Sanjeev Bhaskar’s bemused Dr Prem Sharma is back, as the second series of the award-winning BBC One drama ‘The Indian Doctor’ returns this month.
 
Coronation Street star Ayesha Dharker will continue as Dr Sharma’s wife Kamini whilst new cast members include Indira Joshi who plays Pushpa, Kamini’s mother.

Set in rural south Wales in the early Sixties, the show tells the remarkable story of the first wave of doctors from the sub-continent – more than 18,000 by some estimates – who were brought in by the government to address a critical staff shortage on the National Health Service.
 
Ironically enough the program was the brainchild of Enoch Powell who recruited medical professionals from throughout the Commonwealth.  The often highly qualified doctors found themselves not with prestigious posts in London but pushed by the medical establishment into socially deprived areas or remote communities.
 
The first series of The Indian Doctor explored what became a revelatory experience not only for the new immigrants but for the communities to which they were posted.  Some members of the fictional village of Trefelin find the doctor to be a curious oddity whilst others display outright antipathy.  

The stoical Dr Sharma however tries to make the most of his circumstances whilst appeasing his glamorous and rather dissatisfied wife who feels terribly short changed and longs for even a “passing acquaintance with civilization”.
 
In the new five part series, smallpox hits the community and Dr Sharma and Kamini find themselves at the centre of the emergency.  Prem and Kamini have to work together to discover the source of the outbreak and vaccinate the villagers against infection.
 
As he tries to deal with the medical challenge at hand, Prem must also contend with the arrival of Kamini’s mother Pushpa, an overbearing mother-in-law who is bewildered by the couple’s new life in rural Wales.
 
-    Vijitha Alles

The new series of The Indian Doctor stars 2.15 pm 27th February 2012 on BBC One and BBC One HD.

When a big bank goes bust in Manhattan, forcing a thriving construction site in Mumbai to shut down and the price of recyclable scrap to plummet, entire families in the slums of India go hungry. This is the butterfly effect of the harrowingly interrelated global economy described in Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo's first book, "Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity."

This narrative nonfiction work catalogues a period of three years, beginning before the global market crash of 2008, of the Husain family, supported by a teenage trash-buyer named Abdul, and others who scrape together a living in a slum called Annawadi on a half-acre of polluted land beside the gleaming Mumbai international airport.

Mumbai is a city "that has this incredible contradiction," says Boo says over the phone recently from her hotel room in New York City. "It's expanding, it's prosperous, yet 60% of its residents live in poverty. It's one of the richest cities in India, but life expectancy is less than in other places."

She chose to base herself in Annawadi, which she describes as a "sumpy plug of slum," because of the contrast provided by its location and because it was a manageable size and she was allowed, however wearily at first, to shadow its residents.

The result of these exhaustive efforts has garnered rave reviews and elicited comparisons to the work of Charles Dickens and his skillful portraits of urban poverty. In order to gain the detailed insight with which she writes about her subjects, Boo says she had to "earn" her facts. This enabled her to write about a frame of mind or way of thinking not because somebody told her about it, but because she witnessed it repeatedly. She'll discuss that process and the nature of life in Mumbai's slums at a Zocalo event Wednesday night at the Skirball Cultural Center.

Annawadi, which is home to 3,000 exhausted souls, is hidden from view of the airport by a fence papered with ads for fancy Italianate tile that repeat the words "beautiful" and "forever" over and over again. This is where the book gets its title.

The economy in Annawadi is fueled by those salvaging, stealing and recycling trash and scraps. The book depicts a modern India in the throes of embracing the Western-spun dream of unchecked capitalism and the upward mobility that supposedly comes with it — one that is helping to break down what many deem an anachronistic caste system.

The great irony exposed within the book's finely wrought pages, however, is the lie of equality in the new age of global markets, particularly when it comes to the extremely poor.

A staff writer at the New Yorker, Boo had written extensively about poverty and the disadvantaged in America. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for public service in 2000 for a series of stories for the Washington Post about group homes for the mentally impaired.

Boo wanted to better understand how the infrastructure of opportunity was working in the world's most impoverished places and decided that the best way to do that was "to stay in one place to see who got rich and who didn't." She became interested in using India as a prism through which to view the mutability (or not) of poverty after meeting and marrying an Indian man nearly a decade ago.

To write "Behind the Beautiful Forevers," Boo lived in Mumbai for three years, visiting Annawadi with an interpreter on an almost daily basis, trailing its residents, interviewing them extensively, taking notes, scouring public records and lending her Flip video camera to the slum's children.

