THE NOUGHTIES: WOMEN ON TOP

Boys and girls and proud parents, as you stand in the assembly hall waiting for the traditional end of year school prize giving to begin, let me announce we are going to do something a little different this time. What about a prize to celebrate the achievement of our pupils during each of the past 10 years, which is, in fact, what the board of governors has decided?

The girls, I think I can safely say, have done rather better.

As a new decade dawns, I can tell you as your headmaster that exciting times lie ahead if it is going to be anything like the past 10 years — full of kiss & tells and other affairs of the heart. Calculus and cricket are important but we believe in imparting to impressionable young people a deeper understanding of how the world turns on love in all its manifestations.

As was so memorably summed up in a prize day address by Nirad C. Chaudhuri many years ago, “sex is not love but without sex there can be no real love between a man and a woman”.

Since this year’s prize giving is being sponsored by the Indian multinational Nano Tech, we had invited Gopal Krishna Gandhi, former director of the Nehru Centre in London, to deliver the keynote address. He modestly declined, recommending instead the leading thinker of the modern age. Mamata has been unable to make it at short notice but has been kind enough to send a characteristically profound new age message: “This is a conspiracy. I love Bengali peoples.”

On then, since I notice the first formers getting a trifle restive...

Priyanka Chopra in 2000 after winning Miss World in London

Nominations for 2000:

■ David Beckham, 25, for tattooing the name of his wife, Victoria, 26, in Devnagri script on his forearm.

■ Cherie Blair, 45, for giving birth to a baby son, Leo, while her husband, Tony Blair, 46, still occupied 10, Downing Street, as prime minister.

■ Jemima Khan, mother of two boys and wife to Imran Khan, for telling Vanity Fair: “I went into this marriage whole heartedly and my hope is that it will work.”

● The winner of the £5 Tiger Woods Book Token is Bombay designer, Hemant Trivedi, for creating Priyanka Chopra’s “peachy pink” gown at the Miss World contest in London and setting her on the road to victory and a glittering career in Bollywood. “It wasn’t a fix though it ‘helped’ he was a judge in the Zee TV sponsored contest,” noted an observer.

Nominations for 2001:

■ Anish Kapoor, the “most glamorous and successful British sculptor of his generation”, spoke about one of his sculptures — “a six-foot sculptural form, subtly evocative of a pair of high-gloss red lips, and also, needless to say, a vagina” — and told Tatler: “My work has always been very sexual.”

DEDICATION: Padma Lakshmi

■ Naren Kotyan, who had a DNA test conducted secretly and confirmed that Anoushka was not his daughter with his wife, Sukanya, as he had apparently believed for years, but Ravi Shankar’s.

■ Shazia Mirza, Muslim comedienne, who considered an arranged marriage fixed by her orthodox parents: “I’m really looking forward to my wedding day — I can’t wait to meet my husband.”

● The winner is Padma Lakshmi, who inspired Salman Rushdie to dedicate his novel, Fury, to her. In it a 55-year-old Indian professor, Malik Solanka, moves to New York with nubile wench Neela Mahendra after dumping yet another wife and child. What upset reviewer A.N. Wilson was Solanka’s boast — and for Solanka, he read Salman — that “the sex was good, it was always good”.

Nominations for 2002:

■ Lord Swraj Paul for naming a baby hippopotamus enclosure at Regent’s Park Zoo after Calcutta girl, Aruna Vijh, whom he married in 1956. “We met by chance at a social occasion and were so drawn to each other we married in a week,” he confided later.

● The imaginative Valentine’s card, “Would you give your heart to someone?”, inviting members of the public to apply for an “NHS Organ Donor Register Donorcard”.

● The winner is Edwina Currie, a former Tory MP who slept with John Major for four years before he became prime minister but felt humiliated that he did not give her a single mention in his autobiography.

Nominations for 2003:

■ Hanif Kureishi, the Pakistani-origin author slated for his autobiographical novel, Intimacy, in which the central character did unmentionable things to his wife’s underwear before leaving.

BORN FREE: Liz Hurley

■ Derek Malcolm, the film critic and author of his autobiography, Secret Lives, which revealed his father shot his mother’s lover in a jealous rage and that when his mother died years after his father, a maternal aunt telephoned to tell him: “By the way, your mother asked to tell you that your father wasn’t your father.”

■ Aniruddha Bahal, whose debut novel, Bunker13, won the “Bad Sex Award” given by the Literary Review for excruciating passages such as: “Her breasts are placards for the endomorphically endowed....She is topping up your engine oil for the cross-country coming up. Your RPM is hitting a new high. To wait any longer would be to lose prime time... She picks up a Bugatti’s momentum. You want her more at a Volkswagen’s steady trot. Squeeze the maximum mileage out of your gallon of gas. But she’s eating up the road with all cylinders blazing. You lift her out. You want to try different kinds of fusion.”

● The winner is model and actress Liz Hurley, 37, who did a raunchy photo shoot for GQ magazine and said: “Can a girl ever have too much sex? I shouldn’t think so.”

Boys and girls, Liz is just the kind of pupil we like to have at this school.

Nominations for 2004:

DISTRACTION: Sangeeta Bijlani

■ V.V.S. Laxman, who told the Observer in an interview of the stable domestic lives of happily married Indian cricketers such as Sachin Tendulkar, Sourav Ganguly and Rahul Dravid. “It’s a good thing my name doesn’t crop up on scandal sheets,” Laxman said. The one exception he failed to mention occurred during India’s 1996 tour of England when skipper Mohammed Azharuddin, then still married to his first wife, affected his side’s morale by flaunting girlfriend Sangeeta Bijlani before his hungry team mates.

■ David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, who found time, while keeping Al Quaeda and illegal immigrants out of Britain, to have an affair with an American woman, Kimberly Fortier, publisher of The Spectator. The pregnant Fortier, who had previously taken other lovers (though not an Indian editor despite hints to the contrary), dumped Blunkett and returned to her English husband.

ALAM BELLS: Faria Alam

● The winner is Faria Alam, 38, a Bangladeshi secretary at the Football Association, who enjoyed a one-night stand with the England football manager, Sven-Goran Eriksson. He whisked her off to his native Sweden and stacked the dishwasher before their “night of passion”, she revealed in a kiss & tell.

Next week, we turn to the achievements of our boys and girls in the turbulent years 2005-2009. We are proud that Faria was invited to be a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother. She was the first one to be voted out of the House and didn’t win but, as we will see right after this comfort break, she blazed the trail for someone who would.