Rising to the rope trick

What I love about the Brits is their extreme dottiness when it comes to things “exotic” about India. Although the Indian rope trick exists mainly in the Western imagination, who else but a Brit would devote a whole book to this phenomenon?

Called The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick: The Biography of a Legend (Little, Brown; £14.99), the book has been written by a Scottish academic, Dr Peter Lamont.

He is a research fellow at Edinburgh University, “working on the history, theory and performance of magic”. He also happens to be a magician.

A former president of the Edinburgh Magic Circle, he has performed and lectured in several countries, including India, where he saw a “version” of the rope trick in 1997 in Udipi, Karnataka, “home of the Sri Ananthasana Temple, birthplace of the masala dosa”.

Or did he?

“The rise of the Indian rope trick is a victory of imagination over reality,” he observes.

Maybe the rope trick is a metaphor for the West’s view of the East.

The Indian rope trick, whose existence had initially escaped Indians themselves, was first mentioned in a concocted story, written by one John Elbert Wilkie, in the Chicago Daily Tribune in 1890, says Lamont.

The trick itself goes like this: “A magician throws one end of a rope into the air. It rises into the sky until the rope is completely vertical. A boy then climbs up the rope until he gets to the top. Then, in broad daylight and surrounded by spectators, he disappears.”

Lamont, who is 40 and has been to India half a dozen times, adds: “The Indian rope trick isn’t Indian, it doesn’t involve a rope, and it isn’t a trick.”

His thesis is that “the Indian rope trick has been called an illusion, but nobody has discovered how it is done. It has been called impossible, yet many claim to have seen it with their own eyes. Everyone has agreed, however, that it is an ancient trick, as old as India itself.”

Despite being a Scotsman, he does not wear or even possess a kilt but has had a go at the lungi, whose magic he has not entirely mastered.

“I wasn’t able to tie the knot properly,” he confesses.

He can put in some practice.

“I’ll be in Kerala next month to do some research,” he says.

Trial before error

Blunkett’s justification is that the threat of possible suicide bombers calls for extreme laws, under which the judge would need a lower standard of proof than that normally required to secure a conviction. What’s more, a person could be found jailed after a pre-emptive arrest even before he has committed a crime.

Under current legislation, a foreigner who chucked guns out of a plane over, say, Manchester, could be held indefinitely without trial. In reality, a suspect plane would be lucky not to be shot down.

I am not sure whether the punning Sun newspaper was making fun of the right-wing Blunkett but his photograph, as he entered the Golden Temple with head covered, was captioned as the home “Sikhetary”.

Home run

Norah has cut back on her previous schedule of interviews, which led to exhaustion and depression. Still, her UK tour programme in April seems mad enough — Belfast, Glasgow, Nottingham and London in rapid succession. Plus Dublin. And the UK is part of a European tour which takes in Germany, Austria, Holland, France, Denmark and Sweden.

Everyone, it seems, wants a piece of Norah, but she has had time to pay a quick visit to Delhi to see her 82-year-old father and Anoushka. “My dad and I are really close now,” she said in a recent interview, “but I have never lived with him. I only saw him a couple of times a year, and for 10 years I never saw him at all.” She and her step-sister were stopped frequently on the streets of Delhi, an experience she found unnerving.

She is more comfortable discussing Lee Alexander, whom she met when she moved from Texas, where she was brought up by her mother, Sue Jones, to New York.

“We inspired each other,” she told the Sunday Times, which featured her as a cover story in its Culture section. “We started writing songs at the same time. We got romantically involved as soon as we got musically involved. He’s my partner musically, we live together and he’s involved in all the decisions I have to make.”

Tickets for her UK tour have already sold out.

Dateline Delhi

No better person to do it than Richard Bestic, who has written a piece comparing China, where he was based for five years, with India, where he has opened the Murdoch-owned Sky News bureau.

China wasn’t all bad but permission to travel was often refused and when granted, Bestic had to take along one or more minders at a cost of £55 a day for each one (plus money for food and lodging).

The minder would sometimes prohibit filming, as happened when Bestic wanted to shoot a cockroach farm developing an anti-AIDS drug (on the grounds this would give China a “negative” image).

In some rural parts of China, people have not even seen a TV camera, he says.

“The contrast with my new posting in India couldn’t be greater,” he observes. “Here, a TV camera quickly becomes the centre of what looks to the outsider like a spontaneous street party. Shots have to be gathered before the crowd multiplies and the camera lens fills with mischievous, smiling faces.”

He has found that “police at all levels have given me the most extraordinary cooperation”.

Bestic says: “My hope is that such openness will help with one of my desired aims for the Sky News bureau — that of opening a dialogue between the subcontinent and the millions in Britain who are of south Asian origin.”

Memo to Richard: Your ambition is easily achieved, especially if you can see your way to slashing the £12 or so monthly subscription. Don’t you think Rupert is rich enough?

Colour purple

His creations will be full of bright colours, “very Indiannish”, as will be his post-catwalk party.

“I will be doing the food,” confirms Andy Varma, of Vama in the King’s Road, Chelsea, whose restaurant has in the past catered for a choosier crowd — Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, etc.

Andy has also done big parties for Lakshmi Mittal and the British comedy actor, Rowan Atkinson, whose wife, Sunetra, knows all about Indian food. “Her father is Indian, Andhra, I think, mother’s English,” he says.

Tittle tattle

The Left-wing Labour MP, Tony Benn, who is no friend of Tony Blair, used a call centre joke on BBC Radio 4’s Any Questions to have a dig at the British PM’s alleged subservience to President Bush. “If you ring British Rail inquiries and ask for train times from London, you get through to Bangalore,” he began. He added: “Mind you, if you ring Downing Street, you get through to the White House.”