04 August 2000, 887 words
Jack Warner says that people attack Basdeo Panday because he is Indian. The Hindu newspaper columnists say people criticize Panday because he is Hindu. Me, I think the problem is that Basdeo Panday doesn't speak English.
It may seem like he does. He does, after all, use an English vocabulary and roll his r's. But, like Humpty Dumpty in Alice in Wonderland, Mr. Panday clearly adheres to the philosophy that a word shall mean whatever he wants it to mean.
I only realized this some weeks ago, when Mr. Panday announced that the new airport would be opened a day early on August 30. Mind you, it won't be ready to receive airplanes or passengers. It will have no equipment, and most of the buildings will still be incomplete. But Mr. Panday is going to open it, anyway.
Clearly, the meaning of the word "open" is different for him than for ordinary mortals like myself. It later turned out that Mr. Panday meant that the ceremony to "open" the airport is really going to be a ceremony to "hand over" the airport to the Airports Authority, who would then see about getting it ready for opening (in the usual sense) in November or maybe early next year.
Once I understood this, some of Mr. Panday's more mysterious statements became almost explicable. Thus, when he announced last month that the Government planned to provide secondary school places for all children, Mr. Panday was probably using the word "secondary" in a very exact way. "Secondary" simply means any school which is not "primary". The word "primary" comes from the Latin primus, from which comes the word "prime", which everyone knows the model schools and junior secs most definitely are not.
Mr. Panday was possibly being similarly exact when, in earlier times, he denied receiving a report of the death threat against Ken Gordon and said he could not remember getting any letter from murdered UNC councillor Hansraj Sumairsingh.
But for Mr. Panday, the word "receive" probably means to be given something in his hands. After all, this is a man who grew up in dire poverty, where nothing was handed to him on a platter. But, as Prime Minister, he has aides who receive all his documents, and Mr. Panday, I now understand, is a man who uses words very, very, very precisely.
As I pondered more on Mr. Panday's unique word-usage, I even began to see him as a political Shakespeare - i.e. a man who uses words subtly and with multifarious meanings. Thus, when he described Local Government Minister Dhanraj Singh as his "best Minister", many people were outraged. But I now understand that Mr. Panday was not actually complimenting Singh, since he later clearly stated that Lloyd Best was an enemy of the UNC. Get it?
It may be this Shakespearean mindset which causes Mr. Panday to see, and express, meaning in ways that lesser mortals do not immediately grasp. Thus, when Mr. Panday said that "Chutney Rising" was a racist headline, maybe what he actually meant was that the editor was implying that Indian women were not true Trinis.
Mr. Panday's sub-text was probably as follows: "Every Trinidadian knows that wining is a revolving motion of the waist which occurs in a largely circular motion. To say that chutney was rising implied that the Indian dancers could only 'juk' - i.e. move their waist up and down." It has to be something like that, I think, since only a totally paranoid person could actually believe that the headline was racist.
It may be this penchant for subtle metaphor which has caused some of Mr. Panday's statements to appear inflammatory. Take his infamous "Do dem first" statement made at the UNC's third anniversary rally. Journalists may have completely misinterpreted Mr. Panday's meaning since, in colloquial terms, to do someone is to give them pleasure. And Mr. Panday has always been a man who speaks like that.
In this light, when he seems at his most arrogant, bumptious and egomaniacal, Mr. Panday may actually be self-deprecating. Consider the imbroglio between him and President Robinson over the firing of the two Tobago senators.
It turned out that Mr. Panday and Mr. Robinson had not been meeting for some time. Mr. Panday said that it was Mr. Robinson who wished to limit their weekly meetings because of the latter's ill-health. Mr. Robinson later denied this, but it may be that he had not understood that when Mr. Panday made his statement, he was in fact acknowledging that his presence made Mr. Robinson sick.
It may seem that I go too far in arguing for these interpretations of Mr. Panday's statements. But we must bear in mind that, according to every opinion poll, most of the Indo-Trini populace sees him as a benign and inspired leader. Given this, Warner and the Hindu columnists may have a point.
Maybe it is Indo-Trinis' instinctive understanding of Hindi and other Indian languages which allows them to hear what Mr. Panday is really saying. But how come, you may ask, Warner understands him, too? Well, ethnic loyalty and political self-interest have this in common: they make people deaf, blind and dumb, like the three monkeys. Enter Jack, well-named, stage left.
Copyright©2000 Kevin Baldeosingh