Latest news with #AatishTaseer
Daily Mail
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
Julian Clary's inappropriate quiz show answer: EPHRAIM HARDCASTLE
Is a new book by Aatish Taseer, ex-boyfriend of Princess Michael of Kent's daughter Gabriella, set to revive spurious claims that Michael was the 'royal racist' unnamed by Meghan in her infamous Oprah interview? Harry said it wasn't the Queen or Prince Philip. Omid Scobie named, without evidence, the King and Kate. Meghan claims she had been angered at her first meeting with the extended royals at an annual pre-Christmas family lunch at Buckingham Palace in 2017 over a discussion on the 'skin tone' of a future Sussex baby. A year later Aatish revealed that Princess Michael had two black sheep named Venus and Serena. The royal who made the comment which made Meg bristle has never been identified. Marking the 12th birthday of Prince George yesterday, perky name-dropper Gyles Brandreth enthuses: 'July 22 is always an important date on my calendar, I send out a lot of birthday cards. The Prime Minister of Jamaica, it's his birthday. My friend Bonnie Langford, I always send her a card. The actor Terence Stamp, I always send him a card.' Thank goodness Gyles can afford all those stamps. Colonel-in-Chief of the camp fraternity Julian Clary sabotaged a take of Blankety Blank when asked by host Bradley Walsh to complete the statement: 'If you want to convince someone that you're highly intelligent, tell them you're a world authority on *blank*.' 'I don't know why, but I put 'lesbians',' explained Julian, pictured. 'They had to stop the recording to tell me to tone it down.' Surely harmless fun compared with his 1993 British Comedy Awards claim he had been intimate with Norman Lamont. The Tory Chancellor was in the audience with his wife. Donald Trump 's porky pie about never drawing pictures has been ridiculed as one of his doodles fetched $15,000 at Sotheby's. Someone who might be in the market for a Trump original is Keir Starmer, due to meet him in Scotland this weekend. One of Trump's more playful sketches is of a 'Money Tree', with dollar bills drifting from its branches, which sold for $8,500 in 2020. Starmer desperately needs one of those! Ex-Tory MP Michael Fabricant seems to have lost faith in his party, saying: 'Whether James Cleverly returns to the Conservative front bench is, for the foreseeable future, irrelevant. Deck chairs on the Titanic.' Bewigged Michael and party leader Kemi are feuding. After he announced he 'wasn't in love' with Kemi's leadership, she cheekily said of Michael: 'I'm not surprised he's not in love with me – he's a gay man.' Michael fumed: 'I'm not a gay man. I've been making it very plain that I'm bisexual!' Spare a thought for horror rock star Alice Cooper. 'I just can't get a good supply of snakes any more,' he wails. 'My guy in London always found me excellent snakes, but now I just can't get the permits.' Is Brexit to blame?
France 24
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- France 24
Author Aatish Taseer on his 'Excursions in Exile'
12:41 On this week's show, we speak with author Aatish Taseer about his new book, "A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile". He shares why he has no regrets for calling Prime Minister Narendra Modi "India's Divider in Chief" in his 2019 Time article. We also report on how Bangladesh remains on edge as the country approaches the one-year anniversary of Sheikh Hasina's ouster. Plus, two North Korean defectors make their K-pop debut.
Wall Street Journal
16-07-2025
- Politics
- Wall Street Journal
‘A Return to Self' Review: At Home in the World
At the end of 'A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile,' Aatish Taseer gives thanks to a host of people who made his book possible: editors, agents, facilitators of various kinds, friends and guides, even a barber in Uzbekistan. He should have also named Narendra Modi, India's prime minister, without whom his book would not have come to be. Mr. Modi, it could be said, is the book's midwife, and thanking him would have been pointedly droll. In November 2019, Mr. Modi's government revoked the British-born Mr. Taseer's Overseas Citizenship of India, thus banishing him from the country he'd grown up in, a land where he had lived for 30 of his (then) 40 years. India was his mother's country and, in many ways, his own motherland, a place where he longed to belong. What provoked this Indian ire? In May 2019, days before Mr. Modi won his second term, Time magazine published a cover story by Mr. Taseer about the man titled 'India's Divider in Chief.' The article, Mr. Taseer writes, 'enraged the prime minister' and sent his supporters 'into a fury.' Mr. Modi, a hardline Hindu nationalist, isn't a kind or forgiving man. Retribution was now certain. The story then gets murky and Mr. Taseer's book doesn't shed enough light on it. Under India's rules, a person with a Pakistani parent is ineligible for Indian Overseas Citizenship; yet Mr. Taseer had somehow secured one. He doesn't tell us how. Were strings pulled? After all, he is (as he puts it) the 'love child' of his mother, an Indian journalist, and Salman Taseer, a Pakistani politician. The elder Taseer was assassinated in 2011 by one of his own bodyguards for defending a Christian woman accused of blasphemy against Islam.
