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| WALKING ALONE: Billy Bragg |
Why is Billy Bragging about Tagore?
Over the past couple of months the TV set at home has gone kaput but living with radio alone isn’t such a sacrifice. Last week, for example, BBC Radio 4 had the celebrated “left wing rock musician and activist” Billy Bragg as guest on its poetry programme, Rhyme and Reason.
I certainly sat up when he began speaking passionately about one of his favourite poems by someone called Tagore — Ekla Chalo Re.
In some ways, Bragg’s intellectual home is not the picturesque Dorset village of Burton Bradstock but Calcutta for he espouses a kind of idealistic politics that has been with him since he became a musician 30 years ago.
He has hit out against fascism, racism, bigotry, sexism and homophobia, campaigned for the Labour Party, supported a multi-racial Britain and earned the enmity of far right groups.
When angry students went on the rampage in London recently to protest against increased tuition fees, Bragg announced: “The student protesters of this winter of discontent are my heroes.”
Born Stephen William Bragg on December 20, 1957, in Barking, east London, he still wears his working-class accent as almost a badge of honour. Through all the years, “the Bard of Barking” has remained himself, mixing music and poetry to try and put the world to rights.
Perhaps that is why Bragg, last week, selected Tagore’s Ekla Chalo Re, read out an English translation and said the poem about going it alone “could have been written for me”.
“It’s a very, very powerful poem,” he declared.
Bragg’s distinctive take on life is one that Tagore never put into song: “I once worked with a man who owned a chain of record shops. He said, ‘There are only two things that ever get you into trouble, son — your dick and your signature.’ I’ve been careful with both.”
Book night
Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey may have been banned in Bombay following threats from the Shiv Sena, but another of the author’s books, A Fine Balance (Faber), is among 25 novels which will be distributed free to one million people in the UK and Ireland on March 5.
This weekend, organisers will announce the names of 20,000 members of the public whose applications to distribute 48 copies of their favourite novels to recipients of their choice have been accepted.
In addition to the 9,60,000 paperbacks given out in this fashion, the publishing trade will provide another 40,000 to hospitals, prisons and the like. The simple but unique exercise, the brainchild of Jamie Byng of Canongate Books, is being undertaken to encourage more people to read novels.
Among the books chosen by a panel is one of my all time favourites, Erich Maria Remarque’s evocative All Quiet on the Western Front (Vintage).
Also picked are Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist; Yann Martel’s Life of Pi (Canongate); and Love in the Time of Cholera (Penguin) by Gabriel García Márquez.
Another book, which I failed to find in Calcutta when I had wanted to gift it to my niece’s enterprising “Miss”, is Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (Penguin).
John le Carré, the thriller writer whose The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (Penguin) is on the list of 25, summed up: “No writer can ask more than this: that his book should pass from one generation to another is beyond his most ambitious dreams.”
If the exercise were to be repeated in India, as seems to be the plan, patrons would have to sponsor the distribution of 18 million books through 3,60,000 public spirited people (who will have to undertake not to flog the paperbacks on the black market).
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Miliband mania
David Miliband, 45, the former foreign secretary, defeated by his younger brother, Ed, 41, in the Labour leadership, is now a private citizen.
Though two Tory ministers — Eric Pickles (communities) and Philip Hammond (transport) — were present, Miliband was very much the focus of adulation when 850 guests attended India’s Republic Day function in the vast Ball Room of the now Sahara group-owned Grosvenor House hotel in London’s Park Lane on January 26.
Any notion Miliband senior is quitting politics can be discarded — he and Rahul Gandhi can keep on exchanging text messages as is apparently the way with “PMs in waiting”.
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Museum piece
Sujata Sen and Samarjit Guha, director (East India) and head of programmes respectively from the British Council in Calcutta, are members of a delegation of senior Indian museum officials currently in the UK visiting British museums to discuss collaboration.
The delegates, among them Piyasi Bharasa from the Victoria Memorial, and Satyakam Sen from the Indian Museum in Calcutta, are experiencing a whirlwind tour that includes the British Museum, the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Ashmolean in Oxford, the Ulster Museum in Belfast, the Kelvin Grove in Glasgow and the National Museums Scotland in Edinburgh.
“Everyone is very excited, ‘we will do this’, ‘we will do that,’ when we get back,” Sujata tells me.
She adds that the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, best known for presenting a radio series, A History of the World in 100 Objects, will be delivering the Nathaniel Wallich Memorial Lecture, named after the founder, at the Indian Museum in Calcutta on February 2.
The museum’s website appears not to have been updated since 2005.
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| GONE ETHNIC: Kishwar Desai in “shocking pink” |
In the pink
If there was a sartorial award last week when the £5,000 winners of various categories in the Costa Book Awards met in London for the naming of the overall £30,000 winner, Marxist economist Lord Meghnad Desai’s “fun loving” wife, Kishwar Desai, would have left her rivals standing.
Kishwar’s Witness the Night, dealing with “female infanticide and foeticide in India”, had earlier beaten three others, including The Temple-Goers by Aatish Taseer, to take the Costa First Novel Award. The Book of the Year went to Jo Shapcott, for Of Mutability, a collection of poems.
But it was Kishwar who stood out on the night in a “shocking pink” sari (though it had looked more red to me).
“The sari is a georgette, it’s Benarsi, worn seedha pallu, Gujju style!” my near neighbour in London tells me. “So here you have a Punjabi wearing a corset blouse. I bought it for the evening from a small boutique, Mallika Mathur, in Delhi. With the corset blouse, it cost Rs 17,000.”
Her prize money, worth Rs 3,62,900, should allow her to buy another 20 similar ensembles, leaving a generous Rs 5,000 tip to allow Meghnad to buy an entire wardrobe.
Tittle tattle
So much then for my tip that it was worth getting tickets for the high octane England-India ODI at Eden Gardens on February 27. The disaster is on a par with Tata’s exit from Singur.
Mind you, the warning signs were evident when a BBC correspondent — Rahul Tandon, I think — was interviewed from India by an English commentator covering the fourth England-Australia ODI at the Adelaide Oval on January 26.
“The construction is so full of dust you can hardly see the ground,” the BBC man said — or words to that effect.
The Brits are suggesting the task of completing the construction work at Eden Gardens should be handed over to Suresh Kalmadi — “at least, he gets the job done”.
