Caste system, segregated communities, resentment, racism 1st July, 2004 sound Sound Cassette English Abhijeet Joshi Oral Interview Interview 061 Pravin Lukka Male Busia

Leicester U.K. 'O' levels, science graduate from University of Bombay EN Gujarati, English I would like to start off with some background questions to get an idea of you know where you are coming from, before you came to the U.K. and what your life was like leading up to, present day basically? So I would like to ask, could you tell me where your parents were born and where they came from? Both my parents were born in villages around Porbandar area in Gujarat, Porbandar obviously is famous for, that's the birth place for Mahatma Gandhi and my father was born in a small village called Kadech which is about eighteen miles from Porbandar and my mom was born in a place called Navi Bandar, which became a derelict village, it was kind of a small port. I think remnants of it are still there. And my father went to Africa at the age of ten, in 1919 at the end of first world war, my grand father had been to Uganda in 1909 so he had already been there for about ten years. Okay, then so did your father go on his own or did he go with the rest of his family? My father went with my grand parents and his younger brother and sister, so four of them went together. And do you know how they went? They went by one of those Arab dhow, where everything depended on the wind and the sail and you could go few miles forward one day and the next you could go few miles backwards. So the journey could take anything from about a month to couple of months, but on average the journey was about six weeks and they would be from either Porbandar or Bombay to Mombasa in Kenya and then from Mombasa they would take either train journey or car journey. And when did your mother come to Africa? My mother was my father's second wife so she came to Uganda around 1944, few years after my father's first wife had died and he went back to India to get married again and that's when my mom came. What was your father's profession then when he because he grew up then in Uganda and? See, at the age of ten when my father came to Uganda, he didn't have a, much education in India, he was kind of a, teachers found it difficult to control him and my grand father had this suspicion about missionary schools in Uganda that their angle is solely to convert, African children and Indian children to Christianity, so he would not send him to a missionary school and he taught my father at home how to read, write and count and he taught him how to read the religious scriptures of Hinduism and my father was kind of jack of all trades. Basically a merchant who bought and sold goods, and who was also during season times a cotton buyer, I go to the villages or remote parts of districts and buy cotton from the African farmers and then sell it to the people who want the ginneries and make a living in between. It was quite hard life, long hours and it wasn't hugely profitable unless you are a ginnery owner, but he had a decent living made out of it, yes. And then later part of his life, he had a transport business as well which I used to thoroughly enjoy, because by that time, I was about twelve or fourteen and I used to thoroughly enjoy working with him, evenings, afternoons, Saturday-Sundays, school holidays. And before his retirement he went back to his favorite trade which was shop keeping and he had a shop in a village called Kangole, in the Eastern parts of Uganda, near Moroto, where, if you remember like the Massais and the Turkanas in Kenya, the Karamojong do not really believe in wearing clothes and they believe the cattle all over the world belong to them, so they are cattle rustlers basically. Really? Yes, even to this day they do that, yes. Oh, okay, I never heard of that. The Karamojong in Eastern Uganda. Okay, so where was your father living then when you were born? My father was living in a small village called Busia which is twelve miles from the third largest town of Uganda, Mbale in Eastern Province, only about thirty or forty miles from the border with Kenya and about 150 miles East of the capital city of Uganda, Kampala. So here, he had this business in 1948 when I was born in Busia and I think when I was about three years old he decided that, children would miss out on education, so we moved out to Mbale, the town now, just quite big at that time and it had a nice primary school and a good secondary school. So for education purposes, it's amazing he himself never had any formal education but he is very keen to see that children do not miss out. So for our sake he closed the business in that town and he came to Mbale, so that we could all go to a decent school. Okay, so can you tell me just a little bit about life growing up and from the town, I mean, I guess you still have connections with the villages as well, and with your father's business, you have got, can just tell me a little bit about, you know life for a young person growing up, in Uganda? I think it was very carefree. As children you played with all the children in the neighborhood and you make the most of what you had. People had very little so if you had an apple so you and your friends would share an apple, you try and tell that children here that about four or five people will eat one apple. You find what one apple yeah, they would share a slice and we would be happy. It was just sharing that, that comradeship which was there, and toys weren't in abundance very few toys so you just played and you played lot of sports, you did lot of outdoor activities. If you had a bicycle or a tricycle, you shared it with your friends or your brothers and sisters, everybody had a go and your parents, really, basically fed you, you were never allowed to know what was the family's position economically or whether any problems? You just got up in the morning, got ready, went to school came back at one o'clock, and the schools were usually from about half seven or quarter to eight in the morning till one o'clock because afternoons would be very hot, so generally afternoon schools were avoided. So afternoon you had time either to do your homework, go to the library or sit and do nothing or play, and evening you again had the similar situations and come home in the evening have a meal, no television in those days, so you are lucky if your parents had a radio and they may listen to radio, they will listen to South African music and then basically go to sleep. So very protected life, very carefree life, and you were not really exposed to hardships of or reality of life, in the sense that poverty or how the Africans on the other side of the town lived or how the Europeans, as we used to call them, they were white colonial English people, who ruled the country at that time, how they lived on the posh part of the town. I mean it was kind of a luxury if your parents had a car and you went for a ride through that area. Okay, that's what my next question was going to be, what was the interaction like at that time between the different communities even, you know for adults and also for children, you know was it quite divided? I think the interactions were fine, I mean people were divided on the basis of color. You had the white people whose main involvement was kind of administrative jobs, banks and