The film Slumdog Millionaire was interesting at many levels. It draws on an internationally recognisable brand, the popular quiz show ‘Who wants to be a millionaire?’ The elements of the game show are familiar to many of us and phrases such as ‘phone a friend’ have forever become inscribed with the meaning it holds in the show. As such, the film draws on the international success of an entertainment phenomenon, and the franchising deals that have indeed gone on to help circulate this programme in many countries in the last ten years. Like some of the other popular shows, its national (in this case, British) origins have been subsumed by its international success.

However, unlike the programme, the film is clearly marked as British, drawing its ‘Britishness’ from the nationalities of its producer, director and some of its key actors. The success of the film at the Oscars has been lauded as an achievement of British cinema. Media discussions of the Oscar victory in the British press focused, right from the start, on whether this success is an indicator of the revival of British cinema and how future success at the Oscars for the country can be ensured.

Yet, it is not only the Brits who are making claims to this film. Rather like ‘Obama’ who may be simultaneously claimed by Kenya, the US and Indonesia at a minimum (though the Irish are in on tracing his routes to their land too) Slumdog too can be claimed by many others, most notably by Indians. For many Indians it is an Indian film as every scene is set in India, the narrative delves deep into the miseries of modern life in a Mumbai slum and the storyline is ultimately an unveiling of urban India. Indeed, for Vikas Swarup, the author of the book Q&A, on which the film is based, the story is wholly Indian. In an interview he says ‘I don't want to be branded as a writer catering to Western sensitivity. This is an Indian novel, rooted in Indian tradition, written with Indian idioms. It is an Indian story of Indian characters in the Indian milieu.'  Many of the film's actors, the music and much else draws on Indian people, places, objects, realities. The recognition received by the young actors from the Indian government is testimony to this claim.

Slums in India.
[image © copyright Photos.com]

However, other Indians have betrayed their ownership of the film, not with pride, but by denouncing aspects of the film as not reflecting India properly. An example of the perpetual issue of representation and replication that surrounds film analysis is the way in which the portrayal of Indian poverty, in particular, has troubled many people from/in India. Some see this as a peculiarly British portrayal – a vestigial imperial sentiment, of degradation of what has been lost in the disassembly of Empire. For others, it is not a fair depiction – it glosses over the complexity of life in urban slums. Still others comment on how they felt about this portrayal in the context of being part of a movie-going public in the US or UK. This portrayal of India seems to evoke more shame in British or American theatres, or while going out with British and American friends. These issues of representation and belonging become even more complex when understood as part of the film-going experience.

As I watch the recriminations and the adulations I am wondering what claims to national pride are being performed by the audience alongside those performed by the actors on screen? What exactly is being lost and created in these performances? Whose film is it? Or is its success that it creates either affection or disaffection in those who watch it. It perturbs them and who they are by making them reflect on what they see. Maybe that is why the award should go to…

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Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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The stories of Mumbai were widely covered by the world press. And there have been a range of commentators on various aspects of the coverage of the attacks, especially, the media focus on Taj, rather than the many other sites where ordinary people lost their lives. As Arundhati Roy remarked, the lives of some seemed to matter more than that of others.

However, what I want to remark on here is the way in which the pictures of 26/11 and the analysis then circulated through the media. One evening an Indian friend sent me a link to a set of television programmes on a Pakistani TV channel that claimed that 26/11 was indeed India’s 9/11.

The programmes said that just as the US had perpetrated the attacks on the World Trade Centre in order to justify attacking Iraq and Afghanistan, so too had India masterminded the attacks in Mumbai in order to kill the chief of the anti-terrorism squad, Hemant Karkare, who was due to pronounce that a Hindu-led political group was behind one of the bomb blasts earlier in India. However, the anchor and the guests on this channel claimed, the Indians were unable to conduct this home-made terrorism with the panache that the Americans had conducted 9/11.

I was not the only recipient of this link – it circulated widely on a range of email groups, was shown on Indian television and became a frequently discussed topic within the diasporic community. The large number of hits on its youtube page bear witness to its circulation.

It also provoked a range of responses from those who read it, particularly a degree of disbelief and anger at the stand taken in the programme. It led to familiar calls to stop the appeasement of Muslims in India, and of Pakistan more generally. A few people argued, as Roy has, that terrorism has its routes in past injustices, and economic deprivation, not (only?) religion or regional affiliation.

