Tag: writing

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Jason Arday and Academia’s Eternal Elitist Bigotry

Staring at my laptop, I re-read an email asking for story submissions for a project in which I registered interest. The deadline is fast approaching, but my mind is scrabbling fruitlessly for words, the ever-present feeling that no one will possibly be interested in anything I have to say and that I should just not bother working its way to the front of my thoughts, a wriggling worm of imposter syndrome that eats up my confidence, undermines my faith in my own abilities and holds me back from everything from pitching new publications to making new friends.

Imposter syndrome has been a living parasite inside my head for so long I can barely remember its absence. A recent revisit through my teenage diaries as I cleared out old belongings following my father’s passing gave me a sharp, jarring insight into things perhaps best left forgotten – or perhaps not. The appalling news of Jason Arday’s horribly premature death following a cruel, malicious and unapologetically racist smear campaign ricocheted me back into my own time studying in an elite academic institution, details painfully journalled of how the willful yet hardworking and ambitious young woman I was became eroded to dust by the protracted and systemic bullying I experienced throughout my time there, in the aftermath of my graduation, and tellingly before I even started there.

From the off, I was marked as an outlier – as someone who didn’t fit the mould, who must have been let in by accident or to fill quotas. This was both inferred and boldly vocalized by both staff and students at my sixth form college (high school) who were happy to question in my presence how ‘someone like me’ could have secured such a prestigious spot. On arrival, I was immediately made to feel unwelcome among the throngs of wealthy white youngsters having animated discussion about their gap years, ski trips and trust funds. I kid you not – some of my earliest conversations with fellow students involved the explanation of what a Coutts trust fund was and what it meant to be independently wealthy, with my ignorance a source of snide amusement. These were teenagers who reveled in their money and privilege, with whom I had nothing in common and who enjoyed looking down on me. They had also been spoon-fed all the academic hacks our professors were looking for, having gone to the right feeder schools whose very well-paid job it was to ensure they could deliver the goods straight out of the post. I feel ashamed to say I struggled to keep up. I wasn’t lazy, but I didn’t know how to cram and there was no one to teach me. I had never worked so hard, at such a pace, and I had never faltered academically before. Asking for help was emphatically looked down on, and my attempts to reach out for support were aggressively shut down by my professors, including biting letters promising my expulsion if I couldn’t handle the pressure.

My peers were equally dismissive and mocking of me, both academically and socially. Unlike the other students, I wore bright colours, flares and mini skirts, not tracksuits in navy and grey. I didn’t play sports and my parents didn’t socialise with their parents. I also had a regional accent – well-hidden but still a far cry from their communal bray. Most damningly of all, I answered back. I didn’t make myself small or act like I was grateful to be there – I spoke up in class and socially, refusing to let what can only be described as bullying transform me into their vision of quiet, submissive, poor South Asian girl they thought I should be. I kept pushing, kept working, got better at giving the system what it wanted, thinking if I could just push hard enough, do well enough, I could still belong. But that isn’t how it works. Who belongs has been decided by a preordained script built on race, class and gendered prejudice that is impossible to break. I got through my three years but the constant cutting barbs, callous dismissals, biting rejections, snippy slights and unsupported failures slowly chipped away at my confidence until the girl who thought she could do anything began to believe the hype that she could do nothing.

I’d arrived among the dreaming spires aspiring to academia or politics. Believing this was the first step on my road to achieving my potential, to being a success. I left shattered, experiencing a debilitating breakdown shortly after results day. I abandoned my ambitions, my insides forever twisted from being shown my place. I had chosen my almer mater because I thought I belonged to that world, that life – but even though I passed, I had failed. The damage to my self-esteem was irreparable. As a young woman of colour from a provincial town, I was used to walking around with a target on my back, but when it followed me to a place I thought was safe, a place I had earned my right to be at, a place I had envisioned as the home of the best and brightest who surely must be too evolved to be prejudiced, that was more than I could bear. I broke.

