View Point

An Open Letter to Culture Minister Nyan Gadsby-Dolly Dear Madam, It’s over, madam. Dimanche Gras is dead. Like the numerous, onerous pretty costumes the Pegasus Fancy Sailor and Tan Tan and Saga Boy relegated into irrelevance, the show is arguably now exposed as a creaking, antediluvian anachronism, not merely moribund …

There was change at the top of the calypso pyramid last night as 24-year-old Helon Francis was crowned the 2018 Calypso Monarch with “Changes”—a powerful social commentary about Trinidad and Tobago’s need for introspection and revolution of thought to address corruption and crime in the two-island republic. Much of the …

As is the norm in our Republic, when something outrageous happens, it is condemned only by whispers in cliques and in the chambers and domes of elites, except for a few brave souls who speak out. And so it was with last week’s front page banner headline, “I am not …

“Since our last report, we continued with the investigation and have detained three more persons, bringing the number of individuals detained in relation to this matter to seven. The investigation remains a live one. “[…] The Trinidad and Tobago Police Service is obligated to enlighten citizens and residents of this …

I have a bit of advice for Mr Kamal Persad, coordinator of the research centre of The Indian Review: if you truly wish to defend the reputation of “the Indian-Trinidadian intelligentsia” (your description), as you claim in your latest “letter to the editor” in the Trinidad Express of 6 February, …

Aaron “Voice” St Louis can become the first Trinidad and Tobago artiste in 32 years to hold calypso and soca titles in the same season, after he beat the International Soca Monarch field for his third consecutive title last night. Voice’s song “Year for Love” held off Dexter “Blaxx” Stewart’s …

The 2018 Calypso Monarch Finals promise to be the best in about 20 years. This is so although the judges only got about 70% of the selections correct. The mix will be excellent, not simply in terms of musical variety and lyrical content and style and pace but also in …

“In a market economy, prices indicate demand which, in turn, affects supply—falling prices indicate lower demand, higher prices reveal shortages and, generally, supply adjusts to meet demand. “[…] The trouble was that State subsidies distorted the market for calypso. So government funding, especially over the past 25 years, concealed preferences—or, …

“Is that a new standard that the society is being asked to now adopt? Are our colonial hang-ups and archaic societal constructs so rigid and prejudiced that we cannot see beyond a person’s sexual orientation to determine if (s)he is competent to perform a task for the benefit of the nation? …

“If the current average rate of about two per day is sustained, by the end of the year, we can expect there will be some 700 homicides (aka murders). (But) that sort of figure is plainly ridiculous, outrageous for a country with only some 1.3 million people.” The following Letter …

What a great result from the Panorama semi-finals last Sunday. The two groovy “young boy” songs Year for Love and Hello—subject only to a tie for fourth place with Lightning Flash—ran first, second, third and fourth as played by Renegades, Despers, Phase II and Skiffle respectively. These songs create a …

This week’s column is prompted by two reports last week that made global news. Although reproduced in local media, they would hardly have been expected to create waves within non-academic communities. One of these reports welcomed a new frontier of knowledge of human evolution: the CNN headline, “Modern fossil find …