Yet, it also provoked in me questions of how to deal with this text that I was sent – do I delete the link, share it with our Pakistani friends, share it with our Indian friends, ignore it? The hour-long programme was clearly inflammatory, defamatory, but also thought-provoking about the possibilities of alliances, different interpretations, viewpoints. These questions of communication and of our responsibilities about what to say, when and to whom continue to haunt me as the airwaves abound with sympathy and solidarity with those who were killed in the attacks and more problematically with critique and counter-critique which masquerades as analysis of the attacks. These questions of mediation, of the multiple roles that the media play, what gets reported, how these reports then take on their own life, are re-reported, analysed and become the material for new rounds of angst is the stuff of our lives. This blog is another, and hopefully, a reflexive part of that stuff.

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Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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The retired BBC political editor John Sergeant’s resignation from the popular television programme Strictly Come Dancing was one of the top entertainment stories this week. John Sergeant was by all accounts not a very good dancer and was always rated poorly by the panel of expert judges who help to shape public opinion. By this criteria he should have been voted out but he remained on the show for 9 weeks – winning the popular vote week after week.

His resilience eventually became controversial and he withdrew from the competition on November 19. His resignation has ignited much discussion in the media.

The producers of the programme have supported Sergeant in his decision; contributors to blogs on this issue accuse the judges of forcing Sergeant to leave. They are disappointed at his departure but also at the failure to make the public vote count in shaping who continues forward in the programme. However, in his resignation speech Sergeant suggested that he had quit the programme of his own volition.

He claimed that we live in a democracy and so people will vote as they like, but that his continued presence on the programme was stretching the joke too far. This democratic nature of voting and the rejection of democracy seems to be at the heart of the question on many people’s lips   - did he quit or was he pushed?

The programme Strictly Come Dancing, has a top slot on BBC One on Saturday evenings. Strictly is a game show – competition and elimination of the weaker participant are the tools through which the narrative for the next episode is written. Some people will go on to be part of next week’s programme, others won’t. The basis for the competition is talent, produced with the help of professional dancers, judged by a panel of professional dancers. And the glamour, the sequins, the sets all make Strictly a visual treat for a Saturday night. It brings the glamour of the catwalk into autumn evenings. Hence, the programme advertises itself as offering sparkle, glitz, glamour and of being an extravaganza.

Strictly Come Dancing is also part of the later versions of reality show – a mixture of game show, talent show and glitzy entertainment show. At its heart, Strictly is a reality show - the sixteen contestants who are invited to participate in it are all scripted as ordinary with regard to their dancing skills. The lack of professional dancing skills is part of most people’s everyday reality. The contestants claim ordinariness in comparison to the professional dancers with whom they perform – these contestants could be us! Yet it is the lack of their ordinariness – their high profile (but not too high-profile as to threaten the ordinariness) presence on our screens, in sport, in the news that make them interesting.

It is also through their prominence in these other walks of life that they become part of our reality – we, the ordinary people already know them. They are extraordinary but not that extraordinary that we can not be made to see how they are like us – not professional dancers. This double play on ordinariness is an essential ingredient of Strictly Come Dancing’s appeal. The extraordinary people who participate in the programme are democratised through their lack of professional dancing skills.

This double-edged nature of ordinariness extends to the audience. The panel of judges adjudicates on the performance of each set of competitors. They provide knowledgeable critique of technical aspects of dance. They are clearly experts. Yet, their commentary does not determine the fate of the contestants – that is left to the audience. Moreover, in the age of technology, this is a mediated audience, not just those in the room at the time. The multiple sites where Strictly is debated - blog sites, newspaper articles, the conversations over dinner – means that like all programmes, its effects spill beyond the room in which it is conducted.

People who watch on television or through the Internet make up the bulk of the voters. But the same right to vote also extends to those who don’t watch the programme. As participants in this multiply mediated world, those who don’t watch too may decide to express their views by casting a vote. Moreover, there is no way of distinguishing between the votes of those who watch the programme and those who don’t. It is inherently democratic, giving everyone – indeed anyone – an equal chance to vote contestants off a programme.

Clearly the adjudication of talent is then not necessarily a part of deciding who goes forward from week-to-week. Yet, the choice between contestants is often seen as an act of discernment where ordinary viewers can make judgements on dance. It places members of the lay audience (and the not so-lay, there are bound to be professional dancers who are not part of the adjudicating panel, who too use technical knowledge to vote) in the position of technical judge. It suggests that we, the ordinary people can understand and appreciate dance, and we can even choose between performers. Technical knowledge is democratised and lay people are placed as technical experts.

