Shilpa Shetty denies racism of British TV show participants

Shilpa Shetty wants to turn her back on those campaigning against racism, after benefiting hugely from their support. If she fought back strongly on the reality TV show to emerge the winner, it is in no small measure due to the support of liberal opinion in UK and India. Now, she wants to focus on herself (her life, her career), shutting out social influences. Can an individual's growth be delinked from the society and politics in which she is situated? Shilpa, like many opportunists, is utterly focused on herself, but if the world were to be full of people like her it would be a bleak and frighten-ing place. An individual's personality is mediated by society, hence there is no real divide between the personal and the political. A social and political issue is not something out there for campaigners to take up and people like Shilpa to sit back and watch the fun. Politics is not a feverish, sporadic burst of action at the barricades, or a fulmination against TV shows, but the sum total of choices made in the everyday realm, from which there is no escape. Shilpa perhaps does not realise that her attempts to withdraw from the race debate amounts to the exercise of a particular political choice. By seeking to distance herself from the anti-racists, she is with the racists. There is no third way. In Saul Bellow's book, The Dean's December, the protagonist is a dean who has to deal with a situation of racial abuse. He is not comfortable with what has happened, yet cannot support the strident anti-racists. But there are flashpoint situations, where such ambivalence becomes a luxury. Both the dean and Shilpa would then find themselves on the wrong side. Shilpa does not want to become an icon of the anti-racism movement. If that means that she will not speak on the bias against dark skinned models in TV commercials and Bollywood, or issue a statement against fairness creams, then she is on the same boat as Jade Goody.