By Raffique Shah
September 13, 2025
As I move along slowly towards what will be, if I make it, my 80th year on this here earth, mostly I feel as if I am not relevant to what’s happening around me. There was a time when I would easily sit behind my laptop and write up very sound, must-read columns that my many fans would call in to cuss or kiss me over, depending not so much on what was written but how it was written.
Mostly, my readership consisted of people my age, plus or minus ten; they would be interested in politics, management of the economy, keeping abreast of the national and international affairs, and I was told many times that people just liked my prose.
While I am not one who ever relied on a fan club to keep me writing, it did not hurt to get compliments from people I hardly knew and many people I did not know.
Oh, many readers would have their weekly diet of comic relief and others who were targets, especially politicians, would sometimes call to cuss me, but invariably most of us had a good laugh off what I wrote.
I learnt a lot about the private lives of public officials and prominent citizens. When my column bruised some people’s skin, and I felt I was wrong in so doing, I would sometimes call such persons on the phone and apologise to them. I knew well that the near-invisible line between libel and factual reports was one we seldom broke.
Nowadays, in my winter years, I still get many laughs, more than enough cuss, and wishes of the worst kind: why he eh go and dead? Quite humorous for me and my extended family, I assure you. Because wishing me death and it actually happening would be the blessing I’ve been awaiting.
My many detractors eat and beat up themselves, and here I am at home shaking my butt off, literally, with just enough energy to write again the next week to ruffle their feathers once more.
So here I was last week, a quiet one with hardly a caller waiting to pounce on me: I had taken a dig at PM Kamla Persad-Bissessar. I received a call from a friend-cum-fan midweek, asking if I had seen a response to my column of last Sunday on TTT, of all places. I do not confine myself to TV6 News because we belong to the same media house. I am very liberal and I seek entertainment for news wherever I get it, once I think it’s a credible media house.
Sheldon first asked if my Parkinson’s was stable. It wasn’t. I then shared the call with Leila so that Sheldon could give us more details. Turns out, it seems, that TTT, the State-owned media house, toes whatever party line the governing party may have by serving as a vehicle for propaganda. I have no problem with TTT’s staff. I view the station nightly for its news programme, and especially for sports and culture when they go local.
When I was able to view the recording, it was an interview featuring TTT’s Seigonie Mohammed and retired “Rare” Admiral Richard Kelshall, former commander of the best pirogue fleet in the Caribbean.
It seems that Richard—and he correctly assumed that I didn’t know he was still alive, and who has no relevance—was asked to dissect my last Sunday’s column; no doubt a directive from the Government’s new “Joseph Goebbels”, the Nazis super-propagandist in World War II.
The interview read like the anchor was given the questions to ask, with little to no background knowledge of the 1970 uprising. It should be noted that I do not expect many younger people to know details of 1970, because though the movement was a very relevant part of our history and of where we are today, it is not taught in our schools.
I shall not dwell on Kelshall’s flights of fancy, his heroics when heroes were in short supply, some of them crumbling in tears on the deck of the Coast Guard vessel.
No, but I will say, the Government is free to use washed-up sources like Richard to spread their propaganda to people too ignorant to do the research themselves.
“Rex Lassalle, Raffique Shah and Mike Bazie were not madmen, nor were they bad officers; in fact, they were some of the most brilliant officer material the regiment had seen, then or since.
“The unfortunate thing is that they were better soldiers than their superiors.” —Candyce M Kelshall: The Trinidad and Tobago Regiment and the 1970 Crisis: Mutiny or Revolution? I’d like to reiterate the title of my court martial address here: “The people have absolved me.” Thanks, Candyce.