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Don’t lose your heads over my
turban
Hardeep Singh Kohli
I, the innocent,
slightly overweight Glaswegian Sikh, have exacerbated racial
tensions because I refused to remove my turban? ... I cannot control
the quickening of my heart when I hear ‘Flower Of Scotland’; I have
no ability to stop my soul yearning for the Highlands when I hear
the pipes played.
 Last
week I wrote about my immigration check/terrorist hijinks at
Madeira airport. My refusal to remove my turban seemed to be on the
verge of becoming an international incident. I was emailed via the
SoS website and roundly chastised by a reader who accused me of
being uncooperative and of “exacerbating racial tensions” during
these trying and febrile times. Just let me be clear about this: I,
the innocent, slightly overweight Glaswegian Sikh, have exacerbated
racial tensions because I refused to remove my turban? What else am
I guilty of ? Maybe I should come clean. It was me who suggested
that Scotland forgo its independence and sign the Treaty of Union in
1707. It was me who decided invading Iraq was a good idea. And it
was me who hurdled the barrier at Celtic Park and cuffed the Milan
keeper on Wednesday night.
Keeping it together for
India’s
Partition
I
got a call from my son’s school in July. A phone call from the
school is rarely a good thing. But this was one of those rare
occasions when it was. His history teacher had heard a wee
documentary series I had made for the wireless looking back on 60
years of the partitioning of
India and he wondered whether I might just pop in and have a wee
chat about it. No worries, I thought. A wee chat with what I
imagined to be half a dozen A-Level history students; there’d
probably be a glass of wine and a curly sandwich.
All was well and good until I checked out the school website a few
days before the chat to find out that it was in fact billed as a
lecture; but no ordinary lecture: the Richard Dimbleby Inaugural
Lecture. It was to be delivered in front of 150 students and guests.
And that’s how I spent my Wednesday evening, nervously trying to
seem knowledgeable hoping that the spirit of Mr Dimbleby senior was
otherwise engaged.
Let’s grasp the thistle at the Stade de France
 Some hours after you read this I shall be sat in the Stade de France
in my best kilt, over-sized sporran and darkest blue turban waiting
for the hairs on the back of my neck to make themselves
known as we prepare to go into battle. I then will be on the pitch
(spiritually at any rate) joining the wall of blue, white and
thistle as we get in among the Pumas and try to cause an upset at
the Rugby World Cup. My friend Andy called me and asked if I was
Scottish enough to be interested in going to the game; he had a
spare ticket. Scottish enough? It led me to ponder degrees of
Scottishness. Are the Proclaimers more Scottish than me because they
sing in a Scottisher accent? With my Glaswegian burr am I Scottisher
than Alastair Mackenzie, once Monarch of all our Glens, who sounds
like an Englishman even though he was born and brought up in
Perthshire? And what about Archie Gemmill or Annie Lennox or Alex
Salmond? Are they the Scottishest of the lot? How do you convey what
you feel about your nationality? It’s a strange one. I interviewed
some people in the British National Party a few years back. Bless
them. I was offered the leader of the youth wing of the party, a boy
barely old enough to shave, who had decided that
Britain was solely for the use and enjoyment of the ethnically
white. I was more than happy to help him enforce his policy if the
rest of us could have Australia, America and South Africa back.
Anyway, I asked this lad whether he regarded me as Scottish.
Obviously I feel very Indian, but I grew up in
Scotland. He was quite firm in his opinion that I could never be
Scottish. Ever. This was because I was not ethnically Scottish. This
lad from the BNP was not for moving. I tried to explain to him that
even if my skin and my ancestry are not “Scottish”, my heart and my
soul are. I cannot control the quickening of my heart when I hear
‘Flower Of Scotland’; I have no ability to stop my soul yearning for
the Highlands when I hear the pipes played; I cannot stop shedding a
tear when I watch Braveheart and Mel Gibson is on the rack.
(Incidentally the wee boy from the BNP said he would have been left
cold by the prospect of an evening of chicken dhansak, aloo gobi and
a peshwari naan all hand-served by Beyoncé Knowles and
Halle
Berry. Maybe he didn’t like curry.)
I’m gladdened by the new dawn in the politics of a contemporary, SNP-skewed
Scotland.
The nation has never felt so inclusive, never felt so
forward-looking, never felt so exciting. And I have never been so
proud to be a Scot. I feel part of our future in a way I could only
have dreamt of as I grew up.
Now all we have to do is send the Argentinians home to think again.
One dream at a time...
(About the author: Hardeep Singh Kohli is a Sikh Glaswegian comedian
and writer. As a writer, comedian, actor, presenter, director and
cartographer, he has an extensively broad range of experience. He is
currently working as a regular presenter/contributor for both BBC TV
and Radio shows, has his own column in the Scotsman on Sunday and is
a guest columnist for The Guardian. He was the star of the Channel 4
sitcom Meet the Magoons and produced a Channel 4 documentary, In
Search of the Tartan Turban, which explored cultural identity as a
Scot and ethnic- minority Briton. In September 2006 he reached the
final of BBC One’s ‘Celebrity Masterchef’.)
(Courtesy scotlandonsunday.scotsman.com )
10 October, 2007
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