From Beckham to Le Carre

It is heartening to see that stardom hasn’t gone to Archie Panjabi’s head yet.

Although she has had starring roles in East is East and Bend It Like Beckham and several films on television, I found her doing a little errand on behalf of her husband, Raj. His firm, Imperial Tailoring, makes bespoke suits (“from £550”) and shirts “from £70”).

She was carrying a dark suit with bright green lining which her husband had tailored for one of his clients. “Oh, Raj asked me to deliver this,” she smiles.

Although she is one of Britain’s most successful young actresses, she says she likes to get away from the glamour and glitz of show business.

“This business does really rob you of your innocence,” she begins. “I feel a constant struggle all the time. I don’t ever want to be hugely famous because I had a little taste of it after East is East and Bend It.”

But Archie is going to be even more famous. In June, she is off for six weeks to Kenya, where she has been cast opposite Ralph (Ray) Fiennes in a big budget movie adaptation of John Le Carre’s murder mystery, The Constant Gardener. It will be the most ambitious English movie shot in Kenya since White Mischief in 1987.

Archie will play Ghita Pearson, an Anglo-Indian secretary at the British High Commission in Nairobi. When her best friend, Tessa Quale, is found raped and murdered, tribesmen are blamed. “As the story proceeds, Ghita and Justin (Tessa’s husband) realise it may be something a little bit more sinister,” she says.

Archie, who was born in Britain, lived in Mumbai until she was four. She is planning to write about her own community. “I want to do a book on the Sindhis,” she warns.

Eton Islam

By becoming the first public school in Britain to appoint its own imam, Eton College has shown itself to be a remarkably progressive institution.

There is no accounting for what Eton boys will do. In 1993, I came across Matthew Wilkinson, an Eton King’s Scholar who had been captain of school. He converted to Islam, changed his name to Tariq, went to live in a bedsit in Slough and became a fundamentalist Muslim. He was joined by Nicholas Brandt, his best friend at Eton.

Monawar should be prepared, though, for some tricky questions, such as, “Please sir, why is it so wrong for young Palestinians to become suicide bombers when the Israelis are being so horrible to them?”, or conversely, “Why is targeted assassination of Hamas leaders such a bad thing, sir?”

Easter uprising

Intrigued by critical reviews of Mel Gibson’s much-hyped The Passion of Christ, I went along to see if the film really was as bad as some reviewers had made it out to be.

It was.

The film, co-scripted and directed by Gibson and with an actor called James Caviezel in the title role, depicts the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus Christ. It takes us from the time of his arrest to his crucifixion, via the Last Supper, betrayal by Judas and washing of hands by Pontius Pilate.

The essential message that Jesus sought to pass on to his disciples was that he forgave those who inflicted horrendous torture and suffering on him. But I am afraid that this uplifting message was undermined and even lost because of scenes of sustained and clinical violence inflicted on the viewer. In anatomical detail, the physical violence goes on and on and on. It was pretty sick.

You don’t have to be a Christian to be offended. This is because The Passion of Christ degenerated into a horror flick.

Ode to spring

The crab apple in the back garden is in full bloom. The pretty pink flowers which cover the entire tree last for barely a week before they are blown away by the wind and the rain.

It is said that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Sometimes, it seems that the more things remain the same, the more they change.

The crab apple is a good example of this.

It has marked the arrival of spring every year ever since my wife bought it as a shrub from Woolworth’s, the cheapest of the cheap stores. Beneath the blossom are buried two of our much loved cats. Between the blossoms of one year and the next, so much invariably changes.

I have always felt that there is something about an English spring and especially summer which carries the sense of passing time. The other day, when the sun came out, I just caught the whiff of cut grass, for me as evocative a smell as any. Sadly, that England, of long, lazy afternoons on the cricket field, no longer exists.

To wallow in nostalgia is indulgent, to be sure, but I mean that in a different way. Blair’s brave new Britain, no doubt statistically better in many respects, is, nevertheless, a less gentle place than the England I first encountered as a 14-year-old.

Pathaks at war

Kirit Pathak, the head of the Pathak dynasty, is probably right in stating that in most Hindu families, it is invariably the sons who inherit the business.

Flipping through a recent list of Britain’s top 200 businesses drives home the point that women seldom enter the boardroom. Ironically, Meena Pathak, Kirit’s wife, is one of the handful of women listed, but alongside her husband. Another is Perween Warsi, who also runs her firm with her husband.

However, in today’s anti-sexist climate, it was unwise for Kirit Pathak, to argue, through his lawyers, that in Hindu families girls are left out when businesses are inherited.

“There is nothing in the Hindu culture or religion which Kirit based his defence on,” commented one of Pathak’s sisters, Chitralekha Mehta. “I think what we have achieved is good for women, not just Asian women in particular but for all women.”

Her younger brother, Yogesh, who has come from America to support Chitralekha and his other sister, Anila Shastri, commented: “The issue of women in the Hindu culture that Kirit put forward was an insult to the whole family and women everywhere.”

The case should never have come to court — even the judge Mr Justice Evans-Loome said that “intra-family disputes like this are extremely difficult matters to settle and a case like this is a tragedy”.

Kirit would have done better to have argued that his sisters had stayed silent for years, and had never helped in the business but were now trying to cash in.

One of the many interesting revelations made in court was that Kirit and two of his brothers had converted to Christianity.

Kirit has now had to make a £8-million deal with his sisters. His mother, Shantagaury, aged 77, lives with him.

She is a devout lady who talks to the family parrot, which can only repeat words in Gujarati.

Tittle tattle

It is distressing to hear that the BBC wants to sack Henry Blofeld from its panel of commentators on Test Match Special on Radio 4.

Blofeld wrote recently that he might be dropped

because his “plummy” accent no longer suited the requirements of today’s listeners of cricket commentary.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Like the late Alastair Cooke, Blofeld should remain a member of the BBC commentary team for so long as he wishes to continue.

My gesture of support for Blofeld involved popping into a Red Cross Society shop last week and spending a tenner on the broadcaster’s book, Cricket’s Great Entertainers.

Blofeld has been a great entertainer himself, on Test Match Special, where his habit of addressing all and sundry as “My dear old thing,” has become a quintessential part of the English summer.

It would have been wonderful to have had Blofeld covering the India-Pakistan series. “My dear old thing,” he would have consoled Inzy, “have some chocolate cake”.