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The crisis of each other
My last column was to end differently. I wasn’t brave, and let Minister Cuffie’s public servant secretary divert me. I’m going to try to finish.In writing about forging one nation out of this “small...
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'You go make a calypso on me'
It was only this past decade, in a moment of sheer joy, driving listening to a now defunct calypso station, I discovered Sparrow’s calypso Lulu, recorded around 1959. Its message resonates so...
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Hearing the wrong things about rights
I was taken aback to read the impenetrable ramblings attributed to me in Monday’s paper, following a telephone interview about Trinidad & Tobago’s Universal Periodic Review I did while driving to...
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How come we’re poised to end child marriage?
What exactly proved the tipping point for child marriage laws last week?Provisions (dating back in law to at least 1881) for marrying minors, retained in our current Hindu and Muslim acts, a 2013...
View ArticleUnmarried children still need sex education
I wish Amery Browne the best in his new diplomatic life. Though we really met only after he’d grown into one of the brightest, most effective young professionals I’ve encountered, I feel I’ve known him...
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Orlando fashion statements, and in pari materia
Is the Orlando news cycle over? Do I still get to talk about it this week? Or are we back to our small lives? Where violence and bigotry are normal, expected, backdrop to the fete, the kiss, the ripe...
View ArticleIs either CARICOM, or voting, good for you?
Much of the post-Brexit hubbub has been about the markets. Some social media critiques decry Britain’s enduring racism, with TrinBrits’s accounts of “Leave” voter neighbours’ cheery morning-after...
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I came first in Common Entrance
And no other child should, ever again. I found the well-preserved hole-punched computer card I took to the exam site four decades ago. Before we renamed it Secondary Entrance Assessment. Before we’d...
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Closing the year with open questions
None of this column’s playful predictions for 2015 came true. One or two—about Barry Padarath and oil prices—came close. I might be doing better than Yesenia, but last year-end, I gave up on...
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Sensationalising sex assault bad for all
Neither of two women, reported in the same story to have alleged similar assaults by PH rapists and accomplices, appears to have “cried.”Doing laundry for a trip to Jamaica—whose persistent violence...
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Married to the magic of three-fifths
Voices of a surprising number and stature have taken the Attorney General to task for his “tactical” decision to remove a provision (requiring a 60 per cent margin of votes for passage) originally...
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Some love for Keith
I like Keith Rowley, I have to confess. Despite his clear flaws, his ill-temperedness, the periodic ugliness of his masculinity. Despite my puzzlement at many people he chooses to assign leadership.I...
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‘IT’S JUST IN YOUR HEAD...’
I promised myself to get through Valentine’s Day whole. I’d call another single friend, and we’d take each other out. I couldn’t think who. But I’d be fine. I’d hold my breath, and my head down, and...
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Carnival fantasies
Following the 19-hour Panorama Savannah party, the half-a-dozen calypsonians suing TUCO over its Dimanche Gras selections, and whatever controversy over-costumed bands or street violence emerges today...
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POLICING’S COLLAPSE
The past two weeks have been a watershed for policing. The National Security Minister’s “oops, I didn’t mean crime-free” Carnival holiday saw incidents in Scarborough and La Brea where police officers...
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Raising Boys
I watched the TV docudrama, Suffragette, last week. It popularised a piece of social history I was never taught that the turn of the 20th century campaign in Britain to extend the vote to women...
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What women are doing—with tambourines
“Where Womantra?” Trinbagonian men continue to ask derisively, as if they were looking up agnostically into the Gotham skies for the local superheroines. But, actually, that introit and its companion...
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For Us There Is Only The Living
It was the most gut-wrenching, heartbreaking week on Trinidad’s killing fields. A week to despair, to give up. I had wanted to write about Kevin Baldeosingh making fun of a state institution trying to...
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Bread and highways
I miss Jack Warner and Louis Lee Sing’s 2012 west Port-of-Spain traffic plan. Do you?A scheme that had me whizzing to work during rush hour in 20 minutes. It was one of the most effective and...
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Third-to-last
I mentioned here recently how my social media comment about an employee’s neck-rolling at another person buying gas at St Christopher’s service station on Wrightson Road prompted a robust customer...
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