Jason Arday stuck it out. He believed in and exercised his talent and his skills, and achieved in a way I can only dream of. Not only that, he wasn’t afraid of making the most of his success. Uncowed, he pushed his head above the parapet, tragically yet seemingly inevitably inciting contemporary incarnations of the same mass of amorphous human hatred who stole my dreams to rain all their cruel bile down on him because that is what they do. Those, like Arday, who shone so brightly it terrified the academic elite, run the risk of being subjected to this type of witch hunt whose only goal is to prove that people of colour can’t make the grade, can’t be trusted, don’t follow the rules and are not as talented or as worthy. They itch to put us in our place, normalising double standards for success and for punishment, with people of colour assumed guilty until proven innocent, and often long after. In a profession where reputation is everything, this is the ultimate way to mount a campaign of destruction.

When I see people of colour in positions like Arday’s I know what they have endured to get there, and will continue to endure as long as they stay. We know what language is used about us once those hefty wooden doors are closed and the straight cis white men are left alone in the room. Equality is a dog-and-pony-show in academia, as it across most of society, based on the constructed assumption that those with the most, the best education will choose to act rationally and without prejudice. I do sometimes mourn what I could have done with my life if I had had the right support. I have regrets about not being stronger, braver. I hate still labouring under the weight of the imposter syndrome I was force-fed and the confidence I lost. But most of all I am beyond sickened that the same elitist, bigoted culture I endured is unchanged decades later and is still so loaded with hate that it simply will not allow people of colour to succeed without exacting retribution. As a society, we should be ashamed and expect better from our thought leaders, but I fear we are a long way off that path ever being trodden.

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Before collecting Shanti’s ashes

I’ve woken up too early to a jarringly bright sun. The school holidays have, I’m told, just started, and while my contemporaries are run off their feet ensuring their children are kept busy, I am staring into the void of yet another chapter in the distilled misery of dealing with my father’s death. I chose today to travel to my hometown to collect his ashes because I didn’t want the experience clouding the rest of our trip home, filled as it was with joyful, celebratory events, catching up with friends and a lovely family holiday with my wonderful in-laws.

Of course, I knew it was coming, but lying in the bright Corfu sun beer in hand, the reality of my impending and potentially final trip to Swindon faded into a forgettable future. I could keep it there I know. The funeral director casually mentioned people leaving their loved ones’ ashes at the funeral home for decades and I can understand why. A closed casket meant I didn’t have to really believe he was in there. Even the blurred anguish of clearing out his home, leaving most of his things, that familiar fabric of his presence on whose certainty I had always counted, to languish in charity shops and rot in skips, held a quality of the surreal. The feeling he could walk through the door at any moment, his coat and hat still hung in the hall, slippers waiting for his feet to slide into. Dismantling and dividing his possessions, boxing and abandoning my own, tearing them from their near-40-year resting places felt sickeningly unnatural. At night, I catalogue the things I couldn’t save, that I will never see again. I torture myself visualising the moment he would open his front door, arms wide open ready to hug, as the car he had been eagerly waiting for pulled up with us in it. How as a child, my own ears were so attuned to the sound of his Volvo I could detect it from the end of the street.

Yesterday, in Marks and Spencer, I saw the bald pate of a portly older South Asian gentleman from behind, and for a split second I thought, ahh – there he is. Today, I will be presented with his remains, and there he will be. I have never seen someone’s ashes before. They come in something called a scatter tube, a sealed bag inside, pre-prepared perforations in the lid. They offered one with a cricket theme which I politely declined, knowing encasing him inside imagery of his beloved sport would be more than I could bear. Perhaps I was wrong. Should I call them and change my mind? The simple beach design I chose suddenly feels banal, generic. He may be in there for a while so perhaps I should bite the bullet and make it more homely for him. Of course I know he’s not there. Sometimes he’s everywhere, sometimes nowhere. But having, seeing, the tiny bits of him that are left is terrifying in its certainty. In the complete, incontrovertible reality that he is gone forever, burnt up into tiny fragments of former human. That he, like his belongings and his memories, is now entirely my responsibility to carefully and competently set to rest.

