OCTOBER 2024 marked 36 years since I have been a newspaper columnist. I have written for all the major newspapers since October 1988. It has been a long journey of winding roads, tsunamic waves, cascading poison and an unrelenting downpour of moral ugliness.
Would I do it again if I was to be reborn? The answer is full of unlimited decibels that would burst your eardrums. The answer is no. Do I have regrets? There are so many that it would fill volumes. If I were to write my memoir the opening line would be that I regret the pathways I have taken.

I love my country but I have seen the most evil side of human nature in Guyana that one can see from any set of humans. I have given my entire life to Guyana and I did not expect anything in return but I did not expect to be visited with a lifetime of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.
I don’t regret the way I feel about helping the poor and powerless as a dispossessed youth of Wortmanville who came of age. But were I to be reborn, it would begin and end there –just wishing to help. As I became grown up, I moved from wishing to help to actual help and the journey is one that has left me with psychic scars too large for the surgeon’s knife.

I think the mistake quixotic youths make is that as you feel the emotions of anarchism and idealism and as they take over your mind, the exuberance of being in the company of Don Quixote overwhelms you and it takes you to places where the spirits soar. But as your wings begin to strain the descent to the sea of reality can be more agonising than the treatment of Prometheus. I longed to be Prometheus Unbound but I never achieved that golden moment after 55 years of social and political activism and 36 years in journalism.

The sea of reality reminds you that when youth is in full swing while the window of obligation is fully open, you must never refuse to look inside; such an unwise attitude leads to disaster. I think obligation is one of the keys that hold civilisation together. When obligation is frowned upon, the soul is damaged.
I read the philosophy of John Locke inside out and internalised the value he placed on obligation but I never practised obligation and it has left me with the permanent scars of regrets about my life.

I refused to swim in the sea of reality. I refused to honour the principle of obligation that Locke so brilliantly outlined. Another English philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, taught me another lesson of life – the ultimate objective of human existence is happiness.
But did I bring happiness to those I had an obligation to? The answer is no. When you marry that woman you love and when that kid is born, the Don Quixote passion has to start receding and the instinct of obligation has to replace it. That did not happen in my 55 years of activism and 36 years in journalism and I continue to regret my social and psychological evolution.

I repeat; this is my country and I love it but Guyana has not been good to me. At my age, I do not want any generosity. What am I going to do with it at my age? I am happy with my wife Janet Kissoon, my daughter, Kavita and my phenomenally inviting pets. Freud wrote that we suppress the volatility of chagrin so long residing in our ID and we let the EGO sublimate it for us into self-fulfilling channels.

But Freud was careful to let us know that at any moment the ID can defeat the EGO and we become who we originally were. Maybe I have sublimated the pains of my evolution and I am successful in repressing what is inside the ID. I think I have. The great French existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, wrote about “The Project” but I am not sure if I ever invented my Project.

For Sartre, “The Project” is our route to achieving humanity for us and others. My Project was political activism and journalism; 55 in the former, and 36 years in the latter. But I am firm in my mind, psyche and soul that my Project did not bring me salvation. I am not an unhappy person; far from it. But I will never stop looking back at the Faustian visitors, Kafkaesque strangers and hellish doors I have been imprisoned in my 36 years of journalism. No! No! If I had to live my life over, I wouldn’t walk the roads I took. When I look back, I run from what I see. I will continue to run once the memories are there.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.