Step-Sisters in Faith

They don't like to call that slum in Nizamuddin a basti anymore. It's now the Sundar Nagar Nursery.

I was there today, in four layers of upper clothing (a shirt and a sweater from a shop along the Ruwi High Street in Muscat, a shrug from an outdoor stall in Lajpat Nagar in Delhi, and an almost 10-year-old corduroy sherpa jacket from the JCPenney in Stillwater, Oklahoma) and two layers of bottom clothing (my mother's thermals from I don't know where, and a pair of cargo pants from a Muscat Carrefour). I wore high socks (Lajpat Nagar) and sports shoes (Foot Locker in Tulsa, Oklahoma). The camera strap was around my neck, and the camera never left my hands. I was shooting a group health discussion that the young NGO workers were conducting with the women of the slum.

Eventually I wandered away from the sunny spot where I'd already taken enough shots and photographs of the attendees. I meandered around and finally drifted into the narrow alleyways of the slum. I took a picture of a lost looking dog, wall graffiti, a pink wall. The few residents that I saw in those alleyways paid me no attention. Either they had finally grown used to seeing young urban people around or it was simply a TGIF phenomenon. It was Friday afternoon. The NGO workers had had to start their programme a half hour late because half the residents of the slum were Muslim, and Friday was the day of the congregational afternoon prayer. I'd seen a number of men and boys in the slum today dressed in white qurta pajamas and white crocheted prayer caps. It looked nice. Comforting. Something familiar. Like an old favourite pop song from high school that brings back vague memories.

A young teenage girl in a grubby pink and white shalwar suit stopped her bicycle near me. Her dupatta was draped over her hair. She wanted me to take a picture of her and her friend. I did. Three.

I thanked them and turned to continue on my shot-seeking journey through the slum. The girl called out to me. She said she'd noticed that I'd been taking a lot of pictures. I told her that that was my job. She asked me if I would teach her how to take pictures. I said sure but that one could really not teach anyone the aesthetics.

I turned to walk away. She called out to me again. She asked me my name. Khadija, I told her. She paused.

"Aap Muslim hain??" Are you a Muslim??

Not at that moment. I was just taking pictures, shooting footage.

"Haan." Yes.

She kept looking at me, her mouth slightly open, her eyes confused.

"Aapko namaaz aati hai?" Do you know how to pray?

"Haan." Yes.

She looked confused. I felt awkward. Maybe it was the cargo pants?

In the first week of TYPF

During my first week as Communications Manager at the YP Foundation in New Delhi I was asked by the CEO, whom I directly report to, to write down my daily reflections and share them with her at the end of the week. Here they are...

February 6, Monday
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I've seen too many young people wasting their time, not investing in themselves, not putting to worthwhile use the precious energy that comes free with the gift of youth. Or worse, misdirecting it. Which is why I didn't mind too much the meeting that dragged on for 6 hours today. My lower back was hurting, and I felt like I was on a long flight, but it was heartwarming to see all the well-informed, sensible, and articulate young people in front of me expressing complicated ideas with words like 'macro level' and 'strategy' and not being full of hot air while at it. It was even more wonderful that these were young women. These young people could be anywhere else. They could be out there getting stoned, talking trash, obsessing over insignificant things and unimportant people. These young people could be out there leading unhealthy lives and destroying their minds and their bodies, but they were here, in front of me. I wish they could see what I saw. I wish they could feel what I felt. I felt proud of them, these young people who will one day grow up to be mothers and fathers. Mentors. I'd recently lost my faith in everything, but the more I interact with these sensitive young people, the more reassured I feel.

February 7, Tuesday
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I'm glad I took some time to get to know the programme heads. I met with them individually and got them to talk to me about themselves, their programmes, and their communications needs. I specifically wanted to hear about the communications initiatives that worked for them and those that didn't. The good news is that that there's a lot happening within these programmes and that they've even tried to put it all out using various forms of media. The bad news is that it's all been harem scarem. I thought that maybe there was no framework in place to provide all this media the big picture it needs to work within, but the communication strategy for 2011-2012 is already in place and has some great ideas besides. It's just on paper though; there has been trouble with follow-up and implementation. That's the bad news. I have a meeting with Disha and Rachit tomorrow, and by now I've got a clear enough idea of things to know what questions to ask them. That's the good news.

