India

Thursday

James Bartholomew

Degrees in disaster

So farewell, Yanis Varoufakis. You used to be Greece’s finance minister. Then you resigned, or were you sacked? You took control of the Greek economy six months ago when it was growing. Yes, honestly! Growth last year ran at 0.8 per cent, with forecasts of 3 per cent this year. The government had a primary budget surplus. Unemployment was falling. Until you came along. Varoufakis was a product of British universities. He read economics at Essex and mathematical statistics at Birmingham, returning to Essex to do a PhD in economics. With the benefit of his British university education he returned to Greece and, during his short time in office, obliterated the

Thursday

David Crane

The forgotten faithful

It is often said that cricket was ‘a game invented by the English and played by Indians’, and every so often a book comes along that makes you think that something similar could be said of the English language. It would seem from Farthest Field’s dust jacket that this is Raghu Karnad’s first book, but if this assured and moving memoir of wartime India is an apprentice piece, then you can only wonder what is coming next. From the very first page it is the brilliance of the writing that stands out. There is a very English control of irony that can suggest Forster — the Forster of A Passage

Emily Rhodes

The traffic in human misery

When Sara discovers that her husband died in India, rather than being killed in Afghanistan as she was told, she travels to Delhi to uncover the circumstances of his death. On the surface, Invisible Threads is a novel about an English woman on a personal journey to India, and comes with many of the trappings we’d expect. Lucy Beresford describes the country’s assault on her protagonist’s senses and observes the seeming contradictions of poverty, such as when Sara sees a barefooted beggar — her ‘hair is matted, her turquoise sari filthy, but she is carrying a mobile phone’. Sara also finds India to be palpably erotic, imagining how a sari

Saturday

Charles Moore

Is gay marriage just a fad?

Now that Ireland has voted Yes to same-sex marriage, it will be widely believed that this trend is unstoppable and those who oppose it will end up looking like people who supported the slave trade. It is possible. But in fact history has many examples of admired ideas which look like the future for a bit and then run out of steam — high-rise housing, nationalisation, asbestos, Esperanto, communism. The obsession with gay rights and identity, and especially with homosexual marriage, seems to be characteristic of societies with low birth rates and declining global importance. Rising societies with growing populations see marriage as the key to the future of humanity, so

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

Object lesson | 21 May 2015

The idea of using objects — salt, cod, nutmeg, silk — to turn history lessons into something popular and accessible has been around for at least a generation. It’s a great way to avoid complicated chronologies and the need to remember dates. A well-chosen object, or trading tool, can tell a narrative story that at the same time reflects the multicultural present, often showing unusual and previously unconsidered connections between places and peoples. Neil MacGregor brought the technique to Radio 4 with his brilliantly conceived and executed account of world history as told through 100 objects in the British Museum. That series (and his most recent application of the technique

Kabita Sapkota

Katmandu Notebook

After the first earthquake we were told that the chance of another one was 200 to 1. A fortnight later, when we were just beginning to recover, the second one hit. Perhaps I’m getting better at this, because this time I was able to control my body enough to run outside and join the crowd in the street. Standing with my family, looking back towards our home, I could see dust billowing from the foundations of the houses. They seemed to be dancing back and forth. The chances of a third strike, we’re told, are minuscule. Should we believe this? No one feels ready to relax. Nearly all of us

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Servants of the super-rich

‘Let me tell you about the very rich,’ said F. Scott Fitzgerald. ‘They are different from you and me.’ Indeed they are. They can afford to live in London. Just how different became clear when The Spear’s 500 — ‘the essential guide to the top private client advisers’ — landed at the office. (We assume Spear’s sent it by mistake. We write for love here at The Spectator, and would be insulted if the editor offered us anything so vulgar as money.) Still I was glad to read it. Spear’s paints the best portrait I have seen of a world beyond our means and comprehension. Do you have a starstruck child