Daily Mail
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE Lady Gabriella Windsor's ex reignites claims of racism within the Royal Family as he again insists her mother owned black sheep named Venus and Serena and even drags in the KING - ahead of his new book that will alarm the Palace
The former boyfriend of Lady Gabriella Windsor has doubled down on his claims of racism within the Royal Family in a new interview, as he prepares to publish a novel inspired by his relationship with the King's cousin. Speaking on the podcast Tell Me About Your Father, Aatish Taseer, who was born in the UK and raised in India, recalled how he sparked a media storm in 2018 when he wrote an explosive article for Vanity Fair in which he claimed to lay bare intimate details of their relationship. He admitted that he was 'extremely indiscreet' and said that in England there is 'really no crime you can commit greater than that' especially after remaining 'very, very cozy' with Princess Michael after splitting from her daughter. Taseer, who is now married to a man, even described the wife of the late Queen's cousin as 'a gay icon', with the podcast host retorting: 'If she wasn't so racist, she'd be really marketable.' He also repeated the claim that the late polo pal of King Charles, Kuldip Singh Dhillon was referred to as 'Sooty'. Mr Singh, who died in 2023, previously insisted he 'enjoyed' the nickname. Meanwhile, Taseer doubled down on one of his most sensational claims, that Gabriella's mother, Princess Michael, once owned two black sheep at her former Gloucestershire home, which she named Venus and Serena after the tennis-playing Williams sisters. The interview comes amid Taseer's plans to release a novel he claims was inspired by his time with the Royal Family called In Their Country, about an aspiring journalist from New Delhi named Aleramo Singh Brusetti who is dating a member of the British Royal Family named 'Rose' who was brought up at Kensington Palace by her parents 'Prince and Princess Albert'. Although it is a work of fiction, an extract published by Air Mail weaves in real names and comments about royals such as Princess Margaret and Princess Diana and places including Kensington Palace and the restaurant Maggie Jones. In further chapters of the as yet unpublished work, seen by the Mail, the main character refers to a sexual frisson with his girlfriend's brother and her needing a HIV test after he has sex with a man. While the book is a work of fiction, it also weaves in quotes attributed to Princess Michael of Kent in the 2018 Vanity Fair article. It also includes incidents that have been reported publicly such as her alleged remarks to a group of black diners in a New York restaurant to: 'Go back to the colonies'. Despite this, Taseer said that he remained close to Princess Michael after his relationship with Lady Gabriella ended. He told the podcast: 'After Ella and I broke up, it was one of those relationships that was purely romantic and it didn't have a kind of friendship component. But I I was very, very close to Ella's mother to Princess Michael and who I always think of as a kind of gay icon. 'I would see her from time to time after Ella and I broke up, she came to my first book launch and I would go and see her in England. 'Also, I think once I came out and was married to a one of those situations where it must have felt like a betrayal of our time together.' Elsewhere on the podcast, he discussed his claim regarding the names of Princess Michael's sheep. 'The English, it's wild like that because the upper classes are so, they live at such a tremendous remove from the country,' he said. 'They really don't even know that like, I mean, [King] Charles has a friend called Sooty. Yeah. Like just a close friend. 'So I think the Venus and Serena was just, it was just part of that, that kind of weird air of abstraction that exists around these people and how they're not even aware of how shocking or offensive that might be.' The daughter of Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, affectionately known as Ella, 44, lost her husband Thomas Kingston, 45, in devastating circumstances in February 2024 after he was found dead with a 'traumatic head wound' and a gun near his body in an outbuilding of his parents' Cotswolds home. 'Tom was an exceptional man who lit up the lives of all who knew him,' she said in a joint family statement at the time. 'His death has come as a great shock to the whole family.' In the subsequent months, Gabriella was supported by her royal relatives as she mourned her husband. She arrived for Royal Ascot side-by-side with Princess Anne and revealed how the 'kind' Princess of Wales invited her to advise on the Together at Christmas carol service at Westminster Abbey, where she was photographed with Carole and Michael Middleton. The personal tragedy no doubt put into context the media storm created by former boyfriend Taseer, a British journalist now based in the US, when he wrote an explosive article for Vanity Fair in 2018, where he claimed to lay bare intimate details of their relationship. 