A library at your fingertips
Many days I pass our National Library, and I never fail to bestow a silent blessing on those who work within its rooms quietly, rendering service of inestimable value. You cannot easily measure the huge impact on society of children being encouraged to love books and reading. I have always loved libraries. Sixty years have [...]
A speech about sports today
The Guyana Olympic Association kindly invited me to speak at their recent Annual Awards ceremony. This is the main part of what I had to say. I am impressed with the advances Guyana has been making. I see success in many areas – squash, rugby, our Twenty/20 cricket side in 2010 though they did not [...]
The limits of information
Everywhere in the world the ordinary man in the street has been brainwashed into supposing that the only thing that matters is economic success. Continually it is drummed into our heads that the test of progress is an increase in Gross National Product and personal wealth. Since there is no place in GNP for beauty [...]
Bad Samaritans
An important part of my life in the sugar industry, particularly the latter part, was spent battling the absurd concept that free trade is a universal good. Interminably, it seemed, one had to make the point that indiscriminate application of free trade mantras
The deepest chord
Intermittently through the year, and especially during memorable times up the immense and soul-redeeming Essequibo, I like to read Shelley – as we all should do from time to time since he is pre-eminently the poet of hope. “Let us believe in a kind of optimism in which we are our own gods,” he wrote, [...]
Rsvp to wasted time
If the multitude of establishment executives spent one half the time spent at cocktail parties doing something constructive or creative Guyana would be an infinitely better place. In fact, there is probably enough cocktail time in a couple of years to increase GDP by 2% per year or write a few novels the length of [...]
Light and shadow
Many of us, at some time or another, generally as a new year beckons, have resolved to “keep a diary,” probably as part of some grand and comprehensive plan to organize one’s life better and achieve great things – plans, I am afraid, which very soon run aground on the dangerous
BC: AD
The best words for Christmas are from TS Eliot’s marvellous poem, ‘The journey of the Magi.’ They are not words particularly full of merriment or traditional good cheer or festive laughter. You should read the whole poem, but here are some opening lines: A cold coming we had of it, Just the worst time of [...]
Sovereign remedies
I was distressed in conversation with a friend whom I admire for his level head, his learning, his insight, and his wit to hear him speak of his sense of being cramped for intellectual space, of his boredom with what seem to him the narrow opportunities in the country, of his disgust at the eternal [...]
Remembering Martin
On December 13, thirteen years ago, Martin Carter died. You know how it is when suddenly there is low voltage and the lights flicker low. So it was when he died, the soul-light of the nation dimmed. Without his presence it became that much more difficult to see the truth clearly in the surrounding gloom. [...]
Faith at the crossroads
I have always been impressed by the advice the great French philosopher and mathematician, Blaise Pascal, gave a gambling friend of his who was inclined to doubt the existence of God. “Well, I can understand that,” Pascal said, “but if I were you I would conduct myself as if He did exist. For consider the [...]
The good friend
Reading prevents your life ever narrowing down to the humdrum, the routine or the boring. It sets the mind ablaze. It agitates the heart. It is a good friend, whether the wind blows good or ill. There is not a single day it does not yield knowledge of interest,
The world-insult to women
It seems not a day, and certainly not a week,
‘A fugitive from the camp of conquerors’
I hear the frequent chorus: “Poetry is boring,” “poetry is impossible to understand,” “poetry is irrelevant,” “poetry has no place in this computer age,” “poetry is for academics.” Many times I have heard those who have read a little quote Auden’s “Poetry makes nothing happen” – great Auden whose poetry will continue to transfix and [...]
Terror-stricken
The world is terror-stricken. A condition of advanced paranoia is spreading everywhere. The fastest growing business in country after country is the security business. If you travel at all frequently you get a hint of this as at proliferating check-points you are made to cast off belts and shoes and no doubt explosive water bottles [...]