ALL OVER TRINIDAD & Tobago, all sorts of people will claim they could bring a better Budget than the Minister of Finance today – and they might be right: a civil engineer by training and an occasionally uncivil Parliamentarian in practice, the old Colm’s greatest strength is his self-belief; would that we all shared it. Read more

“I alert my audience of the East Indian thrust toward ethnic dominance…” – Professor Selwyn Cudjoe, National Association for the Enhancement of African Peoples dinner speech, August 2006.

“If anything it is the PNM that has been pushing racial dominance... Dr. Cudjoe’s attacks on the Indian community has been given tacit support by the ruling party.” Statement in response from the Global Organisation of People of Indian Origin.

Professor Selwyn Cudjoe is to be praised for his timely, necessary, sensitive and responsible remarks about Indian people which could only help unite the country. In backwater, back-a-dam places like Trinidad & Tobago, you don’t often find people who offer the combination of Professor Cudjoe’s startling intellectual ability with his flair for language and the great courage required to attack soft targets. My only problems with the old Cudjoe’s speech are: (1) it doesn’t go far enough; and, (2) it would have more impact if he had waited until Indian Arrival Day to make it. (Surely his point was that, Indian Reach!)

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My little holiday will probably end today, though I’m entitled to take off next Friday, too; hard to believe I’m missing contemplating the mess that we are. This first appeared on 7 February 1991. My sentiments haven’t changed; nor have bimbos.

I LIKE BIMBOS. They're user-friendly. I don't know that many nowadays but I still haven't a bad thing to say about them. I recollect now, with neither pride nor shame, that there was a time when every woman I knew had a bra size larger than her IQ. Some of them had larger shoe sizes. In American shoes. There was one with a pair of glasses higher than her IQ. Really. She was pretty helpless most of the time. If no one dropped in to see her, she couldn't tell whether she was in a good or bad mood.

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MY FIRST PAIR of Levi-Strauss jeans lasted longer than my first relationship, though I must confess that my girlfriend did come first, as the girlfriends of all polite men should

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FIFTY GLORIOUS years ago, the world witnessed the birth of one of the most important phenomena in the entire history of the planet Earth, an event that registered on the planet’s timeline from the age of dinosaurs to that of smartphones. Even making allowances for my admittedly huge personal bias, that is no exaggeration. What happened via this handful of extremely talented people in 1962 changed the world forever.

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