'For three surreal years, Ella and I hung about Kensington Palace; we swam naked in the Queen's pool at Buckingham Palace; we did MDMA in Windsor Castle; and we had scrapes with the British press,' he wrote. No further details of the alleged incidents were given. In the wide-reaching piece, Taseer also touched upon the issue of alleged racism within the Royal Family, drawing a link between the royals and Nazis, alleging: 'Royals and Nazis go together like blini and caviar'. Among the most sensational claims was that Gabriella's mother once owned two black sheep, which she named Venus and Serena after the tennis-playing Williams sisters. The timing of the article was significant: it was published weeks before the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, which was attended by the Kents and Serena Williams – a close friend of Meghan. Senior courtiers were said to have been left reeling by the article, which was published in the US magazine but available in the UK, although there was no official comment from Buckingham Palace. Once again, those closest to Gabriella were quick to rally. Members of her inner-circle insisted that the story was full of fabrications and nothing more than an attention-seeking ploy by an ex-boyfriend. A source close to the Royal Family said at the time: 'What he has done is appalling and unnecessarily cruel, especially when he has only ever been shown kindness by her family.' A friend added: 'Aatish is a novelist. He has an active imagination.' The couple were introduced by mutual friends in 2003 while Taseer was studying at Amherst College, Massachusetts, two hours from Brown University where Ella was studying comparative literature. Highly intelligent, Ella is also a graduate of Oxford University, where she obtained an MPhil degree in Social Anthropology from Linacre College. Their courtship was passionate and public – the couple were often spotted in clinches and made it on to Tatler's 'most invited' list two years running. At one point they were tipped to marry. Taseer travelled with the Kents – revealing how 'to fly with the royalty was to fly with Easyjet' – and spent time at the family's five-bedroom apartment at Kensington Palace, which left him cold. 'The warren of dark-brick apartments and offices that greeted me resembled something between a military hospital and an old people's home,' he wrote. 'All the famous inhabitants - Princess Margaret, Princess Diana - were dead, and those who remained, minor royals and palace secretaries, lived in their long cold shadow.' (This was years before the Prince and Princess of Wales arrived to 'liven it up', as he put it.) Princess Michael of Kent, known as 'Princess Pushy', was reportedly impressed by her daughter's beau, once describing him as 'one of the most handsome men I have ever met'. But Taseer's opinion of his would-be mother-in-law was rather more conflicted. Of her denials of racism, he wrote: 'I would have liked to believe her, but I had my and Nazis go together like blini and above a certain age in Britain is at least a tiny bit racist.' He added that he did, however, see a 'nice side' to Princess Michael, describing her as 'funny, intelligent and generous'. Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Michael of Kent watch the racing on Derby day at the Investec Derby Festival at Epsom Racecourse on June 7, 2014 Before the relationship fizzled out in 2006, the Kents reportedly travelled to Bombay to meet Taseer's mother. She arranged lavish dinners and fireworks for Princess Michael on her birthday. Taseer is now a writer-at-large for T, The New York Times Style Magazine, and is married to lawyer Ryan Davis, whom he wed in August 2015. He was stripped of his overseas citizenship of India status in 2019 after he wrote an article criticising the regime of the country's prime minister, Narendra Modi. Meanwhile, Princess Michael once allegedly told black diners to 'go back to the colonies' and claimed not to know her father was an SS officer. In 2004 she was branded a racist by a group in a New York restaurant after a row erupted over the noise she claimed they were making. The royal was accused of slamming her hand down on the group's table, telling them: 'You need to quiet down.' Restaurant boss Silvano Marchetto offered to move Princess Michael and her party to another room. Before switching tables the royal is alleged to have said 'you need to go back to the colonies'. The princess was reportedly challenged at the time and was said to have replied: 'I did not say "back to the colonies", I said you "should remember the colonies". Back in the days of the colonies there were rules that were very good.' She is alleged to have continued: 'You think about it. Just think about it.' One of the group, Wall Street banker Merv Matheson, said: 'She has a problem and that problem is racism. She needs help.' AJ Callaway was also caught up in the alleged row and was surprised to find out she was a member of the Royal family. 