February 8, Wednesday
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I am beginning to feel overwhelmed now. There's been so much information that I've been taking in, so many new people whose personalities and thought processes I'm actively trying to absorb, all as part of my getting to know the communications system here so I can understand what's been happening and how it can be improved. I am always sincere about doing a good job, but I think I need to distance myself a little bit for now. I need time for things to sink in and for the big picture to intuitively make sense.

PS - it was fun talking to Rachit about the email database and the newsletter. I've spent so much time trying to run away from my technical education that had deadened me on the inside for so many years, but it surprises me how I don't completely hate it now. Now when I run into databases and that sort of technology, I feel as if I'm running into a lover from a past relationship that had gone horribly wrong but have now made peace with and even have some fond memories of. Remember when...?

February 9, Thursday
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It was good to get back to the edit machine today. The Mumbai KYBKYR ('Know Your Body, Know Your Rights') consultation video is one monster project, and for all the wrong reasons. Too much footage in a language I don't understand. I still remember the succession of equipment failure that brought that project to a halt in December. It's been a pending project since then, and I've finally got the logistics of it sorted out. Now I can edit. Thank goodness. Finally it's just me and the machine. It's difficult editing footage that you didn't shoot yourself, particularly if the footage has been overshot without a strategy in mind. But I'm excited about how the final product will shape up. I really think I'm a film editor at heart.

You can't make this stuff up

My diary entry from May 26, 1999, in Lucknow...

"This afternoon, a whole bunch of huge scary monkeys grouped into the bathroom for water and there were only us females at home. So we tried to yell and send them away. I found 3 inside and those were thrown out too. I was so scared. I had last gone to wash my face 15 minutes before. It was a dumb experience. Then all of them went to Fakhri mamoo's house and ate everything (the untouched lunch) in the kitchen. The ladies locked themselves up and sent for Baba to send the monkeys away (no males present at this time)."

Shiny happy people

So many young people.

So young.

It was my first week at the NDTV broadcast training programme. I had started spending over 8 hours a day every day in a room with over 40 people in their early 20s. Most of them were 21-22, there were even a couple of 19-year-olds. I was on the other end of that bridge. In another year I would turn 30.

The last time I had been around so many young people in one room for extended periods of time was in high school. And I had been one of those young people, so it doesn't count. Life since then had been one hard impersonal knock after another. No time to enjoy being young. I was too busy dealing with deaths and almost dyings and God. The last couple of years I had almost exclusively spent in the absence of people my age or younger or even a little older. I had had some sort of inkling about things the whole time but I know it for sure now - life had done something to me. I had gone from 20 to a life-weary 60 that looked like 80. I felt so...desperately (almost gratefully) anaesthetised.

But being around so many young people so suddenly wasn't the only major change in my life. I was in India now, in New Delhi, all by myself. I was in a country I had only visited for summer holidays in childhood and barely at all in the past ten years. I was in a city I had only transitted through too many years ago to bother. My environment had changed overnight from a sanitised, controlled, elephant graveyard to an overcrowded, overstimulating, crumbly third-world capital city. I was so out of my element - and feeling so vulnerable - that for the first few weeks I would not even get out of my chair at the NDTV media institute, not even to go to the restroom or to get a drink of water. I would sit there like a rock for over 8 hours everyday with 40-something young people around me barely able to sit in one place or be silent for more than 15 minutes. I would sit so long that every day felt like a long-distance flight. I didn't speak much either. I was so disoriented by the new faces, new sounds, new smells, new lingo around me, that once back at the shabby room I was renting out, I would not even step out for a walk, even when asked. It took me over a month, 2 months even, to get comfortable enough to allow myself unplanned movement.

That first week, I spent a lot of time observing...absorbing the people in that room with me at NDTV. Collectively they were very exciteable and had very short attention spans. They talked too loud, and they laughed too loud. They seemed to jump straight from neutral to fifth. For many of them it was the first time they had been away from home. With some you could tell from the way they would interact with the opposite sex. They loved taking pictures of each other and of themselves. This was obviously the digital generation. I was raised on that precious non-renewable resource called the 35mm film. They monitored their Facebook accounts more often than they checked their email. Some even kept track of Facebook comments and would come find you the next day if you hadn't been leaving comments on their pictures. It was...overwhelming. On top of everything else for me, it was too much.