institutions and who ran the country, and their interactions with Indians was very limited. The Indians or the Asians as they were later on known as, were the kind of the buffer between the white people and the black African people and the Indians generally lived in, what I called the center of the town, I residential area, business area and if people were shopkeepers then most people would normally have a shop in the front and the living quarters at the back and that was it. And if you were rich then you perhaps go and buy a house in a better area and live there and not live behind your business, and in fact most people didn't have cars so you walked. There were no buses in the town so you just walk from place to place and if friends gave you lift or relatives gave you lift that was a luxury and the Africans lived usually, when I talk about Africans it always reminds me the T.V. pictures of Soweto in South Africa, but Africans literally lived in what I call, these council type of houses, one bedroom, one kitchen, shared in outside the town, like cheap municipal accommodation and people lived in council houses here just municipal accommodation and you would ever that an Indian would go and live there so, it was all Africans who lived there. In the morning they would all come into the town areas working either as domestic servants or as laborers in businesses and in the evening they went back. And there were bars and restaurants but they were all segregated in terms of the color, like English people would very rarely venture into a bar where Indians went and again drinking wasn't kind of fashionable. Very few people drank, drinking was kind of considered evil and expensive hobby and not many people could afford because there wasn't that kind of huge incomes. And the interaction between us and Africans was very minimal as well. Not until really my secondary school days that I started becoming friends with African pupils and certainly realized here were all these people whom we had missed in all our life. Okay, so tell me a bit then, how your attitude has changed then for your education? I think by, my primary school in Uganda was at a school called 'North Rock Primary School' which had begun life as Indian primary school. Government supported but vast majority of the teachers were Indians, there were all on contracts from India, and in many ways I owe a lot to my teachers both in primary school and in secondary school for what I am and who I am, because today I take great pride that, I write English without grammatical mistakes because that's the way I was taught. I am very conscious of spellings, I would not misspell a word and allow it to go forward and those kind of values were important to us. Now in primary school it was only after about five or six years that African pupils because it was a fee paying school, not many African pupils could afford to come to school so they used to go in the free schools provided by the government for them and the fee paying children started attending with us and in a class of thirty-two or something like that, there would one or two African pupils, which again didn't dawn upon us that this is really discriminatory, this is, we are in a privileged situation, but then there were private boarding schools for the English children and nobody ever came anywhere near that, you couldn't go near that. And it is in secondary school days that we had more and more African students who came to study with us, and yes when you are in the same class you become friends, you talk to people and you started understanding the resentment that they felt towards Indians because to them, they could not understand that it is the colonial masters who are controlling the system. They saw Indians as the people who exploited them, and the people who were robbing them, people who were denying them fair access to services, people who were denying them fair rights and fair prices to goods and people who were basically exploiting them and this is the kind of village thinking that even Idi Amin pronounced so loudly throughout the world, when he expelled the Asians in 1972. And I remember, I having lots of discussions with my fellow African pupils to say yes the system is wrong, but it's not the Indians who have made the system of controlling, Indians are just a part of that system and yes Indians have to take their share of responsibility for working with this system and working in this system, but in the end you have to win the heart and minds of people to say, we are all in this together. And I think in an ideal world it's ironic that ministers from Uganda coming out to place like Leicester and tell the Asians from Uganda to say, please come back, you know, and yet majority of us, if we were given a choice, none of us wanted to leave Uganda and so my thinking was very much on the basis of equality, on the basis of fairness, on the basis of social justice to say, people should be treated fairly, people should be treated equally. And yes, there were lots of things that we were not mature enough to understand like religious differences or what it means to be a Hindu in Uganda, what it means to be a Muslim in Uganda, or a Christian in Uganda, and all these things were part of growing up, and I think my secondary school days to me the biggest lesson was, you have to be fair to people and you cannot treat African people differently because they are black. So after you left secondary school was that when you went to India? Yes. After my 'O' levels I went to Wilson college in Bombay University for four years and that was another kind of experience. Was that your first time going to India? Yes, that was my first time going to India, prior to that everything I knew about India was what my parents had told us, what they remembered about India twenty-thirty years ago, and what we saw India in the movies and the reality was nothing like that. My first day in Bombay and I was just shocked, the sheer crowd, the noise, the pollution, and everybody was in a rush. I just couldn't believe it and I kept saying have I made the right decision to come here. But I didn't have the courage to write to my parents and say can I come back you know. So I had to accept it and say I chose to come to Bombay so I have got to make something out of it, and my four years at that the University in India was kind of a lifetime experience as, which opened your eyes to so many things, like how Indians could discriminate against each other on the basis of caste system, religion, the area where you came from, like Maharashtrians would hate South Indians, South Indians would hate North Indians, and you just couldn't understand why, why is this mentality there. But one reason for all that in my simple mind was that, perhaps the economic benefits were not being shared equally in the society, so the poor were still poor and there they are saying that the country is going forward. But they were not going forward, they were remaining still where they were, and so there was that resentment that who gets a larger share of the cake and who doesn't get anything at all. Their thing was religion and I am amazed that no religion teaches you to hate another religion or be disrespectful to another religion and yet in the name of the religion so many evils were being committed and I am not here to blame