Secrets of success

Every so often, I wonder why I am not rich and powerful. I mean, I have a pretty good brain inside my skull and naturally curly hair outside it: you’d think this would be sufficient to make me wealthy and influential and irresistible to women. Not, mind you, that I’m obsessed with fortune or fame (females are a different matter). My salary at Newsday would no doubt make Works Minister Franklyn Khan or Pastor Vishnu Lutchmansingh giggle like little girls, but it’s sufficient for all my needs and almost all my wants. But I am puzzled as to why so many persons with inferior brains and hair are so much better off than me.

As usual when faced with a conundrum, I try applying the empirical method. What are the methods used by successful people in Trinidad and Tobago in order to get money and power? One answer is as plain as Hazel Manning in a Poison costume: marry a Prime Minister. Unfortunately, this strategy is not open to me since I don’t think Patrick Manning or Basdeo Panday would find me attractive, even if I shaved my legs. So what strategies can I use?  Being a sort of intellectual, I thought I should look at how our successful intellectuals have used their brains to get large incomes and a public forum. There was Dr Ramesh Deosaran, a sociologist and Independent Senator, who gets funding from the State and private sector to do research on crime and violence. But I soon realised that I could not follow in Dr Deosaran’s footsteps. To be sure, I could ignore the newest research in social psychology; I could also argue that breaking down squatters’ shacks, including those of women with infants, helps create a law-abiding culture and ignore the possibility that Independent Senators earning $8,520 a month for doing nothing during the 18-18 deadlock might undermine ethical standards; and I could even assert that crime is a spiritual problem. But I don’t think I could keep my hair jet-black without damaging its curliness: and that is too high a price to pay.

However, there is political analyst Dr Selwyn Ryan, who has white hair and still gets large fees for conducting polls and writing political columns. Learning to do polls would be easy: what I am doubtful about is my ability to write prose so stiff that it would make any woman delirious with joy were it a column of another kind. And then Dr Ryan himself shafted my ambitions when, in a recent commentary about the history of the PNM, he wrote, “Power does…corrupt even the most altruistic and well-meaning of us. The most predisposed are the ones who persuade themselves or allow themselves to be persuaded that they are not.” Now me, I had always assumed that, in the unlikely event I did get a position of power, I would be immune to bribery, given that I’m not materialistic and have put my ethical standards into practice. But, by Ryan’s PNM logic, I am even more likely to be corrupted because I don’t think I can. And I certainly don’t want that to happen, since corruption causes hair loss, potbellies, wrinkles and other symptoms of a career in politics.

I soon realised, though, that Deosaran and Ryan are small potatoes compared to Professor Selwyn Cudjoe. On his radio talkshow, Cudjoe is described by his co-host Jerome Lewis as “the most respected intellectual in Trinidad and Tobago.” I myself don’t know anyone who has any respect for Cudjoe, but I don’t get out much. And even though Lewis thinks that the plural of “equipment” is “equipments,” that doesn’t mean he isn’t qualified to judge who is this country’s most respected intellectual. Besides, Cudjoe earns thousands of dollars every month for sitting on the Central Bank Board when he doesn’t know a thing about economics or monetary policy: so clearly somebody up there has great respect either for Cudjoe’s intellect or his dashiki. I therefore made a close study of Professor Cudjoe’s thought processes. In a recent article he argued that, of all the commentators who wrote about Carnival, only the “Indian” ones criticised it while the “African” ones praised it. Cudjoe pretended he hadn’t seen the vituperative anti-Carnival articles written by pastors Terrence Browne, Winston Cuffie and Clive Dottin, since this would have shafted his racial argument.

This showed me that I had been labouring under a grave misapprehension (sorry, we intellectuals talk like that). I had assumed that a person earned intellectual respect by being rigorous, honest, and open-minded. What Professor Cudjoe demonstrated is that these attributes are irrelevant, and what you really need is a PhD, a freshwater Yankee accent, and a lemon ice-cube smile. This was when I became truly discouraged. I mean, I could get the doctorate and fake the accent: but I didn’t think I could do that smile without an injection of botux. But thinking about Cudjoe pointed me in a new direction. Maybe he didn’t ignore the pastors because he was a damn liar, but because they had more influence and maybe even more money than he. And how did these men get to be so influential? The answer was as obvious as Fitzgerald Hinds in a kurta. By catering to people’s gullibility! So, rather than using my intellect to promote rationalism and fact, I could instead argue that the world is 6,000 years old, fornication is the cause of all the world’s problems, condoms don’t reduce HIV-infections, beating children eliminates violence, hanging prevents crime, and so on.

Indeed, now that I really consider the matter, I think I should go even further if I really want to have plenty money and influence people’s lives: I’ll just do like Yesenia Gonzalves, Solomon Babu and other fakes and make a set of predictions for the year. Even if most of my predictions turn out to be wrong, I’ll still be featured prominently on the pages of the newspapers and I’ll even be able to sell perfumes that attract love and money. Given all this, my empirical conclusion is irrefutable: the secret of success is to be ignorant, unethical, or untruthful. Damn! Guess I’ll always be a failure.

E-mail: kbaldeosingh@hotmail.com
Website: www.caribscape.com/baldeosingh