One of the many reasons I chose not to have children is that I never wanted to do anything because I had to. I always wanted to live on my own terms, make my own choices, and not be responsible for anyone else. And aside from the onerous demands of being alive placed on us by the authorities that be, I had largely accomplished this goal until my father got sick. Being thrust into the world of elder care, the endless appointments, follow-ups, assessments, and medications to be organised, the basic rites and rituals of human life to manage for another whole person, often in the face of bullish institutional incompetence, was not something I was prepared or in any way qualified for. Neither was my father’s death. Each step on the downward trajectory of his health took more from me than its predecessor, each challenge had to be met in the immediate, leaving zero time or resources to dwell on the past or think about the future. Now the future is here, he is gone and the past is all I have to fend off my desolation. Each memory a gift boxed charm to be unwrapped and attached to a forever bracelet that I hope will, that I need to carry me through however many years of unparented life lie ahead. Knowing I will never again be loved as a child stings me all over, a sharp disorienting pain of loss and loneliness. A limb torn off, its phantom presence a feverish disconsolate ache.

My beloved father is now a tube of bone dust. And I will carry him as he once carried me, sign for him as he signed for me, and take him somewhere he would want to be taken, rest him somewhere he would want to be. The next thing I must try my best to get right on my own. The next emotional and practical mountain landscaped by death.

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Some quick thoughts on Not Writing

Though still groggy, snotty and discombobulated with jet lag, I’m pondering on how the trip to the UK from which we’ve just returned was by far the most positive and healing I’ve had for a very long time. Realisations and discoveries that have successfully eluded me released tiny triggers in my brain and a few pieces of the chaotic mental jigsaw felt their way cautiously around one another before cautiously interlocking.

Being back home was strange. An experience that usually winds me up into ever tighter emotional knots instead helped me understand myself a little bit better. The breakneck 19 days found me pushing envelopes I usually fight to keep static, confronting triggering places and situations, but also opening myself up to different ways of experiencing joy and carefully inching out the rolled dough of my patience, all punctuated – it must be said – with large quantities of booze and the sleep of the dead.

Somehow, amidst all this noise, I found time to think about why I haven’t been writing.

For the last year, I’ve felt creatively atrophied, as though that part of my brain had somehow wandered off without the rest of me. The harder I thought about it, the more disjunctured I felt. Expression slipped through my fingers like Tantalus’s grapes, forever inching beyond my reach. I truly wanted to give up, to stop my brain hurting if nothing else.

It’s easy to forget that writing is hard, especially when you’ve had a really positive, empowering streak that suddenly evaporates and you don’t know why. The time and energy spent searching for the why can be even more dispiriting. Vice-like imposter syndrome sent me spiraling into self-doubt, self-blame and even greater inarticulacy. For a writer, feeling like you’re losing your voice is very frightening. Not Writing is hard because your emotions and thoughts build with no outlet, so you can feel suffocated in your own mind. Of course, this only makes the expressive inertia worse, and being locked inside a situation somewhat obviously precludes the necessary perspective to untangle it.

Being a writer is fraught with expectation. I think, perhaps, I hadn’t really understood the impact of this. People project them onto you, sometimes without even realising they are doing so. And my internal expectations were eating me up too. The fear that I’d write something that wasn’t relatable, that said something stupid, that misused language or was simply dull overtook my mind. Pieces I wrote were binned or shelved. My experiences felt trite and easy to critique, my viewpoints selfish and boring, and my words cliched and facile. I struggle to people-please with my work, yet couldn’t escape the idea that I should be, so the simplest thing was to do nothing. I believed, not necessarily incorrectly, that someone else would always write something better than me – cleverer, more relevant, more eloquent, so why bother? A whirlpool of negativity enhanced by my status as Beer Writer of the Year and the expectation I felt came with that accolade which I knew I wasn’t fulfilling.

While I understood that full-time adulting as my father’s carer was impacting my creativity, taking up so much space in my brain, it felt impossible to work around. The worry and the pressure seemed to be expanding balloon-like, forcing all other thoughts to the side. I felt cut off and alienated from myself and anything else I was experiencing, yet embarrassed to wallow in something so everyday. The physical and psychological strains of perimenopause elicited similar feelings. I became convinced everyone else knew exactly what they were doing and my disorientation was of my own making, a consequence of my basic failures as a human being. Writing began to feel pointless.

