In the midst of death ... life persists ....

I've been meaning to write something about the horrors of the mumbai massacre for days .... but find myself constantly bombarded by stories, op-eds and frankly conflicting emotions ...

Day 1 was filled with such overwhelming fury as i'd never known .... even greater oddly enough than after the London 7/7 bombings .... i'm not reading too much into that (big box cearly filled with too much for a quick post) .... Day two - insatiable need to keep up to date with whatever was happening moment by moment .... By Day three - horror and overwhelming grief .... which has slowly abated to sadness, respect, a need to mourn and remember .... an inexplicable pride in the armed services and also the hotel workers and people who sacrificed themselves or showed great courage to help others .... and huge relief that there have been few repercussions within India ..... and that anger rightly has focussed on the fatuous ineffectiveness of Indian politicians and the ticking timebomb that is Pakistan ...

i've been devouring blogs and articles trying to get more of a handle on what really went wrong .... and what ought to be done ....

Old heroes of mine such as Arundhati Roy seem shrill in their "liberalness" .... somehow i can't bring myself to agree with her polemic ... favourite novelists like Amit Choudhuri have provided nostalgia ... and Shashi Tharoor political platitudes ...

I'm going to the Frontline club tonight to hear some British journos including ones who were there ... give their insight .... so more after that ... but I'm attaching is Karsh Kale's tribute to mumbai ... which has most tapped into the emotions that i'm feeling but can't put words to ...

I heart David Remnick .... The Joshua Generation

Despite a long love for the New Yorker .... i do credit my ex boyfriend for really introducing me to the genius that is David Remnick ....

This piece in the New Yorker on race and the Obama campaign is typical of his gentle lyrical insightful writing .... a brilliant article on the rise of the new "Joshua Generation" ....

I'm not kidding - i think if i could be anybody - i think i'd want to be like him ...

Below is a link to the article being discussed on MSNBC's Morning Joe ...

Hitchens Opines: good solid sense ....

i LOVE that Christopher Hitchens (a true maverick) keeps getting wheeled out this election ... he's succinct, insightful, untheatrical and unapologetic (for his perpetual state of hungoverness) .... and lets honest - everything just sounds cleverer in a British accent ....

And the walls came tumbling down ....

I know I know ... its the eve of the biggest election i've known ... and i'm still blogging about Africa? And not even about the crisis in Congo?

But actually - i think this story is also going to be cataclysmic .... after months of rancour - the ANC has finally splintered - and this could mark the dawn of a new political landscape ....

The SADC (South African Democratic Congress) held its first convention in Johannesburg this weekend led by ex ANC defence minister Mosiuoa Lekota .... and has been heralded by the other opposition parties (importantly - none of whom are majority black).

"The once proud liberation movement has lost its way. The values, the visions and the ideals of the struggle have been forgotten ..."

Its a sentiment I've heard echoed increasingly in SA, and especially so since the ANC ignored the quagmire of sleaze and controversy surrounding Jacob Zuma .... and as the political megalith that is the ANC struggles to maneouvre itself from revolutionary movement to middle-of-road party of economic development and engine of the continent.

Scarily however - it seems as though some of this split is along tribal lines. The worst violence at the end of the apartheid era was not white on black .... but instead black-on-black in the notorious "township wars". Zulu against Xhosa. Beautifully but tragically depicted in the great memoir - The Bang Bang club (which btw is one of the most powerful books i've ever read)

It is of course too early for doom and gloom apocalyptic predictions. This may truly herald the dawn of multiparty democracy in South Africa ... and as the great black hope for the continent we can but hope.

But the lessons learned from Rwanda, Congo, Kenya amongst a long list of others serve as a sombre warning. One of the advantages of the ANC was that it had no obvious tribal affiliation (although each appointment is made with exacting racial precision for the correct ethnic recipe) - and the rape trial of Zuma last year showed what tensions simmer close to the surface.

It would be too unfair if after the evil of apartheid .... and then the scourge of HIV/AIDS .... that SA could then riven by political and ethnic strife. The imcomparable Archbishop Tutu once said of Mandela "How God must love South Africa to have given us such a priceless gift".... I pray for more Mandelas and Tutus so that this wonderful country can negotiate its course to a real multi-party democracy and ensure that the struggle hasn't all been in vain ....

STOP! Karmacy ....

Check the new video from Karmacy .... listen to the lyrics (even the part about the next generation of British colonisation) .... and go buy the album "Wooden Bling" ... its everything that you'd want from your musicians ... intelligent, fun, soulful and totally fresh .... i love these guys ...

