Blighty redux

WHEN YOUR CORRESPONDENT WAS A LAW student in London over four decades ago, if someone had predicted that the day would come during my lifetime when a Paki Muslim would be elected lord mayor of London, I would have dialled 100 for the men in white coats to come and take him away. But that’s exactly what’s happened in the city of my somewhat wild and exuberant youth. On May 7, Labour Party’s Sadiq Khan, not only a Pakistani Muslim but son of a bus driver and seamstress, was elected chief executive of London, defeating Zac Goldsmith, the snotty, closet racist candidate of the Conservative party, by a landslide. Your correspondent would never have entertained this possibility because I was living in London at a time when hatred, ridicule and contempt for sub-continental immigrants in Blighty was at its apogee. Therefore, in those troubled times when Conservative MP Enoch Powell had made an infamous speech predicting “rivers of blood” on the streets of Britain because of the immigrant influx, your correspondent was convinced the natives of that cold, rain-soaked island were incorrigible and would never overcome their racial prejudice. Evidently, I was wrong. To their credit, the ‘limeys’ have proved to be the best Europeans and have got over their master race delusions. In the 1970s when New Delhi typically washed its hands off them, the UK accepted and re-settled over 70,000 Indians expelled from Uganda by that country’s loony dictator Idi Amin. Since then, they have elected several sub-continentals to parliament and the House of Lords. And I believe the kindness of British landladies — a sharp contrast to grasping and uncaring lumpen bourgeois PG (paying guest) rentiers here — has done more for the survival of the Commonwealth (former British (mis) ruled colonies) than all efforts of politicians combined. Almost half a century later, I feel I misjudged my erstwhile hosts. Perfidious Albion isn’t quite so perfidious after all. Unwelcome imposition MANUFACTURED URGENCY AND FRENZY — a distinctive feature of India’s English language news television — has prompted the voluntary return from self-exile of former Sunday and Hindustan Times editor Vir Sanghvi to primetime television. Sanghvi is one of the five same-old expert political commentators of the CNN News 18 channel (formerly CNN-IBN) which has given itself a makeover by forcing its formerly personable women anchors to adopt ill-fitting western attire. Earlier, after he was exposed by the infamous Nira Radia tapes as a super-lobbyist and bag man of several industrial houses which wanted A. Raja — the unprecedentedly corrupt former Union telecom minister in the Congress-led UPA-I government — to be re-appointed telecom minister when the UPA-II won General Election 2009, Sanghvi went into a sulk and self-imposed exile for over two years. Now, since nobody missed him, this kiss-up-kick-down lobbyist who brought journalism into disrepute, has resurfaced in print and television media. This vitriol has a history behind it. In the mid-1980s when your correspondent was editor of Businessworld, I introduced Sanghvi — then the inconsequential…