New generation flowers in England

The Bangladesh Prime Minister, Sheikh Hasina, will, no doubt, be delighted that her niece, Tulip Siddiq, the Labour MP for Hampstead and Kilburn in north London, has given birth to a baby daughter.

I get the happy news from Tulip's mother, Sheikh Rehana, who is Hasina's younger sister.

It is Rehana who spots me while we are milling around in the food bazaar which forms part of Alchemy, the biggest South Asian festival outside the Indian subcontinent that has been held annually in London's South Bank for the last seven years.

"Tulip's had a daughter," Rehana tells me.

And the baby's name?

Maintaining her family's tradition of naming girls after flowers, Tulip and her husband Christopher Percy, a Cambridge-educated company director, have named their daughter "Azalea".

The proud father issued a picture of Tulip introducing Azalea to her very first baby book: a treatise supporting the election of Sadiq Khan as the Labour mayor of London.

Politics clearly runs deep in the family. Very soon baby will probably be lulled into sleep with audio tapes of Das Kapital , Thomas Paine's Rights of Man and Amartya Sen's Poverty and Famines .

I joke, of course. Baby will begin with something a lot easier - the Labour Party manifesto for the next election.

Seriously, though, what kind of Britain will Azalea grow up in?

First, she will have to attend a state school since it would be impossible for a Left-wing member of the Labour Party to send her to a posh private school. Her mother will most probably take her frequently to Parliament, where she will get to know her "aunts", among them the two other feisty Bangladeshi women Labour MPs, Rushanara Ali, who is the member for Bethnal Green and Bow, and Rupa Huq, who represents Ealing Central and Acton.

She will meet three Pakistani-origin Labour MPs - Yasmin Qureshi (Bolton South East); Shabana Mahmood (Birmingham Ladywood); and Naz Shah (Bradford West).

She will see two of Indian origin - Seema Malhotra (Feltham and Heston) and (Keith Vaz's younger sister) Valerie Vaz (Walsall South).

Seeing Asian women in the Commons will be a common sight for Azalea - there are two Conservative MPs in Priti Patel (Witham) and Nusrat Ghani (Wealden).

Britain will be changed beyond recognition by the time Azalea grows up. Far from facing racism, she will be part of the elite in Britain. The chances are she will follow her mother into the family business - politics.

Bard bother

We all know that Shakespeare does travel. So if there was one play I was really looking forward to seeing as part of the Alchemy festival at Southbank Centre, it was The Winter's Tale in Urdu. But after months of preparation, rehearsals and anticipation, the British High Commission in Pakistan pulled the plug on the whole project by delaying the issuance of visas for the actors from NAPA (National Association of Performing Arts) in Karachi - and failing to come up with them even on the morning the cast were due to catch their flight to London.

No explanation was offered even to the London-based director Gregory Thompson who had gone to Karachi to oversee last-minute rehearsals.

Nepal nemesis

Gregory Thompson had also directed a Nepali Hamlet which did manage to make the journey from Kathmandu - and this, I am happy to report, was superb. Over the years, I have seen various productions of Hamlet but none I have enjoyed more.

Thompson worked with Bimal Subedi, an associate director in Kathmandu.

A touch of glamour was provided by Shristi Shrestha, who was Miss Nepal 2012 and who played the role of Ophelia. She was renamed Ojaswi in this Nepali adaptation by Shristi Bhattarai. Words like badla (revenge) and prem (love) and chants of Ram naam at the Hindu funerals of King Hamlet and later of Ophelia gave the play a familiar feeling.

In the end all five of the main characters are either slain or poisoned, a chilling reminder of the June 1, 2001, bloodbath in the Nepali royal family. Most members of the audience in London were Nepali.

Divya Dev Pant as Hamlet was very good. So was Shristi, who should be adopted by Bollywood as the new Manisha Koirala.

She is the exception to the rule that beauty queens cannot act.

Keira's act

The film director, John Carney, got into hot water last week by confiding: "I learned that I'll never make a film with supermodels again."

And no, he was not getting at any of our Bollywood beauties but to the darling of the English acting scene, Keira Knightley, who was discovered in 2002 by Gurinder Chadha in Bend It Like Beckham and nominated for an Oscar in 2006 for Pride and Prejudice.

Carney, an Irish-born director who cast Keira as a singer-cum-guitar player in his movie, Begin Again, in 2012, said that she couldn't act and she "wasn't a singer and wasn't a guitar player". Also, "Keira has an entourage that follow her everywhere so it's very hard to get any real work done".

Carney has since apologised for his "petty, mean and hurtful" comments. One shudders to think what he would say about the beauty queens of Bollywood.

Crime pays

Readers of The Telegraph in India will be familiar with Abir Mukerjee's debut novel, A Rising Man , a detective thriller set in Calcutta in 1919 that has been published by Harvill Secker (£12.99) in Britain.

Last month it was the "Book of the Month" in The Times , London, and "Crime Book of the Month" in The Sunday Times . I am hopeful the TV adaptation will be shot in Calcutta - unless the state government decrees otherwise on the grounds that filming will bring in large quantities of "foreign money" and lead locals astray by giving them gainful employment.

Last week I found Abir and two other London-based crime writers of Pakistani origin, Omar Shahid Hamid and Vaseem Khan, at the Alchemy festival "in conversation" with the journalist Arifa Akbar.

I have read Vaseem's charming The Unexpected Inheritance of Inspector Chopra (Mulholland Books, Hodder; £7.99) - the author, who married an Indian girl, calls his novel "my love letter to Mumbai".

I am halfway through Omar's captivating The Prisoner (Pan Macmillan, Rs 350 in India). Omar, a former Karachi cop, who has set his 2013 novel in the Pakistani port city, said he had "diluted" the corruption that actually goes on.

Since crime (writing) does pay, anyone for a Calcutta crime novel in which an honest policeman gets transferred for daring to disobey a political diktat?

On second thoughts this would be rejected as too implausible a scenario.

Tittle tattle

The reaction of English cricket writers when the England captain Alastair Cook got to 10,000 Test runs last week at the age of 31 was slightly over the top - and mildly irritating. In their imagination he had already overtaken Sachin Tendulkar's 15,921 runs.

Perhaps the BCCI should wait for Cook to retire, say when he is 38, and then wheel out Sachin, probably still sprightly at 50, to knock off the extra runs.

But somehow I don't think that will be necessary.