Negative feedback sealed the deal. Streams of rejections and unanswered emails seemed less like a contraction of the industry and more like a deserved punishment. Aggressive editorial commentary reduced me to tears, cementing in my brain that my words simply were not good enough, sticking them in my throat until I choked on them. I started to look for a new job.

Arriving back in London was, albeit unintentionally, a good time to be Not Writing. Our relentless schedule acted as a sterling preventative, offering respite from staring at a blank page, both literally and figuratively. Talking to people most every day, most of the time, helped break the stranglehold of silence in my brain that comes from a very solitary occupation. Conversations made me feel more grounded and relatable, and brought me back into the world. Old friends and places opened up memories and understandings that reminded me who I am and why I do this. I began to see my capabilities as stymied rather than vanished and reflected hard on how the different stages of my life have led me here, and that I’m not quite as much of an enormous disappointment to my younger self as I’ve been believing. Quality time spent with my father gently eased emotional intensity of caregiving, and hanging out with my lovely in-laws reconnected me to a wider emotional ecosystem. Dipping my toe in the water of my old life usually stings, but this time it healed.

I don’t know if I’ll ever be the prolific high-achieving writer I have been, but right now trying seems like enough, including trying to be better at failing, and trying to lean into the world outside my head.

13th November 2025

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DEI Burnout and exploitative tokenism

Optimism is scarce when it’s not my first ride on the faux-acceptance bus

With my Crafted For Action panel discussion on DEI burnout in the beer industry coming up this Friday I should be excited to finally be presenting on a topic which, challenging and frustrating as it is, I’ve been working so hard to bring into focus for such a long time, and to be working with so many brilliant, talented people who understand what is at stake.

But I’m not.

For people from marginalised groups, recently stuffed a diet of solidarity and equality, the contradictory messaging and advice we’ve received has been nothing more or less than an abuse of trust. We’re told to be our authentic selves. Yet when other people don’t like our authentic selves, it’s our fault for being too authentic, for not sugar-coating and code-switching to taste. We’re supposed to know by magic just how authentic we can be. And if we make a mistake it’s totally socially acceptable for other people to walk away, to go back to their safe lands of homogenous privilege. We’re encouraged to stand up for ourselves – assert ourselves and be proactive in positivising our identities, fight our own battles. But not too much – in case we come across as too confident, too aggressive, frightening, or worse – suggesting entitlement. Because entitlement only belongs to one group and should we dare to declare that we aren’t asking, we are telling, we are uppity, ungrateful and arrogant. We are told we are beautiful – then fashions we have no power over shift and we are told we are not.

Most of all, we have been told we are deserving – that our efforts are to finally be justly rewarded. That we have earned our seat at the table and can play with the big boys. Now we’re discovering our bench at the kiddie table leaves us closed out of any significant dialogue – that the silent serpent of superiority has woken and is poised to pounce, lashing its venomous tail against any semblance of equality we had been promised, laughing a slick smile that we were gullible enough to be fooled again.

And suddenly we’re back in the dust, shaking ourselves off ruefully. It was nice while it lasted, that breath of inclusion.

I can’t see any positives to take. Trying to engage with a rigged system is like being in an abusive relationship. You fight so hard for recognition, to be acknowledged, appreciated, loved, accepted. The promises come when you have something to offer and you take them at face value because you have no other choice, nowhere else to go. A part of you always knows the shoe is on the other foot, but you let it slide because there’s no other route to the heart of the system of power and accepting the reality that each gesture of acceptance is a sham feels like a personal failure, something someone else could get right, will get right, but you’re just not good enough.

That’s how it works. Eroding confidence. Chipping away at self-esteem. Bending until breaking point. By holding out the carrot that lies that there really is a way to win – a way to be seen, a way to be equal, a way to be loved – only you just haven’t found it yet because you’re not good enough. You’re not worthy.

