Why sons are like their fathers

Tottenham fans have serenaded Ange Postecoglou to the tune of Robbie Williams’s Angels but perhaps Let Me Entertain You would be more appropriate after his side swept aside Burnley to maintain their unbeaten start to the Premier League season.

They could have managed more than their five goals at Turf Moor. Son Heung-min scored a hat-trick, while James Maddison pulled the strings and was rewarded with a goal. Postecoglou also has a freescoring centre-back in Cristian Romero, who failed to find the net last season but has two goals already this season.

“It was a testament to the goalscorers who have thrust into the leadership positions and have embraced that with not just words but actions on a daily basis,” said Postecoglou, Tottenham’s amiable Australian coach in his rookie Premier League season. “They have bought into it and Madders is one of them. He was so creative and showed how clinical he is. How he is prepared to work for the team is a great example.”

A fascinating Postecoglou interview from 2020 resurfaced this week on Training Ground Guru where he talked about the bond with his late father, growing up watching the entertainers of the 1970s and their shared interest only in exciting football. It will be music to the ears of Spurs fans.

“I’m loving Big Ange instead,” are the words swapped in the fans’ version of Angels , and they were sent back down the M6 at last happy after visiting this ground. It was where Antonio Conte imploded last year and Jose Mourinho rounded on his own players before that.

There was no such drama here despite falling behind to Lyle Foster’s early opener. Spurs were ruthless in punishing Burnley for their mistakes thereafter. Son’s hat-trick came in the striker role Harry Kane vacated on the eve of the season. And Maddison is now the player attacks go through. He thrives on getting fouled and being heckled by his opponents’ fans.

“He is a pretty strong, resilient guy. It’s not that he likes to get targeted but he wants the ball and has that quality,” Postecoglou said.

Burnley could not have got off to a better start, ahead within four minutes following a move that swept through the visitors’ back line with incisive passing and powerful running. Luca Koleosho, an Italy Under-19 forward, showed Premier League pedigree to get around Pedro Porro before his cut-back invited Foster to finish neatly into the far corner of the net.

Spurs’ riposte came in the form of a long ball down the middle, although the finish was intricate. Porro provided the route-one path to goal with a punt downfield that Burnley failed to deal with. Seconds later, Son had exchanged passes with Manor Solomon before the Spurs captain dinked the ball over James Trafford. They were ahead in the added minutes of the first half after Burnley had four attempts, but failed, to clear Maddison’s corner. The ball fell to Romero on the edge of the area, with his finish finding the top corner off a post.

Maddison’s goal came after Burnley lost the ball in their own territory, with Destiny Udogie shifting the ball to Maddison, who was afforded plenty of time on the edge of the penalty area to take aim and finish well.

Son’s second goal came after Solomon waltzed through Burnley’s defence and squared to his captain. Porro played Son behind Burnley’s defence for his treble. Josh Brownhill pulled one back for the home side in the last seconds.

Son’s ability to play in Kane’s position was part of the thinking in not targeting a No 9 in the window. “It’s one of the reasons,” Postecoglou said. “I have a picture in my head of what I want the team to look like and we are still building. It’s putting pieces together and not neglecting what is in front of you. Sonny, central or wide, has all the characteristics to play in any system.”

Gita Mehta, who has died aged 80, was admired as a novelist and as the author of books about her native India – the India seen from the inside by a returned emigrée, and the India as sold to the West in images of mysticism, poverty and chaos.

She made her name in 1980 with her first book Karma Cola: The Marketing of the Mystic East, a hilarious essay on “spiritual travellers” from the West – The Beatles, Hollywood rich kids in detox, intense Scandinavians, British colonial guilt-trippers – who go in search of the mystic soul of India, but only succeed in keeping everyone awake playing the bongos on 24-hour train journeys while filling the pockets of self-appointed “swamis” in a flourishing guru industry.

“They thought we were profound. We knew we were provincial,” Gita Mehta wrote. “Everybody thought everybody else was ridiculously exotic and everybody got it wrong.”

Writing in The Daily Telegraph James Cameron observed that of the many books he had read about India, Karma Cola was “the only one that has intentionally made me laugh”, while Ann Morrow commended it as “ideal for parents to give their children before they set off to India in the youthful hope of finding themselves and a guru”. The book’s cynical tone and colourful reportage earned it comparisons to the “New Journalism” of such American writers as Tom Wolfe .