anybody or to cleanse anybody's consciousness, but I think all religions have to take their responsibilities seriously. And this is why, even to this day, it doesn't make sense to me, why for example roman catholic some protestants fight in northern island, why for example Jews and Palestinians are at each other's throat and why for example Hindus and Muslims still fight. And yet at an individual level you can look at it and say that Hindus and Muslims put the two of them together and say common guys you have to get on, and they will get on. And that's my experience in life that you have to treat people as they are, and stop labeling people and then saying because you are, you have this such and such label on you, I am going to kick you in, or I am going to discriminate against you. I think if we accept that the world belongs to the mankind, that there is one humanity and that within that humanity you grow, you develop, you learn about your own religion, every religion teaches you to be a good human being. Hinduism will tell you be a good Hindu; Islam will tell you be a good Muslim; Sikhism will tell you be a good Sikh, nobody says to you go and kill anybody in the name of religion. And that's where all those kind of philosophies are developed. But with all those was also a very strong belief and value in social justice, in fairness and in equality in society and in all those making sure that the down trodden that the have-nots in the society had a fair share and were treated fairly and that has been the kind of guiding principle of my life. Even today, I would be the first one to be on the side of anybody being discriminated against or anybody being treated unfairly. Okay, so after you finished your studies then and you went back to Africa, how had the country had changed? Dramatically. During my last year in Bombay, President Obote was over thrown away and Idi Amin had come to power and like all new dictators, new rulers, he promised wonderful things on the first day, that within a few months of his graving power the deaths started happening and he started killing the intelligence here in Uganda amongst the Africans and he never stopped. And when I went back to Uganda, he, his rule had been there for about, almost a few months or a year, nearly a year probably and from entering the Uganda border at Tororo, to Mbale where my family lived 28 miles we were stopped at something like eight or nine road blocks all meant by army, all very eager to do, use machine guns. Now because my father had lived all these years in Africa he knew so many local languages so at each check points he was able to talk to the army officers in their own languages and I think, if my father had not been there, I would have probably been killed or thrown in jail, because A- I was a British passport holder, B- I had come back from India, thirdly I was bringing cholera back to Uganda, so why was I coming back to Uganda, and they just couldn't understand that and I was just shocked the country had changed, you could not travel safely even during day time from one town to another without the army harassing you at every point, and every twist and every turn. And what about actually in the towns of South? In the towns generally things were lot better, lot quieter because whilst some Africans, Ugandans felt that they were benefiting under the Idi Amin regime, a lot of them were suffering as well. Opposition was quietly being butchered and Idi Amin even killed people like Benedicto Kiwanuka, Ben Kiwanuka were the most highly respected Ugandans, who was the founder and leader of Democratic Party. Kind of a person I would have looked upon as the Prime Minister of Uganda. He was murdered by Idi Amin and his henchmen. There were so many such decent people who were killed and to come back to that country was shocking. I had come back with all the high hopes to say I am going to stay in Uganda and probably work as a teacher. But few weeks there and I realized, no, life has changed in here and people are deserting. And from India it was 1971. Yeah, okay so you were telling me about how life had changed in Uganda and the uprising of the military and Idi Amin so, if could you tell me how that actually affected your family then? Well, my father, the business that he had when I went to India, in a small town called Kangole, near Moroto in Eastern Province of Uganda, there was a huge army camp there and he was basically politely told by his army customers that you close the shop and go away, because the leader is planning something, do not stay here, you are not safe. So my father had wound up his business and he had come back to Mbale and when I came back, you could feel tension in the air in the sense that in the evening you would not see many people out on the streets, there's virtually no night life, and people were really scared to go out in the evenings or at night as soon as the darkness fell, people are inside their houses. Economically you could see that shops were beginning to look empty because no new goods were coming in. Slowly I think, other governments, other countries were beginning to find out about true colors of Idi Amin, and he was getting isolated. When he was trying his best to get aid from everywhere, he even visited Britain and the Government at that time promised him ten million pounds, which was never send to Uganda. And I realized from my father's experience of the time, that the things are not right and the options to me were only to join a private secondary school as a teacher and I decided no I wouldn't. Now whilst say, I was in Uganda I also decided to get married and I married my wife, whom I met as a fellow student in Bombay and she was from Dar es salaam in Tanzania. And funnily enough but Idi Amin had declared a war on Tanzania, so the border between Tanzania and Uganda was closed and my future wife and her mother then decided to come via Kenya to Uganda and I had a very simple wedding at that time, which in many ways when I talk about it now it makes me smile a lot about it because I had no job, I had no money, I was dependent on my parents, I was a grown up man, a graduate and I was getting married with no money in my pocket. But I did and my wife and I were quite happy about it. We had a very simple wedding, basically going before a registrar of marriages, the district commissioner and taking our vows and then going to the local Hindu temple, the Sanatan Mandir in Mbale and saying our prayers to God and asking for his blessings for our marriage and then just having some sweet dishes at home and that was it. That was my celebration of my marriage and I also decided that I will try my luck in U.K. Now I was in a peculiar position that although my father was a British citizen, somehow or the other the advice he was given or whatever he was told or not told I do not know, but in 1951 when he had become a British citizen, he didn't register me and my elder sister and my younger brother, three of us as British citizens, and then there were, two sisters and my brother born after 1951 which were all automatic British citizens. So I was in that category of British protected person, so I had a British passport but not citizenship. My application for Ugandan citizenship of course, had been blocked by the government and never processed because they were not sincere enough