Rafta Rafta wins Oscars of UK theatre

India is dominating the news in Britain again but unfortunately this time the publicity is not good. Ever since Scarlett Keeling’s semi-naked body was found on Anjuna beach in Goa last month, the 15-year-old’s photograph has appeared daily in the British papers with the poor girl’s mother insisting that her daughter had been murdered.

The second autopsy has finally accepted that the teenager did not drown accidentally but that the 50 wounds found on her body were inflicted by her killer.

Goa receives around 4 lakh foreign tourists each year and many of them are from the UK. Thanks to the cheap charter flights and package holidays young Britions who would not normally even think of visiting India are ready to jump on a plane for Goa’s sunny, sandy beaches.

They are not interested in the local customs or culture but are lured by the reputation Goa has acquired among their breed as the place for all day sun and all night sex.

Most of them have very little to do with the locals in Goa and only mingle with their white counterparts with whom they party. Bringing their own culture of binge drinking, drug-taking and sexual promiscuity with them, they could be anywhere in the world — Goa is just a place on the map like the Costa Del Sol in Spain or Ibiza in the Mediterranean.

The British Goan community — of which there is sizeable number — is very upset with the bad press their homeland is receiving, thanks to the Keeling case. “There is a definite stench of racism, with the Indian police being made to look like bumbling fools who can’t do their job,” Kenneth D’Souza, an accountant told me.

“It is like the Madeline McCann case where the Portuguese police were being blamed for not being able to find the 4-year-old English girl who went missing from her bed while her parents ate at a nearby bar,” he added.

Shirley Dias a British-born doctor agreed with him. “The don’t look at what they did wrong. Which Indian parent would leave their 15-year-old daughter on her own in a foreign town while they went travelling the rest of the country,” said Dias.

Outraged that Goans are being made to look like rapists and murders, they are demanding that the Indian government stop the charter flights from the UK. “The trade may be good for the area but at what cost?” said Dias, who visits her hometown once a year

The British Asian play, Rafta Rafta, won the ultimate accolade on Sunday night when it won the Olivier for the best new comedy. The Laurence Olivier Awards — named after the great British thespian — are the Oscars of British theatre and were established in 1976.

Rafta Rafta written by the extremely talented Ayub Khan-Din is a comic take on the cultural differences between generations in an Indian immigrant family living in the UK.

While the play has the best of British Asian acting talent including Meera Syal, it is carried primarily on the very capable shoulders of Indian actor Harish Patel. He has done a fantastic job and had me rolling in the aisles. Congratulation to him and the rest of the Rafta Rafta team!