The power to decide what is worthy, who is worthy. That is what has been reasserted with a vengeance – the heavy WASP heel stamping down its authority. And here we are again – demoted to the fringes of acquired taste, tokenised and told to like it. Told there is no other choice.

For them, business as usual has recommenced. No more calls for diverse voices, no more stories highlighting marginalised groups. Safe hands, otherwise known as nepotism and unconscious bias, are back in business, opportunities have disappeared and we’re segued back into irrelevance and silence.

Of course, the stage dressing tells a different story. We hear that we’ve been spoiled, pampered, offered too much, and this is merely a balancing of the scale of overcorrective privilege we’ve been misguidedly allowed to tip in our favour. We’re told whatever gains we made were unearned, unjust – that we were given unfair advantages that must now be reclaimed in the name of true equality. No mention is made of irony or hypocrisy. Faux-allies breathe a quiet sigh of relief as their position is restored, closing the door behind them.

I am tired. I am tired and I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not managing the burnout. I’m not managing the lies and tangled bullshit koolaid of fake acceptance we’re now choking on. I’m not okay with how the system has turned our positivity and trust against us – played its nastiest, most cruel card by undermining any successes we’re had as mere DEI hires. How it raised our confidence then stripped us down in one fell swoop, pulling back an Oz-like curtain on the true machinations at work behind the scenes the entire time, playing to the gallery at our expense and leaving us in the knowledge we were never anything but costumed entertainers, toys to be played with then discarded.

For someone like me who has most always been treated as a performing curiosity, a creature in a zoo to be goggled, poked and prodded for amusement, this blow feels like one too many. The knowledge that, not for the first time, savvy unscrupulous careerists have capitalised on my pain, our pain, to advance themselves by appearing on-trend only to smirk as they pull up the ladder behind them fills me with a burning combination of rage and helplessness. How many more times will I do this dance in this lifetime? I don’t know. I hope I will have better answers for you by Friday and I’m sure my brilliant panel will buoy us all with their stoicism and resistance.

But in the meantime, I remain reeling from my latest trip round the hamster wheel of exploitative tokenism.

17th June 2025

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How HSBC abused an exhausted, overstretched caregiver

Ten hours of phone calls and all I got was spite and incompetence

Yes, a financial institution can be abusive. And not just randomly abusive (although HSBC are that too), but personally, aggressively abusive in a targeted and manipulative manner. You know when you go on public transport and you see those ‘our staff will not tolerate any type of abuse’ signs? I’m pretty sure that every HSBC call centre that picks up from the UK has an “abuse any customer who exhibits stress or frustration, finds fault with the company or threatens to make a complaint” signs.

Today was by no means the first time I’ve experienced abuse and bullying behaviour from HSBC but it has to rank as the most egregious. As a primary carer my life is, to be honest, nightmarishly admin-heavy and stressful. I feel like I have two full time jobs. Checking in with my dad daily, coordinating his care, cleaning, medication, doctor and hospital visits, paying his bills, staying on top of his admin and keeping abreast of his social calendar are all tiring, time-consuming and not how I had planned to spend my 40s. Looking after him affects my work, personal relationships and mental health. I (like other carers including parents) am now never able to be fully ‘off’ which takes its toll psychologically. Interruptions to my own schedule are regular and frustrating – I can’t even switch my phone off on holiday in case my dad needs something. And of course, like other carers I am perpetually beleaguered by other people’s ‘advice’ on what a terrible job I’m doing.

While this kind of judgmental bullying is frustrating and upsetting enough in person, using a position of authority in a financial institution upon which I, as a carer, depend on for accessibility and transparency in dealing with my father’s affairs is a special low. HSBC have not only been horrendously irresponsible in their management of his account since I took over as POA, they are now resorting to threats and intimidation over the phone when called out for their incompetence. Their atrocious security and account management breaches include sending debit cards and PIN numbers (yes, plural) to the wrong address and with the wrong name on them and offering misinformation and incorrect advice, the consequences of which have cost me hours on the phone (approximately ten to date) to try and resolve. When highlighting their failings and requesting to submit a complaint, the smug, cocky and utterly self-righteous advisor threatened me outright, saying I clearly wasn’t able to manage my father’s affairs and he would request a review of my POA because he “had the power to do that.”

