Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 06, 2011 Letters
Dear Editor,
Once again Vishnu Bisram takes history and converts it into synthesis of misrepresentations and myths, while insincerely ad libbing that he is being objective and not in support of any political organisation.
Much like his previous attempt to diminish the severity of African enslavement by asserting that it was no different than indentured servitude, today he applies his skewed formulations to the description of some food items that were banned during the tenure of the PNC regime.
If one had any doubts about the operant that influences what comes out of Vishnu Bisram, his assertion that, quote, “Has Harripaul forgotten about the banning of alou, dhal, roti, channa, etc. and the ‘food police’ inspecting their pots and tawa to see if they are cooking banned foods”, should be seen as a Freudian slip that reveals the subjectivity that inundate every facet of his convoluted thinking, and renders his allusion to objectivity a mischievous ploy designed to obfuscate that very fact.
Vishnu Bisrams’ representation of the items that were banned in Guyana in ethnic vernacular is clearly intended to incite the ethnic patriotism of Malcolm Harripaul, and remind Harripaul that this is the embryonic chamber from which his views on politics in Guyana must be fertilized, born and grow. Well….really? Dastardly would certainly be a euphemistic description of this effort on part of Bisram. But even beyond that, Bisram’s incapacity to examine the restrictions on the food items he references outside of an ethnic perspective validates the position of his critics who question his abilities as a political analyst.
For God’s sake, how can Bisram claim to be a political pollster with the intellectual capacity and experience to interpret and analyse the responses he receives from demographic population samples, when he lacks the simple ability to contextualize the circumstances and consequences of the banning of those food items? Let me examine some of the food items Bisram mentions in the context he describes them, against the reality of usage in Guyana at the time.
Bisram asks Harripaul how he could forget the banning of alou. In such pursuit he described the food item we called “English Potatoes” in a vernacular common to the ethnicity of himself and Harripaul. While I have no intention of speaking for Malcolm Harripaul, maybe, unlike Bisram, he had wider interaction with the population of Guyana, and understood that regular usage of this food item was not confined to one segment of the population.
Maybe Harripaul understands that this particular food item was as much a staple of meal preparation among other segments of the Guyanese population as it was for our Indian Guyanese brothers and sisters. I mean how dense does one have to be not to know or understand something as simple as this. Potatoes were and still are essential elements in meal preparations of soups, metagee, and stews etc. that have common and regular usage across the entirety of the Guyanese population. But, maybe, one has to conclude that Bisram’s perspective of that population has boundaries that include and exclude.
Bisram cites dhal as one the items banned. I can’t recall any import restrictions being placed on dhal. Dhal, according to my understanding, is a meal made from a composition of food items, the main and popular ingredient of which is split peas. But split peas was never a food item exclusive to the meal preparation of dhal. And further, dhal and things like curry always had, and still does, cross cultural usage cross the entirety of the Guyanese population.
Split peas is also a primary element in the preparation of soups, cook-up rice, and so on and so forth, foods that were and are prepared and used regularly among the diverse population of Guyana. The devious predisposition of Vishnu Bisram to reduce this food
item to the dietary confines of one ethnicity speaks to the ethnic ego-centric pattern of his thinking. His perspective seems to be emanating from a cognitive axis located at an extremity where commonsense and logic refuse to congregate.
About the most obtuse and asinine claims that Bisram makes is the one that the banning of flour was equivalent to the banning of roti. I wish the reading audience would contemplate the absurdity of that statement studiously. I mean….flour!! Has Bisram gone completely amnesiac, or is his misconstruction of the banning of flour a product of devilish manipulation?
If the usage of flour was exclusive to the making of roti, why were there so many baker shops all over Guyana? I mean can anyone forget the growth of vendors around all the markets selling bread and other products made from flour after import restrictions were placed on that product? From biscuits to salaras, the variety of products made from flour, and used across the entire spectrum of the Guyanese population, reduces Bisrams’ take on this issue to one that elicits a combination of mirth and astonished disbelief.
If anyone had any reservations about the merits of the criticisms that consequent some of the things he writes about, the intellectually suicidal reasoning manifested in his public enunciations on this issue should surely dissipate them.
It can be said that “…..people who cannot recognise a palpable absurdity when it appears in, or forms part of their thought processes, are very much in the way of growth and development in the human nestings around which such thoughts percolate….” Vishnu Bisram’s perspective on the food items that were import restricted in Guyana gives poignant relevance to this observation.
Robin Williams
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
Apr 19, 2024
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