Why India’s wealthy happily donate to god and govt but loathe helping needy and poor

Be it Amitabh Bachchan or Virat Kohli, India’s rich and famous are quick to lecture or follow PM Modi’s diktat. But selfless charity is missing among most Indians writes KAVEREE BAMZAI in The Print


Migrant workers in Delhi trying to get back to Uttar Pradesh amid the nationwide Covid-19 lockdown | Photo by Suraj Singh Bisht | ThePrint


The modern world is facing its worst crisis in coronavirus pandemic and what are Indian celebrities doing? Well, many clapped and banged pots and pans on 22 March at 5 pm following  Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s call, and filmed themselves while doing so. Others are showing us how to do dishes and clean the home, participating in mock celebrity bartan-jhadu-poncha (BJP) challenges. The rest of the world is trying to help find a cure for the deadly virus or providing monetary assistance to the poor or arranging equipment for medical workers, underlining yet again the generosity gap between other countries’ and India’s elite.

Tennis star Roger Federer donates $1.02 million to support the most vulnerable families in Switzerland during the coronavirus crisis; India’s former cricket captain Sourav Ganguly gives away Rs 50 lakh worth of rice in collaboration with the West Bengal-based company Lal Baba Rice, in what is clearly a sponsored, mutual brand-building exercise. Chinese billionaire Jack Ma donates one million face masks and 500,000 coronavirus testing kits to the United States, and pledged similar support for European and African countries; Amitabh Bachchan uses social media to spread half-baked information — such as ‘flies spread coronavirus’ — and wonders if the clanging of pots, pans and thalis defeats the potency of the virus because it was Amavasya on 22 March (he later deleted the tweet).

Hollywood’s golden couple Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds announce they will donate $1 million to Feeding America and Food Banks Canada that work for low-income families and the elderly; while Indian cricket and Bollywood’s beautiful match Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma get into familiar lecture mode, asking everyone to “stay home and stay safe”. This follows Anushka Sharma’s earlier run-in with a ‘luxury car’ passenger where she ticked him off for violating PM Modi’s diktat of Swachh Bharat. 

Where the rich are charitably poor

What makes rich and famous Indians so quick to lecture, especially on issues in congruence with government initiatives, but so loathe to help the poor desperately in need? The 2010 Giving Pledge by Warren Buffet and Bill Gates, to which five wealthy Indians are signatories, was meant to give a gigantic push to philanthropy worldwide. This was followed by India’s then minister of corporate affairs Sachin Pilot making it legally mandatory for companies to put aside charity funds for Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) projects, making India the first country in the world to pass such a legislation. This year, an attempt to criminalise non-compliance was eventually softened after an uproar from corporates.

Philanthropy is up. According to Bain and Company’s annual Philanthropy Report 2020, domestic philanthropic funding has rapidly grown from approximately Rs 12,500 crore in 2010 to approximately Rs 55,000 crore in 2018. Contributions by individual philanthropists have also recorded strong growth in the past decade. In 2010, individual contributions accounted for 26 per cent of private funding, and as of 2018, individuals contribute about 60 per cent of the total private funding in India, estimated at approximately Rs 43,000 crore.

But in a prophetic warning, the report underscored the need for philanthropy ”to now consciously focus on India’s most vulnerable” and called for targeted action for the large population caught in a vicious cycle of vulnerability — precisely those worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic.

“The disadvantaged,” it said, “are unable to adapt to unpredictable situations that can push them deeper into vulnerability, such as climate change, economic risks and socio-political threats.” Even Azim Premji, who recently made news by committing 34 per cent of his company’s shares — worth $7.5 billion or Rs 52,750 crore — to his continuing cause, the public schooling system in India, has not set aside anything specific for those affected by the coronavirus. India’s second-richest man was the first Indian to sign The Giving Pledge.

Vaishali Nigam Sinha, Chief Sustainability Officer at Renew Power, started charity a few years ago to promote giving. Her experience has been less than happy. Indians, she finds, have refrained from planned giving for broader societal transformation. “Giving is individualistic and not driven via networks, which can be quite effective as we have seen in other parts of the world like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. And in India, giving is usually done to get something back – to god for prosperity, to religious affiliations for advocacy of these platforms, and to government for business returns. Wealthy Indians need to learn to give in a planned way for greater social impact and transformation,” she says.

Little surprise then that India was ranked 124 in World Giving Index 2018 — and placed 82 in the 10th edition of the index compiled by Charities Aid Foundation looking at the data for 128 countries over the 10-year period. 

All of us are in the same boat

But it’s not about celebrities or wealthy Indians alone. We are all in it together. Special planes are sent to bring back Indians stuck abroad due to the pandemic, but labourers and daily wage workers are left to walk hundreds of kilometres to reach their villages. Doctors treating coronavirus patients will be applauded but not allowed to enter their homes.

JNU sociologist Maitrayee Chaudhuri calls it a potent mix of selfishness, self care and entitlement. ”We have a complete disregard for people on the margins and on whose labour we sit. It is all about us and our safety,” she says. This communal selfishness is very different from the churning in the 19th and early 20th century, which led to enormous social reform movements. The slow and meticulous destruction of ‘secularism’, ‘socialism’ and ‘liberalism’ has helped. As has the rise of neoliberal ‘individual self centredness’. “Not to talk about smartphone dumbness,” she adds. There is an absence of empathy everywhere, filled instead with the noise of thalis being banged and bells being rung to show symbolic gratitude to those who serve us.

The examples of those who are giving are few and far in between. There is comedian Kapil Sharma, who is giving Rs 50 lakh to the Prime Minister’s Relief Fund and southern superstars Pawan Kalyan, Ram Charan and Rajinikanth. But in general, our stars have chosen to share very little. Former cricket captain M.S. Dhoni, for instance, has been reported to have donated Rs 1 lakh to a charity trust in Pune, which led to some criticism and a counter from his wife Sakshi, even though it wasn’t immediately clear which incident she was alluding to.

