It is be­cause the Car­ni­val, the arts which give life and mean­ing to the fes­ti­val, and its eco­nom­ic, po­lit­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­nec­tions reach so deeply in­to peo­ple's lives that they are so ca­pa­ble of spark­ing con­tro­ver­sy and con­flict.In his time, Al­bert Gomes, sup­port­er and pa­tron of Car­ni­val arts, said the ca­lyp­so tells us how we have "lived, loved and sinned."

No sur­prise, there­fore, that ca­lyp­son­ian Body­guard's in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the phe­nom­e­non of False Pa­pers has stirred an ear­ly and un­nerv­ing (for many) con­vul­sion. False Pa­pers refers to the fact that the likes of Resh­mi Ram­nar­ine and Omar Khan are said to have claimed aca­d­e­m­ic qual­i­fi­ca­tions which were not sup­port­ed by sub­stan­ti­at­ing cer­tifi­cates.The lyrics of the kaiso touch on what com­pos­er Gre­go­ry Bal­lan­tyne (GB) sees as the eth­nic ten­den­cies of groups of In­do-Tri­nis and con­trast them with what hap­pens in the Afro com­mu­ni­ty.

In a ca­lyp­so twist, GB and Body­guard de­nounce the claim made a few years ago by Gen­er­al Sec­re­tary of the Ma­ha Sab­ha Sat­narayan Ma­haraj to the ef­fect that the rea­son for the suc­cess of In­do-Tri­ni stu­dents at school is be­cause they are study­ing while their coun­ter­parts in the Afro-Tri­ni pop­u­la­tion are oc­cu­py­ing their time "beat­ing pan.""When yuh feel dey was beat­ing more book than the African, dey was fab­ri­cat­ing de­grees, de­fraud­ing the land...I am yet to see one sin­gle African in the lot," goes a line in the cho­rus of False Pa­pers.

http://www.guardian.co.tt/dig­i­tal/new-mem­bers