I noticed some other things though. I noticed how strange it felt for me to look around and see strong, young, healthy bodies. Strong, young men and strong, young women. Children in grown-up bodies. What a different vibe they gave off compared to the dying and the elderly. It was quite startling. Here there was noise and life and sun. I noticed the strangest of things. Did you know that a young person's hair has a certain shine and a bounce? Their skin looks thicker and shinier, as if soaked in some youth nutrient. Like a ripe golden mango. There is an eagerness in their eyes. Young people talk a lot and smile a lot. Something happens to their body language when they talk to a person of the opposite sex. They begin to smile a little differently, it's almost as if their bodies put on a performance. The boys stand taller, and the girls toss their hair more. The boys hold court with their humour, and the girls applaud them with their laughter.

I don't know why it seemed so strange to me. I thought about it some more. I think I had also started on a phase like that once, but somehow it had got cut short. I had had to grow up and forget about smiles and boys.

That week I felt a strange faraway fondness for these very young people that would be around me every day for the next 6 months. There were so many things I wanted to tell them, so many things they needed to know. About failure, about disappointments, unfair tragedies, and unanswered prayers. I wanted to tell them to channel their youth and their energies to better the world while they still believed they could. I wanted them to believe that their health was more important than money or fame or praise. I wanted the boys to know that clean speech and kindness would make them into better men. I wanted the girls to believe that real men will respect them before they love them. I wanted them to know that in each of them I saw potential, that humility and not arrogance would make that potential flourish. They needed to know that there would be times when their will, their convictions would be tested. They needed to be told that it was okay to stand for something even if it meant letting go of something else. That that's what would separate them from the rest. That it's not going to be easy. That it can tear you apart and leave you on the floor, blind and mute and stupid, wondering for years what it is that you lost.

There was so much they needed to know. These strong, young beautiful, people, each and every one of them. I feared for the realities that awaited them. I feared for the compromises they would make. I feared that they wouldn't ever realise that they always had a choice.

My salvation army

I was feeling helpless and alone. The way you do when you're slumming all alone in a new city and don't yet feel confident about yourself. Especially when you're from a religious minority and it kind of shows in how you look and the way you talk.

The call had come sometime in the first few months of the NDTV broadcast training programme in New Delhi. It was from a family friend I had known for a brief period in my childhood long ago in Muscat, Oman. She was now married and settled in Lucknow but was in Delhi for her mother's cancer treatment. She had been bringing her mother, whom I had known for a longer period of time in Muscat but had not met in years, to Delhi regularly for treatment. Every week from Lucknow, which was 6 hours away by train one-way.

Aunty needed blood. In the next few hours. Her daughter wanted me to get the word out somehow about her mother's blood type. My blood wasn't the correct type, and I didn't really know anyone in Delhi. Except the young kids who were in training with me, but I didn't know them well enough to ask for their blood. How does one approach someone for blood? I didn't know what to do. I felt helpless and alone.

I've heard stories of people, particularly in India, refusing to donate blood to people they know, friends or respected elders even, just because they were of a different religion or caste. When the time came, they would draw that line. These were often-repeated urban legends from the motherland that would make their way to the diaspora overseas, particularly during times of ethnic tensions. I heard these growing up outside of India.

I was the only Muslim in training at NDTV. I felt self-conscious about it anyway. It was one of the reasons why, after the phone call, I suddenly felt helpless and alone, and why Delhi felt extra empty and foreign.

I hung up the phone. Three of my closest friends at the NDTV media institute crowded up to me and asked me what the matter was. I told them. Turned out that two of them had blood of the very type that was needed. I didn't even get to ask them to donate, they volunteered the minute they found out which blood type it was. They were ready to leave for the hospital immediately. I would've only needed one person to come along, but both my friends with the required blood type decided to go with me. The third friend wanted to come along anyway.

All three of my friends were born and raised Hindus. Bengali, Gujarati, and Rajasthani. The cancer-stricken lady I knew for a while in a past life was a Muslim. They didn't know her, yet they offered her their blood without even being asked. They offered a part of their own personal bodies. They never even let me get to asking them.

