Peter Minshall
I give you Gandhi and I give you Selwyn, Ralph and Raoul, and I give you Wayne, all in the same breath. “Many people, especially ignorant people, want to punish you for speaking the truth, for being correct, for being you. Never apologise for being correct, or for being years ahead of your time. If you’re right and you know it, speak your mind. Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.” Gandhi.
Mr Ryan, you were incorrect to state that I was equating Wayne with Gandhi in my original use of this quotation from the great Mahatma. I have an anathema to the deification of any man. I myself, from long practice, have learned well how to duck the word “genius” whenever it’s tossed at me. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. I am too well acquainted with the terror of a blank sheet of paper when a pencil is poised in my hand to make a mark upon it. This has to do with integrity.
Gandhi was the breath that I gave you, his breath, his own words, which precisely describes Dr Kublalsingh in the current state of punishment and siege that he endures. Gandhi gave you Wayne, not I. Nor did I equate Wayne with Gandhi. Nor am I equating you and your colleagues with Gandhi, in the same quote, repeated above, in the same breath.
You are merely three of “many people, especially ignorant people,” to whom Gandhi refers, who would punish and prey upon Wayne, he being the singular and lonely voice of one, the “minority of one” to which Gandhi also refers, the voice of truth.
I am astonished at the extraordinary coincidence of the three of you in chorus coming down in meticulous pickiness upon the character and integrity of the solitary Kublalsingh. What crime has Wayne Kublalsingh committed? What has he done that he should be publicly tried and harangued and picked to pieces by three such good wise men as you? Unless of course, you be mice, not men. What is your obsession with him, the man, the person?
The man is simply a messenger. His message is that a great wrong is being perpetrated by the people’s representatives, which involves the people’s money, their land and homes, and their mobility. I have suggested, by referencing the wise words of Gandhi, that Kublalsingh is right, and that he knows it, and that, as a consequence, he must speak his mind. Even if he is a minority of one, the truth is still the truth.
Why don’t you examine the message, seek to question or confirm that truth, rather than harangue the messenger? Mr Pantin, why are you so credulous about the claims in the paid advertisement, and so sceptical of Kublalsingh? Surely your long experience of life has taught you that it is those with power, those who have money and seek more, who are more likely to distort the truth.
A hunger strike has always been, historically, the last resort of the powerless. When those in power hold all the cards, when the law is toothless and its processes are in the interests of the powerful, when the cause is just and the recourses are few to non-existent, only then will the extraordinarily committed choose to starve himself in protest.
Gentlemen, why isn’t your attention focused on that message? Kublalsingh’s work was done with the first hunger strike. It is you who have not done your work since then.
Look at you. I’ve known you gentlemen all my life. At various moments in our history you have been perceptive, analytically astute, and courageous, on the side of truth. Mr Maraj’s summation of the first hunger strike is deeply moving. But it seems of late you have fallen prey to our society’s compulsion to focus on personality at the expense of substance. Now more than ever it is the substance that must be explored.
Yet now I might satirically liken you to a trio of little old ladies knitting away, clickety-clack, knit one, pearl two, peering through the jalousies, eyes glistening, beady, hungry, squinting to see what’s happening over in the neighbour’s yard to salivate and gossip about, while meantime the whole town is burning down behind you.
Well, gentlemen, neighbour Kublalsingh has done his utmost. It’s time for you to do your bit, don’t you think? Get the fire brigade out, boys. Your country needs you. There are lives to be saved. Are you able? Are you mice or men?
We need you to do more and to do better. You have allowed yourselves to be distracted, or perhaps it is too much trouble actually to research and investigate, and so you merely comment on what is in front of your face. You have dropped the ball. It is this indolence, this armchair pontificating, and this ignorance, as Gandhi rightly states, that has landed us in this pretty mess.
Where is your sensibility about our islandness? What is your opinion about this wonder of the world, this minuscule nine miles of tropical highway that is costing $5 billion, which per single square foot is more expensive than any square foot of road anywhere else on the planet? We’re not building the Golden Gate Bridge or the Great Wall of China.
We’re just making a little piece of highway on an island. Nor are we paving it with the gold of El Dorado. Shouldn’t the excessive cost of an ordinary highway be obsessing you more than the irritating nuisance of a man starving himself by the roadside? It’s our money that’s buying the damned thing, but do we know anything about it? At all?
We are told that the highway is good for us exactly as is, and that we must be well behaved, obedient little boys and girls, because Mama Kam and Papa Ram know what’s best for us. Do they indeed?
Well, I don’t think for a moment that Mama and Papa know better. I think they know what is best for themselves. It is yet another manifestation of the Governor General Syndrome, with which the three of you would be well familiar. All power at the centre. Let no damned dog bark.
Patrick Manning practised it, and this lot is more of the same, only bolder and better at it. When we elected this so-called People’s Partnership we expected a break from that past. But the Prime Minister and her Attorney General have betrayed that expectation, betrayed the basics of responsibility to the people whose partnership empowered them in the first place.
We want to know how and why our money is being spent. Who is making the profit on the $5 billion? We don’t see it in the plans. And Mama and Papa refuse to sit at the table with us and tell us. Are transparency, truth and trust too much to ask for? Open your eyes, you three blind mice. Readjust your sights. Instead of picking Kublalsingh apart, let’s see a character analysis of Persad-Bissessar and Ramlogan for a change. It would certainly be more relevant to our well-being and needs as a people.
Kamla is the Mama of Mamaguy. Her recent sanctimonious statements and hypocritical prayers for Wayne's welfare were a stream of morbid, sentimental slush; mawkish, maudlin and vapid in the extreme. She invokes God’s guidance with the saccharine ease of sliced white bread saturated in sweetened condensed milk. So much froth and empty posture. Pure professional Kamla blah.
Ramlogan meantime is the living Mancrab. It is unbelievable. He used to be such a principled, promising, bright young lawyer. He has become a monster. The metamorphosis is total and complete. He now uses the law like a bludgeon, to bully and beat the smallest whisper of opposition or dissent into total submission.
At Divali celebrations the other night he claimed that his gods have given permission and encouragement to man to exploit the environment. Oh dear. The problem is that the ancient venerated Hindu gods of India may well have advised that, but they were giving that advice in good faith to a humankind that then toiled and tooled with ploughshares, with bullocks, horses, mules and donkeys, and with elephants. Technology has changed the rules and the balance of power between man and nature forever.
Man’s greed, his love for money and his lust for power, is now enabled as never before by technology. Mancrab reigns supreme. And when King Mancrab reigns he takes Queen Kam’s divisive multiculturism and turns it into apartheid, Trinidad style, pitting South against North, simply to cover his a--e and take your eye off the ball.
Pure wickedness.
Well, good gentlemen, or gentlemice, you’d better watch the ball more carefully, lest you get your tails cut.
Three blind mice,
three blind mice,
See how they run,
see how they run,
They all ran after
the farmer’s wife,
Who cut off their tails
with a carving knife,
Did you ever see
such a thing in your life,
As three blind mice?
This little nursery rhyme has come a long way since Bloody Mary. You should check it out. Amazing origins. Google it. You’ll find that our Prime Minister would certainly not be the first woman in history to turn a blind eye to a good man’s death, in God’s name no less, were it in her interest and to her advantage. Wayne Kublalsingh is a good man.
On the other side of the street, evil and corruption ooze out of every pore and orifice of the comatose body politic of the Island Republic. Prove me wrong and I’ll eat my black hat and change my name to MacFarlane.