By Raffique Shah
February 25, 2007
It was not the “best Carnival ever”, as some Government ministers and security officials boasted last week. If they meant that it was the best in recent years, with that I agree. There were more than a handful of good calypsoes. There were a few mas bands that were colourful, that blended the skills of “wirebenders” and creativity of costume designers, bringing back some of the splendour of yesteryear. There was pan music supreme, so much so that I felt sorry for the many good bands that were not showcased at the finals. And for once I agree with Police Commissioner Trevor Paul, it was relatively crime-free.
Continue reading A Carnival we can be proud of
It’s the columnist’s perennial dilemma: what topic to address on a Carnival Sunday? Who reads newspapers around this time anyway? Pan “peongs” in their thousands will be bleary-eyed and either celebrating the sound of steel or fuming over the judges’ decisions from last night’s Panorama finals. Many more who will have attended Friday night’s cacophony, “Soca Monarch”, rendered tone-deaf by noise boxes supreme, are too dazed to do anything but seek out more noise. And the few who have remained sober until now will be psychologically adjusting their systems for the stupor that will start by nightfall.
The arbitrary and selective conduct of the police in responding to recent popular protest movements raises fundamental questions on this response and its linkage with the composition of the protective services in plural Trinidad and Tobago. In cosmopolitan societies but more so in a multicultural but in an ethnically polarised T&T our cosmopolitan people must be provided with every basis to identify with the police. The police must never be perceived or be used as a mechanism for political repression or constitute a potential threat to any democratically elected government or act as an arm of the Executive as it is being perceived today in T&T.
Every Afrikan society has beliefs, ideas and teachings that emphasise the existence of a Supreme Being. These beliefs, ideas and teachings are found to be original with the Afrikan way of life. But, beliefs, ideas, teachings and even practices may differ from society to society and from shrine to shrine.
Why try to deny the legitimacy of the Steelpan being our national instrument?
