View Point

What would make Minister Stuart Young think that he could call in on a radio programme last Friday—or any day for that matter!—and deliver his treatise without interruption? What would make such a thought even enter his brain? Ignorance? Arrogance? Or is it, to follow the lead of the PNM …

“We used to call it the People’s Negro Movement and sometimes the People’s N—r Movement because we saw nothing national about it. We saw the PNM as the enemy and [Dr Eric] Williams as the chief enemy. And Williams made it quite clear he saw us Indians as the enemy …

“[George] Singh’s outburst was a public exposé of what the Indo-Trinidadian (Indian) community had always known, i.e. Indian culture (e.g. chutney, pichakaree) is given marginal or no space in ‘national’ and regional shows (e.g. CARIFESTA). […] “In all his anger, Singh was careful not to confirm what almost every Trinidadian suspected …

On Wednesday last, we received news that the Revue Calypso tent was the latest victim of money problems in the cultural milieu. This news was made worse when readers digested that the Revue was more than 50 years old and had been founded by the late Lord Kitchener. Kitchener’s body …

“From the inception of the party under the leadership of Dr Eric Williams, the PNM […] could not have succeeded without the important role played by citizens of Indian descent who were either members of the PNM or citizens who put country first in their respective roles. “It was people …

As The UWI settles into its second semester for the current academic year, the public may be anxious to hear from the St Augustine Campus administration what name it has chosen for the university’s oldest hall of residence, having already repudiated Viscount Milner after whom that hall has been identified …

My heart is breaking for that young woman. You don’t know how it breaks my heart to know that the Ph.D student whose car was stolen some days ago recovered the vehicle but without her marine samples and research. It truly hurts. Although I don’t have a doctorate—yet!— I can …

“Haiti is the only member of CARICOM whose citizens require a visa to travel to any other CARICOM nation. In other words, although CARICOM leaders pay lip service to Haiti, they also know that Haitians might leave their failed state—which is the diplomatic way of calling a country a ‘shithole’—and settle …

It takes a lot of balls to wade into this issue all willy-nilly. But I miss Carnival and I feel for a challenge. Hopefully I won’t offend and the feminists won’t skin me alive. But if I do unintentionally lapse into ‘mansplaining’ when offering my perspective, I apologize in advance. …

We may be having a progressive cultural shift. I am referring to the proposed need for “permission slips” to take a wine on a woman in a fete or on the road on Carnival days. The probability of that shift is to be measured by Machel Montano’s quick reverse from …

The description of “African countries” and their diaspora in Haiti as “shitholes” goes way beyond the racist vulgarity of a decadent American President. It is merely a kind of sordid culmination of centuries of disparagement of Africans and Africa in the interest of western capitalism and white supremacy. But how …

Trinidad and Tobago has always been dreadful at organising anything but Carnival. Nowadays, we can’t even organise that properly. And it is killing us, in some ways, literally. The example of Desperadoes and the Laventille Hill is instructive. Laventille has been problematic but it has produced some of the most …