The end product is a richly detailed tapestry of tragedy and triumph told by a seemingly omniscient narrator with an attention to detail that reads like fiction while in possession of the urgent humanity of nonfiction. In Boo's Annawadi, a cripple named One Leg who likely drowned her 2-year-old daughter in a bucket because the child was sick sets herself on fire and blames the act on Abdul out of jealousy of his family's relatively elevated position in the slum.

That terrible event and its aftermath serve as the book's main plot as Abdul and his family are forced to deal with India's corrupt criminal justice system.

Throughout, Annawadi is revealed as a place where police beat and deprive the homeless, and where hopeless souls fish for food in a blue-black sewage lake. During monsoon season, bare feet butterfly black fungus; maggots breed in wounds wrought by trash picking; and a little boy who cuts his hand completely off in a plastic shredder apologizes to the plant's owner and promises not to report the incident.

This landscape of misery is made even more striking by the fact that the disadvantaged of Annawadi prey upon the even more disadvantaged, causing what meager upward mobility there is to be gained at the expense of the book's most tragic figures.

"Is globalization good or bad?" asks Boo. "What I'm trying to show over time is that people are very vulnerable. I had never given any thought to the economics of recyclable trash."

To maintain the material's urgency, she "tried to write down some of the experiences that I had almost immediately after the experience so I wasn't coming to them cold years later and building a scene with Lego," says Boo, who while reporting the book lived in a simple but nice apartment that "had running water all the time" as well as a bed, a desk and two chairs.

"People say, 'Could you have lived in Annawadi?'" she says. "I could not. I would have spent so much time doing just the work it takes to live that I couldn't possibly have worked."

- Jessica Gelt/Los Angeles Times

Valentine’s Day may be often derided as a rather repellent, commercial exercise by the cynics among us but it’s good to know that there are hopeless romantics still fighting away for the other side.  Forget the prohibitively expensive roses, the Pink champagne and candle-lit dinners, nothing says ‘I Love You’ like the perfect Valentine’s Day song.

And fans of Brit-Asian singer Kee are in for a treat today with the release of the soulful singer’s latest single, the appropriately titled ‘Pyar Hai’.

As a terrifically busy Kee geared up for what is certain to be a hectic Valentine’s, The UKAsian had a quick tete-a-tete with the singer.

What would be your perfect Valentine’s Day?

I’m a real softy at heart and I abolutely love romance and I’m also quite traditional.  This song is the favourite of all my releases for obvious reasons.  Unfortunately I’m a single gal at the moment and yet to really experience that perfect Valentine’s.  I like simplicity so a romantic dinner for two with plenty of candle light.  Perhaps someone should surprise me!

You’ve collaborated with the immensely talented Arjun on ‘Pyar Hai’; what was it like working with him?

I’ve worked with him many times before and he’s like family.  I really like the way he works with music, his perfection.  Above all I think he has the right attitude and vibe and is capable of capturing a particular mood or sensibility of a song and producing it accordingly.  

Did you grow up around music?

I did grow up in a musical environment; I had a close cousin who was part of a band and I loved walking into his rehearsals.  I got professional training for my vocals and was really supported by my amazing family who have always encouraged me.  And I’ve invested a lot of my time and money into making it and that’s important for anyone looking to get into music professionally.  
What’s it been like as a British Asian and a woman to boot?!!
I think it’s difficult to get into the mainstream because you need a lot of financial backing.  But I think it’s becoming increasingly easier to raise awareness, with club nights and social networking sites and blogs and so forth.  So it is getting easier but it can still be quite expensive.  PR is also key.  I know it’s easy to say that if you have the right kind of music and talent then you will be successful.  But I’m afraid that talent alone isn’t.  There are loads of amazing singers and musicians out there plying their trade in bars and clubs up and down the country.  PR is important because you need help to get your talent out there.  As a female, again, the barriers have been broken down to a great extent but there’s still some way to go.  More girls should take more risks with following their dreams, especially in the British Asian community.  

Do you write your own stuff?

Absolutely.  My last release in December was written especially for me because it was a proper Punjabi track and I don’t usually do Punjabi songs.  It was my first attempt so I had to get a lot of help.  Otherwise I write all my songs.  

Where do you draw your inspiration from?  And are you a Bollywood girl or a Hollywood girl?

I’m definitely a proper Bollywood chick.  Hopefully, one day I’ll be able to make it there, maybe get to work as a playback singer.  That’s the ultimate dream but loads of work to be done to that end!
In terms of influences, they are really varied.  I listen to a wide variety of music, from classic Bollywood numbers to contemporary hip hop and RnB so that’s a great spectrum to draw inspiration from.  Beyonce is my idol and I love Atif Aslam.  Of course, I’m loving Arjun and what he’s doing at the moment.

‘Pyar Hai’ is now available for download on iTunes.

-    Poonam Joshi