This story is from February 12, 2006

Now, a website to 'heal' Asians in UK

RASHMEE ROSHAN LALL / TNN / Feb 12, 2006, 21:35 IST

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Hell is to have an American wife, eat British food, have a Chinese house and get an Indian salary.

LONDON: Globalisation heaven, it was once said, is when you have an American salary, live in a British house, eat Chinese food and have an Indian wife.
Hell is to have an American wife, eat British food, have a Chinese house and get an Indian salary. But the times are changing.
In the 21st century, British Asian hell apparently is to live in Blighty, draw a first-world pay cheque, remain buttoned into a century-old straitjacket of customs and have, at some point, been married to an Indian.
The rising numbers of divorced or separated Britain's Asians are caught, in Matthew Arnold's words, between two worlds, one dead, the other struggling to be born.

The putrefying corpse is the solid set of values and moral principles imported from India two generations ago. These were the traditional knick-knacks of a collective cultural inheritance, lovingly packed for overseas transport by grandparents and parents.
They were treated as heirlooms. They have lovingly been polishing them ever since, long after India, the mother country, invested in a modern, wipe-clean range of normative plasticware.

There are no statistics to indicate the size or urgency of the British Asian divorcee situation. Suffice it to say, Britain is Europe's divorce capital. Here, one in four marriages ends badly, lubricated at the bitter end by the inevitable floods of tears.
British Asians number 3.5 million, a small but hardly insignificant, gloriously visible minority in a nation of 60 million.
Those who trade in broken hearts and broken marriages lawyers, websitewallahs, dating agencies reckon more British Asians than ever before are passing through their doors and virtual portals.
According to every anecdotal reckoning, British Asians are increasingly choosing to let go of unhappy, ill-advised or forced marriages without deferring to traditional notions of shame.
After that the deluge. Deferred shame kicks in. The community is not told the truth, nor does it want to know. Britain's native born-and-bred brown quirky-alones are severely left to marinate in the bitter juices leaching out from their dishonourable triumph over the value system.
It is not like India 2006, where divorce rates are still gloriously low compared to the rest of the world (just 11 out of 1,000 marriages) but where there is greater, if reluctant, acceptance of the unfortunate bends and twists in the great surging river that is the human condition.
In honour of their plight, Britain's Asian divorcees are now to get their very own website. Boldly launching on Valentine's Day and brassily titled Asiandivorcee.com, the worldwide web is meant to do the one thing Europe's younger generation of Asians have not yet been able to do say it loud and clear to their community, elders and everyone else.
The borderless web is meant to tear down walls. And join hearts shattered by the messy ructions of divorce.
It is a seminal moment in the life of a community that is overwhelmingly seen to be successful (and especially, for the Hindus, well integrated into British life) but still shrinks within itself when it comes to the birds and the bees and matters of the heart.
The website's garrulous creator is the twice-married Sam Samra, a Birmingham-born-and-bred Punjabi. Samra, now happily re-married to a south Mumbai doctor with a child from a previous marriage, believes he is a change-maker.
His fledgling website is just one teensy bit of billions of internet pages. But, several-hundred divorced British Asians have already defiantly registered. Britain today, tomorrow America and India, says Samra.
No one is sure if one website can change a whole community frozen in the aspic of the cultural mores of yesterday's South Asia. But it may be worth a try.

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