[Reader-list] Out of Sync

[Alice Albinia]

Yesterday afternoon I tried to order a delivery of the
Asian Age from the local newsagent. Who is Sri Lankan.
“Asian what?” he said, handing a New Yorker over my
head to the liberally-scented woman with a poodle in
the queue behind. I am living, now, alongside London’s
genteel Chalk Farm, where the houses are big, and,
like their residents, white. I think he thought I was
taking the piss. At present, Indian news sometimes
makes page two of The Guardian. One mostly finds it
somewhere in the middle, in black and white only,
below Afghanistan, Russia and Peru. But what you lose
in sleep by flying feet first into Greenwich Mean
Time, you gain in peculiar new perspective. This is
where I live then: India on page ten. Having abandoned
two alarm clocks in New Delhi, functioning as I do
five and half waking hours ahead of Great Britain, old
time (lost time) takes on altered meaning. Thus I
spent New Year with a crowd of polite partyers on
Primrose Hill, looking at London through a draggle of
fireworks, and listening to the dislocated Mexican
wave of cheering that greeted their various
approximations of midnight. 31st December is as
arbitrary a marker of time as any other (after a
culmination of Diwali, solstice and Christmas it sort
of loses its charm) but the TV channels love it for
its recycling-of-old-footage soft touch and various
state drudges (the Prime Minister, the Queen) make
summary speeches. The better bit is the morning after,
when we the new citizens get to see the 30-year old
state papers, on hot release from the Public Record
Office. I was born in 1976. 1971, monotonously, was a
year of public gaffes from Britain’s Royal family, of
the Education Secretary Mrs Thatcher’s crackdown on
“extreme left-wing activities” of student unions, and
tough new immigration laws, heckled through by Enoch
Powell, to let in the “old” Commonwealth (the white
ones, of “British stock”) – but keep out the Asians.
Memories are short: 1971’s legislation reviewed
Labour’s 1945 law, for Powell and cronies feared being
“swamped” by an Indian “explosion”. Well, thirty years
on, the papers are swamped by Lloyd-Webber’s rising
star Preeya Kalidas, reviews of Nithin Sawhney’s
latest, and reports that if 2001 saw Lagaan get to the
Top Ten in British Box Office Charts, 2002 will be the
year of Bollywood-Britasian. Ironic that. (But in
Chalk Farm, I still await my era of Asian Age.) This,
I am ashamed to say, is my first posting. Sorry I’m
late. And if it has some meaning, Happy 2002.


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