A PORSCHE OF A DIFFERENT COLOUR

Jan 30, 2012 Features / Columnists, Tony Deyal column

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Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) was an English poet, short-story writer and novelist celebrated for his tales for children (including the Jungle Book featuring Rikki-Tikki-Tavi) and the “white man’s burden” of Imperialism in India.  A postcard by graphic artist, Andrew McGill (1875 – 1962), famous for his “saucy” wit, holds the world record for selling the most copies (over 6 million).
It featured a nerdish young man and an embarrassed pretty woman sitting under a tree with the caption, “Do you like Kipling?”  And the reply from the young woman, “I don’t know, you naughty boy, I’ve never kippled.”
My occasional kippling made a lasting impression and left me with at least one jewel of wisdom – being a man in the truest sense of the world requires special qualities, the most important being the ability to walk with kings and not lose the common touch.   As someone prone to excess I suppose this explains why I am not just common but very common.  Unlike what Polonius (in Hamlet) advocated as proper conduct for his son Laertes, I am both familiar and vulgar, an accusation also leveled at McGill and made his postcards best-sellers.
I thought of this on Monday morning, the first day of the Year of the Dragon.  I was in Trinidad sitting in the office with Gerry Hadeed, an old acquaintance, whose “The Beacon” Insurance company has agencies throughout the Caribbean.  I was congratulating Gerry on his recent appointment as Chairman of the Trinidad and Tobago Airports Authority.
Gerry’s office is at street level on the ground floor of a carefully restored landmark building in what was the “New Town” area of Port-of-Spain.  We were talking about the need to improve customer service at the Piarco Airport especially among the security staff when I saw the silhouette of someone passing outside the window.  Gerry jumped up, opened the window and called out to the person passing by who turned out to be a man with a basket.
Gerry asked us, “What you want to eat?” and turned to the person and asked, “What you have?”  Black cake, marble cake, chocolate cake and pone.  So this very powerful and wealthy man ordered his cake and my pone, paid the vendor who started to dig into his pockets for change and was told, “Don’t worry – when you pass next time.”
That brief encounter captured the essence of Gerry and what makes him a natural leader.  He was close to Dr. Eric Williams, has several photographs with A.N.R. Robinson with whom he is still very close, and pictures of himself with Fidel Castro.  In between all of his business commitments he was a cricketer, a cycling and racing enthusiast, and for most of his live has tried to combine his strong sense of nationalism with his interest in politics as the means of unifying the many different cultures and races that make up Trinidad society.
His dream is to help TNT achieve the vision of one of his mentors, Dr. Eric Williams, first Prime Minister of TNT.  When the country became independent Dr. Williams had wished for the country to celebrate the birth of “Mother Trinidad and Tobago” and the end of Mother India, Mother Africa or, for that matter, Mother Syria.
Gerry is committed to this as a lifelong project.
I contrasted Gerry’s attitude and behavior with some of the politicians of the Caribbean who seem to love the office but not the functions, who are obsessed with the trappings and the glamour of power but try to stay away for as long as possible and as far as possible from the people who voted them into office.
They drive around in the air-conditioned comfort of huge vehicles putting as much distance as possible between themselves and those they supposedly represent.
In Guyana a few years ago there was a cartoon of a politician driving a “bull-cart” into a cane-field and emerging from the other side of the field in a huge Prado SUV.  This was appropriate since it is a Spanish word for “small meadow”.  People spoke derisively of, and condemned, the “Prado” government of Guyana because the Ministers of Government drove around in those huge SUVs and it was customary to see a line of them in front of a “watering-hole” in Georgetown which they and their “buddies” frequented.
In Trinidad two of the Ministers have moved from Japan to German and instead of Prados they have Porsches.  The Ministry of Agriculture has acquired one for its Minister.  A friend called me and said, “Well the name is right.  It is a Porche Carrera and when his term finish he will be an inmate there.”  Carrera is a prison island off the Trinidad coast.
I hastened to correct my “buddy”.  “No, it is not a Carrera, it is a Cayenne.”  I referred my friend to an article I had in the Trinidad Express Business Supplement on Wednesday entitled, “Porsche Faces Life” – a pun on a radio serial or soap opera that once captivated men, women and children in the Caribbean.  The purchase of the Cayenne had certainly heated up the place, even making the front page of the Express.
I had said that by buying a “Cayenne” the Minister probably intended to show solidarity with the pepper growers.  I told my friend that given the variety of pepper we grow, the car might improve on its German origin by having a Scotch-bonnet.  Certainly the purchase put the Minister in the hot seat.
What made it worse was a statement the next day by the Foreign Affairs and Communications Minister who described the public condemnation of the Ministry’s purchase of the Porsche as a “storm in a teacup.”
I have always advised my clients not to draw attention to bad news by attempting to rebut it.  What happened is that the Minister moved the storm out of the teacup into the public opinion agenda.  Worse, the Minister said, in justification, that the Porsche was the same price as a Prado, not realizing that was exactly the point.
It is why the following riddle is so popular.  What’s the difference between porcupines and Porsches? Porcupines have the pricks on the outside.
*Tony Deyal was last seen saying that one of the ways you know your SUV is too big is when your garage is bigger than your house.  You know the SUV costs too much when Germany’s GDP increases by five percent right after you buy your Porsche.

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