to give the citizenship. And I inquired about my leading position and there I was told if the Uganda high, if the British High Commission in Kampala would give you a visa, you can go to U.K. So I went and applied for a visa and I got a visa and I exercised my right to come here and I was lucky that I was allowed to entry without any restrictions, which meant I could actually apply for a job. There was no compulsion on me to go back after the six months would expire and so on that basis, I was able to exercise the loop hole in the immigration law and come here in 1971, in September and that's when my life then began in the U.K., some 13th September 1971. Did you come with your wife at that time? No. She joined me two months later, because the only contact point I had in Leicester was my elder sister and her husband were living in Leicester by that time and my younger brother, he had come to Leicester and he was working in Leicester, although he was very ill at that time, so at least I had an address to come to. But then I quickly realized that it's my sister's family, her husband's and I can only be a guest for a few days, I cannot put a camp there and I also realized that, I had no money and something like twelve pounds was my total capital that I had in my pocket and I also realized that I didn't want to claim any social security benefits because I would have seen that as a kind of an insult that here I had come and all I was interested is claiming the benefits. So the options to me was to get a job and I still say today, that if anybody wants to work there's always jobs. I made a few inquiries and I soon realized that with first degree from Bombay I am going to face the same problem everywhere, either I am too highly qualified and no local experience or I am somebody who has got good qualifications but no relevant jobs for you and I said fine I'll take any job that comes along and some people who you talk to in Leicester and in those days there were just very small Asian population in Leicester and so even you could stop a fellow Asian on the street and talk to them and ask them something, ask to them directions either, just say I want to rent a house where can I go. Do you know anybody who wants to rent a room, you could do that, now you cannot, I mean now you got to be careful. But asking people like that I was told that there was a dye house Riverside Dying Company Limited on Green Heath Road in Aylestone, they had a job on as a machine operator. So I went there Monday afternoon, and I was dressed up in suit and tie, the manager interviewed me and said, yeah, you can have the job. But then because I was talking in perfect English trained, it dawned upon him that, I was different, that all the Asians working in there, nobody had any conversation with him like that. So he asked me, what's your qualification and I told him I am a science graduate from University of Bombay, and he said, 'I cannot give you the job, you are too highly qualified, it's an insult to you', I said 'Yeah, you are right.' And then I told him my predicament that, 'Look I am going to face this everywhere I go, I need a job, I will give you a commitment, I'll stay with you for six months, and in six months if you can give me a better job in the dye house, in the laboratory or on the quality control side or on the testing side, I'll stay. After six months if you cannot give me something permanent I'll leave,' how about that and he said, 'Fair enough, that's fine.' And he asked me when can I start. I was totally naive I didn't know the rules, I said I can start now. He said, 'No, you cannot start now you start next Monday', I said no I do not want the rest of the week. So he agreed that I could start the following day, which was a Tuesday morning but he said, 'You are paid week in arrears, is that okay,' and I said, that's fine. And I worked four days the first week and the following Friday, when my pay slip came on a week on Friday, eleven pounds eighty three pence net. I think somewhere in my house I've still got that pay slip, in the attic. And yes, I promised myself that I am not going to stay here for very long, that I am going to definitely better myself and towards the forth or fifth month, they started giving me job on the quality control and dyeing side, but the managing director had promised that laboratory job to someone else. They couldn't give me that permanent job and so at the end of six months I left them. And I went and joined another new dye house 'Texture Jersey Group Limited' and I became their laboratory person and slowly I progressed from laboratory manager to quality control, at the works' chemist, all sorts of titles and they were very happy with my job and the company was very happy. But in about three years I realized and they realized that I was stuck in the laboratory, that I wasn't going anywhere and they wanted me to go and do a post graduate course, 'Society of Dyers and Colorists', and that would have given me a qualification A.S.D.C., something like that, and that was five years and I couldn't commit for five years. But in those early three or four years, what I had also begun was getting involved in a lot of voluntary work. There was lot of racism, there was lot of resentment. You have heard lot of stories in the media and in '72 when Idi Amin kicked out everybody, obviously Leicester, was one of those local authorities which put an Advert in Uganda, just to say do not come to Leicester. We have no social services, we have no education, no housing, we are overstretched do not come, and I think that backfired on Leicester and today, people like me, I do enjoy reminding local councilors about it that you were the people who put this Advert and look what Ugandan Asians have done to Leicester. And then yes, we will have a laugh about it, but in those days National Front was very strong in Leicester and we had to be careful, even in those days I wouldn't walk into a pub into the city center and I think even today I wouldn't because you learn how to keep out of trouble and you do that and I was very lucky that after my first job at 'Riverside Dying Company', my father wrote me that he had been granted this resettlement voucher, which meant that he was able to come to U.K. with my mom, my two younger sisters and my brother, five of them came in May 1972. Few months earlier before the exodus began and my father didn't like it at all, he kept saying I am going back to Uganda, and I kept saying to him, 'Look dad we are still settling down, we are still trying to find our way, I am saving hard to buy our first house, just stay few months if you do not like it then we will see', and he come over in '72 and the expulsion is announced and of course all his friends and some of our relatives came and he was happy that we settled in Leicester. But Leicester was also changing rapidly and I think my involvement in voluntary work, in committee work, in antiracist work, in promoting racial harmony, all those again positioning me for a role in local authorities or a role in the voluntary sector and I think when I realized in textile industry that I was stuck I decided to move out and that's when I joined Leicestershire Libraries. So tell me how your work then has evolved over the years with both you know, work wise, and with your voluntary work with the community