India needs to catch up in creating memorials and museums dedicated to events that have had a huge impact on us. Whilst we, a small group of citizen volunteers, work towards setting up a Partition Museum dedicated to those who lost their homes (and sometimes their lives) in 1947, it has made us doubly appreciate the importance of archiving both public and private memories, and documents. We are continuously mining a whole host of forgotten stories and experiences that we plan to memorialise in a physical space in India, and hope that Partition survivors from all over the globe will join us.
But we seriously need to learn from the Britons, who are past masters as keepers of memory, carefully making history out of the most mundane happenings, even a flower show!
And so the Chelsea Flower Show, an eagerly awaited annual floral extravaganza, has become a venue to celebrate Queen Elizabeth II’s 90th birthday. It is all done with due pomp and ceremony, but with a clear effort to monetise history, so that it can be preserved, financially secure for the future. Only if a country preserves its past (even traumatic and tragic occurrences) and documents its present, will others respect it.
The Queen opened the show as she does every year. This year to celebrate her 90th year, she was presented a floral portrait. Ming Veevers Carter, the portraitist, used the Royal Mail stamp as his model for the profile. The Duchess of Cambridge, who accompanied the Queen, was presented with a new flower: the Rossano Charlotte chrysanthemum named after her daughter the Queen’s latest great grandchild.
Not just the royalty, but even battles are commemorated this year on the grounds of the Royal Hospital in Chelsea covered with displays, small and big, of amateur and professional gardeners. And so there is a special display of 300,000 artificial red poppies sent in by hundreds of people from around the world to commemorate the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. The Royal Horticultural Society is the host and its many members and guests can visit the show on the opening day. After that, it is open to all for a week. By the time it ends around 150,000-200,000 people will see the great display.
Over the week a lot of champagne will be consumed at the Chelsea Flower Show with suitable canapés. (Will the UK ever consider going dry Highly unlikely, as they know the money they make off the boozing public!) But soon we will have Wimbledon where it is strawberries which are de rigueur. The good news is that we have a bumper harvest of strawberries this year estimated to be worth £550 million. Expect a strawberry-laden Wimbledon with innumerable jugs of Pimm’s.
Meanwhile, the Battle of Brexit gets hotter by the day. With just four weeks to go, both sides are getting strident and somewhat bitter. Prime Minister David Cameron might win the vote, but there are dark mutterings about whether he should stay on, either way. Can there be a palace coup Yes, if you believe the right-wing media. There are even claims that the man who crafted Mr Cameron’s elevation to Prime Minister’s post, the bicycle-riding Steve Hilton, has also defected to the “leave” campaign. (Can he be in cahoots with the other bicycle-riding Tory, our former mayor ) According to Mr Hilton, the UK has become “ungovernable”, and has been captured by a self-serving elite. Not mincing words at all, he dismisses the fears raised by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank of England about leaving the EU — claiming in an article that leaving the EU is the “idealistic”, pro-people choice, because it means taking back power from “arrogant, unaccountable, hubristic elites ”
At times, methinks, this sounds like a clarion call for independence! (Perhaps the “leave” campaigners could begin to look up speeches from Nehru and Gandhi!)
Undoubtedly, this referendum will shape the UK’s future policy, and with just 30 days left, you can imagine the flutter. Everyone is keeping a sharp eye on the bookies — probably the only ones who know the truth.
But the air has been full of quarrels about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Some of the Brexit debate is charged with xenophobia. No wonder the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Reverend Justin Welby, was moved to say: “Racism is embedded in our culture.” This is true even as the country is getting more multi-racial by the day, and we have just elected a Muslim mayor of London, born of immigrant parents. Old Blighty is getting pretty mixed up and muddled!
The House of Lords has mice running in its corridors as do Number 10 and 11 Downing Street. The answer, of course, is to have a cat, a “mouser” as they are called, to chase the mice away. This week, the Brexit controversy has reached the peaceful world of mousers. In a slightly mocking style, a question was put to the foreign secretary whether Palmerston, the resident mouser at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, was a EU spy leaking valuable information Philip Hammond, the foreign secretary, assured the House of Commons that Palmerston had been vetted and had total security clearance and his loyalty was above suspicion.
Kishwar Desai is an author and chair of the Partition Museum Project