Most of the time the programme trundles on with some degree of consensus between this form of technical knowledge and lay knowledge, between talent show and entertainment show, between judges and the voting public. The ordinariness of the contestants is slowly removed as the participants acquire technical skills. They become talented and rightful contenders for winning a talent show. They become extra-ordinarily able to dance. Or when that fails to happen there is some consensus between the views of the technical judges and the lay people – the contestants who fail to become extraordinarily talented are criticised by the judges and voted off the programme by the voting public. Judges shape public comment and eventually the two merge in their decisions.

Yet in the sixth episode of Strictly Come Dancing this pact came undone. The ordinary people repeatedly voted to keep John Sergeant on the programme despite his poor dancing skills. They voted for his affability, his entertainment value; they ignored his lack of talent. They voted for his ordinariness but also his extraordinariness. Gaffes seem to be part of John Sergeant’s personality – after all, his most memorable broadcast was a gaffe made at the time of the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s resignation. He was standing outside the doors of NO. 10 telling the nation that she would not come out to speak to the people and before he had finished, the camera focused on the Prime Minister coming out of the door to do just that.

The judges, on the other hand, performed their role as adjudicators of talent and criticised his performance. The mismatch between Strictly as entertainment show and Strictly as talent show came to the fore. There were questions raised about the nature of the programme as a talent show, given Sergeant’s continued survival, and eventually he resigned despite continuing to win the popular vote.

John Sergeant is right in stating that we live in a democracy but the discursive powers that shape that democracy that influence voting and that make some individuals make the decisions they take are clearly far more complex. The democratic nature of the country, the programme and the role of the voting public in shaping the reality of reality television remains unclear.

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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The NHS was the brain child of Aneurin Bevan and drew upon his experience of the medical aid scheme offered in Tredegar in South Wales by the major employer in the town, the Tredegar Iron and Coal Company. Bevan became minister for healthcare and housing under Clement Attlee’s post-war government and used this opportunity to radically restructure medical care, ensuring that it was free at the point of delivery for all citizens, irrespective of their ability to pay. It has become one of the hallmarks of British identity, summoning up what the then Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown referred to on January 14, 2006 in his speech to the Fabian Society as 'one of the great British institutions – what 90 per cent of British people think portrays a positive symbol of the real Britain – founded on the core value of fairness that all should have access to health care founded on need not ability to pay.’

Aneurin Bevan.
[image © copyright BBC]

Since the inception of the National Health Service, migrant doctors have been seen as an integral but devalued part of the health workforce. These doctors were necessary for its operation, providing a mobile army of labour in the lower rungs of a pyramidal medical hierarchy, ensuring that UK doctors at the apex did not have to compete too much for pickings from the much diminished private sector. Overseas qualified doctors were provided training in the health service in return for meeting the health service requirements of the population. They were, however, systematically disadvantaged in terms of access to jobs, career mobility, the places where they found employment and the specialties they could occupy. They have come to be called ‘sepoys’ and ‘indentured labour’ pinpointing the situations of trained migrant doctors and the organization employing them. Disproportionately represented in training posts and in non-career grade posts they have, however, been a backbone for the development of this very British institution. Thus, in 2003, only 17 per cent of South-Asian doctors were consultants compared with 42 per cent of white doctors, which provides some evidence that migrant doctors from South-Asia continued into the present century to find their careers limited by the hierarchical nature of the NHS.

But one of the specialties where they have found a home and established a niche is geriatric medicine, a specialty that too was born in 1948. Marjory Warren, often considered the “mother of geriatrics” established the first geriatric unit in the UK, where older patients were admitted, rehabilitated and sent home. This was an innovation in elderly care at that time. Before the establishment of the NHS doctors had provided free medical service to support the charity hospitals but had earned substantial incomes, on the whole, through private practice. After the establishment of the NHS and the amalgamation of most existing hospitals, including the workhouses, into the national provision, doctors’ salaries were paid for out of the national taxation system and there was some resistance to taking over the regular care of elderly frail people. Geriatrics became associated with the wider disdain given to its clientele, older people. As such it became a ‘Cinderella specialty’, a disregarded area of healthcare serving the needs of one of the least regarded groups of patients. However, the work of a few pioneers such as Marjory Warren, slowly changed the nature of healthcare for old people with the development of acute care for older people and its own subspecialisms. It began to offer a career trajectory and eventually became what it is today, the second largest specialty with just under 900 consultants in hospitals. As we enter an ageing society, this development of geriatrics within the NHS is set to continue.

