Is India safer than the UK? 

A silver Audi with its windscreen pierced by three neat bullet holes bears witness to the most dramatic news story in Britain since the new year - the shooting dead by police at 6pm last Monday of a 28-year-old alleged drug dealer, Mohammed Yassar Yaqub.

The incident happened on a slip road on junction 24 of the M62 motorway - and purely by chance the very first member of the public to arrive on the scene because of a faulty Google map reading was the BBC's Calcutta correspondent, Rahul Tandon.

After a day in London, Rahul had been on his way to see his elderly parents in Halifax in Yorkshire and his son and daughter, aged 13 and nine respectively, were in the car with him.

"A lot of my friends have been sending me messages, 'You must leave crime-ridden Britain and head back to the safety of India,'" he admitted.

Rahul told me his daughter Ria was almost traumatised by the whole experience. Three high-performance cars - the Audi plus a Jaguar and Mercedes E-class - were boxed in by police who shot Yaqub (in what his father called an "assassination"). Now in the eerie silence, the place was crawling with forensic officers, ambulances and flashing lights.

Ria was "very scared", said Rahul, adding that "when we came home she was crying and she said, 'I hope nobody has died.'"

Rahul, himself born in Huddersfield and "a Yorkshire lad through and through", is married to Romila Dasgupta, a BBC World Service producer whose Bengali parents emigrated from Calcutta.

"We moved to Calcutta when my daughter was only six months old," explained Rahul. "Her experiences are based around Calcutta. I thought someone used to the noise and chaos of India would not be affected in the way she was."

Rahul, who was due to return to Calcutta today at the end of his Christmas holiday, remarked: "On a very serious note India has somehow developed this perception of being unsafe post-Delhi but I must say, you are far more likely to stumble into crime in England than in India. I still think of India as being so much safer."

He acknowledged that "there is political violence in Calcutta but I would be very surprised if I stumbled on to something like this in Calcutta".

Present perfect

Akshay Kumar — a British Indian actor and not the Bollywood star — has an intriguing role in the new ITV drama, 
The Halcyon, which tells of the glamorous and sexy comings and goings at a luxury hotel in London right in the middle of World War II.

Akshay's character, Adil Joshi, "is the charming heart and soul of the Halcyon bar, intuitive to customers' needs and always a picture of politeness. When not serving the public, his cheeky humour makes him popular amongst the hotel staff. Adil has a quiet confidence about him."

The first episode last week brought to mind Sankar's 1962 novel, Chowringhee, set in Calcutta's fictional Shahjahan Hotel, which perhaps deserves similar treatment.

Literary England

VisitEngland, the country's tourist board, has declared 2017 to be The Year of Literary Heroes, in recognition of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death and 20 years since the release of J.K. Rowling's first novel, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone .

2017 is also the 125th anniversary of the first Sherlock Holmes publication; and the 350th anniversary of John Milton's Paradise Lost .

This year also marks the 75th anniversary of Enid Blyton's The Famous Five ("cue lashings of ginger") - I am loving reading Five Go Down to the Sea.

Kipling’s father

A new exhibition opens next week at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London honouring Lockwood Kipling (1837-1911), who spent 10 years in Bombay as the first dean of Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art, before moving to Lahore as principal of the new Mayo School of Art.

"Lockwood Kipling: Arts and Crafts in the Punjab and London" will show he did much to preserve the arts and crafts of India and later helped the V&A's collection.

He was also the father of Rudyard Kipling, who was born in 1865 in the dean's bungalow in Bombay.

Time, surely, to turn that into a museum in Lockwood's memory if not that of his son, who has unfortunately been turned into a controversial figure because of his alleged racist views.

Tittle tattle 

An ex-guardsman has told how he once "nearly shot" the Queen after the mo- narch went for a walk in the grounds of Buckingham Palace when she could not sleep at 3am.

"Bloody hell, Your Majesty, I nearly shot you," he exclaimed, after confronting a suspicious figure in the dark.

"That's quite all right," the Queen responded calmly. "Next time I'll ring through beforehand so you don't have to shoot me."