Shit India!

Remember seeing the horrified faces of those who had just watched Paromita Vohra's Q2P at Tate Modern. Guess they'd been expecting something exotic, colourful, garish...I dunno, dancing elephants or gyrating hips from a Bollywood film. Or maybe something 'spiritual,' some austere, un-worldly Indian holy man, a swami, a sufi, telling it like it is, offering some solace for the soul in these troubled times. The Orient, after all, is full of mystique and wonderful extremes.

Quite disconcerting, really, to learn that 638 million people have to defecate in the open becasue there aren't enough toilets. Shining India? Not so sure.

Of course, goes without saying: you can't imagine Pakistan or Bangladesh being any less shittier.

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Ban the Burqa?

The poor level of political debate in this country is always something that's astounded you.It's not just the staple BBC programmes with their comfortable, middle class, middle Englander platitudes and trite observations, programmes that offer a semblance of-and therefore acceptable level of-serious concern and reflection; it's not just the rantings of the dunces in the Daily Mail, The Sun, etc., etc.

No, it's the ability to repeatedly miss the fundamental point-almost at will, one is tempted to say-and concentrate, instead, on secondary issues. Apart from cases where identification is absolutely paramount (security, say)and cases where it's forced on women, does it really matter that much? I mean, of course it's distasteful and not very progressive (quite the opposite, to my mind)but does that warrant a ban? Freedom surely entails the possibility of other people choosing what to you may appear as silly or harmful options but that to them come across as meaningful and correct choices.

But, again, shouldn't the main concern be about equality in education, housing, jobs and not the burqa as a sign of difference, a sign that is only adopted by very few women? As with the BNP's focus on migrants, the more central issues of globalisation, class, and the decline of manufacturing are swept under the carpet by the BBC wallahs. If you believe in free markets then capital and labour must be free to move across borders. Eventually the cultural contradictions of capitalism will come to the fore.

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Here's Will Self (which reminds me, must take some Spike back to the land of the pure)...

On the day after the catastrophic defeat, Richard Littlejohn “wrote” in the Daily Mail: “If the Few had defended as badly as England, we’d all be speaking German now.” Someone in television once told me that he’d been present at a meeting where a reality show was pitched called Daily Mail Island, the conceit being that contestants were marooned on an island where the only news they had of the outside world came to them via the Daily Mail. Needless to say, the pitch failed when one of the commissioning execs observed that such a land mass already existed – and it was called “Britain”.

Richard Littlejohn..how to describe him? Not as rabid as mad Mel or as shrill as Anne Leslie, just one of the professional whingers.