and how you have changed then with that also? In this modern day and age people plan a career, people will say that in three years I want to be from A to B and in four years I want to be from B to C, I have no such career plan. I just took opportunities as they came along in life, I just saw wherever I could contribute something, I went, and so from that point of view, my jobs have really been whatever came along and I liked it and I applied and I got. I mean I am not one of those people who applies for too many jobs, no I do not, if I like a job and I am happy and I am doing that and I enjoyed then I came to stay with that job. So in '76 I joined Leicestershire Libraries to develop library service for ethnic minorities and by the time I left Libraries in 1989, I had become an area librarian with a group of ten libraries and very-very interesting job but, again I was stuck at middle management level. But in my years in libraries I had three or four years as liaison officer for ethnic minorities, then as a special services librarian, then as a divisional specialist and then late last six years as an area librarian, I enjoyed every bit of it. And again it enabled me to continuously participate in committee work, in voluntary work, so I joined an organization called Gujarati Sahitya Academy because I have this passionate belief in promoting mother tongue, and I do say to people of Asian origin, there are not a lot of minorities here, yes you must learn English, yes English is absolutely important if you want to succeed, if you want to compete as equals, but equally if you do not ignore your mother tongue because if you ignore your mother tongue then lot of your culture and your value system will disappear with it because lot of things cannot be translated. And I always give the example of the Hindu tradition of bowing down to your elders, to your parents touching their feet and asking for their blessings and you try and explain the philosophy behind that in English. You need couple of paragraphs or a chapter to write down to say what does this mean and what's the philosophy behind it. And so my jobs continued and my involvement continued in the voluntary sector, promoting racial equality, promoting racial harmony, challenging racism wherever I saw it and also promoting a fairness and equality for everybody to say look as Asians we also have a responsibility that we do not discriminate against each other. Then as Asians we have made a home in this country, so we also have a legal duty to this country, in the sense that as citizens, you have certain obligations to the state, like Mahatma Gandhi said, 'Do not expect anything from the society, if you are not prepared to put back in to the society in equal measures', and so I firmly believe in that, that if you expect society to do something to do for you, than you must be prepared to do something for the society as well and I think anything that we do, whether you are involved in a parents-teachers association or whether you are involved in helping a disabled group of children, everything is worth it and that's the philosophy I believe in that, wherever you are able to contribute something, share your experiences, pass your knowledge, develop your skills and share them with others do that and I continuously do that and I still do it at today. But I do not believe in staying in any one group or organization for longer than necessary because you must cultivate leadership, you must encourage new people to come in and take over. And there are always new ideas, even the best can be improved, so there is no such thing that you have achieved the best and so there is no more progress. No progress is a continuous process in life. Okay, I would like to just ask you a little bit about the religious side of your life because you told me a lot about you know, the economic side and the your work and your voluntary work, but I want to ask you, would you say, you came from a religious background, were your family very religious or how would you class them? I would say that I came from a Hindu family, Indian Gujarati Hindu family, who were averaged family and average commitment to religion. I although I must say that I do not know a single prayer by heart, but that doesn't mean I do not pray to God, to me God is one and God is everywhere and therefore whatever I talk to God, in terms of what I call as my conversation with God, that's my prayer, that's my song for my God. My parents as I said before as well that they were not educated people, yet both of them knew enough about religion. My father had read all the religious scriptures, the Bhagwat Gita, the Mahabharat, the Ramayan, and some of the puranas and things like that and we had a nice collection of religious books in the house which I used to read as a child and so Ramayan, Mahabharat, Bhagwat Gita all these things were kind of holy scriptures talked about in our house. Then in Uganda we had a public celebrations of all major festivals, so every time there was a either the Holi, or the Ram Navmi, or the Janmashtmi, you would go to the temple, you would with your parents or with your friends and you may not understand the whole depth of the philosophy of Hinduism but you would participate in the festivals. And I think festivals of any kind are very important because they put the roots of religion inside you, and so I would say that I am a born Hindu I would not call myself a staunch practicing Hindu, but I would I am a very-very pro Hindu person, now being a pro Hindu person doesn't make me anti anybody and I always defy people to say that, yes, I am pro Hindu but that doesn't make me a negative person against anybody, I am not and yes I am very proud of Hinduism. Now, if you ask me what is the most attractive part of Hinduism to me, then there are two things about it, one, is that Hinduism puts values into you but doesn't compulsorily demand anything of you. If you do not want to do anything, if you do not want to believe anything, Hinduism gives you that choice and to me at a personal level that means a lot because my family comes from the Vaishnav background, so my mom is very staunch Vaishnav, she doesn't, even today she hasn't eaten garlic or onions all her life. She is seventy-seven, even today she will not have her meal without doing her Pooja, the Thakorji, the Pushtimarg Dharma that she follows, she will do all that in the morning before she will have her meal. And I admire that and yet she has not put that compulsion in me. Now when I went to India as a student she had told me that look Pravin, as a child I should have put you through the Brahm Sambandh ceremony which is basically making holy religious person, your Guru, and I haven't done that, so I want you to go to Porbandar and my Guru is there, go and make him your Guru. So basically you go and surrender yourself to your Guru, his gives you Guru Mantra and he will give you a Kanthi, which you put on and you then have a duty to your Guru, and that Guru has a duty to you. Now that particular aspect of Vaishnav religion that I saw, it didn't inspire any confidence in me, to me it's made of kind of commercialization, and so I didn't go for Brahm Sambandh and even today I haven't had a Brahm Sambandh in my life so officially I have no Guru. And in Hinduism the deep philosophy is that without Guru, without