So – this company sent out cards incorrectly three times. The first time involving a fraud offence which I had to report to the police (more carer POA nightmare paperwork). They then advised me that they could update my address for my POA card to a US address – which I did, assuming they knew what they were talking about. I subsequently discovered that not only had another two sets of cards and PINS been sent to the wrong address, but that they put my father’s name on my US address, not mine, so now he is liable for tax as a US citizen (which he has not nor never has been). Error after error after error. Yet, according to this chap, speaking on behalf of HSBC, I am the incompetent one.

It gets worse. This gentleman – whom it has taken me three hours, five phone calls and six different departments over the last 2 days – to reach next tells me this can only be resolved by my father filling in a paper form and taking it to the branch. I explained politely that he has dementia and I’m currently abroad. He insisted that “someone must be able to help him with this,” exhibiting zero understanding or empathy of the complexity of being a solo caregiver living in another country and trying to retain some semblance of a life of her own. My father has chosen to live somewhere he has no family. This is legally beyond my control. This man’s assumption that I can just magic someone up to fix the mess his team made is absurdly arrogant. Yes, I can arrange for his daily carer to do this, but I have to pay for extra time and she has to be able to fit it in with her other clients. We don’t all live in some multi-generational sitcomesque circumstance, you presumptuous prick.

This man also made strong inferences reverting to the base assumption that as his daughter I should be with him all the time or I am an unfit caregiver unworthy of a POA. How much of his assumption may or may not have come from my gender and South Asian name I do not know, but imagine speaking to someone like that in a professional capacity? The utter inappropriateness, rudeness and outright insulting lie has me sick to my stomach. If I was doing such a terrible job, how have I caught all the errors HSBC have made with my dad’s account (including allowing over £1,000 worth of fraud to occur – all of which I did the work to get back) that his enormous team of banking professionals allowed to happen and did not flag? The hypocrisy is enraging.

This is not the first time an HSBC advisor has spoken down to me, tried to undermine me and insulted me to my face. It seems that when dealing with a POA this is their first resort (again, I see a corporate mood board). At the first sign of frustration staff immediately hang up the phone on customers, yet they are allowed to patronize, lie, insult and threaten to their heart’s content with absolutely no consequences as HSBC UK has no proper complaints policy. They have no phone or email for complaints – you must take the time to write and mail a physical letter about the bad things they do because they know no one has that kind of time – and never, ever call back when they say they will. Professional to the hilt.

To return to today’s unpleasant individual, not only did he insult me repeatedly, claiming the address error was not their fault because “it just happens sometimes with POAs – you were unlucky” and saying “you should have known this could happen” when their advisor never gave me that information, he also showed a shocking level of disrespect for my father. I explained his illness multiple times, and that it would be confusing and potentially traumatic for him to have to deal with this, even with help. Imagine being asked to confirm your citizenship and tax status after living the UK for over 50 years if you’re mentally unwell. The ridiculousness and insultingness of the situation is so infuriating and upsetting. I offered to fill in the form myself by email and send it back to them but that wasn’t acceptable to him. Absolute zero empathy showcasing his acute ableism.

This individual and the organisation he represents pose an active threat to the mental wellbeing of their clients, particularly caregivers and vulnerable people. Being spoken to in this way after a long day of doing someone else’s admin can feel gut-wrenchingly cruel. You are doing your best, trying so hard, you know you haven’t done anything wrong but the calculated barb that some pathetic jobsworth chucks at you to cover their own arse still stings, spitefully adding stress to an already exhausting situation. And forcing vulnerable people to complete unnecessary tasks that may be challenging for them due to your own administrative errors is pretty gross and actually quite inhumane.

I suppose if your organisation is that pathetically incompetent insults and threats are all you have to arm yourself with. Nonetheless, HSBC is not a safe place for carers or those being cared for. Unfortunately I can’t move my father’s account – at least for now – but I’m getting mine the hell away from these bullying, intimidatory people and I highly suggest that anyone caring for someone vulnerable (or actually just anyone) do the same.

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