Tag Archives: Vaneisa Baksh

It’s not a local thing, not a Caribbean thing even. It’s more of a contemporary thing; this craving for brown food. Everyone succumbs to the smell and crunch of crispy, fried platters of unhealthy greasiness. Every shade is available—golden, tan, pale—however you like it, you can order it, and devour …

Permit me to invite you to tag along on a short journey that fleetingly slips inside the minds and memories of a few legendary cricketers. Their conversations emanated from the landscape of cricket, but they are replete with insights into the broad tapestry of living. I probably devote too much …

A common pipeline fuelling the vitriol that is passing for discourse online has been the blatant racism and political partisanship that are obviously intertwined. It is tempting to ask how we got to this rabid state, but it has been festering for so long that we know it is not …

This past week has seen graduation exercises at The University of the West Indies (UWI)—a batch of degreed people flowing out of its gates, just over 3,000 of them. I’ve spoken to a few of them, getting a sense of their experiences within academia. Some were first-timers, others were completing …

A few days ago, Nemme McSweeney sent me the link to a YouTube video featuring the man behind Moruga Hill Rice, Mark Forgenie. I know it’s long, she said (just over an hour), but Mr Forgenie encapsulates so many healthy concepts we keep ignoring. It was riveting: a combination of …

Off the top of my head, I can count 14 North American fast-food franchises thriving in Trinidad and Tobago. There are probably more, but this is the figure I reached without scrubbing my brain too hard. It might not seem a lot, but the number of their outlets comes up …

I can’t imagine anyone whose insides have not been churning at the gruesome images of murder, maiming and absolute devastation of humanity by humans globally. Most visible are macabre scenes from Gaza: children, babies, women, the elderly, the young, all strewn together as the faces of physical pain—limbs and torsos …

Boos, jeers, racist taunts, and insults are the most despicable traits of spectators at sporting events. Yet, universally they remain as prevalent as cheers and bonhomie. A charitable excuse would be that it expresses the passions stirred up by rivalries, or might be triggered by unsporting behaviour and reprehensible conduct …

A decision had to be made. Should I reflect on the 2025 edition of the Caribbean Premier League (CPL) before it had ended? It wasn’t difficult because what I wanted to talk about really had little to do with the outcome. The final match is on Sunday (yesterday), and I …

Last Sunday, Mohamed Irfaan Ali was sworn in for another term as president of Guyana. That night, he attended the second of the CPL home matches for the Guyana Amazon Warriors, who had beaten the Trinbago Knight Riders the night before. They were playing the Saint Kitts and Nevis Patriots, …

We invoke the concept of the public in different contexts. Broadly speaking, we are referring to people in general, but there are several common appendages to the word public: nuisance, pressure, opinion, intellectual, and good, are a few. These aspects came to mind within the domain of cricket with the …

The late Austin Clarke published A Passage Back Home as a tribute to his friend, Samuel Selvon in 1994 (the year Selvon died). He wrote about them attending what he called Carifesta I in Georgetown, British Guiana. “All of us from the various diasporas into which we had drifted, Europe …