India Inc hasn’t fared much better either. When PM Modi asked everyone to show their support for health workers fighting coronavirus by applauding them, one of the country’s most proactive industrialists was among the first to tweet his support, and also one of the first to be trolled for it. He quickly responded by offering to manufacture ventilators, among other things. Reliance is reportedly donating a hospital for coronavirus patients, weeks after Isha Ambani had hosted a Holi party on 7 March — when the number of coronavirus cases had rapidly begun to rise. Her mother, after all, is the queen of giving, contributing to an array of eclectic causes, and has been honoured for it by getting elected to the board of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2019 or by becoming the first Indian woman in 2016 to be elected to the International Olympic Committee for supporting the sporting dreams of seven million Indian children.

But for India’s corporate class, it took a nudge from the Principal Scientific Adviser K. Vijay Raghavan to remind them that healthcare and preventive healthcare are covered under Schedule VII of the Companies Act: “Hence supporting any project or programme for preventing or controlling or managing COVID19 is legitimate CSR (CSR) expenditure.” He also quickly got an office memorandum issued by the Ministry of Corporate Affairs a day later. 

Elites’ capitalist worldview

Is there a kindness deficit in India’s business elite as well, which mirrors the lack of empathy of the country’s middle class? Business writer and bestselling author Tamal Bandyopadhyay says there are exceptions but culturally, the Indian business community is not exactly fond of opening up its purse on its own unless there is a compulsion. “Even when the companies are compelled, they find ways to evade it. We all know how many of them handle their CSR activities through creation of trusts. When it comes to buying electoral bonds, the story is different.

“Similarly, some of them get excited and rush to do certain things to express solidarity with the government in power. For instance, when the push is on digitalisation, there are takers for adopting towns for digitalisation in constituencies which matter. Essentially, most of them don’t believe in doing things no strings attached. Of course, there are people who believe in doing things quietly but they are exceptions,” he says.

In Western nations such as the US, philanthropy has deeper roots, with the practice essentially starting through donations to religious organisations. By the late 19th century, there was a rise of secular philanthropists such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, which Stanford professor Rob Reich has noted as being controversial and one way of cleansing one’s hands of the dirty money.

In his book Just Giving: Why Philanthropy is Failing Democracy and How It Can Do Better (2018), he has noted: “Big Philanthropy is definitionally a plutocratic voice in our democracy, an exercise of power by the wealthy that is unaccountable, non-transparent, donor-directed, perpetual, and tax-subsidised.”

A similar critique has come from Anand Giridharadas, whose Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World makes the argument that the global financial elite has reinterpreted Andrew Carnegie’s view that it’s good for society for capitalists to give something back to create a new formula: It’s good for business to do so when the time is right, but not otherwise. According to Reich, philanthropy works when it is able to find a gap between what governments do and what the market wants.

Few people exemplify this better than Bill Gates, who has for long donated to the cause of global healthcare. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has already contributed $100 million to contain the virus, which he declared a pandemic even before the World Health Organisation did. The Foundation’s newsletter The Optimist is also performing a key role in spreading critical information about the Covid-19 pandemic and dispelling myths. 

Indian philanthropy isn’t secular

In India, the twain of religious giving and secular funding has not met. Management expert Nirmalya Kumar calls it a sensitive subject and says it is related to the philosophical concept underlying Indian religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Sikhism that believe in reincarnation. “Our soul starts life again in a different physical form based on the karma of previous lives. As such, as has been sometimes articulated to me, the lack of charity is an unwillingness to interfere with the consequences that God has determined appropriate. Who am I to come in between the person and their God?”

But the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is traditionally known for engaging in social seva (not just swayam seva , or self service), evidenced by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s decision to feed five crore people during the 21-day lockdown. Sikhism has a well-developed tradition of Guru ka langar, and it was on full display at Shaheen Bagh when ordinary Sikhs served food to people protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC).

Some business families also do philanthropic work, among them the Nilekanis, the Murtys and the older Bharatrams (their founder Lala Shri Ram founded Delhi Cloth Mills and set up several educational institutes like Shri Ram College of Commerce and Lady Shri Ram College). Radhika Bharatram, joint vice chairperson, The Shri Ram Schools, recalls growing up in a middle class, progressive home where her sister and she were encouraged to volunteer at the Cheshire Home and Mother Teresa Home. Marriage, she says, brought her into a home where making contributions to society was in the family’s DNA and she is now involved as a volunteer with organisations such as Delhi Crafts Council, Blind Relief Association, SRF Foundation, the CII Foundation Woman Exemplar Programme, and Cancer Awareness Prevention and Early Detection. What drives her is empathy: When “you come from a position of privilege, there is joy in making a difference to someone else’s life”. She says it motivates her when the purpose is greater than the individual.

Unfortunately, the middle class and the elites have tended to keep self interest above public interest. In the new world after the coronavirus pandemic, this is one attitude it must change.

Our cult of personality is leaving real life in the shade

George Monbiot in The Guardian

By reducing politics to a celebrity obsession – from Johnson to Trump to Corbyn – the media misdirects and confuses us 

Illustration: Ben Jennings


What kind of people would you expect the newspapers to interview most? Those with the most to say, perhaps, or maybe those with the richest and weirdest experiences. Might it be philosophers, or detectives, or doctors working in war zones, refugees, polar scientists, street children, firefighters, base jumpers, activists, writers or free divers? No. It’s actors. I haven’t conducted an empirical study, but I would guess that between a third and a half of the major interviews in the newspapers feature people who make their living by adopting someone else’s persona and speaking someone else’s words.

This is such a bizarre phenomenon that, if it hadn’t crept up on us slowly, we would surely find it astounding. But it seems to me symbolic of the way the media works. Its problem runs deeper than fake news. What it offers is news about a fake world.

I am not proposing that the papers should never interview actors, or that they have no wisdom of their own to impart. But the remarkable obsession with this trade blots out other voices. One result is that an issue is not an issue until it has been voiced by an actor. Climate breakdown, refugees, human rights, sexual assault: none of these issues, it seems, can surface until they go Hollywood.

This is not to disparage the actors who have helped bring them to mainstream attention, least of all the brave and brilliant women who exposed Harvey Weinstein and popularised the #MeToo movement. But many other brave and brilliant women stood up to say the same thing – and, because they were not actors, remained unheard. The #MeToo movement is widely assumed to have begun a year ago, with Weinstein’s accusers. But it actually started in 2006, when the motto was coined by the activist Tarana Burke. She and the millions of others who tried to speak out were, neither literally nor metaphorically, in the spotlight.

