I’m now in London and am about to go for some meetings. I am staying with my youngest brother who lives near Canary Wharf, a place which has seen some drastic changes since I lived in the UK.
For many people who have never been to the UK, London
is pretty much their experience of the entire country. However, if you’ve lived
outside of London, you’ll realise that there is a huge difference between
London and the rest of the UK. If you were to look at the UK as a family,
London would be the child that got everything, including all the genetic
benefits of being born to fairy tale royalty. I can’t think of any other capital
city in the G7 that plays such a dominant role when compared to the rest of the
country as London. On the good side, people seem better looking and more
confident when compared to the rest of the UK. On the downside, London traffic
is awful. London accounts for a quarter of the nations GDP and contributes well
and above what it takes out from public finances. It’s as if you only notice
that the rest of the UK exists when it comes to football season (Manchester and
Liverpool).
One of, if not the factor in making London such a
dominant force when compared to the rest of the UK, is the fact that its very
international. When the rest of the world comes to the UK, the predominantly stay
in London and when I lived in the UK, one of the great jokes was the fact that its
hard to find an English person on the streets on London.
The British government has literally invited the world’s
wealthy to live in London (something which we’re working on emulating in Singapore)
and having a sizable real-estate portfolio in London itself is often part of
the prerequisites of being wealthy. Its said that this policy has made London
the world’s laundromat for money (a point that one makes about Singapore but in
less open ways). The two most prominent groups of people parking money in
London are the Russians, hence “Londonigrad” and the South Asians (India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh), hence “Lodnonistan” or “Londonabad.”
I’ll leave aside the topic of money laundering to
intelligent people. What I will say, however, is that one of the great joys of
having so many people from elsewhere settle in a single place is the fact that
you get good quality cuisine from a variety of nations. Nowhere is this truer when
it comes to Indian food. If you like north Indian food, take a trip to the UK
and you’ll get probably the best Indian food around.
I was reminded of this when my brother brought me out
to Dishoom in Canary Wharf. This is literally the success story of the Russel
Peters joke about the ancestral home of every Indian being the UK. Dishoom is a
British-Born chain of upmarket Indian restaurants.
The Dishoom restaurants are modeled on the “Irani-Cafes”
of Bombay (now known as Mumbai). They even had signs in Hindi and as my brother
pointed out, they even adjusted the smells of the place.
You could call the experience of being in Mumbai or at
least the parts of Mumbai that the like Baal Thackery would want the world to
see.
How did it happen? I guess you could say the large
South Asian diaspora in the UK has ensured good quality food. This is a
community that has worked hard and built decent lives for itself (you never see
a homeless person of Asian Origin in the UK). Its also a story of how the
British as a whole have welcomed South Asian cuisine into and made part of
their own. Dishoom is, I believe an example of what you could call what people
can build up if they had the chance to.
This little bit of Mumbai on the Thames has proven
that you a single city can add to the life and landscape of the place. It’s a reason
for places to be open to the outside world. Places that are open inevitably
prosper. Places that shut themselves inevitably don’t – anyone want to migrate
to Pyongyang?
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