WATERWORLD: A video grab of a tsunami wave

Tsunami enters lexicon of terror

The contribution of ordinary British people for the tsunami victims, heading towards ?100 million, is in character. No nation is more generous when it comes to helping those in trouble. What partly persuaded even pensioners to donate their pensions was the moving reporting by the BBC and ITN.

When one weeping woman clung to BBC?s Ben Brown, he wasn?t embarrassed at all as Englishmen of a bygone generation would have been. He simply put a comforting arm around her.

The BBC?s policy of promoting cultural diversity among its staff paid off. Its Sri Lankan-born news presenter, George Alagiah, flew from London to Colombo and located the house, now destroyed, where his grandfather had lived and where Alagiah himself had spent childhood holidays.

Who lived and who died was a lottery. Well known to me is the Colombo-born Nirj Deva, a Tory Member of the European Parliament for southeast England. He had gone to see his mother and was preparing for a quick dip when he glanced out of the window of his beach hotel.

?I could not believe what I was seeing,? he said. ?A massive wave was roaring toward the shore.? But ?my feelings of grief and disbelief have now begun to subside, and I am beginning to feel angry,? added Nirj, a Tory spokesman in Strasbourg on overseas development.

Could lives have been saved? Nirj?s questions include: ?Did the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration know what was happening? Is there any truth in rumours that warnings were suppressed in some countries for fear of damaging the tourist industry??

Actually, I wasn?t unfamiliar with the word ?tsunami?, because a few months ago one struck Japan, where my nephew went last summer to teach English. I rang my brother who assured me he had spoken to his son who was fine because ?the tsunami had hit another part of Japan?.

But now in England, tsunami has replaced 9/11 as shorthand for the new horror.

BEND IT LIKE... Archie Panjabi

Return to Rugby

Poor Salman Rushdie. After watching a television dramatisation of the 1857 Thomas Hughes novel, Tom Brown?s Schooldays, on ITV over the New Year holidays, I can sympathise with him. Having left the familiarity of Cathedral School in Mumbai, Salman arrived in 1961 at the age of 14 at Rugby, the famous British public school in Warwickshire where, according to legend, rugby football was born in 1823.

Watching the adaptation, in which the fine actor Stephen Fry is cast as the wise headmaster Dr Thomas Arnold, Rugby?s version of our own Father Murphy at St Xavier?s in Patna, I can well understand why Salman had a miserable time at Rugby.

In the 90-minute film, we see the vulnerable little Tom Brown being mercilessly tortured by Flashman, the loathsome school bully. The graphic bullying scenes so upset my wife that she declared she could not bear to watch any more.

?Rugby was tough,? Salman would recall later. ?Cambridge I had a very good time at, but coming to Rugby was really quite brutal. I was not quite 14 and taken aback to be made to feel like a foreigner, which, until that point, I had never thought of myself as. I did experience certain amounts of racial discrimination ? not from the staff, from some of the other boys. And that was shocking and depressing. And so I remember my school days as not being particularly happy. I was bad at games. I think it was the triple whammy: foreign, clever, bad at games.?

I have been wondering whether there is an equivalent of Tom Brown?s Schooldays in Indian literature or whether it is only English public schools which leave a permanent mark on their pupils. It is perhaps because he went to Rugby that Salman was able to emerge relatively unscathed from the dark days of the fatwa.

ROLE PLAY: Stephen Fry

Moving Muslims

We all loved Archie Panjabi as the sister of the football-mad Jess in Bend It Like Beckham. One of the new generation of talented British actresses, Archie now plays the title role in Yasmin, a disturbing new movie which Channel 4 is screening on January 13. It is worthy of a release in India and Pakistan for it shows how the Bush/Blair ?war against terror? following 9/11 is poisoning the relationship between British Muslims and the wider community.

This story is set in Yorkshire where Yasmin Hussein is a young woman of Pakistani origin, forced by her father to marry a cousin to get him into the UK. She inhabits two cultures, switching between hijab and tight jeans as the occasion demands. But in the aftermath of 9/11, the Hussein home is raided by armed police looking for terrorists.

Of course, they find none but the police heavy-handedness drives a once Westernised Yasmin towards Islam, while her younger brother, Nasir, heads off for Palestine to fight for his ?brothers?.

In the original script by Simon Beaufoy, who wrote The Full Monty, Yasmin was going to end up as a suicide bomber. But this was ditched after being considered unnecessarily provocative. ?I?m going off for a drink ? you fancy coming?? an Englishman from work asks her. To which, Yasmin, the reborn Muslim, responds: ?I?m going to the mosque ? you fancy coming??

Not quite game

In one respect, I am out of tune with the new England.

There was a time long ago when the BBC television carried live coverage of Test cricket. ?Oh, just one more over,? I would say to myself, when I should have been more gainfully employed. And then, ?Let me just see one more over from the other end.? Over by over, hours would happily pass.

Now, Test match coverage has been relegated to satellite TV which I don?t have or want. Even BBC Radio 4 doesn?t have ?running commentary?. Personally, I think the rise in violent crime in England is explained by the decline in cricket. Didn?t the English always teach us that cricket was a civilising influence?

FRENCH PUBLICITY: Aishwarya Rai

Power play

A men?s magazine, GQ, has ranked Iqbal Sacranie as number 10 in the list of the 25 most powerful men in Britain. Malawi-born Sacranie, 53, an accountant, is the secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain and is the first port of call for British journalists requiring a quick comment on any story with an Islamic angle.

He came to prominence during the early days of the Rushdie crisis when I marked him out as an upwardly mobile Muslim. He carried two mobile phones (?Can you please hold on, I?m on the other mobile?? I imagined him saying).

Tony Blair tops the list but, tongue in cheek, GQ has identified the second-most influential man in Britain as George Bush. Mind you, veteran Labour Left-winger Tony Benn would reverse that order. During the Gulf War, when many accused Blair of being Bush?s poodle, Benn quipped: ?When you telephone Downing Street, you get put through to the White House.?

Tittle tattle

Just when we thought France was an Aishwarya-free zone, the ubiquitous ?ex-Miss Monde? has made the cover of L?Express, a magazine which has done a 64-page special report on India.