At least actors serve everyone. But the next most-interviewed category, according to my unscientific survey, could be filed as “those who serve the wealthy”: restaurateurs, haute couturists, interior designers and the like, lionised and thrust into our faces as if we were their prospective clients. This is a world of make-believe, in which we are induced to imagine we are participants rather than mere gawpers.

The spotlight effect is bad enough on the culture pages. It’s worse when the same framing is applied to politics. Particularly during party conference season, but at other times of the year as well, public issues are cast as private dramas. Brexit, which is likely to alter the lives of everyone in Britain, is reduced to a story about whether or not Theresa May will keep her job. Who cares? Perhaps, by now, not even Theresa May.

Neither May nor Jeremy Corbyn can carry the weight of the personality cults that the media seeks to build around them. They are diffident and awkward in public, and appear to writhe in the spotlight. Both parties grapple with massive issues, and draw on the work of hundreds in formulating policy, tactics and presentation. Yet these huge and complex matters are reduced to the drama of one person’s struggle. Everyone, in the media’s viewfinder, becomes an actor. Reality is replaced by representation.

Even when political reporting is not reduced to personality, political photography is. An article might offer depth and complexity, but is illustrated with a photo of one of the 10 politicians whose picture must be attached to every news story. Where is the public clamour to see yet another image of May – let alone Boris Johnson? The pictures, like the actors, blot out our view of other people, and induce us to forget that these articles discuss the lives of millions, not the life of one.

The media’s failure of imagination and perspective is not just tiresome: it’s dangerous. There is a particular species of politics that is built entirely around personalities. It is a politics in which substance, evidence and analysis are replaced by symbols, slogans and sensation. It is called fascism. If you construct political narratives around the psychodramas of politicians, even when they don’t invite it, you open the way for those who can play this game more effectively.

Already this reporting style has led to the rise of people who, though they are not fascists, have demagogic tendencies. Johnson, Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg are all, like Donald Trump, reality TV stars. The reality TV on which they feature is not The Apprentice, but Question Time and other news and current affairs programmes. In the media circus, the clowns have the starring roles. And clowns in politics are dangerous.

The spotlight effect allows the favoured few to set the agenda. Almost all the most critical issues remain in the darkness beyond the circle of light. Every day, thousands of pages are published and thousands of hours broadcast by the media. But scarcely any of this space and time is made available for the matters that really count: environmental breakdown, inequality, exclusion, the subversion of democracy by money. In a world of impersonation, we obsess about trivia. A story carried by BBC News last week was headlined “Meghan closes a car door”. 

The BBC has just announced that two of its programmes will start covering climate change once a week. Given the indifference and sometimes outright hostility with which it has treated people trying to raise this issue over the past 20 years, this is progress. But business news, though less important than environmental collapse, is broadcast every minute, partly because it is treated as central by the people who run the media and partly because it is of pressing interest to those within the spotlight. We see what they want us to see. The rest remains in darkness.

The task of all journalists is to turn off the spotlight, roll up the blinds and see what’s lurking at the back of the room. There are some magnificent examples of how this can be done, such as the Windrush scandal reporting, by the Guardian’s Amelia Gentleman and others. This told the story of people who live far from where the spotlight falls. The articles were accompanied by pictures of victims rather than of the politicians who had treated them so badly: their tragedies were not supplanted by someone else’s drama. Yet these stories were told with such power that they forced even those within the spotlight to respond.

The task of all citizens is to understand what we are seeing. The world as portrayed is not the world as it is. The personification of complex issues confuses and misdirects us, ensuring that we struggle to comprehend and respond to our predicaments. This, it seems, is often the point.

Peter Roebuck's Somerset agony

David Hopps in Cricinfo

The civil war that beset Somerset cricket more than 30 years ago was all the more remarkable because of the unimposing, bespectacled figure at its centre. Peter Roebuck would not have immediately struck a casual observer as a man capable of going to war. An unconventional loner, gauche even with close friends, he did not meld easily with either the old-fashioned administrators in charge of the club or the imposing superstars, Ian Botham, Viv Richards and Joel Garner, who would eventually be expunged from a Somerset dressing room that had fallen on hard times.

The conflict that took hold of the sleepy market town of Taunton throughout the summer of 1986 dominated the sports pages in a way that now is hard to imagine. Until now, it has only been possible to hazard a guess at Roebuck's state of mind as he became the principal hate figure for rebel supporters who were campaigning against the county's decision to release their great, long-serving West Indians, Richards and Garner and, as a consequence, accept the ensuing departure of Ian Botham in protest.

Previously unpublished diaries, which were not made available to the authors of the excellent Chasing Shadows: The Life and Death of Peter Roebuck in 2015, have now revealed the full extent of Roebuck's mental anguish. Condemned by his critics, increasingly reviled by Botham in a rift that would last a lifetime, and often left to flounder by Somerset's archaic administration, he presents himself as an honourable man who made his choice and forever fretted over the consequences.

"Lots of people are asking about my health," he writes as Somerset's warfare reaches its height. "I suspect they are waiting for a crack-up." Somerset comfortably won the vote to let go of Richards and Garner at an emergency meeting at Shepton Mallet in November 1986, and Roebuck took the spoils, but his life would never be the same again. Even as victory approaches, he rails at English society as "mean, narrow and vindictive" and falls out of love with the country of his birth for the rest of a life that was to end in tragic circumstances 25 years later.

By the time he wrote his autobiography, Sometimes I Forgot To Laugh, in 2004, Roebuck was able to tell the Somerset story with relative calm. Not so in his diaries, typed out contemporaneously in obsessive detail, complete with scribbled adjustments. Three unseen chapters of a book called 1986 And All That have been discovered and placed on the family website. "The truth can finally be told," is how the family puts it.

Roebuck was in his first season as Somerset captain, regarding himself as a more relaxed figure, at 30, than the intense batsman who had written the self-absorbed study of life on the county circuit, Slices of Cricket, a few years earlier. That self-ease soon departed. In midsummer he was informed at an emergency meeting of the management and cricket committee that Martin Crowe, not yet a New Zealand star, merely a young batsman making his way, and someone who had spent time with Somerset's 2nd XI with an eye to a future signing, had been approached by Essex.