Kate Chisholm

The lives of others | 14 May 2015

‘I call Zelma Cacik who may be living in London,’ says the announcer, in the clipped RP accent of the BBC in the 1940s. ‘I call her on behalf of her 16-year-old cousin…’ The voice betrays no emotion, no feeling, it’s so matter-of-fact, but the script spares no punches as it tells the cousin’s story in blunt statements of fact. She was born in Poland, separated from her family when she was 12 and made to work in a munitions factory while her parents, her sisters and brother were sent to Treblinka extermination camp. Twelve names in all are called out on the archive radio programme from 1946, one of

Thursday

Harry Mount

Two wheels good

Bicycles — in Britain, anyway — are the Marmite means of transport. I am among the bicycle-lovers, almost religious and certainly addicted in my need to have a daily bike ride. But I can see why people — and drivers in particular — hate some of us: for our smugness, our need to keep on moving through red lights and along pavements. It isn’t like this in Holland, where bicycling is so embedded in daily life that most drivers are bicyclists and vice versa; where mutual understanding leads to mutual respect. Why do bicycles have this effect? Of intense affection among some, hatred among others; of mass use in some

Thursday

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 23 April 2015

There are already people camping outside St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, to await the birth shortly of another royal baby, the second child of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. It is hardly a very exciting event. Babies are born all the time, and there are already quite enough descendants of the Queen to ensure the survival of the Windsor dynasty on the throne of the United Kingdom for a long time to come. Yet there are many people in this country for whom this commonplace event will be more thrilling than the forthcoming general election, even though it could presage the dismemberment of the country itself. The British monarchy continues

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

The roots of the matter

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/panictimefordavidcameron-/media.mp3″ title=”Lara Prendergast and Louise Bailey, a hair extensions specialist, discuss the hair trade” startat=1622] Listen [/audioplayer]Perhaps you recall the moment in Les Misérables when Fantine chops off all her hair? The destitute young mother sells her long locks, then her teeth (a detail often excluded from child-friendly adaptations) before she is eventually forced into prostitution. It would be nice to think that her experience was no longer a reality, that the business of human hair had gone the way of the guillotine — but the truth is, it’s booming. The modern market for extensions made of real human hair is growing at an incredible rate. In 2013, £42.8

Thursday

Andrew Taylor

A mingling of blood and ink

Historical fiction is sometimes accused of being remote from modern concerns, a flight towards nostalgia and fantasy. It’s not an accusation you can reasonably level at M.J.Carter’s historical crime novels. The first, The Strangler Vine, was set in an unsettling version of colonial India. Its sequel, The Infidel Stain, takes place three years later in 1841, in a London that Dickens would have recognised. The story follows the subsequent careers of her two main characters — the louche and mysterious Jeremiah Blake and his far more respectable young friend Captain William Avery, now retired from the East India Company’s army. Blake is making his living as an inquiry agent. Viscount

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Crossing cultures

For an Indian woman to make a dancework about La Bayadère is a promising prospect. This classical ballet of 1877 by Russia’s French-born genius Marius Petipa tells the simple story of an Indian temple dancer — essentially a religious sex slave — whose potential salvation by an amorous young soldier is dashed when he expediently marries the rajah’s daughter. Death and transfiguration ensue in some addictively gorgeous balletic poetry, along with all sorts of improbable exotica to please the tsar’s eye. Londoner Shobana Jeyasingh, born in India, trained as a traditional Bharatanatyam dancer, and is a contemporary dance choreographer of keen intelligence, if sometimes letting her brain get the better

Thursday

Jeffrey Archer

Jeffrey Archer’s diary: a pirate at the traffic lights, and other Indian wonders

This last week, in India, I visited six cities in seven days: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Calcutta and New Delhi. This is my 11th trip to India and from the very beginning the signs were good. For a start, the temperature on arrival in Mumbai was a cool 22 degrees and I was told it had rained for the past two days, though I’ve actually never seen rain in Mumbai before. Because of a new eight-lane highway, we got from the airport to the Taj Hotel in the city centre in just 40 minutes, despite a minor hold-up. As the car was idling in a traffic jam, a young boy who

