The Town Gardens is my favourite park in Swindon and it gets used frequently for festivals. This weekend it hosted the Swindon Mela, billed as a celebration of all things asian. This was an awful lot of fun although far too crowded for my taste; still, if moved to a larger park it might lose a bit of the cosmopolitan flavour that the Town Gardens offer. Also, the Garden is at the highest point in town and that lends a bit of an air all by itself.
By asian, the Brits almost always mean Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, and Bangladeshi but it was nice to see such a wide variety represented (although Indian geographically, there is a substantial Goan population in town that has a vibrant culture and a unique identity, for instance). I didn’t note a lot of Iranian or, looking further east, Thai stalls but the crowd made it hard to get close to any of the information booths or vendors. There was a little segregation to note:
The ethnically English among the crowd (and a lot of us other pale folk) found the most culturally familiar fare at the Cobra Lager stand. Bitter and strong (like me!), it was refreshing after the climb to Old Town on this warmest day of the season.
The Bollywood actor Jeet worked the crowd not from the stage but face to face. He even came back onto stage and performed more (again, right at the railings to the delight of the mostly female fans) when the much more aloof and (it seemed to me) self-important Silinder was fashionably late. After his extra gigs, Jeet came strolling through the crowd with his offspring, shaking hands and chatting amiably with anyone who came along.
With Jeet away (there’s a dirty joke in there somewhere), the stage filled with a female dance troupe and the crowd up front quickly exchanged young women for a bunch of dudes.
The overall crowd mix remained about 60% caucasian British, 40% Asian, with 2 or 3 Caribbeans and a couple of Americans. Advice for next year’s visit: arrive early and stake out a good place near the Bowl after getting some food and beer (the queues are enormous after about 1 pm).
The Endless British Pub Crawl 