| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: It's payback time | 21-NOV-09 |
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| Londoners were regaled recently with the spectacle of their former deputy mayor cleaning out a public lavatory wearing a bright fluorescent orange jacket emblazoned with the words “Community Payback”. It must have been even more exciting for viewers than Marie Antoinette in the tumbril on her way to the guillotine for it was not the end of the road for Ian Clement. He will soon return from the lavatory to face the music of daily life, when some of the real fun might start. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Black isn't black | 07-NOV-09 |
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| This is being written in what is nowadays called a studio in London. That artistic word only means it’s a single room with a tiny entrance lobby, a bathroom and a kitchen. It was a bed-sitter in a more honest age when paying-guests were lodgers and the lowest floor was the basement. Though not a blade of green may be in sight, basements have burgeoned into the sylvan glory of garden flat. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Pricey porters | 24-OCT-09 |
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| Sadly, no Indian Railways porter — I almost wrote ‘coolie’, the word I grew up with, then absolutely neutral but now horribly politically incorrect — reads Business Standard. Otherwise, this column would have assured him that the demands and discourtesy that the authorities so desperately want to abolish before next year’s Commonwealth Games are by no means a uniquely Indian phenomenon. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Migration's migraine | 10-OCT-09 |
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| It sounded like the understatement of the year when Montek Singh Ahluwalia said India would “not be threatened if movement of unskilled work force is allowed globally”. Far from being threatened, India will be greatly enriched if even more Indian labourers join the armies now toiling in Singapore and the Gulf. Or, perhaps, he meant that Indian workers can hold their own against Somalis, Yemenis and other economic refugees from similarly impoverished societies. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Looking the part | 15-AUG-09 |
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| The campaign to round up Delhi's beggars and brush them under a carpet of mobile courts, biometric database and special institutions before next year's Commonwealth Games is a tactical mistake. If India's capital looks too spick and span, aggrieved Britons might feel even more strongly they are being taken for a ride by doling out money to a country savouring thoughts of Chandrayaan, a nuclear sub and plans for fighter aircraft and another aircraft carrier as it celebrates 62 years of independence. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: If it's royal, it's art | 20-JUN-09 |
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| Exhibitions at Indar Pasricha Fine Arts in London’s Connaught Street recall the society woman who was grateful to Frank Buchman, founder of the Moral Rearmament Movement, for introducing her to God and the Queen of Rumania. Perhaps the order should be reversed, giving her Majesty precedence over Him. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: Blue-collar students | 06-JUN-09 |
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| The disturbing reports of racist attacks in Australia bring home to one how the profile of the Indian student overseas has changed since Kipling wrote about a young Bengali training to be a barrister in London passing himself off as a minor prince. Someone I knew in England in the 1950s elevated her father to ‘Maharajah of Kuchnaipuram’ and flaunted a picture of Calcutta’s Victoria Memorial as “our place in the country”. |
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| Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The grey in black | 09-MAY-09 |
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| When the Reserve Bank asked Grindlays Bank, the premier British banking institution in India in the sixties, now, alas, lost in the chaotic maws of Standard Chartered, to disclose accounts held by Indians, it received a pithy reply from Lord Aldington. |
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