Indians clinch 2nd spot in reality show

Letter from London

Yet another first was achieved on Saturday night by British Indians when the bhangra group, Signature claimed second place in this year’s reality show Britain’s Got Talent.

London duo Madhu Singh and Suleman Mirza beat all expectations when they came in as the runners up, just behind a 14-year-old break-dancing boy in a final watched by 14 million people. Singh and Mirza gave a new twist to traditional Indian dancing by performing a tribute to Michael Jackson in a bhangra beat.

While the three judges described Signature’s act as ‘absolutely brilliant… three yeses’, it was in the public vote that they lost out. “The whole of Southall has been frantically voting as many times as they possibly can for the local boys,” my friend Babs told me, who lives in the area known of London as ‘Little India.’

But unfortunately the power of the brown pound was not enough to tilt the votes in favour of Signature. Even so, we must congratulate Signature for breaking the bastion of traditionally white winners by at least getting to the coveted second place. The winning act wins a prize of £1,00,000 and performs in front of the Queen in the prestigious Royal Variety Performance. Better luck next time!

Murdered just over two years ago Nisha Patel Nasri, a hairdresser and part-time special constable with Metropolitan Police, was given a guard of honour at her funeral and lavished with praise for her bravery. Even after Nisha’s husband Fadi, who ran an escort agency, was convicted of masterminding her murder last week, the Commissioner of the Met said she was a huge loss to her family, friends and the police force.

But since then allegations of abusing her position has taken some of the shine off the 29-year-old who was killed just outside her home in Wembley in north-west London. Nisha has been accused of using her warrant card to force her way into the homes of some of her husband’s clients and using her position to recover his debts.

She is also supposed to have used force against clients and driven some of the prostitutes who worked for Fadi to their customers. It is a shame that the woman whose murder had shocked and saddened the Indian community in the UK, has turned out to have been involved in such seedy business.

The community which had claimed her as their very own heroine is now disgusted with the whole affair and are keen to distance her from themselves. Nisha has let the side down.

Noted novelist Hanif Kureishi recently called creative writing courses the ‘new mental hospitals’ shocking the students of Kingston University where the author of the Buddha Of Suburbia teaches a creative writing MA. But there is one former student of Kingston University who would disagree with him. The 24-year-old former librarian Sarah Rees Brennan has just won a six-figure book deal with Imprint McElderry for her fantasy trilogy for children. She insists that creative writing courses are certainly worth the money — but it could be because she was not taught by Kureishi.