Letters to the editor

Our bias, their bias8226; PAMELA PHILIPOSE8217;S excellent argument 8216;Inside the Idiot Box8217;, IE, January 19 deserves special me...

Our bias, their bias

8226; PAMELA PHILIPOSE8217;S excellent argument 8216;Inside the Idiot Box8217;, IE, January 19 deserves special mention, because while she takes the TV episode with the required grain of salt, she also analyses racism in British society. Many Indian commentators are unwilling to do this, it seems. I should mention that Vishnu Sharma, who Ms Philipose mentions, was a friend of mine. I find the fact of popular Indian protest at the Shilpa Shetty controversy refreshing, even though personally I have little sympathy for the actor 8212; she surely knows what to expect from a show like that. This is a good time to remember that when certain members of the Labour Party had crossed the line of decorum while talking about Mahatma Gandhi, there were hardly any Indian protests, not even from the high commission.

8212; Paramjit Bahia, London

8226; IS Philipose being too kind about the Brits? Is she, like some of her fellow commentators in this newspaper, too much of a Macaulay8217;s child to really spot the underbelly of British prejudice? Can we trust the English-speaking educated chatterati of India to really understand why common citizens have identified with Shetty? I ask these questions because Philipose and The Indian Express seem to have taken an elegant, let8217;s-intellectually-see-this- thing kind of attitude towards the Shetty controversy. I refer in this context to the editorial 8216;Race to bottom8217;, IE, January 18 which more or less argued that getting het up about this is very uncool. Just the day before 8216;Brown Sahibs8217;, IE, January 17, this paper had editorially pondered the possibility of the union of English-speaking free countries, a group that would have, among others, Britain and India as members. Anglosphere is cool. Obviously, empathising with the common man is no longer cool.

8212; G.K. Bose, Kolkata

8226; APROPOS of Philipose8217;s article, as a nation we are getting unnecessarily emotional over the Shilpa Shetty issue. We are forgetting that an average Briton is like the average citizen of any any other country. Neither should we make too much of British commentators exhibiting 8216;uncommon commonsense8217;. Media pundits will have this quality. It is a necessary minimum for their job. Our media pundits have it, too. But not all of our ordinary citizens.

8212; M.K.D. Prasada Rao, Bangalore

8226; I FULLY agree with Farah Baria 8216;A million prejudices8217;, IE January 18 that before we shout ourselves hoarse about racism in Britain, we better put our own house in order. Baria missed mentioning caste bias among the many prejudices Indians display. Let us look at our matrimonial ads 8212; there8217;s more prejudice there than in a full season of Celebrity Big Brother.

8212; R.P. Desai, Mumbai

Buddha8217;s path

8226; I MEANT to write this after reading Saubhik Chakrabarti8217;s 8216;Communism and its uncle8217; IE, January 10, but it is good that laziness intervened. I saw Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee8217;s impassioned defence of industrialisation 8216;Thousands of young people need jobs8230;8217;, IE January 19. My question now is, taking off from Chakrabarti8217;s analysis and reading Bhattacharjee8217;s argument, does the CPM have any choice but to break up? Buddhababu makes a lot of sense to me, but does he make sense to, say, CITU leaders who want to unionise BPOs?

8212; J.P. Duttagupta, Kolkata