Silhouette of elderly man in wheelchair.
[image © copyright BBC]

In part responding to the dire medical neglect of older people within the NHS hospital system and in part to government and management pressure to improve bed occupancy figures, geriatric medicine grew rapidly, to large extent depending on recruits from overseas for its expansion. But this 'Cinderella specialty' status also gave room for overseas trained doctors who found their own opportunities for career growth to find a home. They too became pioneers in this discipline, shaping the nature of geriatric care today. It came to be a field where South Asians could find jobs so that 22 per cent of all geriatric consultants appointed between 1964 and 2001 were non-white and had trained outside the UK, compared to 14.1 per cent of all consultants in the NHS.

These doctors felt drawn to the UK, rather than the USA, because in South Asia they were already part of a socio-cognitive community for whom markers of participation in the UK labour market were central to notions of career progression. Migration to the UK for the purpose of training, gaining membership of prestigious UK Royal Colleges (MRCP etc) has long been embedded in South Asian doctors’ professional cultures.

For many doctors, their lecturers in medical school had undergone some form of training in the UK and that upgrading and validating skills through training at one of the UK royal colleges was seen as crucial to being recognized as a good doctor. Thus, the doctors’ mobility was already embedded in a network of professional development which valued temporary movement to the UK. Moreover, at least in medicine, the power of empire continued to be forceful as medical practice and qualifications were very much influenced by regulating bodies and by professional organizations, located in the metropolis. Doctors were thus already in some ways part of a professional community where migration to the UK was seen as part of career progression.

As the country is poised to celebrate, and rightly, the establishment of one of the most remarkable institutions of twentieth century UK, it is also worth remembering and commemorating the twists of history that led to the development of geriatrics and the role of overseas qualified doctors therein.

For details of a project exploring the experiences of South Asian geriatricians, visit Overeseas-trained doctors and the development of geriatric medicine.

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Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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I still hold by what I said there but the teachers' strike on April 24^th made me wonder when and what kinds of calculations might be important, even necessary.

And this is why.

Ed Balls, the schools secretary wrote in an article Why Britain has the best teachers ever on Tuesday October 23, 2007 :

The best teachers show children and young people a world they never knew existed. They open doors of opportunity and inspire a lifelong love of learning.

I hope everyone can look back on at least one teacher who really made a difference to them. We all want our children to be taught by people who not only help them to learn and progress, but also make a real difference to their lives and aspirations.

He offers a ringing endorsement to the teaching profession. He recounts, if you like, their incalculable worthiness.

However, at least according to the National Union of Teachers (NUT), this worthiness definitely remains uncalculated in the current pay offer that the government has made to teachers. At 2.45% it is well below the retail price index of 4.1%. The NUT therefore calculates that their wage increases are well below the inflation rate. They see this not only as a mark of Government failure to reward teachers with appropriate pay increases but also as signalling the wider worth given to teaching. Poor pay leads to a feeling of unworthiness among teachers and can result in falling standards amongst those who are drawn into the profession. In short, unless teachers are paid as if they are the best, the ‘best’ will shun teaching.

At the heart of this issue is an interesting paradox. Ed Balls clearly values teachers but he does not (at least according to the NUT) place an appropriate financial value on their contributions. The teachers ask for, what they consider, rightful financial remuneration – the incalculable worthiness recognised in Ed Balls’ speech seems to be inadequate. They want appropriate commensuration for their work.

Perhaps, it is worth stopping off here to explore a little what exactly we mean by commensuration. Commensuration is the process by which different qualities are made comparable by quantifying them. Of course, this process of quantification is inherently a way of ascribing value. It is not an end point but part of a system whereby you have some expectations about the contributions that might be made by teachers.

Commensuration as a practice always simplifies complex realities by eliminating heterogeneity and selecting comparable elements. It fixes, through the process of revelation, particular aspects of their existence as valuable, while obscuring others. For Plato, this process of simplification made it easier to navigate the world. It was a necessary part of rational living as it would remove passion and emotion from processes by which we value goods or people. It would stabilize our decision making by giving less room for subjective variations in what we value. His student, Aristotle, on the other hand, thought that too much was lost in this process of simplification. Difference and uniqueness and valuing things for their own sake, were, for him, the qualities that made us ethical humans.

Irrespective of whether we support Plato’s viewpoint or Aristotle’s, the value of a teacher’s labour it appears has already been calculated. The main pay scale varies across 6 bands while the upper pay scale has three bands. Progression in the main pay scale is related to years of work while progression in the upper pay scale is based on the discretion of the governing body. The value of the teacher will be assessed by school governing bodies, in line with local priorities. In addition teachers can also apply for Teaching and Learning Responsibility Allowance, if they take up a responsibility beyond that required by others. And then there are the Advanced Skills Teachers with their own 18 point pay spine; Excellent Teachers with their salary scheme; and the Leadership group which includes head teachers and other school leaders who have a 43 point pay scale. Teachers can also apply for Performance Related Pay and some teachers will be eligible for special allowances for teaching in London.

