Dr. Lomarsh Roopnarine and Dr. Compton Bourne

May 21, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When you study world cultures you don’t get depressed, simply because there is so much that is hilarious about the countries of the world, their peoples and their traditions. If you are on a certain wavelength, then depression will follow you if you take too seriously the world and its hypocrisy and double standards.
You are bound to end up as crazy if you internalize your anger at what the Israelis do to the Palestinians and the world turns a blind eye. This very world would be quick to jump on other countries if they violate international law.
When the UN Environment Committee bestowed ‘Champion of the Earth’ on Bharrat Jagdeo it was not an occasion to get angry, but to laugh. The people on that committee didn’t know the difference between Ghana and Guyana, and who was President Jagdeo. When TIME magazine named Jagdeo as a ‘Hero of the Environment’, it was absolutely certain that the magazine’s editors did not read even a half inch of the thousands of newspaper pages in Guyana that painted a horrible picture of the dirtiest capital city of the world.
I am absolutely convinced that the aging souls in the Council of Trent University in Canada who awarded Jagdeo an honorary doctorate did not read even one critical newspaper editorial of the twelve-year rule of Jagdeo. I don’t doubt for a moment that they ever heard about Jagdeo before Jagdeo’s beneficiary in Canada asked the Council to give him the award.
Now Minister Manickchand gets an honorary doctorate from Lesley University for “improving the lives of women, children and families in Guyana.”
These things make you laugh and they should. You should avoid being emotional at these misdirected foolishness of the world, because that is the way the globe is. In Guyana, our mediocrity should make us laugh rather than keep us in a state of vexation. All types of people in Guyana are showered with all types of recognition. You know they don’t deserve their accolades, but this is Guyana.
The sooner you come to grips with it, the better for your soul.
I remember some years ago, the US Embassy awarded a certain newspaper official, the Guyanese woman of the year award. This was a loud, brazen, crude, offensive individual who knows no limit to her crass public behaviour. A sixty-two-year-old womanizing Hindu pandit who became an important governmental heavyweight in the early nineties drove his exploited twenty-year-old lover, who was his secretary, to suicide. The number of Hindus who publicly worship him is large.
Why get depressed. Laugh it off. This is Guyana. It is an ironically hilarious place. Roger Khan’s man in the judiciary is nicknamed the “Oracle.” The “Oracle” makes you laugh. Last year, I read a certain former Guyanese singer praising a ridiculous book on Thomas Carroll in the Stabroek News. The author left out the most important document that was compulsory research. This was Carroll’s twenty-page confession to the district attorney in which he bore his soul to his interrogators about the horrible things he did in Guyana and the prominent individuals and business places that helped him sell American visas.
How can such a book be anything but a fake?
A Guyanese living in Canada wrote a column in the Stabroek News informing us poor Guyanese, that Ministers Priya Manickchand and Frank Anthony are the likely saviours of Guyana in the future. Doesn’t this country make you laugh? It does. So laugh and don’t get depressed.
As we are on the topic of books, let us mention Guyanese professor, Lomarsh Roopnarine. He wrote a book on Indian indentureship and is complaining in KN and SN that a book on indentured women and on the PPP’s heroic role in fighting Burnham just published by a Guyanese woman is receiving too much acclaim.
He writes that the book is so bad in its research that it ought to be withdrawn by the publishers. Roopnarine is shocked to know that the book is a contender for the Orwell Award in the UK. Someone needs to tell this professor to come to grips with the world. The people who administer the Orwell Award never read anything about the PPP in the seventies and eighties.
I end with a little story Roopnarine should digest. Only about two living person possess the Order of Excellence – Guyana highest national award. One such person is Dr. Compton Bourne. When he came to UG as its Chancellor, we were all elated. Compton Bourne turned out to be the poorest administrator who ever landed at UG. To think this man was the head of the Caribbean Development Bank. Guyana and the world make you laugh.

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