a Guru you will not get salvation, I the Moksha, the freedom from this cycle of birth and death will not come, but, then deep down my heart I feel that, I am not ready for that freedom anyway because the other aspect of Hinduism that's very attractive to me is Karmayog in Bhagvat Gita. When Krishna talks to Arjun on the battlefield, he tells him about the four paths in which a man can achieve salvation and the most important aspect he said is what you choose for yourself and he talks a lot about Karmayog, the law of action and reaction, and to me that's my guiding principal in life because to me what Bhagvat Gita says that every action has a reaction. So like in simplistic terms, God keeps a book on you, a kind of your credit and balance account, you do good deeds it goes on your credit, you do bad deeds it goes on your debit side, now that then means to me that, even if I mentally think evil of somebody, or even if I mentally say, 'Oh, I wish, that person, so and so happens to them', then to me that's action and that's evil action, and that will go against my debit account. Now you may say that this is a simplistic view of it, but, to me it's what works in my life, to me it's what keeps me going. This is why every morning I want to get up and I want to be a better human being, I want to be a better Hindu, when I go to work I want to be honest, I want to be fair, I want to do my job properly, and when I go home, I want to feel that I have actually earned my wages and I haven't sat there, doing nothing and somebody is giving me wages for nothing. Now that to me is very-very deep, meaning of Hinduism to me and going back to the Vaishnav religion in terms of the Guru, when I saw that, if my mother had made a Guru for me in childhood then I would have accepted it, but having grown up with education and particularly with a science degree, that questioning attitude has stayed with me all the time that unless something logically makes sense to me, it's difficult for me to except it. But I saw that I do not want to put my children through the same, because if I do the same to them, then they will mess out, so both my children had Gurus when they were children. And it's amazing both of them accept it. Even now my son is at the University, but he will always say that, 'Dad, whenever I go to the University, my Guru's photograph must be in my room, because I pray to my Guru when I go for my exams.' Now to me that's his faith in Hinduism. My daughter does her prayers everyday, but she is very satisfied. Yes, I do my prayers now and then. Recently we felt that, we needed to get closer to God as a family, so my wife, myself, my son and my daughter we decided whoever is at home on a Sunday evening, he must go to the temple for the evening Aarti, the prayer and we started going to different temples and is continued. Now. So it's different temples, you are not affiliated with any particular? No, to me, see again Hinduism gives me that choice. I can, as long as I worship God, I pray to God, it doesn't matter whether you pray to Ram or Krishna or Shankar or Vishnu or you pray to Hanuman or you pray to Jalaram whatever you pray to because Hinduism tells God is everywhere, so wherever you want to see God, you can see God, and so we have been going to different temples and funnily enough it's continued and it's continued in an effortless manner. Like now every Sunday afternoon we look forward to it, which temple are we going today? It's half an hour, but that half an hour of our life is kind of pure, peaceful time, like it's a time when we are in conversation with God. We go to the temple, we will pray, we take part in the Aarti, we will take the Prasad then we sit there and listen to the Bhajans and Kirtans going on and whenever anyone says there's no time, whenever out of any offers feels, okay, we need to go, we'll get up and go. Now that is what modern Hinduism is to me. That it gives me choice, it gives me freedom, it allows me to be a Hindu as I want to be and it doesn't question, why am I doing that. I mean I have had conversations with a lot of Vaishnav Gurus about Brahmasharan and even today, not so far, no one has given me a convincing answer, why I should make them my Guru. So then for why commit? Yeah, and yet, somebody like Swami Satyamitranandji of the Samanvay Parivar, when he was a Shankaracharya, I heard him as a child, I must be hardly ten or twelve in Uganda and he was visiting and there's lot of debate and the reason I remember all this was that the four Shankaracharyas in India are not allowed to cross the borders of India or cross the ocean. This is what my parents have taught me that Shankaracharyas are supposed to be there as a religious head of Hinduism within Indian boundaries and they are not supposed to cross the oceans at all. Swami Satyamitranandji cross the ocean to visit the Hindus all over the world and so for that he was made to resign his seat as Shankaracharya. Now under Hinduism if you had pointed to the Shankaracharya, which is the highest honor for a religious person, you are there for a lifetime till you die nobody is ever been asked there to resign. Satyamitranandaji had to resign because he violated the principle of crossing the ocean. However, going back to his, my experiences of him as a child, he talked about Hinduism partly in Hindi partly in English and whatever I understood, I understood and I liked it and I said, 'Wow! this man talks about Hinduism which I like.' And so his kind of philosophy always fascinated me and in last few years whenever he's been to Leicester, although I do not belong to his group, either, I do go and see him, time to time, deep down of my soul I consider him as my Guru he knows that. But again, although, he has given me a mantra, I have not taken the Kanthi, I have not done what the Brahm Sambandh would require me to do. And when I explained this to my mom, she had accepted it and she said, yes that's fine, that means you do believe in Satyamitranandaji as your religious Guru, and I said 'Yes, mom I do, but not the way you wanted me to do, I take a Vaishnav Guru.' And again Hinduism will ask me to do that. Okay. What are your attitudes to the arts and cultural side of Hinduism? As you have told a lot about the religious, the religious side but, I think that's quite a common and permanent side to Hinduism as well? Arts and culture are day-to-day part of Hinduism, when everything you do is an art and everything that follows you as part of your daily life is art, for example, cooking, now if you want to look upon cooking as a responsibility as a joy, as a 'Oh gosh, I got to go to home and cook the meal for the family, then it is a problem, it is labor' but if you look upon cooking as an art where I am going to create a dish out of basic raw ingredients and then serve it on the table and say 'we thank God for the food we are having today' then those who will eat it will enjoy it, will like it and say 'Wow! this was good.' To me Hinduism is full of symbols because that's what Hinduism teaches you, that look symbols are important whether you believe in 'Om' as god or whether you believe in something else or whether you believe in writing 'Shri', every symbol is taking you one step closer to God and so as far as culture is concerned, yes, I think that culture can only remain alive, if people allow it to