Minorities

 

This post was prompted by a piece from Sathnam Sanghera in The Times. He is one of my favourite writers and is always worth reading.

My father had a practical attitude to race. He’d be 103 if he was alive today.

When the Nigerians and others started to move to Wood Green in North London, he saw them as a market to exploit. After all they needed his printing services just like everyone else. So by treating everybody the same, he got quite a lot of wedding stationery, letterheads and business forms over the years.

I always try and follow his principle.

In some ways something that seems to have disappeared is the celebration of being Indian or African.

For instance in the 1950s, a lot of African women used to wear the colourful tribal dress. They don’t now and I smile when I occasionally see the brilliant colours, as it makes us all feel better. At about the same time my mother had her varicose veins done at Highlands Hospital in Winchmore Hill. The surgeon was a woman and Indian, and she used to do her rounds in a sari. My parents thought it exotic, but not the least bit wrong and the surgeon did a good job.

In fact, it is sad that saris seem to have disappeared from the workplace. I used to work with a thirty-something Indian woman engineer in the early 1970s and she would wear one a few times a month. And especially, if we were all going out to celebrate something. (We did that a lot more often then.) She also told us all about the practicality of the garment and why it had evolved the way it had. Sadly, I’ve forgotten her lessons.

In that office we also had an ex-Indian Air Force squadron leader, who was almost a caricature of Biggles, with a rather large sense of humour.

We need more of the practical and less of the nit-picking.