Thru Novel Lenses! New Vision New Perspectives New Ideas New Directions For the New World! Futuring Sustainable Development in the Post Pandemic Planet From Pre School to Policy Making
So we did it. Again. The numbers are in and Trinidad & Tobago has been named the “happiest” Caribbean nation yet again. Why? Lifestyle, dynamic culture, booming business center, strong government and, of course, largest Carnival celebration in the Caribbean, according to the World Happiness Report from the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) released on April 23, 2015. Want More. click HERE: Trinidad and Tobago ranked highest in happiness in the Caribbean and 41st in the world (6.168)I. And that's up 0.336 notches from 2007-2007. Additionally, with 15 public holidays last year, Trinidad & Tobago is among the top ten countries in the world for the number of public holidays.
The World Happiness Report aims to help country leaders recognize the importance of happiness and well-being for the success of the world and sustainable development. Researchers examine 11 areas essential to happiness and well-being, including health, education, local government, personal security, income and overall satisfaction with life. Trinidad & Tobago was also the top-ranked Caribbean nation in the previous Happiness Report, which was published in 2013.
Machel Montano may be the happiest man alive among the happiest people in #happynation which must include significant numbers of happy women, too, (if one is to go on his video in which he seems to be the only man alive!) Yet this national state of being is not reflected in the Happy Planet Index nor the World Happiness Report promoted by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network initiative of United Nations where Trinidad and Tobago ranks somewhere at number 130 among 151 countries assessed – believe it or not!
But then, Bhutan - the country whose development philosophy is based on Gross National Happiness(as opposed to the standard material assessment: Gross National Product) and upholds the need for recognition of mental and emotional wellbeing of citizens as a primary goal of governance – does not even feature in these global assessments whose methods and assignments of value then become questionable.
We’re short on time as Dr Kris Rampersad and I meet at Normandie Hotel to chat. After a quick photo shoot with Elise Romany, we have just 45 minutes before she is due at the National Museum to open an exhibition by
LeRoy Clarke, ‘Eye Hayti …Cries…Everywhere.’ That’s far too short a time to chat with someone whose CV in media, cultural heritage and development work weighs some 50 pages heavy as a writer, researcher, media strategist, lecturer, journalist, founder, publisher, sustainable development, advocate and more.
Despite the time frame, Dr. Rampersad is as cool as they come. She orders a cup of tea, Earl Grey, black with no sugar as I cling to my third cup of coffee for the day and she starts, “Tea, is an ancient ritual in all our cultures, you know? It is my pick me up. I get less than four hours sleep, you see.” Then she moves straight to the subject at hand: “Do you know that I was one of the founding journalists of Newsday?” It’s a fact that I did know once but forgot. She doesn’t mince words: “Many of the new journalists forget or do not know, like much of our society has little interest in heritage. Newsday started in a social climate not unlike what we have today: tremendous negativity in the news. Then, it was driven by public outcry for more balance, with more positives even with rising crime.Today that outcry seems to have died and we just accept and relish and even revel in the blood and gore. We are losing our social conscience because we have done little to try to protect or retain it. Newsday came on the scene as ‘the good news paper’ and I was titled ‘the good news reporter’,” she reminisced, laughing.
“Our first cover story, which I wrote in September 1993, was ‘5000 Lives Saved’ (by the local suicide hotline). Think about it – a headline for such a story would normally read ‘5000 Attempted Suicide.’ My journalism was already taking on that character to impact the social conscience; that news and media should know its social responsibility to proactively shape the national character, not just report or react to it and that was the thinking that drove the founders of Newsday. But it didn’t last long. A few months in, the paper ran a crime story and its readership jumped beyond what its good news was attracting. The executives reversed the paper’s direction to what Newsday now is,” she says.“If we are lamenting the deterioration of our social conscience today, we are only reaping the whirlwind for not having invested in what it would have taken to change public orientation and outlook, not just react to it.” As negative as it all sounds, Dr Rampersad exudes energy, optimism and hope. “Social change doesn’t happen overnight, and it is not unattainable. That belief drives everything I do. But it is a collective responsibility. Positive change requires investments, risk-taking and resources.”That conscience about the long term, that we are only here for a short time as custodians not just as consumers, she notes, is what is missing from our society today.
Though she prefers not to be labelled an academic, much of her time is spent in intensive research, not just behind a desk, but interacting, collecting oral stories of peoples and cultures, visiting museums and piecing together stories couched within artefacts and she has accumulated and documented audiovisual materials and interviews from over two hundred cities in more than fifty countries across the world, and supplementing and comparing this with other materials.
“This means very little to most, but I have the only full length intimate video interview with Senior Counsel Dana Seetahal, but who’s interested, eh? No one ever took the time to try to find what made a woman who was giving so much to our society tick. Whatever interest there was in her horrendous death has just moved on to the next unsolved murder statistic.”