remain alive and people allow the mother tongue to remain alive. It is like say, the Bhajans and the Kirtans, now nobody has a monopoly over it, nobody has a copyright over it and as long as that chanting and that singing goes on, Hinduism will go on along with it. The day you stop singing, I think it will be a danger sign for Hinduism because singing and chanting goes hand in hand with Hinduism. When you look at for example the devotees of Hare Krishna movement, I admire their courage, their devotion. One of my niece who used to live in London, has joined the Hare Krishna movement and her husband is from the movement in, he is a Maharashtrian from India and they both are placed in Mathura because, eventually, their desire is to settle in Mathura. And I admire that and so to them to come out on the street with a dholak and sing Hare Krishna and say to a total stranger 'Hare Krishna' is fascinating. Okay, what about the youth of today, I do not know how if you think going back to India, so you may have seen how the youth or, their attitudes towards Hindu religion there but also, may be compared to the youth in the U.K as well and what are your opinions on these practices of Hinduism today? First let us talk about the youth. I think, there are some worrying signs and I'll talk about the worrying signs first. Internet and satellite television has brought the world together. So today it's almost like nothing is impossible. You are stuck something, 'Oh, I will go on the internet and find it,' it's that simple in life. Computerization means that your day-to-day life is so busy and controlled by so many gadgets that you are just moving fast. And then there are the problems of alcohol, teenage sex, sexual health, HIV aids and drug activities. And I say that, the Hindu youth are not immune from any of these. They are equally at risk as much at risk as anyone else. Now Hindu parents generally are laid back, they are not controlling, they are not dictating and so there is always that danger that lot of Hindu youth can go astray quite easily. That's what I said that, that the worrying signs, because the HIV aids explosion, wise people do not talk about it, I talk about it because I work in social care and I see the danger signals all the time. Now, how shall I say, you cannot legislate against people's behavior, or control people's behavior through legislation but you can influence people's behavior through education, through honest debate and through being a friend. Now I would like to see that the Hindu community centers, Hindu temples take on these kind of issues and discuss them openly and honestly, but they do not. Sex outside marriage and sex outside marital relationships goes on, and Hindu community is no, not immune to it either. Now if you look at the explosion of HIV aids in India then what was seen as a kind of medical condition, a disease that was say rampant in red light district areas and amongst very poorer sections of society and the sex workers etc., has now hit the middle class communities in India. And because I have lot of friends from Bombay and I keep in touch and I go there regularly and I have debates with all of them on this time. Okay, so you were telling me about the HIV problems. Yes. In India. That it's now hit the middle class communities and people are suddenly beginning to realize that the sexual behavior that's there, has been there for years and years but now that sexual behavior calls for responsibility and responsible behavior. Now in this country, that message has not yet sunk in. Here every time I have this discussion with professionals, Asian businessmen, people want to shy away and not talk about it and think that I am talking of gloom and doom, but I am not, because there are Asian businessmen who travel all over the world. Uganda was full of AIDS at one time, fortunately they have got it under control now. But then there are other African countries, South Africa is facing a big problem. Nelson Mandela is doing his best to raise the awareness so that people become responsible when it comes to their sexual behavior. Now it's those kind of things. Similarly, drugs my police officer friends tell me that there is hardly any secondary schooling in this county where there isn't a drug problem and so I am, I ask myself a question that means children of Hindu families who go to these secondary schools and sophomore colleges, can come in contact with drugs, can meet a buyer, can get hooked on drugs quite easily, parents may never find out. Smoking is another thing for a few years I was based in the city here which is quite close by to the Montfort University and in about 10 years I have been shocked to see, the number of Asian women, younger Asian women, who now are walking in the town with a cigarette in hand. Twenty years ago you wouldn't have seen anybody or if an Asian female person was smoking, it would be done behind the close doors, now it's out in the open. Now we all know with all the publicity that's going on how dangerous smoking is and yet this is on the increase and I say to myself, 'okay, I am sure some of those Asian women are Hindus, how did they get hooked on smoking.' There is not enough research on that one either. Now these are issues of what I call 'social responsibility', and pockets of Asian community have not yet woken up to their social responsibility. And I take every opportunity to raise these issues, okay, some people give me a polite hearing, some do not but it's important, that the debate goes on. Whenever I get invited to talk to Hindu students at Universities, I raise all these issues with them and the other thing that the youth have, are facing in this country is divisions amongst youth in terms of religion. If you look at a Muslim youth or a Sikh youth, they are brought up very differently. Muslim youth go through lot of compulsory religious and cultural education in their childhood, which Hindu youth do not necessarily. Sikh youth go also relatively quite a lot of religious education and which then means that the children are all equipped with different skills and different knowledge basis and that is the recipe for disaster, because that leads to colorization, that leads to people intellectually and mentally categorizing themselves and saying we will stick around together with our own kind, that's not how the modern world operates. Today even if you differ with somebody, you deal with your disagreements on the table in a sensible way, here what is happening is that we are getting colorized, we are getting into pockets. What happened in the Northern cities few years ago, the classic examples were that the Pakistani youth and the Bangladeshi youth fought. Now they are all Muslims and it make us belief why on earth were they fighting, what went wrong in their upbringing and I say to people that it's only a matter of time that Hindu youth may get caught up in such violent situations, it's happening in parts of. With segregated communities. Yeah, it's happening in parts of Southold and it's happening in Slough and we do not want it to happen everywhere. Now lets talk about the positive side about the youth. I see them confident, vibrant, active, clever and all the doors that were perhaps shut to people like me thirty years ago are open to them. Whenever I go to London in particular, there is hardly