Travel

Evening Standard

The great myth about immigration is that there has never been any proper debate on the issue.

Not true. In the 40 years since I first arrived from India, immigration, like taxes and the royal family, has formed a constant backdrop of national discourse.

I came months after Enoch Powell’s “rivers of blood” speech. Then, immigration was a codeword for coloured immigration. But, as yesterday’s figures from the Office of National Statistics show, the group showing the largest population increase between 2001 and 2009 were 533,000 “other whites”: east Europeans and people from South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. This should help us stop seeing the issue as a purely ethnic one.

Read more >

Brit Asia TV

Outstanding British Asians: show features remarkable British Asians who are role models to gain inspiration from for young British Asians.

Guest: Mihir Bose, journalist and sportswriter, former BBC’s sport editor.

Mail on Sunday

India, said author Nirad Chaudhuri, can make even the lowliest commoner feel like royalty. You only have to stand in the street and do something a bit different and a crowd will gather, looking at you in awe. Before you know it, you have attracted a following.

Royal flash: Mihir (second left) prepares to step onto the Maharajas' Express.

But, even allowing for this very Indian trick, the way we were greeted as we arrived at the Kolkata station to board the Maharajas’ Express did make us feel special.

Nothing during the previous two nights in Kolkata – formerly known as Calcutta – had prepared us for Chitpur station, as far removed as possible from the mania of Howrah, the city’s historic rail station.

Read more >

You think of the fall and you think of New England. But here I was in Ontario, not the most obvious place or the most fashionable but, for me, absolutely right.

One word summed it up: Panna, my sister or Chordi, as I called her in the Indian style of respect for an older sister. She had lived in Toronto for nearly half a century and I had decided to spend time with her following the death of my mother and also make the most of the timing of my visit by taking in some of the scenery I had seen in the father and daughter Fonda film, On Golden Pond.

It had been a bad year: as well as my mother’s death, I had ruptured the tendon which holds the knee to the thigh (and without which you cannot stand) not once, but twice in five weeks.

I have been going to Canada for 47 years. The first time was to escort my sister for her arranged marriage. For me, an articled clerk in London training to become a chartered accountant, but secretly wanting to be a writer, this was an unexpected bonus.

Read more >

Mail on Sunday

It could only happen in America. After a rail odyssey of 3,397 miles from New York to San Francisco, our journey was ending at a bus stop.

As we stepped off the coach on California Street in the heart of San Francisco’s financial district and lugged our cases a couple of blocks to our hotel, my wife and I probably looked like overstocked shoppers coming back from the supermarket.

Read more >