Later Gita Mehta took to fiction, and published Raj (1989), a commercial blockbuster about rich princeling families looking for love in the run-up to Partition, which was hailed in the New York Review of Books as a powerful reinterpretation of history, though less kindly received by British critics.

Her A River Sutra (1993), a collection of tales told in poetic prose, centred around a civil servant who retires to rediscover his soul and run a guest-house by the sacred river Narmada where pilgrims come and tell him their stories.

She returned to opinionated reportage in Snakes and Ladders (1997), a 35-chapter guide to modern India, taking in politics, economics, autobiography, jokes, history, polemic, anecdote, interviews, race, the arts, literature, caste, and the sex industry.

Gita Mehta was married to Sonny Mehta , known as one of the top names in transatlantic publishing, the brains behind the Picador imprint at Pan Books in London and subsequently head of Knopf, the most “literary” imprint of Random House US.

A glamorous literary couple, the Mehtas divided their time between London, New Delhi and New York, where Gita, elegant in floaty saris whatever the weather (“because we’re one of the few peoples left in the world whose form of dress isn’t defined by Calvin Klein”), was known for her vivid, all-embracing personality, her delight in meeting new people and in new ideas, and for a beady-eyed scrutiny and dry wit that made her very good company.

In an article in The Daily Telegraph she recalled being rung up in New York and asked to appear on television to discuss her sexual fantasies: “I nearly fainted… In the West you talk about love and sex lives; in India we are more likely to talk about bowel movements… I recommend a return to the bowel movement – you don’t have to worry about being too old for it.”

A journalist who requested an interview recalled that “Would you mind awfully if I… chain-smoked throughout?” were her first words.

But Gita Mehta’s “insider-outsider” take on modern India was derived as much from family background as her own cosmopolitanism. The second of three children, she was born Gita Patnaik in New Delhi on December 12 1942 to Bijayananda (“Biju”) Patnaik, the scion of a princely family from Orissa (now Odisha), and his wife Gyanwati, née Sethi.

Her enormous extended family covered all parts of the Indian political spectrum, from intense Anglophilia – “There was a time when my mother had seven male cousins up at Cambridge simultaneously. Others were in the RAF” – to revolutionary activism. A cousin of her father’s, a 19-year-old poet, was shot dead while leading a raid on the British armoury at Chittagong, while another was taken in chains to the Andaman Islands aged 14 and imprisoned for 17 years.

Gita’s father Biju would become celebrated postwar as one of the most colourful and maverick personalities of Indian politics. At the time of his daughter’s birth he had come under the spell of Mahatma Gandhi, and the family home in New Delhi, which sheltered nationalists escaping the law, was known throughout the country as Absconders’ Paradise. Yet he did not follow the example of other Indian “freedom fighters” in seeking an end to British rule through collaboration with the Japanese.

Instead, on the outbreak of the Second World War he joined the RAF and, according to his daughter,  was “complimented, even decorated, by the Vicereine of India” for the large number of British civilians he had evacuated from Burma in the teeth of the Japanese advance. At the same time, however, from his RAF aircraft, he dropped bags of Gandhi’s “Quit India” leaflets on to Indian troops under British command and made clandestine flights to carry Congress Party leaders to secret meetings.

In early January 1943 he was arrested and jailed for his exploits and Gita recounted the tale of how, as he was being led away, he whispered to his wife to get rid of their weapons. This she did, using the family two-seater Sunbeam-Talbot convertible which she only knew how to drive in reverse. Unwittingly, in the dark, she dumped the cache outside the local police station. Fortunately, no connection was ever made.

As her mother campaigned to get her father released (she was finally successful in 1946, a year before independence), Gita, barely three years old, was sent with her older brother to a boarding school in Kashmir run by Irish nuns who told her: “We don’t allow crying here”.

“My brother and I spent the entire time trying to escape,” Gita said. “We once collected biscuit tins, waited until 9pm and tried to stack them up by a wall and climb over it, but…”

Back home in Delhi, she acquired a lifelong love of literature from visits to street booksellers hawking Mad magazine alongside works by Plato and Dickens: “Anna Karenina, sahib? Madame Bovary? Hot books, sahib, only this minute arrived.”

