From behind a barrier near King’s Cross station in London came a chorus of screams. Ahead of me, a mother pushing a child in a pram peered through the tiny gaps in the fence with apparent alarm. She needn’t have worried. The scene unfolding was a group of schoolchildren who had discovered a series of water jets at pavement level and had decided to run between them fully clothed. It was an understandable response to finding an urban oasis amid 35° Celsius temperature that day.
Earlier that week, an interview at Wimbledon I was doing was briefly disrupted by shrieks and then laughter. At the centre of it was the tournament’s hawk, whose job is to scare away pigeons but had landed on the outstretched hands of a group of ball boys and ball girls instead of flying under a ceremonial arch devised for the purpose.
Both incidents amounted to the opposite of the headlines that bedevil London. Newspapers declare it the phone-snatching capital of Europe, where feral youth on electric bikes directed by modern-day Dickensian Fagins tap into a global network that resells stolen phones via agents in southern China.
A friend in Bengaluru, who is a frequent visitor to the city, resorted to pulling out a phone safety tether from her handbag, suggesting I attach it to my phone for my time in London.
At a national level, meanwhile, the UK was being derided as a quasi-banana republic after Prime Minister Keir Starmer said he would be stepping down this month after scarcely two years as premier, paving the way for the seventh change at 10 Downing Street in a decade.
The contrast with the reassuringly civil, good-humoured city I encountered over my fortnight there made me wonder if we can understand a place by reading the news from afar.
This is an unsettling question for anyone who values journalism, but more so for someone who worked as a foreign correspondent for much of his career. Since journalism school, I have grumbled about the “coups, earthquakes, famines syndrome” that has long characterized foreign coverage of the developing world.
Now, in an inversion of that critique, the phenomenon applies to the developed world as well. Ahead of my first trip in several years to the east coast of the US last August, I was warned about the unpredictability of airport immigration and deployment of the National Guard in Washington DC by the Trump administration.
My first encounter with the youthful National Guard was one of them courteously holding the door open for me as I entered the ornate railway station in the capital. My scariest moment turned out to be a rehearsal for a wedding in Brooklyn, where I had been asked to be the celebrant. I nervously began catastrophizing that I would be like the bumbling trainee priest played by Rowan Atkinson in Four Weddings and a Funeral.
This summer, the multiculturalism of London, despite the growing popularity of Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, seemed an unconscious everyday celebration—just as it had been when I lived there in the early 2000s.
The list of invitees to the Royal Box for the Wimbledon semifinals last Friday included cricketer Shubman Gill with his sports agent Sebastian Shaji, easily the most dashing guests that day despite the presence of English actors. Surinder Arora, who owns and manages a host of airport hotels in the UK, was there, as was Barclays CEO C.S. Venkatakrishnan and the UK’s Lawn Tennis Association head, corporate lawyer Roy Colabawalla.
South Asians excelling in Britain are as commonplace as streetlamps, remarked upon only by gawking tourists. Among the guests brought by Prince Michael of Kent was the renowned criminal lawyer, Aftab Jafferjee, who was schooled in India.
To rework the old cliché, one Wimbledon day doesn’t make a British summer. But what the British anthropologist Kate Fox correctly identified as the routine politeness of the British remains, despite frequent public transport disruptions and delays that I lost count of.
Fox purposely bumped into people on public transport to discover that the vast majority reflexively said sorry to her. Which begs the question: Fabulous summer exhibitions by Mumbai-born Anish Kapoor and Indian artist Arpita Singh in London are all very well, but when will there be an apology from a British prime minister for centuries of colonialism?
And there is some truth to the headlines of urban dysfunction. Violent crime is down to record levels in both the US and UK, but phone-snatching and shop-lifting are up dramatically over the past few years. Yet, the national cliché I encountered most often in London was people praising how the Indian economy is booming and its middle-class surging.
Explaining the distortive effects of a deflator on India’s GDP figures and that a speaking event by the author of India Out of Work was on my calendar this week in Bengaluru would have been a conversation killer.
Beyond the gloomier world-view of foreign investors, this is now the prevailing image of India overseas. On balance, I am grateful for that—and that my turquoise phone strap remained a fashion accessory.
The author is a former Financial Times foreign correspondent.