By Raffique Shah
September 26, 2026

As we exit SoE number 2,3 or 4, with a real threat of it returning, because as Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has said, she can reinstate it if she wants, I take a look back at what it has accomplished. To say nothing significant would be a gross understatement of how ineffective the SoE was, and an accurate description of how little to nothing was accomplished.

A stupid boast of a little over 3,500 people being arrested has done nothing to assuage the fears of the nation because as far as I am—and I am sure, thousands of readers are—concerned, crime marched irrespective of the SoE. So, come better than that, Madame Prime Minister.
Continue reading Criminals don’t ask for your party card →

By Raffique Shah
September 19, 2026

As a young fella, I had several animals. I was never really a cat person, but dogs, I loved and took care of.

At one point the people in my village, Beaucarro, used to call me Brown Boy, after my pet dog which attempted to accompany me wherever I went. They would often hear me shouting after him: Brown Boy, go home! We had just moved from Freeport junction to Beaucarro which was about a mile away, and Brown Boy had not yet settled into his new surroundings. Whenever I would head out to school on mornings, Brown Boy saw it as his duty to accompany and protect me on my way there. On one such morning, as I left for school with him in tow, I remember going back home and taking him with me and tying him, because school was three miles away and at that very young age, I didn’t want him to become stranded or disoriented.
Continue reading One for the Animal lovers →

By Raffique Shah
September 12, 2026

To hear the stories being told from four cardinal points of the globe we call our world is to listen to or to read—or worse, experience—the common global issue of pharmaceutical failures. I’m not referring to failures in the sense of malpractice or drug side effects—well, at least that’s not what I’m concentrating on. My problem, as I am sure many others out there will have experienced, is the constant non-availability followed by price gouging of drugs necessary to treat ailments or conditions, if you will, that many people have absolutely no control over.
Continue reading No medicine, no excuses →

By Raffique Shah
September 06, 2026

I came from a family with a literate mother and a semi-literate father, both of whom understood the importance of their children getting a sound education. My siblings and I were not all cut out for the academic path, but we did the best we could with the abilities we had, I being the only one who received a tertiary education at that time back in the 1960s-1970s.

Today, though, all of our children have received some sort of tertiary education, and most of them are now employed alongside their peers in various sectors throughout the country. I bring this up because come tomorrow, the nation’s newest school year will open and some children will be going to school for the very first time, while others will be picking up where they left off the last academic year, and yet others will be either dropping out or graduating, never to return to academics again in their lifetime.
Continue reading Illiteracy in the age of AI →