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| on a high: Felicity Aston |
Felicity Aston has that lovely colour English girls have when they frolic outdoors in shorts playing hockey in a bracing wind. She comes across a little like a character in an Enid Blyton novel where children go off seeking adventures during the school hols.
She seems to be great fun and the seven Commonwealth women, who will accompany her on an expedition to the South Pole in November next year, will, I am sure, have an exceedingly jolly time. The group will include one Indian, whom she will pick during an interview in Delhi on August 30.
She is thrilled with the number and quality of candidates from India (the closing date is August 15, so there is still time for more applications via the expedition website, www.commonwealthexpedition.com ).
“There are a lot of feisty women who have applied and the applications have come from all over India,” she reveals.
“They say they are very pleased it’s a women-only expedition,” explains Felicity, 30, who will be setting off shortly on a world tour to pick her expedition members.
“All my life,” she confesses, “people have underestimated me.”
They shouldn’t. She has worked as a scientist in the Antarctica for nearly three years and also led women skiers across Greenland (where she risked her own life rescuing another woman from drowning).
When the Commonwealth women return, they will be expected to visit schools in their respective countries and tell children what they have experienced.
On the 500-km journey, lasting 30-50 days, to the South Pole, there will be dangers, admits Felicity, including blizzards, temperatures of –30°C and deep crevasses, into which skiers can disappear if they are not roped together.
Since each member is allowed to take one book, we discuss whether there is a fat paperback that Felicity might like.
She has an unread copy of Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy. I suggest Vikram Chandra’s Sacred Games; Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady; and, most pretentiously, Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past.
Her imagination was fired as a little child when she came across an illustrated book left open by her father: “I saw pictures of (Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest) Shackleton.”
That was it.
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| true mentor: Tanusree Shankar (right) and her students with Monika Mohta (left)Lost Soul: Prafulla Mohantidestiny’s child: Mark Ramprakash with an admirer |
Tanusree Shankar, who choreographed the Indo-French opera, Padmavati, in Paris and in Spoleto in Italy, is in London with four of her students who have joined a three-week intensive dance course.
The four, among the most talented at her Ananda Shankar Centre for Performing Arts in Calcutta, are attached to The Place, north London, which describes itself as “the UK’s premier centre for contemporary dance, uniting training, creation and performance”.
Should business houses see fit to help with the funding of future trips, Tanusree would, of course, be grateful.
May be Bengali teachers have a special way with their wards but watching Tanusree look after Sweety Choudhury, Indranil Ghosh, Dipam Chatterjee and Govinda Mandal, I am reminded of Muriel Spark’s inspirational teacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Sadly, I don’t think Tanusree will instruct her “crème de la crème” in the ways of love and romance in London but she insists she is not a mother hen.
“I am going back to Calcutta before them, so they will have to return on their own,” she said.
Professor Sumit Ganguly saw red when a Financial Times news report, “Urban India feels under siege after bombings”, referred to India’s “ostensibly secular” society.
“It was the ‘ostensibly’ I objected to,” I was told by Ganguly, who holds the Rabindranath Tagore Chair in Indian Cultures and Civilizations at Indiana University in America and author of 15 books, including The State of India’s Democracy.
In his protest letter to the FT, “Secularism is alive and well in India”, Ganguly fumed: “Given the pallid state of secularism in most advanced industrial societies, and especially the US, one is forced to wonder why Indian society is ‘ostensibly secular’. Though societal discrimination against segments of its Muslim minority is rampant, the Indian state and its constitutional dispensation remain resolutely secular. More to the point, despite existing prejudices, there is no dearth of Muslims in senior positions in government, industry and the armed forces. For all their shortcomings, both democracy and secularism remain sturdy in India.”
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The artist Prafulla Mohanti can usually be relied upon to spot the cloud attached to every silver lining but he deserves a sympathetic hearing when he says that despite economic progress — or possibly because of it — India is losing its soul.
More specifically, he laments that his once idyllic Orissa village of Nanpur has not been able to keep urbanisation at bay.
In the Nanpur of his childhood, “palm trees swayed in the wind like dancers” and his grandmother, muttering “Brahma, Vishnu and Maheshwar”, taught him to draw the concentric circles that he still does today.
Discussing “The Soul of India” at the Nehru Centre in London, Prafulla agonised that the country was being turned into one vast concrete jungle. He recalled Gandhi’s words that the soul of India lived in its villages
Among the younger members of my family in Calcutta, though, that view has to be adapted: “The soul of India can now be found in its shopping malls, especially the Forum with a brief detour to take in Pantaloon.”
Local newspaper report: “Residents in St Mary’s Island, Chatham, Kent, have been warned by police not to approach a 6ft pet boa constrictor on the loose after escaping from its owner’s house. They were warned to remain vigilant and not to approach the large brown snake with distinctive black markings if they spot it, but to call 999. They have also been advised to keep small animals in the house.”
Last week I attended the funeral of a friend’s father. The family, devout Hindus who left Uganda as refugees in very cruel circumstances in 1972, have decided that the ashes should be scattered in Britain, rather than be sent to India, as is traditional, for dispersal in the Ganges.
“After all,” said my friend, his daughter, “after nearly 40 years, England was his home.”
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Mark Ramprakash, who broke his lucky bat scoring his 99th First Class century against Sussex on May 3, had to borrow one from Surrey teammate Scott Newman to get to his long awaited 100th 100 when he scored an unbeaten 112 against Yorkshire at Headingley last week.
“I got my first hundred here,” remembered Ramprakash, who was 19 when he hit his first century against Yorkshire on July 20, 1989. “To get my 100th here seems like fate.”
Ramprakash has told me he wouldn’t turn down a chance in Bollywood — and the boy can dance.
Talking of bats, Ramprakash will accompany “curry king” Sir Gulam Noon when the latter has one made to order by Gray-Nicolls at their workshop in Robertsbridge, East Sussex. That will be Noon’s 113th bat.
Many wonder what Noon does with all his bats. A long-time Labour supporter, he could use them to knock some sense into the warring factions inside the party.