Crowe, Roebuck writes, was "a man of brilliance rare in the game, a man of standards rare in the game". Roebuck's yearning to reshape a failing, ageing Somerset side has youth and work ethic at its core and encourages him to support the majority preference on the committee to sign Crowe and release Richards and Garner after many years of loyal service. One wonders how Botham will respond to Roebuck's allegation in the diaries that Botham viewed Crowe at the time as little better than a good club player.

In Somerset, Richards and Garner were far more than overseas players. They were part of their limited-overs folklore, as much a part of Somerset as scrumpy or skittles. As Roebuck, this cricketing aesthete, frets over the implications, he writes in his diary: "Echoes in my mind kept repeating that this Somerset team could never work, could never be worthwhile unless we abandoned the past and began to build a team around Crowe. Our chemistry was wrong. It hadn't worked with Botham as captain, and it wasn't working with Roebuck as captain. We'd lose Crowe to Essex."

Botham at the press conference announcing his decision to leave Somerset Adrian Murrell / © Getty Images


A couple of weeks later, that course of action was confirmed. Sworn to secrecy until the end of the season by a Somerset management and cricket committee of 12, a body which Roebuck naively imagines is capable of confidentiality, he ludicrously seeks to maintain discretion in the height of summer in a dressing room awash with rumour. Out on the field, "smiles hid hatred". In Roebuck's version of events, all those responsible for the decision keep their heads down and often fail to tell him what is going on. Rebels soon force an emergency special meeting, and at the end of the season virtually everybody but him seems to disappear for a prolonged holiday - acts, in some cases, of breathtaking irresponsibility. He delays his return to Australia, where he spends the close season, to see the job through.

"I was bound to be forsaken by friends," he writes. "It was all right for them, they were amateurs, committee men, they could leave this club and this game at any moment. It was my living, much more was at stake."

A cerebral and unclubbable man, he is ill-equipped for the task - whether the art of appeasement or politics. Lost in his own thoughts, he reads cricket books, watches movies, takes long baths, and makes impromptu visits around the county in search of understanding. Some imagined friends desert him, some of them quite cruelly, and, for the first time, he is assailed by scurrilous rumours about his private life. Tabloid journalists descend upon Taunton, enquiring about his relationship with the young cricketers he houses on an annual basis. Fifteen years later, his belief in the educative value of corporal punishment was to lead to a guilty plea, to his instant regret, to three charges of common assault against South African teenagers.

Roebuck's insistence that he will not surrender to "moral blackmail" is one of the most revealing passages in these freshly discovered chapters. "These tactics, this moral blackmail, this offer not to tell lies if I will not tell facts, must not rush me into a hasty marriage with attendant car and nappies. Through my life so far, I've tried to be as independent, financially and personally, as possible… I fear love for its invasion of privacy though now, at last, I begin to think about it. For the present, I have two lives (in England and Australia), three careers (cricket, writing, teaching), and a variety of ways of keeping the world, though not friendship, at its distance. I don't care a jot what anyone else does in private, so long as it does not hurt people. I want to help the young, something I've failed to do so far in my years at Somerset because I was too involved in my own game to care for anyone else."

The Roebuck family website goes as far as to suggest "a causal connection" between events at Somerset that fateful summer and the manner in which his life came to a tragic end many years later. You would have to be a believer in chaos theory to accept this conclusion without reservation.

Another 25 years elapsed before Roebuck fell to his death from a Cape Town hotel window in 2011 while being questioned by police about an alleged sexual assault, which remains unproven. A police statement at the time said that Roebuck, by then a celebrated author and journalist, committed suicide, a version of events that was accepted by a closed inquest, before last month South Africa's Director of Public Prosecutions responded to family lobbying and agreed to review the findings.

In mental turmoil he might have been, but Roebuck required no passage of time to see the mid-1980s as a period when county cricket's unwieldy amateur committees were no longer fit for purpose, unable to deal with the advent of the celebrity cricketer. It is no coincidence that the mid-'80s also saw county cricket's other great conflict, as Yorkshire descended into internecine strife over the future of Geoffrey Boycott.

"Somerset, a small county area with a small county cricket team is one of the battlegrounds upon which this battle is taking place. It is a battle between old-fashioned standards and celebration of stardom. It isn't really a battle between management and worker at all. Botham is not a worker, cannot pretend to be a working class hero. In this battle the management and the workers are on the same side. "

Roebuck bats in a benefit match for Botham in Finchley, London © Getty Images


Somerset's general committee is elderly white males to a man, and when Roebuck goes to an area committee meeting in the seaside town of Weston, where incidentally he finds warm support, he learns that a 26-strong committee has been extended to 27 just because somebody else asked to join. "We must change this old, male hegemony in charge of cricket," he writes. "A game cannot, in 1986, be run by genial, sensible pensioners. It is frightening how much cricket depends on the tireless voluntary work of old men."

Much has been made over the years about the enmity that grew from this summer onwards between Roebuck and Botham, polar opposites in character and cricketing approach, But it is Roebuck's fear of Richards' volcanic temperament that stands out most in these unseen chapters, such as an exchange during a Championship match at Worcester, after Somerset's intentions are known, a day that begins with Roebuck strolling by the banks of the Severn in search of rural bliss and soon becomes something altogether more tempestuous.

"Viv asked to see me in private, so we went upstairs where we wouldn't be disturbed. For the next 15 minutes he launched a tirade of abuse […] He said I was a sick boy, a terrible failure, an unstable character, someone who should never be put in charge of anything… He said I hadn't yet seen his bad side and he'd unleash it upon me from now on. During this torrent, I sat quietly, not angry at all though a little startled."

Tensions with Botham are also laid bare. "Botham is trying to form the players into a gang behind him," Roebuck writes. "He's shown little interest in these young cricketers on previous occasions, but he is a formidable warrior… If he can't win them over he'd certainly try to bully them into line." He even explores likenesses between Botham and Percy Chapman, an Ashes-winning captain in 1926, who "fell into decline, drinking heavily and putting on weight, ravaging his body". He questions Botham's desire to be surrounded by like-minded "chums", not stopping to reflect that he himself was also bent upon building a Somerset side in his own image.

"I am not a loner," he concludes, "rather my preferred pursuits (reading, writing, music) are solitary. I am private, it is true, and enjoy the companionship of my close friends much more than the conviviality of a loud, large group. As for splitting the team, the whole point of this struggle was that it had been split for years."