Kate Chisholm

What it’s really like to live in India today – stressful

After a month cooped up in a Scottish castle, no internet, no TV, and no radio, watching hectic snowflakes billowing through the wooded hillside opposite my window, I realise that what I’ve missed most about this supposed deprivation has not been the news (to which I thought I was addicted) or the chatter, the company of other voices, but the chance to be taken in my head to other places and inside quite different experiences of life. It’s not just the factual education that radio can provide (although I’m pretty sure most of what I know has come from listening on air), it’s the absorbing intimacy of hearing other people

Wednesday

Lara Prendergast

An uncomfortable interview for India

British film-maker Leslee Udwin’s video interview with one of the Delhi rapists may not make for comforting viewing, but there are some home truths in there that must be faced up to. In the past hour, the Indian government has banned the video – a move which is both cowardly and futile. They fear the rapist’s remarks that he has ‘no remorse’, and that he ‘blames the victim for fighting back’ might create ‘an atmosphere of fear and tension’. In the West, a similar message is being touted around: that the rapist should never have been given a platform. Don’t show the video and allow him to justify his actions. I visited Delhi’s

Steerpike Steerpike

Jeffrey Archer: Bollywood plagiarised my books

Jeffrey Archer is none too impressed with the Bollywood film industry. In an interview with India’s DNA Newspaper, he said that several Bollywood films have ripped off his books without his permission. The comments came after the convicted perjurer was asked whether his novels have the potential to translate into Hollywood films: ‘Well, forget Hollywood, just look at your Bollywood! These bunch of thieves have stolen several of my books without so much as a “by your leave”.’ According to Lord Archer, his books Not A Penny More, Not A  Penny Less and Kane and Abel have both inspired successful Bollywood films. In the interview Archer goes on to say that he has found Indian film producers difficult

Thursday

Peter Parker

Sophia Duleep Singh: from socialite to socialist

Princess Sophia Alexandrovna Duleep Singh (1876–1948) had a heritage as confusing as her name. Her father was a deposed Indian maharajah who had been exiled to England, her mother the Cairo-born illegitimate daughter of a German merchant and an Abyssinian slave. The young princess was brought up in considerable splendour on a vast Suffolk estate as a thoroughly anglicised aristocrat who would be presented at court and become an enthusiastic participant in the Season before unexpectedly joining the battle for women’s suffrage. Anita Anand traces what she calls the ‘roots of rebellion’ to Sophia’s father. Duleep Singh had been proclaimed maharajah of the Punjab at the age of six, after

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

The National’s latest attempt to cheer us up: three hours of poverty porn

Bombay is now called Mumbai by everyone bar its residents, whose historic name (from the Portuguese for ‘beautiful cove’) has been discarded for them by their betters. Near the airport a huge advertising board bearing the slogan ‘Beautiful Forever’ overlooks an alp of discarded junk where homeless paupers crouching in tin shacks toil and slave around the clock to earn a meagre bowl of grey, rat-licked gruel. Welcome to the National’s latest attempt to cheer us all up. The verminous scrapheap teems with cocky adolescents, witty thieves, evil moneylenders and struggling mums. Their stories interweave but the main thread involves a foul-mouthed clash between some shirty Muslims and a crippled

Thursday

Roger Alton

International cricket must return to Pakistan (and my team went first)

In a tiny courtyard just off the teeming alleys of Lahore’s old town, a young Pakistani boy in a gleaming white shalwar kameez picks up his Adidas cricket bat and proceeds to clout to all corners the plastic ball his pal is chucking down. Behind him on the wall the outline of three stumps is drawn, and the word Out! chalked there, more in hope you feel. In the corner a little schoolroom has emptied out and excited young boys and girls, books in hand, look on, giggling happily. Is this the new Imran? Almost certainly not, but we are in one of the holy places of Pakistan cricket, and