Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 22, 2014 Letters
Dear Editor,
I refer to a letter by Mr. Gokarran Sukdeo in SN of June 14, 14 headlined, “Green and the PPP are the problem not the solution.” He wrote the following of Dolly Hassan; “I always admire her writings –always refreshingly interjected with creative metaphors and images…Dolly admitted she was not conversant with the day to day politicking in Guyana…she still cherishes the memories of the indomitable Cheddi Jagan and what was then the PPP.” (end of quote)
First, I confess before the letters in the press came out on the Opposition Leader’s visit to Richmond Hill, I didn’t know who Dolly Hassan was. Forgive me if I sound chauvinist but I have spent my entire life reading people’s writing on Guyana and I am familiar with a majority of those productions having spent my adult life in academia. But I have never read an analytical piece on Guyana by Dolly Hassan. It could be that Mr. Sukhdeo meant writings by Hassan on subjects not related to Guyana.
Secondly, it would be impertinent for any human to deny another person that person’s object of admiration. If you are African-American and you admire Chinese music and don’t listen to Beyonce that is your right. So I would not comment on Mr. Sukhdeo’s admiration for Dolly Hassan but as an educated man (he wrote that he went to UG) one would expect an educated mind to be capable of detecting analytical weaknesses and fictions in the polemical exchanges of people
I will list the most glaring example. I first became suspicious of Vishnu Bisram being a professional pollster because as I read the dozens and dozens of letters he would publish each year, there was a conspicuous fault. So I began to cut out each letter and file them. After a time a pattern emerged that exposed Bisram.
He would tell readers the countries around the world he visited where he did polling and the lands he traveled to do political analysis in each year. Yet at the same time, he was a fulltime school teacher in New York. It couldn’t be because as a teacher myself I know that would be impossible.
I have seen teachers at UG get into boiling water for two week absence muchless a month. Former Minister of Education, Desiree Fox was actually dismissed for staying away from teaching for six weeks. As I kept on reading Bisram, it was clear to even a school boy something was not right about what this gentleman was telling readers about himself. It is the same with to Dolly Hassan
If Mr. Sukhdeo read what Hassan wrote then he would know that she could not be telling the truth to him when she told him that he was not familiar with the “day to day politicking in Guyana.” Or maybe she was but chose to write silly things about the two opposition parties and the Mayor.
For a person not familiar with Guyana’s politics, Hassan is bold to make the following statements in her June 11 letter in SN; (1)-the PNC destroys its credibility by criticizing “every single act of the PPP” and blaming the PPP for every problem. (2) Both the PNC and AFC as parties that do not have the maturity and wisdom to govern. (3) Guyana has a garbage problem and Mayor Green is to be blamed for it. (4) The parliamentary situation is one in which the politicians are running around like bullying school boys.
How does Hassan know all these things if she does not take an interest in what happen in Guyana? If that is true then how can she write these things? She must know that she opens herself to the charge of penning nonsense. Surely, Mr. Sukhdeo cannot be that naïve. It is either she lied to him or it is true she doesn’t know what is taking place and the contents of her letter were dictated by someone else. I don’t care to know. My motive for writing this letter is to point out to Mr. Sukhdeo that Hassan has a credibility problem that he must face up to it.
Ms. Hassan scandalizes the PNC and AFC by saying they don’t have the wisdom or maturity to govern Guyana as if the PPP does. Look at UG after twenty years of PPP rule.
Ms. Hassan did say that she knew Dr. Jagan from the seventies and eighties. This is the problem with the Indian folks in Richmond Hill. These people left in the seventies and eighties and took with them the memories of a brave Dr. Cheddi Jagan fighting an unpopular PNC Government. And they have been stuck in that world for the past forty years. They see Guyana in 2014 with the identical lenses that they viewed it forty years ago. And it doesn’t matter if you are as educated as Dolly Hassan or
just a semi-literate labour. I end with Shakespeare in Measure for Measure,
Man, poor man
Dressed in brief authority
Most assured of
In what he is most ignorant of
Frederick Kissoon
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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