She is also active on the range of social media as well: LinkedIn,Facebook, Twitter and her own blog. “As much as there are negatives, the new technologies place the world at our fingertips. It’s a tool, to be used, negatively or positively, and for a child consumed with curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, who grew up barely able to afford books, for me it makes everyday Christmas,” she laughs. “It allows me to piece together connections about us; about our place here in the region, in the Americas, in the world that no one knows!”
Dr Rampersad was recently appointed chair of the National Museum and Art Gallery, a position that she says, was thrust on her for articulating the need to transform “such core national institutions which now exist only as shells of what they should be, pawns of power play and bureaucratic wrangling.” She explains, “It’s a sad indictment on all of us that our museum should be in the state that it is when a museum is the pulse and soul of a nation’s character and identity. We need to ask ourselves where our focus really is as a nation. I get shocked looks when I say that the same kind of dedicated attention and investments it took for us to develop our oil industry is needed for the cultural heritage sector, there’s no two ways about it; so when the oil dries up – and we are told we have, what, less than two decades – we would have a developed parallel economy in the heritage and its satellite sectors. Look at the developed world, this has been at the social and economic centre of those societies since time immemorial. It is not about what’s left or falls out of national and corporate and education budgets,” she says. “It requires proactive and conscience intervention.”
Speaking of heritage, she delivers a radical thought-provoking notion as we chat. “Look at our ancestry – we are not children of slaves. We are not children of indentured labourers. We are children of societies with magnificent cultures and traditions that have traveled across the seas to build this new and magnificent society,” she leans forward, emphatically, “which I firmly believe is second to none in the world: and I have seen plenty, eh!” She adds, “You want a good sound bite? We should also remove the word ‘Tolerance’ from our national watchwords; just as we need to redesign our National Coat of Arms. It contains elements that have nothing to do with us. We as a people are not about tolerance – the way we function as a society, the way we celebrate together; how we party, according to David Rudder. It should be dropped. And then we can try to start dealing with politics,” she laughs harder.
No doubt much of this global thinking comes from actually being a global thought-leader. Her work has transformed the globe in no small way. A working proposal from her computer and her networking skills to celebrate “Women as Agents of Change” has been used not only by our Government, but moved through the Commonwealth and OAS and onto large swathes of the world as well.
The model of engaging people to activate plans for change she developed in her hands-on work with communities across the Caribbean through inter-American institutions, UNESCO, the Commonwealth and others, is being used across the spectrum to get bureaucracies and decision-makers to understand that their plans and actions should be about people. That brings no monetary rewards, but, “it is about legacy,” she says.
To read the continuing story about Dr Rampersad and hear her viewpoints on what she has to say about the challenges facing our first female Prime Minister as well as the upcoming general election and our nation’s way forward, log on to our website www.newsday.co.tt or check us out at Newsday Womans Weekly on Facebook.
Follow Dr. Rampersad online on Facebook where you can also check out ‘LiTTscapes’ or via Twitter (@krisramp) and through her blog Demokrissy (kris-rampersad.blogspot.com)
Related Links: https://krisrampersad.com/
http://www.newsday.co.tt/womens_weekly/0,208014.html
https://goo.gl/Ni2dof
https://goo.gl/tDiT57
https://goo.gl/yTbLqX
https://goo.gl/458X94
https://goo.gl/9e32Bv
Just call me Lizzie: The natural choice isn't it? The name of two of my grandmothers.
Welcome #RoyalBabyPrincess: The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, William and Kate must be so proud, as are your other #family #Jahaji Bahin
New evidence on the DNA link and maternal bloodline...For #England, For the #Commonwealth, For the #NewGlobalOrder ... more in still on its way, #LetterstoLizzie
Related Links: http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.com/2013/06/letterstolizzie-princes-will-harry-my.html
Following an audio/visual appeal by Stephen Hawking - without ICTs I would not be able to communicate my research... #UNESCO Executive Board considers recommendations of the New Delhi Declaration on inclusive ICTs for persons with: Making empowerment a reality @krisramp, @lolleaves, @glocalpot @UN @UNESCO #Demokrissy #UNESCO #196ExB,
See link ...A Brief History of a Time I Encountered Stephen Hawking http://kris-rampersad.blogspot.fr/2015/04/a-brief-history-of-time-i-encountered.html
My Collission With Stephen Hawkings, Seeing Stars...
..You might say I was, as he is, motor-challenged myself; or a co-incidence of space and time or a confluence of coincidences, or a conspiration of global forces that culminated in this headlong collision with Stephen Hawking.
As brief in history as it was in current as well as in the vast time scale of universal occurrences, it remains indelibly impressed on memory as it must be on the memory of the world because of its momentous nature.
A beautiful day in spring in the fork in the part between the river Cam...
****
I become aware that
someone is looking at our antics. I turn. My attention is drawn to the twinkle
in his eyes. His face twitches and he nods, I think. It is the twinkle that
holds my attention before I notice that the face belongs to a frail man in a
wheelchair. I smile embarrassingly, nod back, and turn and whisper to John that
we are being watched. He looks in the direction of my nod.