Celebrity isn’t just harmless fun – it’s the smiling face of the corporate machine

Our failure to understand the link between fame and big business made the rise of Trump inevitable

George Monbiot in The Guardian


‘It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds’. Photograph: Eduardo Munoz/Reuters

Now that a reality TV star is preparing to become president of the United States, can we agree that celebrity culture is more than just harmless fun – that it might, in fact, be an essential component of the systems that govern our lives?
The rise of celebrity culture did not happen by itself. It has long been cultivated by advertisers, marketers and the media. And it has a function. The more distant and impersonal corporations become, the more they rely on other people’s faces to connect them to their customers.
Corporation means body; capital means head. But corporate capital has neither head nor body. It is hard for people to attach themselves to a homogenised franchise owned by a hedge fund whose corporate identity consists of a filing cabinet in Panama City. So the machine needs a mask. It must wear the face of someone we see as often as we see our next-door neighbours. It is pointless to ask what Kim Kardashian does to earn her living: her role is to exist in our minds. By playing our virtual neighbour, she induces a click of recognition on behalf of whatever grey monolith sits behind her this week.

An obsession with celebrity does not lie quietly beside the other things we value; it takes their place. A study published in the journal Cyberpsychology reveals that an extraordinary shift appears to have taken place between 1997 and 2007 in the US. In 1997, the dominant values (as judged by an adult audience) expressed by the shows most popular among nine- to 11 year-olds were community feeling, followed by benevolence. Fame came 15th out of the 16 values tested. By 2007, when shows such as Hannah Montana prevailed, fame came first, followed by achievement, image, popularity and financial success. Community feeling had fallen to 11th, benevolence to 12th.

A paper in the International Journal of Cultural Studies found that, among the people it surveyed in the UK, those who follow celebrity gossip most closely are three times less likely than people interested in other forms of news to be involved in local organisations, and half as likely to volunteer. Virtual neighbours replace real ones.

The blander and more homogenised the product, the more distinctive the mask it needs to wear. This is why Iggy Pop was used to promote motor insurance and Benicio del Toro is used to sell Heineken. The role of such people is to suggest that there is something more exciting behind the logo than office blocks and spreadsheets. They transfer their edginess to the company they represent. As soon they take the cheque that buys their identity, they become as processed and meaningless as the item they are promoting.

The celebrities you see most often are the most lucrative products, extruded through a willing media by a marketing industry whose power no one seeks to check. This is why actors and models now receive such disproportionate attention, capturing much of the space once occupied by people with their own ideas: their expertise lies in channelling other people’s visions.

A database search by the anthropologist Grant McCracken reveals that in the US actors received 17% of the cultural attention accorded to famous people between 1900 and 1910: slightly less than physicists, chemists and biologists combined. Film directors received 6% and writers 11%. Between 1900 and 1950, actors had 24% of the coverage, and writers 9%. By 2010, actors accounted for 37% (over four times the attention natural scientists received), while the proportion allocated to both film directors and writers fell to 3%.

You don’t have to read or watch many interviews to see that the principal qualities now sought in a celebrity are vapidity, vacuity and physical beauty. They can be used as a blank screen on to which anything can be projected. With a few exceptions, those who have least to say are granted the greatest number of platforms on which to say it.

This helps to explain the mass delusion among young people that they have a reasonable chance of becoming famous. A survey of 16-year-olds in the UKrevealed that 54% of them intend to become celebrities.

As soon as celebrities forget their allotted role, the hounds of hell are let loose upon them. Lily Allen was the media’s darling when she was advertising John Lewis. Gary Lineker couldn’t put a foot wrong when he stuck to selling junk food to children. But when they expressed sympathy for refugees, they were torn to shreds. When you take the corporate shilling, you are supposed to stop thinking for yourself.

Celebrity has a second major role: as a weapon of mass distraction. The survey published in the IJCS I mentioned earlier also reveals that people who are the most interested in celebrity are the least engaged in politics, the least likely to protest and the least likely to vote. This appears to shatter the media’s frequent, self-justifying claim that celebrities connect us to public life.

The survey found that people fixated by celebrity watch the news on average as much as others do, but they appear to exist in a state of permanent diversion. If you want people to remain quiescent and unengaged, show them the faces of Taylor Swift, Shia LaBeouf and Cara Delevingne several times a day.

In Trump we see a perfect fusion of the two main uses of celebrity culture: corporate personification and mass distraction. His celebrity became a mask for his own chaotic, outsourced and unscrupulous business empire. His public image was the perfect inversion of everything he and his companies represent. As presenter of the US version of The Apprentice, this spoilt heir to humongous wealth became the face of enterprise and social mobility. During the presidential elections, his noisy persona distracted people from the intellectual void behind the mask, a void now filled by more lucid representatives of global capital.

Celebrities might inhabit your life, but they are not your friends. Regardless of the intentions of those on whom it is bequeathed, celebrity is the lieutenant of exploitation. Let’s turn our neighbours back into our neighbours, and turn our backs on those who impersonate them.

The poppy has become a symbol of racism – I have never worn one, and now I never will

Robert Fisk in The Independent


Yes, the boys and girls of the BBC and ITV, and all our lively media and sports personalities and politicians, are at it again. They’re flaunting their silly poppies once more to show their super-correctness in the face of history, as ignorant or forgetful as ever that their tired fashion accessory was inspired by a poem which urged the soldiers of the Great War of 1914-18 to go on killing and slaughtering.

But that’s no longer quite the point, for I fear there are now darker reasons why these TV chumps and their MP interviewees sport their red compassion badges on their clothes.

For who are they commemorating? The dead of Sarajevo? Of Srebrenica? Of Aleppo? Nope. The television bumpkins only shed their crocodile tears for the dead of First and Second World Wars, who were (save for a colonial war or two) the last generation of Brits to get the chop before the new age of “we-bomb-you-die” technology ensured that their chaps – brown-eyed, for the most part, often Muslims, usually dark skinned – got blown to bits while our chaps flew safely home to the mess for breakfast.

