THE EDITOR: The nostalgia of my boyhood days in the sugar barracks of Golconda was not the only impact of my return this month. I seemed to have developed a greater sense of awareness as the son of indentured labourers of how I had benefitted from their toil to ensure that my siblings and I 'take learning" to avoid their unhappy fate.
For them education was key, and with the opportunity for such, facilitated by the work of the Canadian missionaries in sugar estates like ours, I am what I am today, as has been the case with many other children of East Indian descent growing up in a similar environment.
This is no 'racial talk' as some may be inclined to think, their 'mindset' conditioned by how racially divided we are as a people because of our brand of racial politics.
Group consciousness is beneficial for a developing society for it allows groups to build and sustain themselves, culturally drawing on their ancestral heritage as they co-exist peacefully, in the way East Indians do with their inherited customs and rituals; as Africans out of their Orisha heritage and other elements that are the inspiration for Carnival, calypso and cuisine; as the Chinese with their Double Ten; as the Syrians with their own customs in their close-knit communities; as the indigenous peoples with their own rituals, music and dance, all at the same time contributing to our rich diversity,
They are much like the rainbow, beautiful in its totality but its individual colours clearly identifiable, or the popular "fat soup" on a Saturday, unrivalled for its unique taste because of the blend of its ingredients, like the cassava, the eddo, the fig, but each clearly identifiable from one another.
It is difference in diversity at its compelling best and perfectly in tune with man and nature, the one with many peoples of different colours and creeds and the other in its plants and animals in their infinite variety.
But difference only becomes a problem when the preoccupation with group identity degenerates into identity politics with one group or entity seeking to dominate another or encroach on its space.
The trees in your backyard co-exist peacefully and thrive once well spaced out, but become stultified if they are crowded. But man's history speaks to encroachment and domination as the Way in the World (VS Naipaul); with the idea of empire as its supreme manifestation (the Russia/Ukraine conflict case in point in the present); in America with black Americans versus white; in Africa with Hutus against Tutsis; in the Middle East with Sunnis in conflict with Shia; in India with Brahmins against untouchables; in Peru with indigenous peoples against the establishment; in Australia with black aborigines in conflict with whites; and the Rohingya in Myanmar, a classic example of human domination and abuse of another at its worse.
It seems as if it is man's nature to want to dominate others, beginning with the caveman clubbing his rival to death for survival (Charles Darwin's idea of 'the survival of the fittest') and that