Newton's Apple: an Ode to Science

"It is no more crazy than a dog finding a rainbow. Dogs are colourblind, Gretchen. They don't see colour. Just like we don't see time. We can feel it, we can feel it passing, but we can't see it. It's just like a blur. It's like we're riding in a supersonic train and the world is just blowing by, but imagine if we could stop that train, eh, Gretchen? Imagine if we could stop that train, get out, look around, and see time for what it really is? A universe, a world, a thing as unimaginable as colour to a dog, and as real, as tangible as that chair you're sitting in. Now if we could see it like that, really look at it, then maybe we could see the flaws as well as the form. And that's it; it's that simple. That's all I discovered. I'm just a...a guy who saw a crack in a chair that no one else could see. I'm that dog who saw a rainbow, only none of the other dogs believed me."

- Stuart, "Kate & Leopold"

It happened sometime during the sound class at the NDTV Media Institute. Most of the 40-something apprentices had zoned out because of the technical nature of the subject, probably PTSD-ing over memories of science classes in school. An unfortunate phenomenon because if explained properly - enthusiastically - scientific principle has the ability to suddenly click and come flinging itself at you, wrapping itself around you over and over until you feel like a mummy helplessly sealed in all the possibilities that have suddenly revealed themselves to you. But most students never get to that point. Most students are turned away from science because they were not presented the science of possibility, the science of heroic vision, the science of revolution. Unfortunate, so unfortunate. Because that click when scientific principle dawns on you, really dawns on you, feels like the moment of shock when you realise that you are in love and you can't do anything about the psychedelic colours that are rotating in your eyes. Everybody knows that falling in love, requited or not, is one of life's greatest experiences. One has not lived if one has not loved with wonder and amazement, their mouths hanging open, their sight having long set out on the journey into the far, far distance. Imagine how much a person misses when one does not fall, really helplessly head-first fall, in love. That is exactly the experience a student who is not presented the real juice of science is deprived of.

The sound engineer who had been addressing us was obviously not one of those students. He was supposed to teach us about microphones but had digressed to the aesthetic quality of sound. He had started talking faster and faster, and his eyes had started sparkling. This was a man caught in the throes of reciting poetry about his beloved.

He had already told us that the human ear could only hear a very narrow range of sound. Human beings were only able to hear sounds between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz. This is not a measure of how loud the sound is. He made us listen to sounds that were close to 20 Hz and also to 20,000 Hz, and we could barely hear them because they were on the very edges of our ears' hearing abilities. He made us listen to sounds that were off our hearing scale, and we couldn't hear them at all. But the sound was there. Just because you couldn't hear it didn't mean that it didn't exist. It was propagating itself all around us, the waves were probably hitting our eardrums, but because our ears were not built to register sound waves of that frequency, we couldn't even detect its existence. That was a mildly frightening experience.

But everyone knows that dogs can hear sounds that human beings can't. But they can't
see colour like we can. Our perception of light is also determined by what our eyes have been built to detect on the electromagnetic spectrum. Along that spectrum, which to our knowledge is infinite, human eyes can only see a very narrow range, specifically 790 terahertz (blue), 400 terahertz (red), and all the colours in between. It is just EM radiation, and the part our eyes can detect we call light. The ultraviolent radiation and infrared radiation right on the edges of the visible light spectrum? It's there, but we can't see it. Because our sight, like our hearing sense, is very, very limited.

And so it happened, right in the middle of sound class. I was sitting in the front row, my eyes (unlike most of the rest of the class) glued to the sound engineer who was still caught up in the embrace of his love for sound. My mind was uncharacteristically quiet, but that often happens when I'm looking at passion playing out before my eyes.

And suddenly something exploded in my face. It had happened. Scientific principle had clicked. And shaken my insides quite violently.

I looked around. No one had noticed. The class was still slump over. The sound engineer was still going at it. But I would never be the same again.