Yes, I rage against the poppy disgrace every year. And yes, my father – 12th Battalion The King’s Liverpool Regiment, Third Battle of the Somme, the liberation of burning Cambrai 1918 – finally abandoned the poppy charade when he learned of the hypocrisy and lies behind the war in which he fought. His schoolboy son followed his father’s example and never wore his wretched Flanders flower again.

Oddly, the dunderheads who are taking Britain out of the European Union on a carpet of equally deceitful lies – and I include Theresa May and her buffoonerie of ministers – are guilty of even greater hypocrisy than the TV presenters whose poppies, for just a few days a year, take over the function of studio make-up artists (poppies distracting viewers from the slabs of paste on their TV faces). For the fields of Flanders, the real mud and faeces and blood which those vile poppies are supposed to symbolise, showed just how European our dead generations were.
British soldiers went off to fight and die in their tens of thousands for little Catholic Belgium, today the seat of the EU where Nigel Farage disgraced his country by telling the grandchildren of those we went to fight for that they’d never done a day’s work in their lives. In France, British (and, of course, Irish) soldiers bled to death in even greater Golgothas – 20,000 alone on the first day of the Somme in 1916 – to save the nation which we are now throwing out of our shiny new insular lives.

The Entente Cordiale which sent my father to France is now trash beneath the high heels of Theresa May – yet this wretched woman dares to wear a poppy.

When Poles fought and died alongside British pilots in the 1940 Battle of Britain to save us from Nazi Germany, we idolised them, lionised them, wrote about their exploits in the RAF, filmed them, fell in love with them. For them, too, we pretend to wear the poppy. But now the poppy wearers want to throw the children of those brave men out of Britain. Shame is the only word I can find to describe our betrayal.

And perhaps I sniff something equally pernicious among the studio boys and girls. On Britain’s international television channels, Christmas was long ago banned (save for news stories on the Pope). There are no Christmas trees any more beside the presenters’ desks, not a sprig of holly. For we live in a multicultural society, in which such manifestations might be offensive to other “cultures” (I use that word advisedly, for culture to me means Beethoven and the poet Hafiz and Monet).

And for the same reason, our international screens never show the slightest clue of Eid festivities (save again for news stories) lest this, too, offend another “culture”. Yet the poppy just manages to sneak onto the screen of BBC World; it is permissable, you see, the very last symbol that “our” dead remain more precious than the millions of human beings we have killed, in the Middle East for example, for whom we wear no token of remembrance. Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara will be wearing his poppy this week – but not for those he liquidated in his grotesque invasion of Iraq.

And in this sense, I fear that the wearing of the poppy has become a symbol of racism. In his old-fashioned way (and he read a lot about post-imperial history) I think my father, who was 93 when he died, understood this.

His example was one of great courage. He fought for his country and then, unafraid, he threw his poppy away. Television celebrities do not have to fight for their country – yet they do not even have the guts to break this fake conformity and toss their sordid poppies in the office wastepaper bin.

No jokes please, we’re Indian

Editorial in The Hindu

Sometimes the reaction is the real joke. The police force in India’s financial capital have sought legal opinion to check if they have grounds to file an FIR against a comedian for a video he recently posted on the messaging application, Snapchat. The Mumbai police were following up on a complaint from the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, a political party with a remarkably low threshold for taking offence. And the MNS was not the only party outraged by the post by Tanmay Bhat, a comedian fairly well-known for his “roast videos”, or takedowns of celebrities. Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena, for instance, decided to make it clear that people like Mr. Bhat “should be whipped in public”. Using the “face swap” feature on Snapchat, Mr. Bhat had spoofed Sachin Tendulkar and Lata Mangeshkar, with jibes about his cricketing ability and her long singing career. It was certainly not polite. It could be argued that locker-room chatter goes with the roast territory, and that it is in the nature of the beast to push the boundary of how much political incorrectness can be deemed passable. The point here is not to applaud his sense of humour — or to condemn it. It is to spotlight the speed with which the system mobilises to shut any expression of mockery targeted at the well-known.

That the effect is to stifle freedom of expression, to force the next person to look over her shoulder before mocking the next public figure, is obvious and intended. To be mocked is the most trying way of being critiqued. One can ignore evenly stated takedowns — not spoofs that make folks laugh. To deal with mockery in a democratic society, one needs to be committed to a public culture of engagement, of openness to questioning. India’s public figures are clearly not. Politicians and celebrities (mainly film and cricket stars) have failed India not just by using the strongest arm of the law to curb expressions of humour aimed at them, thereby forcing self-censorship on what we may laugh about. They have failed it by not enabling sensitisation on what should pass as good humour and what may not. When jokiness is curbed so menacingly — and for all the brave front they may put up, cartoonists and comedians are lonely people against the might of the state — the only response is to rally to defend freedom of expression. In an environment where possibly personal jokes are seen to warrant scrutiny and police action, no space can be available for shared humour, for comedy to evolve sufficiently so that the larger community internalises what is truly, even rockingly, funny and what’s not so progressive.

We’re not as selfish as we think we are. Here’s the proof

George Monbiot in The Guardian


Do you find yourself thrashing against the tide of human indifference and selfishness? Are you oppressed by the sense that while you care, others don’t? That, because of humankind’s callousness, civilisation and the rest of life on Earth are basically stuffed? If so, you are not alone. But neither are you right.

A study by the Common Cause Foundation, due to be published next month, reveals two transformative findings. The first is that a large majority of the 1,000 people they surveyed – 74% – identifies more strongly with unselfish values than with selfish values. This means that they are more interested in helpfulness, honesty, forgiveness and justice than in money, fame, status and power. The second is that a similar majority – 78% – believes others to be more selfish than they really are. In other words, we have made a terrible mistake about other people’s minds.

The revelation that humanity’s dominant characteristic is, er, humanity will come as no surprise to those who have followed recent developments in behavioural and social sciences. People, these findings suggest, are basically and inherently nice.

A review article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out that our behaviour towards unrelated members of our species is “spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals”. While chimpanzees might share food with members of their own group, though usually only after being plagued by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note, behave more like the homo economicus of neoliberal mythology than people do.

Humans, by contrast, are ultrasocial: possessed of an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare, and an ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months,children begin to help each other, for example by handing over objects another child can’t reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people’s violation of moral norms.

A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three- to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note.) The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare, rather than by a desire to look good.

