I am frequently drawn by the direct and uninhibited language of fellow Trinidad Express columnist Joanne Paul. In her commentary last Monday, Dr Paul treated with our massive diabetes problem. Interestingly, from my perspective, she came to the conclusion that it was time to acknowledge the truth.   ‘Things are …

The use of technology to ‘spy’ on citizens has been high-profile news because of continuing charges and counter-charges about what terms and on whose authority spyware has been purchased from Israeli sources, and also about who was being spied upon. As usual, material issues have become blurred as Government, Opposition …

If I wanted to make my mother Celia steups, I would tell her that Sparrow was better than Kitchener. Of course I did not mean it because I became a Carnival piong when they both ruled town. This column focuses on Kitchener because this year is the 100th anniversary of …

Marshall McLuhan, Canadian educator and philosopher, published work in 1964 which became fundamental to understanding the media in the electronic age—even though electronic communication, as we know it, had not yet been invented.  He created the famous phrases ‘global village’ and ‘the medium is the message’. McLuhan posited, in summary, …

Nestor Sullivan was modestly described as manager of Pamberi Steel Orchestra when we lost him at the beginning of this month. My few precious interactions with him and his cool, dry witticisms caused me to become aware that he was a tireless presenter of scholarly but practical papers on the …

Negative characterisations are not liked by our rulers and their satellites when they are on the receiving end although they frequently abuse us. ‘Do so eh like so’ has resulted in a flurry of attacks on the vice-president of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, for saying last week that ‘things in Trinidad …

Owing to pressures on my time, I was unable last Sunday to join in the commentary on the Prime Minister’s confession that he was the high official present at President’s House in August 2021.   He was not there to meet the President, as he frequently does, but to meet …

Ghosts of commissions past have appeared in response to the Prime Minister’s decision to have a commission of inquiry into the deaths of four divers on 25 February, while they were working on one of the pipelines of Paria Fuel Trading Company (Paria). It was a wise decision of the …

“How sleep you now, unfeeling kings? Does one human feeling creep through your hearts’ remorseless sleep?”   These were the words of the poet Percy Shelley challenging suppression of the working class. There are no words strong enough to condemn the cruelty of the management of Paria Fuel Trading Company …

Views reportedly expressed by the well-qualified presenters at a webinar, entitled ‘Hosting and managing the Carnival Experience in Trinidad and Tobago in 2022 and Beyond’, converged with much of what I have been writing concerning Carnival and cultural development matters over several years, including last Sunday. The Trinidad Express newspaper …

‘Covid-19 will force us to re-build our economy,’ I wrote nearly two years ago, in April 2020. ‘We should place our vibrant performing arts at the core of the recovery agenda, not merely with the disproportionate focus on one transitory carnival season, which we may not even have in 2021. …

Our country has been widely shamed internationally by the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard’s fatal shooting of an illegal migrant baby.  The use of the label ‘accident’, the premature ducking of responsibility and due process as well as the crude, partisan political exchanges have compounded the shame. For the moment, …