Andrew Whitehead

 

The Alchemy of visas

16/04/2012

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To the South Bank's Alchemy festival on Sunday - a celebration of South Asian culture, with a Bollywood dance teach-in (phenomenally popular), and food stalls which sell the sort of stuff you wish Indian restaurants would.

Between us, we managed a papri chaat, a chole bhatura and a masala dosa. Grand!
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The craft exhibits in the Royal Festival Hall were greatly depleted however, thanks to HMG. Seven of the stalls - that's more than half the total - had notes saying that the artists had been 'delayed due to visa'.

Alchemy is now approaching its half-way mark, so I suspect these guys are never going to make it to the South Bank. A pity!
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Nehru (and Indira) in China

17/09/2011

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Wonderful pictures of Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, visiting China in October 1954 - possibly in public view for the first time.

Relatives in Delhi recently came across a package of photographs they had been given twenty years ago by a retired Indian army officer who was emigrating. They contain high quality photos of one of the most important of Nehru's visits overseas. In the 1950s, Nehru coined the phrase 'Hindi Chini bhai bhai' (India and China are brothers). In 1962, the two countries were at war - a conflict which India lost and which is reputed to have hastened Nehru's death two years later.

You can see the glamour of Indira Gandhi, looking much younger than her then age, 36. I am fairly sure that the Chinese leader in the photo above is Premier Zhou Enlai.

All these photos have recently deposited with the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library in Delhi.
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