'I thought she was just a crazy woman. I still think she's a crazy woman,' he said at the time. A spokesman denied that the princess made the slur, which reportedly arose from a confrontation about the group making too much noise in the Da Silvano restaurant. In 2014 it was revealed her father, Baron Gunther von Reibnitz, was a high-ranking SS officer, which the Princess Michael claimed was shocking news to her. He joined the Nazi party in 1930 but would escape to Bavaria in 1945 when it was occupied by the Americans. Princess Michael was born Marie-Christine von Reibnitz during the final months of World War Two. Historian Philip Hall unearthed the baron's Nazi link at the Berlin Document Centre, where evidence showed he had joined the SS three years before Hitler became chancellor. He also found references to Baron Gunther von Reibnitz being recommended for an appointment by Herman Goering and he is believed to have fought on the Polish front. After the war's end, the baron split from his family. The children and their mother headed to Sydney, Australia, and he settled in Mozambique, where he ran a citrus farm. The Czech princess joined the British Royal Family when she married Prince Michael of Kent in Vienna in 1978 and would later claim her union with the Silesian was an arranged marriage. She famously accused the British of racism in the 1980s when she said in an interview: 'The English distrust foreigners. I will never become British even if I live here the rest of my life.' She was branded Princess Pushy until 2013, when she was described as Princess Cushy for whinging about the rent she paid to Kensington Palace. Before 2010 she was paying just £69 a week in peppercorn rent, but would go on to pay £120,000 a year to stay at the palace, which has ten main rooms. The new rent rate was imposed when the late Queen was forced to restructure her grace-and-favour residences to bring rents into line with present-day market values. She also courted controversy when she told Tatler magazine she knew 'the real story' about Princess Diana following her death in 1997.
Scroll.in
05-07-2025
- Politics
- Scroll.in
July nonfiction: These six new titles explore the constantly changing nature of the Indian identity
All information sourced from publishers. A Return to Self: Excursions in Exile, Aatish Taseer In 2019, the Government of India revoked Aatish Taseer's citizenship, thereby exiling him from the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity and, in the process, compelled him to ask broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and nationality. In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist facade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated here, is practiced so little. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them? In this blend of travelogue and memoir, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes a politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and delves deep into the heart of the migrations that define our multicultural world. The Hindi Heartland: A Study, Ghazala Wahab The Hindi heartland, comprising Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, and Uttar Pradesh, covers nearly 38 per cent of India's total area and is home to over 40 per cent of India's population. It provides the country with over 40 per cent of its parliamentarians and determines the contours of national politics (out of the fifteen prime ministers India has had since 1947, eight have been from the Hindi belt). Yet, despite its political significance, the Hindi belt is among the most impoverished regions in the country. It consumes the bulk of the country's resources, but lags behind other states on various economic and welfare indices. It is plagued by violence, illiteracy, unemployment, corruption, poor life expectancy, and numerous other ills. Centuries of war, conquests, invasions, political movements, and religious unrest have made the heartland a place of immense paradox. Despite its extraordinary and timeless religious heritage – some of the country's most revered spiritual leaders were born here and it is home to innumerable shrines and places of pilgrimage – it has also witnessed some of the worst communal riots in the country and has been troubled by long-running, divisive sectarian politics. Many of India's founders, who gave the country its secular identity, hailed from the heartland, but so too did those who have spread religious discord. And the land of Ganga–Jamuni tehzeeb routinely witnesses lynching and murder in the name of religion. The book is divided into five sections and examines the region's disproportionate influence on the nation's politics, culture, and identity. Believer's Dilemma: Vajpayee and the Hindu Right's Path to Power, 1977–2018, Abhishek Choudhary Believer's Dilemma concludes Abhishek Choudhary's two-part study of Atal Behari Vajpayee (1924–2018), the RSS propagandist who established himself as an imaginative moderate, drawing