If our senses are so limited, what makes us think that our understanding of everything isn't? What makes us think that only what we can see or touch or feel is real, and that everything else cannot be? Maybe there are more colours, maybe there are more sounds. We know for a fact that there are and that other living beings around us can sense them. Will you let a dog convince you that there is no such thing as green? Or a painting? Will you let a dog laugh at the senselessness of a Rubic's cube or deny you the rainbow you can see right in front of you? Can you even imagine what existence feels like to a dog? To a fish? To someone with a differently-abled brain and sensory organs? Some creatures can detect electric fields, tell direction based on the Earth's magnetic field (an inbuilt compass!), they can even see in what you think is the dark. Some can see UV and IR radiation the way you and I can see pink. What would you do if you could suddenly see the radio waves around you when you couldn't see them before? What if you could see them in the sky? What would they look like? A new colour? What if you could see them going right through you when you couldn't see them before? Do feelings have a colour? Do they have a sound, or even a temperature, a scent, a texture, a flavour? They say animals can smell fear. How about memories, intentions, intuition, or even sex?

Maybe there are many other ways to exist that we not only live in passive oblivion of but that we actively and sometimes violently deny. And why? Because we cannot detect them? That is like trying to measure time with a ruler. And we don't even know what time is. We don't even know if it exists. We assume it exists because we see change around us. If there is no change, then there is no time? Does change cause time? Is time merely a by-product of change? Bacteria exists not only around us but inside of us. What else may be existing, and in what form, around us? Inside us?

That's what I got from just being introduced to the audible sound spectrum. 20 Hz - 20 kHz. Just a numerical range to the eye, but all the things it could mean... Just one small fact that didn't mean anything by itself, but like a seed that's been planted invisible into fertile soil, it burst out into new life when the conditions were right. When the time was right. Just because you couldn't see it before doesn't mean it wasn't there, waiting, the whole time.

My skin colour around the world

This past year in India I have been told more than once that I am 'fair'. I wouldn't have thought so much of it except that I know what 'fair' means in India. It means that it's more important than your educational or professional qualifications, more important than your ethic, more important than everytime you failed but had the inner steel to get back up for another blow. It means that you are somehow better and more deserving. Especially if you are a girl. That wouldn't be so bad except it also means that the struggles and dreams of the other darker people around you are worth less. That someone who is even lighter skinned than you is better than you just because of that. That who you are doesn't really matter. Even when you know that everyone is better than you in some way, that some people live lives that would have extinguished you a long time ago. It means that a lot of good, honest, decent people - the kind that humanity continues to survive because of - are told in so many ways that they would be better if only they were more 'fair'. That that's more important than being good, honest, and decent.

I had spent all my life hearing I was 'fair' in the Middle East and in India, and suddenly in America, I was not 'fair' anymore. America relegated me to a new position on the colour spectrum, somewhere in the middle. I was now olive-skinned. I was exotic. I was brown sugar. Brown, brown, brown. Then bronzers came into fashion. You were beautiful if you were brown. 'Fair' is losery, 'fair' is pasty. Ew. You got more sexual attention (often times unwanted) if you were brown, but that also meant that that's all you got. After ten years of Jennifer Lopez and Beyonce and Shakira, I accepted it. It took me 10 years, but now I was brown, and I was proud.

It's not like I did that all on my own. I got a lot of input over the years. It made me realise that the way I saw myself was a lot different from how other people saw me. That I couldn't do anything about it. That I was imprisoned in my skin. I specifically remember a very white coworker coming up to me at work once and telling me that the skin colour of my Yahoo! Avatar was too light. He didn't mean it in a bad way, but I was surprised. I had set it to a light brown. I thought it over and changed it to a darker brown shade, even though, all ego set aside, I was sure that's not how I looked. I didn't like how it made me feel. I felt like I was being forced to change my basic understanding of my own skin even though I was the one in control of the computer mouse.

I don't think too much of skin colour anymore. I find it irrelevant. I usually base how attractive I find another person on how healthy and open they seem. I think I am colourblind, even when it comes to myself. It took a lot for me to get to this point. Maybe that's why I react badly when I am now included in various 'Fair & Lovely' references or asked with movie star wonder and fascination if I'm Kashmiri. That kind of attention makes me cringe. This has happened too many times. And it's always unwanted. I am more than my skin colour. My beauty is because of my ferocity and my vulnerabilities. Everyone's beauty is because of that. I have lived and contributed to other people's lives. I have meant something to people along the way. Other people have meant something to me. Those people were good, honest, and decent. They were more than their skin colour. I am more than mine. And I'll be damned if I let anyone change the way I look at myself again.

