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The Hundred Foot Journey
The Hundred Foot Journey, plays out against a physically short distance, yet the distance that keeps the people involved apart, is vast. The movie tells the story of a meeting between two cooking cultures: Indian and French. Both are proud of their cooking traditions. An Indian family, displaced some time before to England by political violence in their home country, seeks out a new life across the channel in Europe. A chance car breakdown takes them to an idyllic French town; where they find the food ingredients with the flavours they are seeking. Their arrival sparks a competition between cooking cultures and rival restaurants. Four characters are at the heart…
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Only Water in a Stranger’s Tears
‘It’s only water in a stranger’s tears.’ I start with this line partly because I’ll always get in a musical reference if I can (it’s a lyric from the song Not One of Us, by Peter Gabriel), but also because it sums up to me what defining ‘the other’ (the foreigner) seems to be all about: denying the humanity of a particular group of people. And perhaps nothing defines our humanity as much as our tears, whether from grief, distress, fear, or even happiness. We shed tears when emotion, that quintessentially human experience, overwhelms us. We cry with sympathy, too, and not just for people we know. You’d be forgiven…
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The Crisis of Human Rights: Discrimination Against Non-Citizens
The basic idea at the heart of human rights is that all human beings are equal: equal in rights – equal in human dignity. This idea is universally accepted and believed. At the same time another idea – the idea that we are separately citizens of different countries is also a feature of the modern world – and the way it is practised has led to enormous discrimination and violation of human rights. In reality people, as a matter of law, have different fundamental rights even though we believe that all human beings are equal. In a recent paper titled “Human Rights in the Age of Migration: An Empirical Analysis of Human…
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Identity Crisis
Some countries obsess about ‘who we are’. The obsession becomes more intense, the more people with different coloured skins, different accents, diffent cultures become part of day to day life. In an age of migration “we” can become very confusing. Who can “we” be, if quite obviously “us” includes “them”. This question is not just one of tribalism, although tribalism is at the roots of this anxiety. The world is constructed around the idea of “races”: every nation a state and every state a nation. Italians in Italy, Germans in Germany, Poles in Poland. The theory was simple: better simplistic – and it never worked well. At its worst it…