Having read her way through much of the literary canon, from Bombay University she read English at Girton College, Cambridge, where, by mistake, she sat her finals at the end of her first year: “Afterwards they hauled me up. I said, ‘But did I pass?’ and they said Yes.” With uncharacteristic meekness she sat her finals again when she was expected to.

At Cambridge she played bridge with Germaine Greer and Clive James and became friends with Eric Idle of Monty Python, Jonathan Lynn the co-writer of Yes Minister, and Richard Eyre, later of the National Theatre, who recalled her as “extraordinarily beautiful” and of having “the air of someone who had lived several lives… I don’t think I’d met anyone that cosmopolitan.”

It was at Cambridge, too, that she met fellow student Sonny Mehta while they were standing in a queue to see Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal; they married in 1965.

After graduation she studied at film school in London and embarked on a career as a documentary filmmaker for British, European and American networks, including reporting the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971 for NBC and making Dateline Bangladesh, a film compilation of the war which was shown in cinemas in India.

Her development as an author was slow in gestation, partly due to her proximity, through her husband, to prize-winning writers. “Imagine: You’re working on a book and Gabriel García Márquez comes for a drink,” she told Publishers Weekly: “You think, ‘Does the world really need me?’ ”

The idea for her first book was sparked by a cocktail-party conversation in New York: “There had been the usual talk about karma. I wafted past in a sari and somebody said, ‘She can tell you what karma’s all about.’ I said, ‘It’s not what it’s cracked up to be.’ The guy said, ‘Yeah, that’s a great answer, so write it.’ It was the chairman of Bantam Books so I wrote it.” It took her just three weeks. Her last book, Eternal Ganesha (2006), was a coffee-table book about the ubiquitous, elephant-headed Hindu deity.

Gita Mehta was offered one of India’s highest civilian honours, the Padma Shri, in 2019, but declined on the grounds that “the timing might be misconstrued” because of an imminent general election.

Gita Mehta’s husband Sonny died in 2019. She is survived by their son.

Gita Mehta, born December 12 1942, died September 16 2023

Adrian and Hurricane were crowned AGT champions (Image: NBC)

The winner of America’s Got Talent has been revealed, with Adrian Stoica and Hurricane taking home the crown.

The popular trainer and his faithful border collie Hurricane came out on top in an action-packed final which featured a whopping 11 acts.

Adrian and Hurricane beat off stiff competition in the two-night finale of Season 18 of AGT from second placed Anna deGuzman and Murmuration in third, and will now walk away with an incredible prize.

The dynamic duo will star in their own Las Vegas residency, drive around in a new Kia car and get a staggering $1million cash prize.

Adrian grabbed hold of Hurricane as confetti rained down after their win was announced, with judges Simon Cowell, Heidi Klum, Sofia Vergara and Howie Mandell getting to their feet to applaud.

For all the latest on news, politics, sports, and showbiz from the USA, go to Daily Express US.

READ MORE: David Walliams ‘sues’ Britain’s Got Talent bosses over X-rated rant

Adrian and Hurricane were joined by Cat Cora (Image: NBC)

Earlier on in the evening, Adrian and his pet pooch were joined by a very special guest in a pre-recorded video.

Celebrity chef Cat Cora cooked up a fancy meal with the pair ahead of the grand finale, but in ended in disaster when Adrian chased Hurricane and they made a big mess.

Some fans were not too happy with the result and took to Twitter to voice their negative opinions.

“AWFUL!!!! America got this one wrong!!! Putri Ariani deserves the win more,” wrote one viewer.

Another added: “Man … Hurricane is a phenomenal dog and i love their acts but i gotta question how Murmuration didn’t win it all ; they were just perfection every single performance”

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A third put: “Congratulations to them but I feel like something was off with the voting this year. Absolutely stellar acts…..gone…..???”

However, others backed the duo, with one fan tweeting: “Well Deserved! It’s about time someone won for their talent and not their story”

Another said: “People getting mad over this for what? These two were very talented and keep in mind the time that went into this for him and Hurricane, this was at least for me thee best dog act ever on the show”

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