‘Stephen Hawking,’
John whispers, surprising me. The usually sardonic drawl contains a
hint of awe. The frail man seems to nod again, at us eyes still twinkling, clearly
enjoying our clowning.
I had been teasing
John, trying to deflect his growing exasperation at my hopeless inability to
balance on the bicycle from which I had already taken several tumbles. The
bikes - one of the amenities of the Nuffield Foundation Press Fellowship that
brought us with three other journalists to Wolfson College, Cambridge - had
been presented to us with much fanfare as a means to get around the sprawling
campus and its surroundings which was the size of my city, Port-of-Spain, times
ten.
I continue ribbing
John, which exasperates him even more. Trying to lighten his mood, I drew his
attention to the swans regally commanding the River Cam. He is easily
distracted.
“They are
protected, you know,” he says.
“John knows
everything,” I taunt him, mounting the bike again as he reaches to poke me. I
try to cycle out of his reach. He follows on his bike.
That’s when I almost collide head long onto the lap of Stephen
Hawking, staring directly into those twinkling eyes with its power to interpret
twinkling starts in the universe. I am face
to face with the man who was making science fiction real. He is on one of what I would come to
recognize as his regular afternoon strolls on The Backs, in the foreground of
the River Cam.
*****
View from the Cosmos
This Hole inside me,
has become larger than life, so large that it is no longer inside me, but I am
inside It. It is expanding to cuddle the world on which It let me lose. Into an
infinitude of space, encompassing the planet, the stars, the universe, and
beyond, still expanding.
I fall into the dark
depths of sleep. ‘Hawking radiation’ is emanating light rays around me and I am
inviting him to explore inside me.
“What you are trying
to detect thousands of light years away, is right here inside me,” I taunt him ... The twinkle in his eyes warm me with confidence.
....Stephen Hawking and I are staring at this hole inside me.
“It has helped me.
Maybe It can help you prove how black holes lose their primal energy and
‘disappear’. Maybe it can show you how they reveal their secrets, as It has
released Its secrets to me,” I tell him, and then you can get your Nobel after
all.”
A range of
experiences and incidents that I thought random and unconnected floated out and
connect themselves, like a fast paced slideshow, linking one episode to the
other. I feel as if I am piecing together the moments of my life and
simultaneously presenting it to Hawking for his expert opinion on this my
theory of the human as a microcosmos, an exact replica of the vast universes
that were his domain of curiosity.
“Your
Nobel might be just this Hole away,” I tease. The most famous scientist in the
world has not been awarded a Nobel Prize,. It was not a matter of if, but when.
It was a matter of some restlessness in the scholarly world that the man dubbed
the World’s Greatest Scientist had not received a Nobel because of
insubstantial proof of his theory, though the Nobel Committee has defended some
of its more controversial awards. A dreamer myself, and touched by how he has
defied the odds for more than fifty years with ALS (amyotrophic lateral
sclerosis) for which at 21 he was given only five years to live. I feel some
complicity. We have both been challenge to defy death and live with life-challenging conditions ...
This is an Extract from my Upcoming Biography, LIFE! HoleHeartedly
and .A Brief History of a Time I encountered Stephen Hawkings or a glocal culturally simplistic challenge to the scientific theory of everything...
Stringent economic times, suspension of US funding and increased programme workload challenge members of the UNESCO Executive Board to maintain standards and quality of services in core programme areas of education, science, culture, information and communications and priority areas of Gender, Small island Developing States, Africa, Youth and Rethinking Development at joint sitting of Programme and External Relations and Finance Commission. Trinidad and Tobago co chairs session with Chair of Finance Commission @krisramp, @lolleaves, @glocalpot, @UNESCO @UN #Demokrissy, #LeavesofLife
Global Citzenship in focus. teaching and learning about our place in the world... a pivotal point to changing outlooks in post 2015 sustainable development agenda - the pre midnight session at UNESCO Executive Board 196th session. Programme and External Affairs Commission...
@krisramp @lolleaves @glocalpot @unesco @UN
Learning without fear UNESCO moves to make schools safe zones and promote actions to eliminate gender based violence in schools ...another late evening session of UNESCO Executive Board Programmes and External Relations Commission Chaired by Mexico, Co-Chaired by Trinidad and Tobago...
@UNESCO #UNESCO @glocalpot @lolleaves @krisramp
Additionally, with 15 public holidays last year, Trinidad & Tobago is among the top ten countries in the world for the number of public holidays.
But then, Bhutan - the country whose development philosophy is based on Gross National Happiness(as opposed to the standard material assessment: Gross National Product) and upholds the need for recognition of mental and emotional wellbeing of citizens as a primary goal of governance – does not even feature in these global assessments whose methods and assignments of value then become questionable.
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