any profession, where Hindus have not made a mark. There is hardly any vocation where Hindu young people are not in the forefront whether it's banking, accountancy, pharmacy, medicine, business, you name it and Hindu youth are there. Now, that's very encouraging, that's very good, I like that confidence, I like that the fact that in any social studies it's shown that children of Indian background go to Universities in greater numbers than any other group in this country, that children of Indian background families achieve higher results academically in every field. But then the sad part of all that is that economic wealth and that economic force that we are creating hasn't got a political voice. For example Islam has converted itself into a political voice in this country, a Muslim member of 'House of lords' is not ashamed to say I am a Muslim and I will represent Islam interest. Yes there are some members of 'House of lords' who happen to be Hindus, have they ever spoken as or on behalf of Hinduism. No they haven't, why that lack of confidence? Why? Because there is not that political ideology, there is not that political thinking, that religion and politics to go together hand-in-hand. I mean, today Tony Blair is a practicing Roman Catholic, now he is proud of that, and you respect that, but you do not see that in Hinduism. Roman Catholicism is a very powerful political voice in this country. Judaism, the Jewish community is a very powerful political voice in this country. The Hinduism is zero, there is no political voice for Hinduism and that ray of hope I see in youth, that if these debates continue, then someday, somebody will say, yes, I am a Hindu and I am not ashamed to be a Hindu and I do not have to anything, I do not have to apologize for anything. I am a British Hindu, and yes I want political voice, I want my voice to be heard in the corridors of power. Do you think that will happen then with this generation that is coming up, either may be second, third generation now? I am optimistic it will happen because if it does not happen then we are talking of a society where identity would be a crisis. And we are talking about a whole generation of Hindu society growing up in Britain where there will be severe problems of identity. Along this, the lines of identity and segregation in Hindu communities maybe made by themselves, it comes in the issue of the caste system or caste issues, I mean, do you think if they are still relevant today? No. In the U.K or there they are not? Caste system is breaking down, which is a very good thing. People like me want it to break down because it is a divisive system. I mean, if you look at, and from whatever little I have read about it, in terms of history of caste system development, it was designed as an economic order of the society not as a social order. But that economic order has become a social order, with devastating effects. Even today in India, even in the last elections that was held, caste system plays havoc. If you put a candidate of the wrong caste in a wrong area that candidate would be defeated not because he had all the abilities but because he was of the wrong caste. Now that is not what politics should be about. Fortunately in this country, and also in India the caste system is breaking down. The caste system has to break down. Now it is operating in this country, which is ironic in many ways, but as far as the young people are concerned no. We see beginnings of lot of mixed marriages and you see the other thing about the mixed marriages is that, it's Hindus marrying outside Hinduism, either in Christianity or Islam or Sikhism, but as a result of all that, equally Hindus are marrying within Hindus by breaking the caste system, which is good thing and most parents accept it very-very naturally. I have a daughter and, yes I would like her to marry within Hinduism, if she goes outside Hinduism I have said to her very clearly as a parent and with all your legal right as an adult I cannot stop you, but it has it's own responsibilities and challenges and you would make to deal with it, but if you marry any Hindu person, doesn't matter to me who that person is. And so I think, that kind of responsibility today is developing as well and I see lot of marriages outside the caste system happening all the time, which is a good thing. But caste system definitely needs to be broken down at its core because it has no relevance in this modern day and age. Okay. Just a couple of final questions now, I would just like to ask you how would you actually identify yourself now-a-days because you have got Indian roots but you were born in Uganda in Africa. You have got a strong Indian connection with studying there etc., but then you moved to the U.K and settled here and your family has grown up here with you know, you had the British citizenship as well, you are also a practicing Hindu so there is a lot of things kind of coming together, so if somebody is to say, who are you and what would you call yourself now? Okay. First of all, let me say by saying the positive that there is no crisis of identity in my case. I am very proud to say that I am a British citizen, I am very proud to say that I am of Indian origin, I am very proud to say that I am Ugandan by birth and I am very proud to say that I am a Hindu of Indian origin. Now all these things to me sit side by side, I do not participate in political activities in India, I participate in political activities here. Economically I earn my living here and my life is here. I pay taxes here and I see my future very much as here. Yes, when I retire it's my desire to back to Uganda and do something in the voluntary sector there, purely and simply because I owe a lot to that country, where I was born and if the politics had not destroyed it then perhaps I would have never come to Britain I would have stayed in Uganda. It's a beautiful country and now they are crying for all of us to go back. But things have changed and it's not that simple to go back and now in terms of identity, I have absolutely no qualms and in my, the description of myself would be a phrase in a phrase in the sense that I am a Hindu person of Indian origin and I am a British citizen. Okay, where do you see as home now? Do you still talk about back home in India, or back home in Uganda or U.K. is home or did the, like you said its on the long side? Home is Leicester. Okay. India is ancestral home. India is where my cultural routes originate. India is where I have my other side of the Lukka family there and I keep in touch with them. I keep in touch with my mother's side of the family and I like visiting them, I like helping them, I like making that impact in their life so that economically they are able to better themselves. I like to keep in touch with my University friends. But India is my ancestral home, it's not a place where I could say it's my home, no it's my ancestral home. My home is Leicester. Okay, and finally then do you have any final thought or message to give it to people who will be listening in the future? Be a good Hindu. Believe in whatever you want to, you do not have to be anti anybody to be a pro Hindu person and Hinduism is peace loving, gives you total freedom, gives you total choice. You develop your relationship with God, that's what Hinduism is. Okay, thank you very much.