Mihir Bose’s experiences in the UK resonate somewhat with my own (I came to Britain from India, fulfilled a dream, and I say this: we’re a great country, but a work in progress, 30 April). In 1966, as a 14-year-old, I arrived at Tilbury Docks on a cold foggy morning aboard the SS Himalaya. My father, on temporary assignment in the UK, was able to get me admission to Westminster City grammar, a five-minute walk from Buckingham Palace. I was the only Indian; the racism I faced was not vicious but muted, often manifested through jokes and accent mimicry.
There is a certain advantage to being a minority of one versus a group. People are more accommodating. However, I still remember the first joke from school: “Did you hear about the Indian who lived with a cow?”
“Really, what about the smell?”
“No problem, the cow got used to it.” Having never lived with a cow, I struggled to understand it at the time, but felt the peer pressure to join in the laughter anyway.
Now, after spending most of my life abroad and residing between Bengaluru and London, I too perceive Britain as a work in progress, but experience it as well ahead of the other mature democracies in the west, at least in the context of diversity. Although I agree with Bose on the need to come to terms with the past, I dread to think how impractical it could turn out to be. We live in a world where not only do we have the online tools to confabulate the present, but also to instantly reframe our past.
For those determined to edit the past with skewed narratives just to endorse their own agendas, this has now become a dangerous weapon of mass distortion. Distortion of our past seemed much more manageable when it was confined to just history books.
Shyamol Banerji
Bengaluru, India
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