A teacher.
[Image ©: copyright photos.com]

By the time I waded through these ‘differences’ in how teachers’ pay is calculated and these marks of recognition of uniqueness, simplicity began to look decidedly appealing! Jokes apart, the recognition of what matters in a particular context is something to be lauded. Teachers may (in my mind rightly) object to the way in which they have been transferred from the old scale to the new, without pay protection, leading to a reduction of recognition of certain tasks that they do and an erasure of the value of others but the many different scales does suggest the difficulties in equating qualitatively different types of work undertaken under different conditions. So the calculation of value seems, in this case, to have been done with an eye on the diversity of conditions in which teachers work

However, what is at stake here is not just the recognition of differences between teachers but also that between teachers and other workers in the economy. Why do teachers, who are given charge of shaping a whole generation for a minimum of 12 years, get paid so much less than some other professionals? What does this tell students about respect and value? What is the metric being used to calculate value? And how does this compare with how other people’s work is valued and measured? This is where recalculation seems to be necessary and important, given the society in which we live. Perhaps Ed Balls needs to go back to school for some lessons on calculating and rewarding value!

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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Certain individuals always seem to raise more questions about worthiness than others – migrants being an obvious category as evidenced by all the discussion on how migrants can prove they are worthy of citizenship in the UK.

‘Housewives’ are another. This week a poll of 4,000 housewives for an online networking website alljoinon.com ‘suggested that the average mum worked for nearly nine hours a day every day. The website said a housewife would earn almost £30,000 a year if she was employed to do all the same errands.’ This is significantly higher than the UK’s average annual wage of £23,700.

[Photograph taken by Geekgirly. Used under Creative Commons license.]

There is a lot going on in this snippet – for one, ‘housewives’ is not a category we hear much about any more so it had me intrigued as to why we don’t really hear much about this ‘category’ anymore. Have they fallen off all policy agendas and media interest? Or are they now called something else? In this snippet it is also assumed that all housewives are mums – has the model of the working woman become so ubiquitous that the only ‘housewives’ in the country are mums? What of women, who do not have children, are they not housewives too? And then the article calls what a housewife does ‘errands’ – cleaning the toilet never feels like an errand to me!

But what really riveted me in reading this piece was the fact that yet again we see a desire to calculate the value of housework. Back in 1972 Chase Manhattan Bank estimated the value of housework undertaken per household in the US at $257 per week. In 1978 Canadian housework was valued at 40% of GNP. By 1984 in Germany the value of "house and family work" was estimated at three times total government expenditure. Clearly, these attempts at calculation have been going on for some time now.

Social scientists too are in on the act. In the 1970s most of the analysis of housework revolved around the sexual division of housework and its economic value in a capitalist society. Feminists argued that women who did most of the housework without pay within their own households contributed to the economy by subsidizing the family wage and by ensuring the growth of the next generation of workers at a rate far cheaper than that which could be purchased in the market. And some feminists argued for the need to place a value on housework so that those who did housework would be adequately and appropriately remunerated. As Selma James, one of the founder members of the Wages for Housework Campaign said many years ago "Work that is not valued is not happening and therefore cannot be refused".

However, for other feminists there was something about the love and affection that went into ironing children’s clothes and in cooking their food which was never easily calculable. They argued that the psychological and the ideological aspects of housework were omitted in economic calculations of ‘worth’. As Diane Elson, an economist, argued in 1991, household work cannot be assessed solely in terms of its economic utility as it has an intrinsic value and not merely an instrumental value. The emotional elements of housework contribute as much to society even though there may be no way of counting exactly what these contributions are worth. And then there may be other elements of housework that never come into calculations. They plainly do not qualify for calculation – indeed, they may even resist any attempts to put a value on them. And if we were to be humble we could even say that we simply do not know what they are worth.

So today when we weigh up yet again how much housewives are worth, it might be useful to remind ourselves of how worth is counted up and the qualities that never come to be calculated when we take stock of our own and others’ worth to society. Perhaps, it is that incalculable quality that the Valentine’s card evokes. And one day we may even be able to extend that incalculable worthiness to the strangers around us – to recognise the limits of simply numerically evaluating the ‘worth of migrants’ to the UK.

About the author

Parvati Raghuram is Lecturer in Geography at the Open University. Her research interests focus on the ways in which the mobility, of individuals, goods and of ideas is reshaping the world.

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