Mihir’s documentary on immigration to air on Monday 23 April at 9pm, London Live

London Evening Standard

I arrived as a student from India nine months after Enoch Powell’s “Rivers of Blood” speech and for my first three decades here lived in the shadow of it. I was called a Paki and told to go home. In 1969 a landlady in Hampstead said she could not rent me the bedsit advertised in The Times because “my husband would not like that”.

In the Eighties I was thumped by a skinhead on a crowded Central line train, and saw the ugly face of the beautiful game when reporting football matches for The Sunday Times. As the only non-white football reporter in the mainstream media, my presence often raised eyebrows from football managers, with one suggesting I was reporting the wrong sport.