flashes.”)

And though, in her casual clothes, she does look somewhat like a small boy, my ex-girlfriend, Beth, is single-handedly improving the public image of the au pair industry. She is meticulous in her care of the four Wheeler children and careful too, to instil some racial tolerance at an early age. I witnessed this first hand yesterday, when I met with Beth and her youngest – two-year old Bea.

“I like your shirt,” I said. “It’s pink. Do you like pink?”
“Yeah,” she replied, coyly.
“My shirt is blue.” I said, pointing to it. “Do you like blue?"
“Yeah,”
“And what about brown, Bea?” asked Beth. Then, pointing at my face, “Do you like brown?”
She thought about it. It was an excruciating moment, but rewarded with relief.
“Yeah,” said Bea. “Brown!”

Postcard from the Last Day: Atlanta, GA

It's an image some might associate with "real America": Two cops are sitting in a road side diner, sipping coffee and actually eating donuts.

But they're not overweight, as you might imagine, nor are they male; hell, they're not even White! What's going on? you might ask.

Before they rush off to fight crime (they've actually just ordered more coffee), I think to myself, on the final day of my trip, of the lessons that I've learned. Have I learned about myself? Sure. I've learned that I have very sensitive teeth; that I'm a chocoholic (but for Corona); and that I'm not so bad with women (and that having a British accent, though only incidental back home, is pretty valuable here).

I've also learned that the pursuit of "real America", which I suggested was the point of this trip, is pointless in nature. "Real America" is not what I imagined. It's the people that have constantly altered my perception. It's the slim, Black policewomen; the Cubans in Miami; the girl from Dayton, Ohio (who I know for sure does not have a tattoo on the small of her back); the gamblers and the drunks in Las Vegas; the hopeful of Hollywood; Michael Jackson; the ex-girlfriends; the trendy and spendy of San Francisco; the Jazz; the Bostonians.

On the train to the airport at the very outset of this trip I peered into the gardens of suburbia and deduced, like a shitty Dr Watson, that people's lives were roughly the same. I saw paddling pools, rock gardens and patios. But I didn't see the people.

And though I don't expect to see slim, Black policwomen, or Michael Jackson, for that matter (not until he gets his passport returned, at least), I might look at England and its people through different eyes and, at least until those two weeks in July we Brits call summer, a different light. Goodbye sunshine, goodbye America.