We're experiencing technical difficulties

I am a strong person. I believe in certain things. I have put in my time, I have paid my dues. I stand up for other people, and I stand up for myself. These are things that have rescued me from the dangers of quick-fixes and instant gratifications and superficialities. By now I have learned to rely on these things that I believe in blindly. I expect them to work the way I expect my hand to obey me when I tell it to get out whatever's fallen into my eye.

What does one do when the moral machinery of one's life fails? When something has fallen into one's eye as somethings always do, but one's hands don't obey one's commands, one's expectations anymore? Your eyes begin to water, you can't blink, you can't not blink, you feel like you have a razor blade jutting out of your eyeball, every second that it's in there feels like you are being irreparably damaged, and you can't do anything about it. You can't even breathe properly. And you're panicking. You just stand there feeling stupid and exposed, vulnerable, unable to help yourself with something so small because somewhere along the sensory and motor neural pathway something has started malfunctioning, something is preventing you from fulfilling your basic primal instinct - the ability to protect yourself, the ability to do something to minimise pain.

I don't know anymore if the things that have worked for me without fail so far and got me through times of despair work anymore. I just don't know anything anymore. It's been like this for 6 months now. I thought maybe I was exhausted and needed to get back to the things that usually recharge me, but those aren't working now. I don't really know what the point is of being born, taking all those tests through school, worrying about your face or your body, watching television, being the bigger person, pushing yourself to be the best you can be, working so hard all your life for people you don't even like, getting knocked down over and over and over again in various flavours just so you can get up everytime and get back on the hamster wheel for until the next time you fall off. One day you say, I'm tired, I don't think I want to get back up. I'll only get knocked down again anyway. Why did I have to get knocked down anyway when I was doing all the right things and putting in my time and showing up and being sincere? I must not be doing something right. Maybe it's all crap, all that stuff about teamwork and compromise and doing the right thing. At some point, when you're lying in your hamster cage with your face buried in wood shavings that smell like the litter needs to be taken out, you realise that you're tired and maybe want to keep lying in your own litter. You realise that the wheel can wait, the litter can be taken out tomorrow, that nobody was ever looking at you. You, the pathetic faceless ball of fur lying lifeless at the bottom of the cage. One day you say no, you want to be selfish, you want to say, goddammit what about me??

Then what do you do?

In the Queen's English

Insight from the 50s into the colonial hangover. Helps me understand what I once heard my father say about how people used to look up to Britain as the center of all that was noble, pure, and perfect. A remnant of that phenomenon was seen in action during the wedding of Prince William. I didn't understand why the Indian media was saturated with some foreign royal wedding to the extent that it was. It's not like the concept of royalty is an exotic novelty in India. The whole thing faintly smacked of a colonial hangover, but I wasn't so sure until I read the following excerpt. What makes my inability to relate to India's fascination with Great Britain a little frightening is that I can now recognise bits of a colonial hangover in me before I actually went to live in another foreign country I also thought was my own. Change 'British' to 'American' and you have history repeating itself all over again with the American Dream.

"Belief in an ideal dies hard. I had believed in an ideal for all the twenty-eight years of my life - the ideal of the British Way of Life.

It had sustained me when as a youth in a high school of nearly all white students I had had to work harder or run faster than they needed to do in order to make the grade. It had inspired me in my College and University years when ideals were dragged in the dust of disillusionment following the Spanish Civil War. Because of it I had never sought to acquire American citizenship, and when, after graduation and two years of field work in Venezuela, I came to England for post-graduate study in 1939, I felt that at long last I was personally identified with the hub of fairness, tolerance and all the freedoms. It was therefore without any hesitation that I volunteered for service with the Royal Air Force in 1940, willing and ready to lay down my life for the preservation of the ideal which had been my lodestar. But now that self-same ideal was gall and wormwood in my mouth.

The majority of Britons at home have very little appreciation of what that intangible yet amazingly real and invaluable export - the British Way of Life - means to colonial people; and they seem to give little thought to the fantastic phenomenon of races so very different from themselves in pigmentation, and widely scattered geographically, assiduously identifying themseves with British loyalties, beliefs and traditions. This attitude can easily be observed in the way in which the coloured Colonial will quote the British systems of Law, Education and Government, and will adopt fashions in dress and social codes, even though his knowledge of these things has depended largely on secondhand information. All this is especially true of the West Indian Colonials, who are predominantly the descendants of slaves who were forever removed from the cultural influence of their forefathers, and who lived, worked, and reared their children through the rigours of slavery and the growing pains of gradual enfranchisement, according to the only example they knew - the British Way.