the Hindu Right from the fringes to displace Congress as the natural party of power. The second volume combines new archival documents with revealing interviews to present an unsentimental history of India's ongoing political moment, beginning with the short-lived Janata coalition and the Vajpayee–Morarji Desai tussle to steer foreign policy; Mrs Gandhi's ad-hocism in Assam, Punjab and Kashmir; Rajiv's cynical turn toward the Hindu vote; Vajpayee's failure to secularize the newborn BJP; the Sangh Parivar's meticulous plan to raze the Babri, and much more. Choudhary traces these machinations of the previous half-century to cast fresh light on major events from Vajpayee's term in office (1998–2004), including his desperation to conduct nuclear tests; his cold pragmatism and heartbreak in negotiating with Pakistan and China; his wide range of emotional strengths, which allowed him to manage an unwieldy thirteen-party coalition and turn India into a multi-party democracy; his role in propping India up as a potential superpower and embedding capitalist aspiration into its socio-political imagination. Mapping the evolution of the Sangh Parivar, this book reveals a deeper pattern in Vajpayee's character: his reflexive loyalty to his ideological family in moments of crisis – be it the 1983 Assam riots, the 1992 Babri aftermath, the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, or his tragic last public appearance in 2008, when the stroke-battered patriarch voted against the Indo-US nuclear deal he had earlier helped seed. Dapaan: Tales from Kashmir's Conflict, Ipsita Chakravarty In Kashmir, folktales often begin with the word dapaan – 'it is said'. So too do local narratives told and retold about the past, among people who have lived through nearly eight decades of a bitter contest between India and Pakistan. This is a story about stories. In the hyper-nationalist din over a territorial dispute, Kashmiri voices are often drowned out. Yet the region is home to long habits of storytelling, its communities intensely engaged with history-keeping. For centuries, folk traditions of theatre, song and fable have flowed into a reservoir of common talk. Mythology, hearsay and historical memory coexist here without any apparent hierarchies. By the time armed rebellion spread through Kashmir in 1989, many of these traditions had died out or been forced underground. But they have left traces in the way ordinary people speak about the conflict – in their songs of loss, and jokes about dark times; in fantastical geographies, and rumours turning the Valley's militarisation into a ghostly haunting. From Partition to the 2019 Indian crackdown, Ipsita Chakravarty discovers a vivid, distinctly Kashmiri vision of events that have often been narrated from the top down. Her interviewees conjure a kaleidoscope of towns and villages shaping their own memories. OTP Please!: Online Buyers, Sellers and Gig Workers in South Asia, Vandana Vasudevan A great shift is underway in how we buy, eat, move, work and sell owing to technological intervention. Tech platforms – whether a Swiggy, Amazon or Uber in India, a Foodpanda in Pakistan or a Pathao in Bangladesh or Nepal – have eased the pressures of modern life. They have freed up our time, provided jobs to grateful millions and delivered guilty pleasures and last-minute necessities to online buyers. But behind the dazzle of the digital, much is opaque. Gig workers live a precarious life while internet retailers cope with the oppressive rules of global behemoths. Consumers wonder if there are consequences to instant gratification and the extreme ease of living. OTP Please delves into the wondrous new world of electronic commerce by connecting diverse stories and perspectives gathered across South Asia, from Peshawar to Patna and Colombo to Kathmandu. It explores the emotional dynamics between the different actors on this stage, the workings of tech companies and the implications for policy. My Life: Story of an Imperfect Musician, Ustad Allauddin Khan, translated from the Bengali by Hemasri Chaudhuri My Life: Story of an Imperfect Musician is the freewheeling autobiography of Ustad Allauddin Khan, the legendary Indian classical musician and founder of the Maihar–Senia gharana. Transcribed from his spoken accounts at Santiniketan in 1952 and translated from Bengali to English for the first time, the book offers an intimate look into his tumultuous journey – from his modest beginnings in Tripura to becoming a revered guru and maestro. In his candid yet commanding voice, Allauddin Khan recalls his spiritual devotion to music, years of gruelling training, battles with poverty and his uncompromising integrity. He narrates his encounters with saints, ustads, nawabs and commoners with equal vividness if punctuated by his humour, rage and humility. The book sheds light on his unconventional personality – fierce, loving, deeply principled – and his immense contribution to Indian classical music, not just as a performer but also as a mentor.