Rock the Vote .... Obama '08

It must be even colder for you ....

.... said my cab driver to me last night on the way home when we were chatting ubiquitously about the weather (i mean really - what else do we do here in england ....)

I wasn't sure what to say in response .... but I decided rather than just laugh politely and take it ... i thought i'd maybe try explaining that brown as i am ... i was actually from here ...

"Well ..." i said brightly .... "I was born and bought up in Birmingham - so I do know cold and misery ...." (trying to keep it non-polemical) ....

"Yeah .... but your blood is still different innit? .... i mean - you can't get away from that love no matter what or where you were born. Its thinner or summink. See - I have a coloured mate ... and he and his misssus have to keep the heating on all the time .... even in the summer .... its your blood darling - its always going to be foreign" ....

I gave up. And talked about wanting to get home to have a nice cup of tea ....

But it reminded me of a line from the sublime classic "How to be an Alien" which someone bought my dad when he first came to this country in 1965 ....

"It is a shame and bad taste to be an alien, and it is no use pretending otherwise. There is no way out of it. A criminal may improve and become a decent member of society. A foreigner cannot improve. Once a foreigner, always a foreigner. There is no way out for him. He may become British; he can never become English."

Super Gordon!

According to Paul Krugman in the NYT Op Ed section this am .... Gordon Brown did good .... in fact he did exceptionlly good ....

"Has Gordon Brown, the British prime minister, saved the world financial system? ..... the Brown government has shown itself willing to think clearly about the financial crisis, and act quickly on its conclusions. And this combination of clarity and decisiveness hasn’t been matched by any other Western government, least of all our own."

Wow. He does make the point (quite a lot) that the UK is small fry on the economic stage as compared to the colossus that is the US .... but somehow our little nation stood tall and persuaded other world leaders to act not on ideology .... but instead to to look insightfully yet decisively into the abyss ...and actually do the right thing .....

The Guardian is less adulatory .... but flattering nonetheless .... holding its breath for a Labour revival .... and for a Brownian renaissance ....

As my mum would say .... silent waters run deep ....



Addendum: Just read that Krugman (of Princeton and the NYT column cited above was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics today ... so he must know what he is talking about ....)

Going for an English ....

No reason for this ... just reminescing after today's earlier post about how sublime GGM was ....

Curry is King .... or The Bhuna Bailout ....

Such is the craziness of this current end of days situation that all the papers today are carrying the story about how Gordon Brown went to bed early last night safe in the knowledge that the bank bailout would be smooth .... since Alistair Darling ordered a £245 curry takeaway from his favourite curryhouse for the Masters of the Universe that met with him in order to end this descent into chaos ....

As a proud card-carrying brown person ... i'm rather tickled that poppadoms and pickles were the sustenance for our 'saviours' .... no longer is it the beer and sandwiches of old Labour ... the caviar and chapampagne of the Tories .... or even fish and chips of the BNP .... chicken tikka masala - surely britain's greatest export - is the the flavour of the moment .... the stuff that society runs on when the going gets tough ....

I can only think of the classic Goodness Gracious Me sketch when the uncle claims everthing as Indian ....



But sadly ... it all leaves a rather nasty taste in the mouth (i'm loving this terrible punning) .... since the Labour spin machine just makes us wary that we're being purposefully manipulated into thinking
a) they're just normal people like any of us .... or
b) oooh look how multiculturally pc they are - please angry brown people don't hate us for branding you all as terrorists.... or ....
c) the discussions to avert the apocalypse took the form of a rather amiable curry on a kitchen table with Darling being in complete control and not a knife-edge debate on the coming of hell - oh-how-very-quirky-British-stiff-upper-lip-and-not-like-all-that-fuss-the-americans-made we are ... (actually the last one i rather like ... i mean really ... how nice and civilised that our politicians sorted the mess out over dinner and not with some nasty melodrama)

Of course .... it may just be that our Chancellor thinks best with a naan and tarka dal inside him ... and who am i to disagree ....

Naturally the papers are going wild about this tasty little tidbit ..... Hardeep Singh Kohli in the Guardian today is calling it the Bhuna Bailout in a rather saccharine coquettish piece comparing the banks and building societies to the nation's favourite dishes ...

To which one wit has commented ....

King Prawn Rogan Josh : £12.50
Poppadums : £5
Lamb curries : £40
Chicken curries : £30
Tandoori rotis : £20
The knowledge that you can distract the taxpayers with talk of curry while shafting them for £50 billion : Priceless
There are some things which money can't buy. For everything else there is the Guardian.

Amen.