Why? How would the hard logic of evolution produce such outcomes? This is the subject of heated debate. One school of thought contends that altruism is a logical response to living in small groups of closely related people, and evolution has failed to catch up with the fact that we now live in large groups, mostly composed of strangers.

Another argues that large groups containing high numbers of altruists will outcompete large groups which contain high numbers of selfish people. A third hypothesis insists that a tendency towards collaboration enhances your own survival, regardless of the group in which you might find yourself. Whatever the mechanism might be, the outcome should be a cause of celebration.

‘Philosophers produced persuasive, influential and catastrophically mistaken accounts of the state of nature.’ Photograph: Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

So why do we retain such a dim view of human nature? Partly, perhaps, for historical reasons. Philosophers from Hobbes to Rousseau, Malthus toSchopenhauer, whose understanding of human evolution was limited to the Book of Genesis, produced persuasive, influential and catastrophically mistaken accounts of “the state of nature” (our innate, ancestral characteristics). Their speculations on this subject should long ago have been parked on a high shelf marked “historical curiosities”. But somehow they still seem to exert a grip on our minds.

Another problem is that – almost by definition – many of those who dominate public life have a peculiar fixation on fame, money and power. Their extreme self-centredness places them in a small minority, but, because we see them everywhere, we assume that they are representative of humanity.

The media worships wealth and power, and sometimes launches furious attacks on people who behave altruistically. In the Daily Mail last month, Richard Littlejohn described Yvette Cooper’s decision to open her home to refugees as proof that “noisy emoting has replaced quiet intelligence” (quiet intelligence being one of his defining qualities). “It’s all about political opportunism and humanitarian posturing,” he theorised, before boasting that he doesn’t “give a damn” about the suffering of people fleeing Syria. I note with interest the platform given to people who speak and write as if they are psychopaths.

The effects of an undue pessimism about human nature are momentous. As the foundation’s survey and interviews reveal, those who have the bleakest view of humanity are the least likely to vote. What’s the point, they reason, if everyone else votes only in their own selfish interests? Interestingly, and alarmingly for people of my political persuasion, it also discovered that liberals tend to possess a dimmer view of other people than conservatives do. Do you want to grow the electorate? Do you want progressive politics to flourish? Then spread the word that other people are broadly well-intentioned.

Misanthropy grants a free pass to the grasping, power-mad minority who tend to dominate our political systems. If only we knew how unusual they are, we might be more inclined to shun them and seek better leaders. It contributes to the real danger we confront: not a general selfishness, but a general passivity. Billions of decent people tut and shake their heads as the world burns, immobilised by the conviction that no one else cares.

You are not alone. The world is with you, even if it has not found its voice.

Celebrities endorsing products also liable for misleading advertisements: Panel

Dipak Kumar Dash,TNN | Feb 4, 2014, 05.22 AM IST 

The authorities are mulling provisions to ensure that celebrities endorsing products are also made liable for misleading advertisements.

 

NEW DELHI: If the skin whitening cream isn't as phenomenal as advertised or the hair oil not producing a lush mop as promised, you may soon be able to claim compensation not only from the advertisers, but from the celebrities endorsing the product. 

The Central Consumer Protection Council(CCPC), under the chairmanship of minister K V Thomas, on Monday decided to set up a sub-committee to suggest strategies to deal with such advertisers. Among the concerns raised was peddling of products by celebrities. 

"About 50% of the daylong conference was spent addressing ... the huge impact of misleading advertisements, particularly food items, hair oil and health products," said a CCPC member who attended the meeting in Kochi. "Even the celebrities must pay compensation in case there is a complaint," said Joseph Victor, a CCPC member. 

Panel mulls measures to monitor ad claims 

What seems to have moved the consumer affairs ministry is a direction from the MP high court to set up an ad monitoring panel as recommended by the Vibha Bhargava Commission. "An ad monitoring committee with proper budgetary support from the Centre may be set up to monitor the advertisements on regular basis... the committee will have the powers to (take) corrective actions and (impose) compensation," the CCPC said. 

Sources said that the decision was taken unanimously by CCPC, which has members from central and state governments, besides representatives from consumer organizations and academicians. The sub-committee may be formed in less than a week and could submit its recommendations by February-end, sources said. 

Some members told TOI the issue of southern superstar Mamootty endorsing products was discussed. "We have similar problems across the country. We have Shahrukh Khan or some other Hindi film star endorsing consumer items and they get huge payment for doing so. Misleading ads featuring such famous faces shown on TV even for a day serves the purpose of advertisers. We discussed how suo motu action can be taken against ads which have been withdrawn. Even the celebrities must pay compensation in case there is a complaint," said Joseph Victor, a CCPC member. 

Another member, Ashim Sanyal, said he had raised the issue of monitoring ads, which are in huge numbers and across different modes and media. "We need to plan the mechanism for monitoring. The sub-committee will come out with directions and provisions to deal with the menace," he added. Lok Sabha MP Charles Dias, who also attended the meeting, told TOI that concerns were raised on manufacturers' ad spend, which is passed on to buyers. "Most of us felt that there should some sort of monitoring on how much is being spent on advertisements," he said.

From Roy Hodgson to Carol Thatcher, this fixation on celebrity gaffes tells us nothing about racism

Britain is a nation in denial. While celebrity stories grab the headlines, true discrimination is thriving and largely ignored

• 
• • Joseph Harker
  • The Guardian, Tuesday 22 October 2013

‘It was great that we celebrated Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah at London 2012, but the common conclusion, that this proved our nation was at ease with diversity, was pure delusion.' Photograph: David Davies/PA

In the past seven days two stories have shown how little we know about race in modern Britain. First, the one that dominated the headlines: what Roy Hodgson said to the England team at half-time in their World Cup qualifier, and what he meant by using the word "monkey" to refer to a black player. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion. Comment columnists and sports writers weighed in. Radio stations ran phone-ins. Arguments raged.

There's no doubt that, given the history of monkey chants at football grounds during the 70s and 80s, Hodgson was at the very least stupid and incredibly insensitive to use such a word in reference to one of his own team. It's right that he apologised. But what concerns me about this story is not whether Hodgson's a racist but the way it skews our understanding of how racism impacts on modern society. Media reporting is now all about what TV and sports personalities say, rather than what ordinary people do out there in the real world. And the discussions are always centred on whether the alleged target was justified in being "offended".

