Paras Ra­moutar

"Mis­sion of Hope-A Cri­sis Of Val­ues seems to have been writ­ten to sum­mon us to a high­er pur­pose, and to get us to make a per­son­al com­mit­ment to make a dif­fer­ence to our coun­try-to save our youth, to res­cue our coun­try and to make a pos­i­tive fu­ture pos­si­ble by think­ing dif­fer­ent­ly, fol­low­ing it up with ac­tion and mak­ing our in­di­vid­ual pres­ence count," wrote Dr Bhoen­dra­datt Tewarie, then pro-vice chan­cel­lor, Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment, Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies, and now Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, So­cial and Eco­nom­ic Re­struc­tur­ing and Gen­der Af­fairs.

The book is co-au­thored by Lin­coln My­ers and Al­loy Lequay, both well-known in the field of pol­i­tics and so­cial think­ing. It is pure­ly lo­cal think­ing and re­search. There are ten elu­cida­to­ry chap­ters on such is­sues as: sports and cul­ture, in­vest­ing in hu­man cap­i­tal, crick­et and so­cial con­di­tions, so­cial equal­i­ty, the ed­u­ca­tion sys­tem in T&T, a sum­mons to our re­li­gious lead­ers, na­tion­al ser­vice-a re­newed call, and a na­tion weeps. Each of the chap­ters pro­vide di­rec­tion­al sup­port and guid­ance on the sub­ject mat­ters raised.

In the chap­ter on crick­et and so­cial con­di­tions, Lequay quot­ed fore­most writer and po­lit­i­cal thinker, CLR James in, Be­yond A Bound­ary. James not­ed that, "West In­di­ans crowd­ing to test match­es bring with them the whole past his­to­ry and fu­ture hopes of the is­lands...in the in­evitable in­te­gra­tion in­to a na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, one of most ur­gent needs, sports, and par­tic­u­lar­ly crick­et, has played and will play a great role." To fur­ther em­pha­sise the val­ue of sports to the in­te­gra­tion of com­mu­ni­ties and the up­lift­ment of par­tic­i­pants, the au­thorsre­ferred to the Re­port of the West In­di­an Com­mis­sion, en­ti­tled, Time for Ac­tion. It says: "We must know that se­ri­ous dis­ci­pline is in­volved, self-dis­ci­pline, dis­ci­pline for a pro­found­ly im­por­tant pur­pose, not just for self­ish pur­pos­es but for oth­ers who de­pend on our suc­cess be­ing achieved."

Maybe this is an op­por­tune time, with rel­e­vance to our crick­et­ing ca­pac­i­ty. In the chap­ter, In­vest­ing in Hu­man Cap­i­tal, Lequay re­ferred to the 1965 de­c­la­ra­tion by the late pres­i­dent of Zam­bia, Ken­neth Kaun­da, when he in­tro­duced his par­ty and gov­ern­ment a phi­los­o­phy of de­vel­op­ment which he called Hu­man­ism, in which he com­pared the tra­di­tion­al so­ci­ety of Africa with the in­dus­tri­alised so­ci­eties of the West­ern World and ex­pressed the view that, "Africa's gift to world cul­ture must be in the field of Hu­man Re­la­tions."

Pres­i­dent Kaun­da ex­am­ined the op­er­a­tions of the vil­lage com­mu­ni­ties, and not­ed that the vil­lage chiefs in­ter­venedin dis­putes and took what­ev­er ac­tion was nec­es­sary to strength­en the fab­ric of so­cial life, as they un­der­stood the hard­ships of rur­al life and recog­nised that a high de­gree of so­cial co­he­sion was nec­es­sary for sur­vival. "Our com­mu­ni­ties in Trinidad and To­ba­go to­day are cry­ing out for such a hu­man ap­proach. The ques­tion is how can we be­gin to in­ject this in­to the blood­stream of the na­tion?"Hu­man­ism in Zam­bia meant the in­tro­duc­tion of or­der and dis­ci­pline and the el­ders preach­ing their own val­ues and the im­part­ing of knowl­edge and wis­dom to the youth of the com­mu­ni­ty," Lequay wrote.

Mis­sion of Hope-A Cri­sis of Val­ues needs to be in­ter­pret­ed in our school sys­tem, along­side an ac­cel­er­at­ed pro­gramme of youth em­pow­er­ment and so­cial mo­bil­i­ty by both Min­is­ter of the Peo­ple and So­cial De­vel­op­ment, Dr Glen Ra­mad­hars­ingh, and Min­is­ter of Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment, Nizam Baksh.

This pub­li­ca­tion is a wor­thy read­ing for our young peo­ple, as well as our re­li­gious lead­ers, as it is en­cy­clo­pe­dic in con­tent, de­spite be­ing on­ly 114 pages. It has a lib­er­al sprin­kling of say­ings and thoughts of great thinkers, politi­cians and so­cial re­form­ers from across the globe. There are quotes by Count Vil­lo­rio Al­fieri, Ital­ian po­et 1749-1803; Pope Piys X1, 1857-1939, Thomas Car­lyle, Eng­lish philoso­pher 1795-1881, and a very force­ful and philo­soph­i­cal quote by Dr Al­bert Schweitzer: "Seek al­ways to do some good, some­where. Every man has to seek his own way to make his own self more no­ble and to re­alise his own true worth.

"You must give some time to your fel­low men. Even if it is a lit­tle thing, do some­thing for those who have need to help, some­thing for which you get no pay but the priv­i­lege of do­ing it. For re­mem­ber you don't live in a world all your own. Your broth­ers are here too."

This book is avail­able from RPL(1991) Ltd; rpl1991@tstt.net.tt.