The ties which bind them to Britain are strong, and this is very apparent on each occasion of a Royal visit, when all of them young and old, rich and poor, join happily together in unrestrained and joyful demonstrations of welcome. Yes, it is wonderful to be British - until one comes to Britain. By dint of careful saving or through hard-won scholarships, many of them arrive in Britain to be educated in the Arts and Sciences and in the varied processes of legislative and administrative government. They come, bolstered by a firm, conditioned belief that Britain and the British stand for all that is best in both Christian and Democratic terms; in their naivete they ascribe these high principles to all Britons, without exception.

I had grown up British in every way. Myself, my parents and my parents' parents, none of us knew or could know any other way of living, of thinking, of being; we knew no other cultural pattern, and I had never heard any of my forebears complain about being British. As a boy I was taught to appreciate English literature, poetry and prose, classical and contemporary, and it was absolutely natural for me to identify myself with the British heroes of the adventure stories against the villains of the piece who were invariably non-British and so, to my boyish mind, more easily capable of villanous conduct. The more selective reading of my college and university life was marked by the same predilection for English literature, and I did not hesitate to defend my preferences to my American colleagues. In fact, all the while in America, I vigorously resisted any criticism of Britain or British policy, even when in the privacy of my own room, closer examination clearly proved the reasonableness of such criticism.

It is possible to measure with considerable accuracy the rise and fall of the tides, or the behaviour in space of objects invisible to the naked eye. But who can measure the depths of disillusionment? Within the somewhat restricted sphere of an academic institution, the Colonial student learns to heal, debate, to paint and to think; outside that sphere he has to meet the indignities and rebuffs of intolerance, prejudice and hate. After qualification and establishment in practice or position, the trials and successes of academic life are half forgotten in the hurly-burly of living, but the hurts are not so easily forgotten. Who can predict the end result of a landlady's coldness, a waiter's discourtesy, or the refusal of a young woman to dance? The student of today may be the Prime Minister of tomorrow. Might not some future important political decision be influenced by a remembered slight or festering resentment? Is it reasonable to expect that those sons of Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the West Indies, British Guiana, Honduras, Malaya, Ceylon, Hong Kong and others who are constitutionally agitating for self-government, are completely unaffected by experiences of intolerance suffered in Britain and elsewhere?"

- ER Braithwaite, "To Sir, With Love"

A Black man in Britain

From the chapter where the author - a well-educated, well-dressed, well-spoken Black man - has been openly turned down for work a number of times because of the colour of his skin in the Britain of the 50s.

"I had now been jobless for nearly 18 months. Disillusionment had given place to a deepening, poisoning hatred; slowly but surely I was hating these people who could so casually, so unfeelingly deny me the right to earn a living. I was considered too well educated, too good for the lowly jobs, and too black for anything better. Now, it seemed, they even resented the fact that I looked tidy.

When my demobilisation became imminent I had written to my uncle about the problem of clothes rationing, and, over a period of months, he had sent me a supply of underwear, shirts, socks, ties and four nice looking suits which fitted me tolerably well; the clothing coupons I had received at the demob center were used in purchasing a few pairs of very serviceable shoes.

Caught like an insect in the tweezer grip of prejudice, I felt myself striking out in unreasoning retaliation. I became distrustful of every glance or gesture, seeking to probe behind them to expose the antipathy and intolerance which, I felt sure, was there. I was no longer disposed to extend to English women or elderly people on buses and trains those essential courtesies which, from childhood, I had accorded them as a rightful tribute, and even found myself glaring in undisguised hostility at small children whose innocently enquiring eyes were attracted by my unfamiliar complexion.

Fortunately for me, this cancerous condition was not allowed to establish itself firmly. Every now and then, and in spite of myself, some person or persons would say or do something so utterly unselfish and friendly that I would temporarily forget my difficulties and hurts. It was from such an unexpected quarter that I received the helpful advice which changed the whole course of my life."

- ER Braithwaite, "To Sir, With Love"