Will you come in?

It snowed yesterday,
We fought the day before

I've got the flu today,
And a eustachian tube that's sore

It's a centimetre or two in Bloomsbury,
But a full ten in the South East.

The courtyard's crisp, white and dry
The cherry tree, a frozen, not too pleased ghost;

I make myself tea, and pancakes with maple syrup
And soup, warm focaccia, and a mozarella salad,

Then ask the pigeons, shivering two to a bough,
"To share the tea, I'll be glad

Or some soup, since you look so rough...
Will you come in, and be my guests?"

A bit more than racism

What’s happening in Big Brother is not easy to label. Like with those tiny bruises sustained in the everyday cut and thrust of life in a multicultural society, I am not even sure labelling would be helpful. However, an understanding of the factors that have led to the behaviour may well lead to some sort of sensitization.

Let’s get one thing straight. If this had happened in a British schoolyard,Mme. Shetty might have had a concerted campaign of physical assault to contend with. She may well have been beaten, kicked, spat at, or, as has happened in the past, occasionally stabbed. As happens with thousands of school kids across this country, who have the misfortune to wear the wrong clothes, belong to the wrong social class, have a disability or a deformity, have the wrong accent, wear glasses, be confused about their sexuality, be black/white/brown/yellow in the wrong town, listen to the wrong music, be too pretty or clever or hardworking or all three etc. Heck, if there is one common thread to bullying, it’s that the factors that lead to it are pretty egalitarian. And very context specific. What makes you a victim in South London can make you an object of admiration in the Home Counties.

Race can be a factor, but then, it is a factor that can work in either direction. So what did Jade Goody say? She said Shetty is ‘up herself’ because she won’t talk about shagging and doesn’t burp or fart. Nothing racist there, that’s just about class (either the presence or the absence of it, looking at it another way). Jade called Shilpa a ‘Poppadum’. Just like the now deeply dismayed British public called her a ‘Fat Pig’ when she won the non-celebrity version of BB. Actually, they said ‘Kill the Pig’. But that’s okay, since Jade’s White Trash aka Chav, and it’s culturally acceptable to want to kill a fattish Chav. And that's the subtle faultline here, with Middle England pointing fingers at less-than-middle England. It's the chavs' fault, you see.

Now, onto the really racist bit. Danielle, who’s had to forfeit her Miss Great Britain title to a certain Preeti Desai (surprise, surprise) said she didn't want to eat a chicken that Shilpa had grilled, on the grounds that it was undercooked plus she didn't know where Shilpa's fingers had been. Danielle then called Shilpa "a dog". Danielle also said that Shilpa ‘should f*** off home’, the one unambiguously racist remark of the lot. One would imagine, if Preeti’s parents had f***ed off home, that would have been one less problem Danielle had to contend with in her desperate bid for Z-list celebrityhood. Generations of immigrants, from Slough and Brixton to Southall and Leicester, can tell you that this is the one sentence they have grown all too weary with over the years. It is not an easily forgotten one.

Which brings us to perceptions of racism. For the working class Afro-Caribs of the Windrush generation, the Amin-fleeing Gujaratis of Leicester and the asylum seeking Somalis of Woolwich, being told to ‘fuck off home’ is resonant with menace and meaning. Put it on prime time TV and you re-open barely healed wounds from the dark days of Powell and Thatcher. For the current crop of supremely confident, globe-trotting, fresh off the plane, highly skilled Indian migrant, it is something mildly disconcerting, but no more. And for some of these quasi-liberals, even acknowledging that such a remark is racist is akin to threatening their carefully cultivated (and protective) intellectual confidence. Especially since home’s already Bayswater or Sutton Coldfield. Unless they have to contend with something like this.

Channel 4 has clarified that Jade's unemployed and barely literate boyfriend Jack, also a housemate, had referred to Shilpa as a "c***", not a "Paki". The implication was that since the lad’s restricted himself to gynaecological descriptions, that’s all right. Given that two male contestants on the Australian version of Big Brother held a female housemate down while one of them slapped his penis on her face, Channel 4 is saying, ‘he just called her a c***, for f***’s sake, can’t these people take a joke?’ And here also they have a point. After all, BB is supposed to be a mirror to our society. And what do Eton educated stockbrokers in the Square Mile mutter under their breath when confronted by a confident, more successful female peer? They usually call her a c***. That’s allright, then.

The Indians, probably the Shiv Sena or some Tamil outfit with a sideline in self-immolation, are burning effigies. Of what? For what? Maybe they’ve figured out a way of getting some votes out of it. Or maybe it’s because everyone, from Germaine Greer downwards, seems to think Shilpa is a Tamil. Sorry, guys, she’s a Bunt (Yes, I know. It rhymes). So don’t waste your kerosene.

So BB is just doing what it’s supposed to i.e. hold up a mirror to society. It’s doing a good job, no? It’s not just shrill bloggers with traces of intelligence who can fight the dirty fight and stimulate some debate. Traditional media can do it much bigger and much better. So let Shilpa do her thing (and she’s doing it remarkably well, you must admit). Stopping the show is about the daftest thing you could do.

And, everyone who’s tuning in and jamming up the messageboards is saying pretty much the same thing. As for me, am I glad I don’t even have a b****** telly! I meant a f****** telly. With Fat Pigs, WAGs, down-at-heel singers, Bollywood starlet-star in-betweens and Jacks on the dole popping out of it. Enjoy.

Burkhas and bikinis, Hijabi Barbies, kites and masturbation

In other words, the Burqini!

Many questions arise, triggered by the memory of young, middle-class Indian 'aunties' flapping around shallow waters in salwars kameez. However, all are banished in appreciation of innovation. Like I've said before, it's the adaptation, innit? And maybe, even the aunties could use it.