So the stories we hear are: should Carol Thatcher have called a black tennis player a "golliwog"; should England football captain John Terry have called an opponent a "fucking black cunt"; should Ron Atkinson have called a footballer a "fucking lazy thick nigger"? How should they be punished? Should they be sacked? And in too many cases the abusers quickly become martyrs, the new victims of a nation gripped by political correctness – you just can't say anything nowadays, can you?

And liberal commentators have caught on too. When talking about such issues as sexism, or gay rights, or disability, or antisemitism, their regular refrain is: "Imagine if they'd been talking about black people, just think of the fuss that would have been made."

And added to this, controversial comments by black personalities are seized upon as proof that there's an equal and opposite racism coming from the other side: Rio Ferdinand agreeing that Ashley Cole was a "choc-ice" – outrageous; Diane Abbott tweeting that "White people love playing 'divide & rule'" – the woman who campaigns against racism turns out to be just as racist herself.

In the endless coverage of all this, let's not pretend we're actually talking of racism; these are celebrity gaffe stories for the search-engine age. Though the issues are, for black people, irritating and possibly offensive, they are as relevant to racism as a cough is to tuberculosis. The fact you were once upset by a tweet doesn't mean you understand what racism's about.

The second race story last week addressed the real issues. An undercover BBC London investigation into lettings agents showed the massive extent to which black people are being denied homes – without them even knowing it. One reporter posed as a landlord and asked the agents not to show his rental property to African-Caribbean people. The agents – even the Asian ones – readily agreed. To test the agents' willingness, two other reporters, one black, one white, posed as prospective tenants. As the agents had promised, the black hopeful was told the property had gone; the white prospect was invited for a viewing.

Ten agents were found to be discriminating in this way; even more shocking, one of them said on (hidden) camera: "Ninety-nine per cent of my landlords don't want Afro-Caribbeans or any troublesome people." If true, and there's no reason to doubt his claim, it throws open all sorts of questions about how widespread discrimination is in modern Britain. This investigation, after all, took place in a city often held up as being at ease with difference. If it's happening in London, it can happen, and probably does, anywhere in Britain. And to cap it all, the black "rejects" would have no idea they were being discriminated against; they wouldn't have suspected a thing, unless this happened over and over again – in which case they'd risk being labelled paranoid for blaming it on their skin colour.

This is the true story of racism in the UK: how it is still so casual, and how it excludes and disenfranchises thousands. It's a story, though, which attracted minimal media attention. A news article in the Guardian and the Telegraph, but no interest from any other newspaper, and no battalions of columnists giving their opinions.

No celebrities involved; only black people affected. No story. As they say, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? If blatant racism occurs, and no one reports it, does it exist?

How things have changed. In 1988 a similar investigation took place by undercover BBC reporters in the city of Bristol. The documentary Black and White, broadcast over five successive weekdays, exposed discrimination in jobs, housing and the leisure industry and shocked the nation. Stunned viewers asked themselves how this could be happening in a country they believed to be so tolerant, and where discrimination was supposed to be illegal.

The documentary had a massive impact, opening people's minds to the fact that racism wasn't simply about National Front marches, skinhead thugs, abuse and violence. Geoff Small, the black undercover reporter, recalls: "For weeks afterwards, white people would approach me in the street and offer their sympathy and sincere apologies for what I'd gone through." Now, however, we look back on the 70s and 80s with a sneer. We believe we're so much more sophisticated now. Alf Garnett and the Black and White Minstrel show have gone; we've heard all about police racism through Stephen Lawrence; we see black faces presenting TV shows; many minorities have been successful in business; and we've even had black faces in the cabinet. For Christ's sake, even the President of the United States is black!

These steps, important though they are, are mainly about individual achievement; and the problem is that now, in this allegedly postracial era, the rose-tinted glasses of our diversity training are in fact blinding us to the reality for most black people – which has changed little in the intervening years. In case we need reminding, jobless rates are twice as high for black people as for whites, unemployment is a staggering 56% for young black men; black pupils are less likely than their white peers to get five good GCSEs and are routinely marked down by their teachers; they are three times more likely to be permanently excluded than the overall school population; stop and search rates are over five times higher for black people; and black people are five times more likely to be jailed.

But the story Britain likes to tell itself is that discrimination has gone away – that now we're used to black and brown people living among us, the barriers have come down. It was great that we celebrated Jessica Ennis and Mo Farah at London 2012, but the common conclusion, that this proved our nation was at ease with diversity, was pure delusion. As is the dominant view that the rise in interracial relationships and "beautiful" mixed-race babies shows that racism is on the way out.

The fact it persists undiminished is, it seems, too much for our society to take. And to keep the fantasy in place, we look for excuses: if there are more black jobless it's because of their poor attitude to work; if they perform badly at school it's their laziness and culture; if they're overrepresented in the criminal justice system then they're just naturally more aggressive. If black people could only sort out these self-inflicted problems themselves, everything would be OK. After all, doesn't every business say it welcomes job applicants from all backgrounds? The doors are open, why aren't you coming in?

Needless to say, this proves problematic for genuine anti-racists. It's the problem doctors used to have in "proving" that smoking causes cancer. You can't show it in individual cases, but when you track the increase in smoking and compare it to the increase in cancer rates, it becomes obvious. As for inequality, the general statistics show the racial disparities but individual cases are almost impossible to prove, allowing the deniers to claim that no barriers exist.

We certainly need the facts and figures, but what history shows is that most of us only react to this kind of thing when we see it with our own eyes. Would the abuse allegations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq ever have been believed were it not for the photographic proof? Statistics, unfortunately, can be manipulated and argued over endlessly. But seeing individuals act in a certain way is far more damning. What if, for instance, the BBC team had gone undercover with recruitment agents, or in the teachers' common room, or the judges' golf club? And what about the police? Ten years ago another undercover BBC investigation caused a storm after exposing the raw racism among trainee officers, most of whom used terms of racial abuse on a daily basis.

To investigate all these would, of course, be a significant undertaking; but we need to change the terms of the debate. If we are to achieve genuine equality, which most people say they want, then we need to show how racism can operate, indeed thrive, without a sign telling the world it exists. Without visible proof, we look set for years more discrimination, and years more denial.