Kay Jordan as a true champion of universal human rights naturally turning a tough concept into a most affable human experience!

Kay Jordan as a true champion of universal human rights naturally turning a tough concept into a most affable human experience!
1420 Hrs GMT
London
Sunday
16 january 2011
By © Muhammad Haque
Kay Jordan has been a foremost supporter of the universal human rights movement. As she has shown repeatedly whenever an issue has arisen about the appropriate language of communication in the Brick Lane area or elsewhere in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets.
Kay has been perplexed at the persistent ignorance of those who keep on referring to the Bangladeshis inaccurately. On many occasions in the past decade she has shown an active awareness of and respect for the appropriate language. Nowhere else has that issue been more important than when eding with the needs of so many Bangladeshi women in the Kay Jordan community. There is no other phrase to best describe the people, many of them women, who have grown to look on Kay as their sister, big sister, friend and true interpreter of their needs.
When I first discussed the matter of organising the local community with Kay in 2004 at the start of the Khoodeelaar! campaign against the Crossrail hole threat, one of the very groups of people Kay mentioned very positively was the women. “I will get my women together!”
So I said let’s go and talk to them!
It was with this preparation that Kay and I arrived at an address in the Princelet Street, not far from the plotted site for the nasty Crossrail hole . The rest of that walk, as they say, has become part of the ongoing action that is the campaign against the Big Business agenda scam Crossrail.
Kay has known from her life of contact with and of helping so many women what their ordinary language is. What their cultural expressions and preferences are. What makes them feel at home and what gives them human sustenance. Kay has lived a true active hectic life in a really alive community where her sense of being has been daily confirmed by the affinity she has felt with so many people, more than half of them women.
So when I was speaking from the rooftop of a former factory in the Hanbury Street I was doing so only in English. I had minutes earlier picked up the megaphone and had aimed it in the direction of the imminent batch of the House of Peers Crossrail Bill Select Committee [February 2008] quite literally blasting out bold English terms when I noticed that a fast walking Kay was approaching me. As all the people lined up behind the Khoodeelaar! campaign paraphernalia looked visibly OK, I was curious as to what had just gone awry to make Kay head in my direction that fast. It wasn’t long before I knew. Kay wanted me to do a bit of my campaign spiels in the Seelotee language. Not that I would need much convincing to turn on the Seelotee repertoire! Out of interest, however, I asked why. Kay had no hesitation: some of the women would like that as they spoke Seelotee as their main language!
A self-confessed tough talking no nonsense Yorkshire woman approaching a village boy sited in inner city East End of London since materialising on these shores from far away Seelot in the “remote region in Bangladesh” and reminding him that a number of the women among those gathered to back the campaign he was conducting could do with a bit of Seelotee language campaign talk!
If that was not behaviour totally designed to make Kay Jordan feel one of us in the community, I cannot think of anything else that could be!

And this I recall before I get down, here, NEXT, to updating on Rhoda Brawne’s backing of Kay Jordan as they both did battle with the House fo Peers Crossrail hole Bill “select committee” in March 2008


[To be continued]