Courtesy Vij and the lovely Mme. MC, Professor of Sexual Health, dinner table companion irresistible, ex- life coach extraordinary and fellow Tuesdays with Morrie junkie, an update of this post has become necessary- presenting the Hijabi Barbies.

And this is what MC and Katherine are doing in Gujarat- helping fly thousands of kites during the kite season that say 'Masturbation is healthy and good'. Okay, here's why; for the uninitiated- traditional cultural beliefs in South Asia hold that the core of male health resides in the semen or Dhat. This, in turn, is related to Ayurvedic/Unani traditions that hold that one drop of semen is equal to about forty drops of blood yadayada. Which means that in many parts of the subcontinent, men prefer to have sex with a sex worker than masturbate. Since much of this sex is unprotected and since Sexual Health across the world has come to imply (historically and erroneously) something that is synonymous with Women's Health, many men in South Asia tend to neither jerk off (if you'll excuse me) nor walk in to clinics.

Enter Christine, MC and their kites. Now, a lot more men in Gujarat masturbate, and a lot less get the Clap, HIV etc. Thank you.

It’s Winter

From it’s opening frame, when Mokhtar walks out into the snow from an old warehouse that’s being locked up for the day, this is a movie that echoes Thoreau’s creepily prescient take on our states, that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’.

The prematurely middle aged Mokhtar (Ashem Abdi) then arrives at his isolated home near a railway track, where his handsome wife Khatoun (played by an eloquent eyed Mitra Hadjar), his little daughter and his tired mother-in-law weren’t really expecting him. The first spoken sentence in the movie is, 'What are you doing here?' He has lost his job. There aren’t many more in Teheran that he can do, or wants to. He is tired, at the end of his forbearance and he's decided to go abroad to seek a decent living. Mokhtars face, from its beaked nose to its unforgivingly deep sockets, could be carved from a weatherworn tree. The family accepts this in silence. He leaves from a desolate Railway Station, and as Khatoun watches silently from a distance, he kneels amidst the snowdrifts and hugs his daughter briefly. Parting words would be a luxury.

The camera cuts abruptly to the arrival in town of a young man looking for work. He’s handsome, and from his slickly greased hair and his long sideburns, to his casually worn suit jacket, is also aware of this. He seeks lodgings at a dormitory in a local teashop, and strikes up a friendship with a reticent young worker named Ali Reza (Saeed Orkani). His name is Marhab (Ali Nicsolat).

This devilishly charming young drifter, a ‘specialist mechanic’ who can ‘repair anything’, is turned down wherever he seeks employment, and is quickly reduced to washing the windscreens of passing cars and trucks for a pittance. One morning, he spots his friend on a sweeping rut of sandy road, trudging to work, whistles, and as he waits, catches up at a flailing run, all slim limbs and flying coat. The frame might have been a painting.

Ali Reza finds him a job at the automobile workshop that he works in. As winter fades into dry, dusty summer, Marhab spots Khatoun waiting for a bus, and is taken. Six months have passed with neither word nor money from her husband. She now works as a seamstress in a garment factory. But this money is not enough and her mother must sell chairs from their spartan home, so that they may survive.

She still has a zest for the islands of exuberance around her, and wanders into a weekend market, and spots a tiny red sweater. This is the brightest colour in the movie, and as only a flaming red can, it brings together all the players. She can't afford to buy it for her daughter, but Marhab has spotted her. He buys it and takes it to the child, under the pretence that her mother had left it in the market.

The child is entranced. She wants the sweater. But her suspicious grandmother rejects it. Stonewalled, Marhab is forced to return. But he is not about to give up. However, this is also not a man who endures his frustrations as he waits. And this leads to a crossing of paths with a local prostitute. Was this planned? Serendipitous? Both? Either way, the momentary spark that passes between them is inciendary. The woman, who is veiled, wears lipstick. Again, it’s red.

He eventually gathers that the husband is dead, which spurs him to his first argument with an exploitative employer. He wants money, to buy a carpet. Carpet on shoulder, he heads purposefully to Khatouns. Eventually, he proposes. When she finally accepts, after a brief, happy courtship, her words are drowned in the snarl of passing traffic. But she smiles. And we know.

But this is just the beginning of a story with more than fleeting echoes of the Martin Guerre legend. And inevitably, it has to end with winter. But the movie imposes nothing on the viewer; merely inviting her/him to observe these lives untranslated and draw their own conclusions about a society that allows such despair. And like all great cinema, it subtly enlists you until you are a protagonist.

This is also a movie that talks to you through its silences, through things left unsaid. And like Shaji N Karun’s Piravi and the Coens’ Fargo, it also talks to you through its colours and its weather; its snows, its dry suns, its dusts and its heat. But where Karun and the Coens use the monsoons and the snows as both foreground and background, Pitts uses it sparsely, almost like reluctant parentheses, and with an elegantly powerful minimalism. The music, by the legendary Hossein Alizadeh (if you aren’t listening to him, you should be), is plaintive, powerful, timeless.

This is direct, realistic moviemaking in the finest traditions of the Iranian New Wave, of Kiarostami and Makhmalbaf. And fittingly, the cast of It's Winter are non-professionals, directed with sensitivity by Rafi Pitts, who learnt his craft at a Central London film school. It is a spare movie, for it’s spare in all senses, from it’s storytelling to its budget. It would be artless to call it a movie about Iran. Its context is universal. And it epitomizes movie making at its terse best.

It’s Winter (Zemestan); 2006; 82 mins

12A; In Farsi with English subtitles

In theatres since December 15

Director: Rafi Pitts

Based upon the story
Safar by Mahmoud Dowlatabadi

Music: Hossein Alizadeh & Mohammad Reza Shajarian