Category: Eyewitness

For writers Most Guyanese don’t give a hoot about the little band of snot-noses who pretentiously and portentously go around announcing to all and sundry that they’re “writers”. The one who’s most obnoxious about this affectation is the now long-in-the-tooth poseur Ruel Johnson. Groomed as an act of charity and expiation (you know how these liberals are about the ‘depressed’ classes) by Ian McDonald, the teenaged Johnson was allowed to submit a mishmash of jottings for the Guyana Prize for Literature. This was a mistake of the first order, compounded…

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…Virtual piffle There’s always been speculation about what happens after life. Some say you go to heaven… or most likely, human nature being what it is, to hell. Well, after Executive Committee (ExCo) member Ralph Ramkarran left the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), which was life to him, we’re finding out. We’d have said Ramkarran was in some kind of limbo. You know, that region right outside of hell where you hang around until the powers that be, decide what to do with you. But Ramkarran just informed us as to…

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…vigilantism The murders of two men – one in Sophia and the other in Berbice – have forced the nation to grapple with this latest descent into barbarity. Now while there’s been a great deal of ink spilled over the depravity of those who inflicted the fatal beatings – we’d like to make a wider connection. You see, these kinds of societal breakdowns and the incidents – wide apart as they were geographically and ethnically – are society-wide and are never happenstance. Invariably, they’re connected with broader movements that create…

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…Indian arrival So the songs have been sung, the speeches have been made, and the dances have been performed. What now? Well, at least, we can look back about what went down this last “Indian Arrival Day”. For one, non-Indian politicians were quite conspicuous by their absence from the various celebrations held all over the place. What’s going on? Politicians don’t care what a crowd might be celebrating…it could be a public hanging for all they care. Once there’s a crowd, they’ll be there, pressing the flesh and hoping for…

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Life in Guyana Back in the (colonial) day, when you wanted to say someone had it real good, you’d say, “You got life in London!” Well, according to the Latin American Public Opinion Project (LAPOP), people might now be saying, “You got life in Guyana!” A researcher from the University of Connecticut conducted research in 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean involving 38,631 persons as to how they felt about their lives. Happy or unhappy? Turns out that 70.7 per cent of Guyanese are happy with their lives…

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…blowing Ramjattan told his pals over at the Muckraker that a “whistle-blower” gave him some “hot information”. Our minds immediately cast back to the pope’s butler who spilled the beans of what had been going on behind the walls of the Vatican. Secret meetings, code names, ‘drops’, like we heard about in spy movies, all rose to the fore. Those revelations led to the resignation of the pope and we still haven’t heard the last of the effects of that ‘whistle-blower’. Then, of course, there’s the most famous ‘whistle-blower’ of…

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A PPP stalwart A “stalwart”, my dictionary declares, is “a loyal, reliable, hardworking supporter or participant in an organisation”. The PPP has made the term quite familiar in Guyana – it’s an organisation that prizes ‘stalwarts’. Reepu Daman Persaud, who just ‘left his earthly body’, was unquestionably one of the staunchest stalwarts in the history of the PPP. Persaud, of course, wore several hats in the party – none more important than being head of the Hindu Dharmic Sabha, always described nowadays as ‘the largest Hindu organisation’ in Guyana. But…

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Propitiations? The long knives are out for Gocool Boodhoo in GECOM. Long seen as a man who didn’t cower before the hotbed of opposition connivance and partisanship in the Secretariat, the opposition have made it bold to declare they’re not backing him for the renewal of his contract which is due. The opposition have long made known their dissatisfaction with Gocool – and Chairman Steve Surujbally. In fact, even while the commission attempted to follow the rules to ensure the last election results were accurate, the opposition marched in front…

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Phagwah’d out While not of the Hindu persuasion, your ever vigilant Eyewitness enjoys Phagwah as much as your average Ramdular down the street. How could he not? Did he not, as a boy, make sure he was there to watch the Holika conflagration? There’s probably a pyrotechnist lurking in every one of us – and it certainly manifests itself most fully when we’re young. To look at those flames reaching for the skies and hear the crackling of the combustion, awaken very primeval emotions. Maybe it goes back to our…

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Flat Earther Believe it or not, there is a bunch of people who still believe the earth is flat. Yup! You heard that right. They even have a ‘Flat Earth Society” (FES) that informs us, for instance, that the moon landing was a hoax, What else can it be when the moon’s only a thirty-two foot disc, not much bigger than Leguan. Antarctica is a 150 foot wall around our flat Earth which prevents the oceans from falling off. “Glenn” Mook Lall, owner of the Muckraker KN, is the current…

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