Re-thinking education
I hope the young, intelligent and energetic Minister who has been put in charge of education in the country takes a fresh look at what needs to be done. This goes beyond giving current teachers and those to come a much better deal and dramatically re-funding UG. There is need for a root-and-branch reexamination of [...]
Godfrey Chin’s marvellous life-work
In a recent conversation with Godfrey, amidst the multitude of evocations that continually cascaded out of his extraordinary memory, he told me about bird-whistling competitions and donkey-cart racing in Guyana long ago, and described to me the hundred and one manifestations of that condition of bewitched infatuation in a man or a woman called typee. [...]
Striving for perfection
I wish I could convey, in particular to young people, whose mental appetites seem whetted so easily these days by the transient and the trashy – I wish I could communicate the quiet depths, the delights, the leaping excitements of great poetry. Perhaps I should remind the young inclined to scoff, that Bob Marley has [...]
The wisdom of Alexander Herzen
I’ve had the good fortune lately to do one of the things I enjoy the most – browse in good bookstores and buy a stock of books to read and add to my library. I cannot think of a more peaceful, pleasurable, and satisfying occupation. Once, employed in this lovely pursuit, I found waiting for [...]
Sugar suffers another blow
The perception seems to be that sugar is dead in most Caricom countries and dying in the rest. As a result public concern is muted or non-existent when the European Union, as it has been accustomed to do in recent years, gets set to inflict further damage on this industry. Sadly, it is probably half-forgotten [...]
Christmas
I regret I start with grimness in my Christmas column this year. Perhaps it is good to remember that for countless millions in the world this is, as T S Eliot reminded us in the greatest poem ever written about the birth of Christ, “Just the worst time of the year.” So this column records [...]
A fact of life
Anyone who writes about life must think about death. It is not being morbid to do so. As Steve Jobs said in an address at Stanford University in 2004 which has become famous since he himself died prematurely at the summit of his life as the greatest design and marketing genius of his age: “Death [...]
How not to think in a new Guyana
It happens all the time in small, closely-knit groups – cabinets, party executives, boards of directors, sports associations, church congregations or club committees. It is called groupthink. It is when such groups become more and more certain that their collective judgment is infallible. Groupthink signals big trouble. The individuals within such groups, who may or [...]
Before and after elections – what matters
We should beware the over-mighty State. A State that gathers all powers to itself drains initiative away from where it does most good – at the local level, at the level of the small group, the family, the individual. And the danger does not end when formal democracy – consisting of elections every few years, [...]
The global juggernaut
Free trade remains the ideology of the age and protectionism the discarded evil. But in the real flesh and blood world of profit and loss bits of both, at one time or another, are essential human devices to organize trade most beneficially. In the final analysis free trade is less an economic strategy than it [...]
The greatest cricket ever played
I have two indelible pictures in my mind – inscribed there not through seeing the exploits myself but through listening at the time with a fearful pride and thereafter hearing eye-witnesses tell their vivid stories of how it happened. One picture, now grown so large in the imagination that it has taken on the shape [...]
America completely off-track
America’s insatiable appetite for oil is leading to her own ruin and endangering the whole world. The United States produces only 10% of the world’s oil but consumes 25% of it. This tremendous gap helps to create the mighty and growing American fiscal and trade deficits which skew the world’s economy in a way which [...]
Retreat from the madding crowd
In my home, a step down off the dining room, overlooking the beautiful garden my wife has created, I have my studiolo. A studiolo in Renaissance times in Italy was either a piece of furniture or, in the case I have in mind, a small room in which to write and read and listen to [...]
Will the election make us happier?
The debate about what constitutes happiness has been going on for thousands of years. It is unlikely ever to end. Even if scientists come up with a pill which, taken daily like a vitamin tablet, imparts an all-encompassing feeling of permanent contentment, that will not end the questions. Can such artificially induced euphoria really be [...]
All leaders need Archilochus
When I worked in the sugar industry I remember once discussing a problem with a young and junior colleague. I was absolutely certain that I had the right answer but he argued and put another view. I found myself getting irritated and probably I showed it. It would have been easy for him to shrug [...]