Empire and race for BBC Radio 4 Broadcasting House
I know people whose lives have been blighted by racism, but I’m not among them. One of my earliest childhood memories is of hiding, with tens of other Sikh families, in the local temple, as far-right gangs terrorized the Midlands, but our homes remained untouched...
Bear Grylls’ Island
Published in The Times, 2016
It’s day three of my stay on a desert island in the Pacific, and as it rains ceaselessly in London and temperatures hit zero, I am lying under a tree on a bright white beach alongside two young women who have quickly become friends, watching the Moon shimmering over the surface of the sea and listening to the crashing of waves and the chirruping of exotic wildlife. Sound like paradise? Well, not quite.
Samuel L. Jackson
Published in The Times, 2014
There’s an awkward moment, for me at least, near the beginning of my meeting with Samuel L. Jackson in a hotel bar in Atlanta, Georgia, when I ask him for his opinion on 12 Years a Slave and he leans back in his leather chair, strokes his grey cashmere beanie hat and responds, “Are you asking me that because it is a frontrunner for the Oscars, or because I am black?”
William Boyd
Published in The Times, 2013
When William Boyd was commissioned by Ian Fleming Publications Ltd to write a new James Bond novel, he talked about the gig as if it were the fulfilment of a life’s dream.
He had, he said, first fallen in love with 007 when he was a boarder at Gordonstoun and a copy of From Russia with Love was passed around his “pre-adolescent coevals as if it were some form of rare samizdat pornography”.
Beef
Broadcast on the BBC, 2001
Over the years I have shed many of the outward manifestations of my Sikh upbringing. I cut my long hair off when I was 14, 5000 days of hair growth falling to the floor of a barber’s shop like a dead crow. I last danced to bhangra at a wedding in Wolverhampton in 1999, looking as if I was being electrocuted while trying to simultaneously unscrew two light bulbs. And I’m so rusty in what was once my mother tongue that I struggle to convey simple instructions concepts such as “call the fire brigade, please” in Punjabi.
Wilbert Rideau
Published in The Times, 2013
Wilbert Rideau was recently sitting behind his desk in the study of his Fifties red-brick home in downtown Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when, looking through the window, he watched a youth walk past a magnolia tree, enter a neighbour’s garage and come out with a leafblower. Being proud of the suburb – “An even mix of black and white households and a good mix of young families, singles and retirees,” he relates in a Southern baritone – and pleased with its low crime rate (“Only 1 homicide in 50 years”), he called the police. But when they apprehended the young man and brought him to Rideau to be identified, the 68-year-old journalist hesitated. “I was 99.99 per cent certain it was him, but I couldn’t say so...” He tails off. “I just wouldn’t want to gamble on that 0.01 per cent.”
V.S. Naipaul
Published in The Times, 2010
The prospect of meeting V.S. Naipaul fills me with a strange combination of excitement and trepidation. The author has written 20 mesmerising books of fiction and non-fiction, but is also notoriously difficult, famed for once reportedly dressing down Iris Murdoch while dining with Margaret Thatcher at 10 Downing Street, for once greeting George Lucas with the remark “I don’t know Star Wars, I am not interested in films”, and for once also describing interviewers as monkeys.
Martin Amis’ Money
Published in The Times, 2010
There is a certain kind of bloke — and, let's face it, it's always a bloke — who cites Martin Amis as his favourite author. Now in his thirties or forties, this bloke read The Rachel Papers and/ or Money as a teenager and enjoyed it/ them so much that he revisited Amis when he studied English at university. He continues to rate the author, even though he is too distracted by boxed sets of 24, 2.4 children and the tedious administration of middle age to have read any of Amis's recent stuff.
Column: Dubai
Published in The Times, 2008
There are certain places that I would like to visit before I die, Tokyo, Mumbai and Havana among them. But, like grilled cheese sandwiches, I don't travel very well and there are many more places that I would rather die than visit. And, for many years, the city that has topped this list has been Dubai.
Column: Brevity is Best
Published in The Financial Times, 2006
Last week I wrote about how I would rather eat my own arms and legs than speak in public and received two sorts of response: e-mails from people who would, similarly, rather eat (their own) limbs than make a speech; and e-mails from people who had recently endured a speech so tedious that they wanted to eat (their own) limbs out of sheer frustration.
Piers Morgan
Published in The Financial Times, 2006
Among the many initiatives Piers Morgan introduced at the Daily Mirror – the 3am Girls, the anti-war stance, the declining sales, etc – was a zero tolerance approach to pushy celebrity publicists. It is a surprise therefore that the PR arranging my interview with the former tabloid editor tries to insist that weuse the pictures they have taken and that we run a competition linked to a product Morgan is promoting. The cheek!
Jack and Suzy Welch
Published in The Financial Times, 2005
Of course, I know that Jack Welch, former chairman and chief executive of General Electric, is a big deal. I know that in his first year in charge, GE was America’s 11th largest company, and that when he left in 2001, it was number one, with a market cap of about Dollars 400bn. And I know that for four years in succession, between 1998 and 2001, the FT ranked him the “world’s most respected business leader”.
