Shushma

Last year COVID brought to the forefront how society views people who have a disability or special needs- that their life is deemed less important than a person who has no disability or special needs. Why do I say this? Well, there was a lot of talk about priority of beds if the hospitals became full and the Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) orders. If a person was ‘fit and well’, they would get priority over my daughter due to her Special Needs and Cystic Fibrosis and a DNR order due to her CF. It has been brought back into the spotlight due to Jo Whiley tweeting that her sister with learning disability had to wait as she came under No6 in the priority list, yet Jo had been offered it. Her sister is now in hospital with COVID, fighting for her life. So, who then assesses quality of life and what determines quality of life? Let’ first look at what quality of life means- in the English dictionary it states the degree to which an individual is healthy, comfortable, and able to participate in ...

Society has so many connotations about India and Indian people due to what they see/hear/ read through the media as well as the British Asian people living here. The question people ask me is “Where are you from?” I say London. I mean come on; how can they miss the cockney accent! They then say, “but where are you originally from?” I want to say “why don’t you ask me directly, which country I belong to because I am brown,” but I don’t. I say I was born here but my parents are from India. This then leads to more questions. Growing up, I always felt I didn’t belong to any country because the UK never accepted me as I had brown skin and India never accepted me because I was born and raised in London. Now I don’t care. I know who I am and that’s all that matters. People get confused between religion and culture. This is what it means to me. I feel religion is a belief and devotion to a particular God. Yet when I say I have no religion, people, especially Indians believe ...

Some programmes have a lasting effect on you and It’s a Sin was one of those. Why? Because I was born in the 80s and to me that seems recent and yet I have been completely ignorant to how it was for people who were Gay and had AIDS in the 80s. I know it has been so raw and painful for some of friends having to relieve those memories as the programme has triggered this. I often wonder who choses what we study in schools and why. I never learnt about the British Raj, how Wales became part of the U.K. or the pandemic of AIDS. It’s part of the things that the U.K. got ‘wrong’ yet instead of teaching it in schools it’s been buried under the carpet. How are we ever meant to learn from those mistakes if we don’t revisit history? Watching It’s a Sin echoed what is happening now with COVID, the only difference, is that it was seen as the gay plague, men who had to quarantine against their will and for no reason. If AID...