![]() |
Chart 1. Kalyanee cannot be the longest-serving GS. |
![]() |
Kher Jagatsingh organised the Labour Party like clockwork. |
Written to the beautiful people of Mauritius
![]() |
Chart 1. Kalyanee cannot be the longest-serving GS. |
![]() |
Kher Jagatsingh organised the Labour Party like clockwork. |
![]() |
It's not the Jama Masjid but only its largest darwaza. |
Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company.
Mark Twain
It's the beginning of the pandemic and I land on a 2016 video where the great Indian actor Irrfan Khan is debating with some clerics a few statements that had sparked a little bit of controversy. I am watching this after founding out he had just died. It was public knowledge that he had cancer, had gone for treatment overseas but it was still a surprise to learn of his demise because I was under the impression that he had defeated it.
In the discussion, the Paan Singh Tomar actor was essentially saying that one should not accept any religion blindly but check which parts make sense, test them and that he didn't need anyone to explain the Koran to him. One of the clerics wouldn't have any of this while two others were not only more supportive of the leading man in Maqbool but appeared fairly mesmerised. And probably regretted that Richard Parker wasn't in the studio. At one point Irrfan quotes a dialogue from Life of Pi, the movie based on Yann Martel's award-winning book.
![]() |
Not every collider has a big carbon footprint. |
More Than Just Errors
You also need to examine how much time you mindlessly spend on religion because across the ages beliefs have been used extensively to distract, subdue and control people and to harbour animosity if not hatred against others who have different viewpoints. These have been unsurprisingly pretty bad and bloody objectives. Add to this the many cases of paedophilia recorded in organised religions and you wonder what purpose these middlemen between you and God serve. Something Kabir had already warned us about more than five centuries ago.
And then last October we found through the CIASE report that these mental disorders among French clerics is at an entirely more massive scale than we had imagined. It's good that other countries are doing a similar exercise. After all we recently learned that Pope Francis had to implore forgiveness from the First Nations of Canada particularly for the evils perpetrated in the residential school system. So you don't want to spend too much time on religion otherwise you won’t have enough to understand what is happening around you, to your community and country which is far more important.
It's clear that after the death of distance we are in the middle of a substantial reduction in human ignorance through self-discovery. There's simply too much codified knowledge for this not to happen. People will keep on combining practices and religions. Zen with Islam. Sufism with Buddhism. With yoga and breathing à la Thich Nhat Hanh and what not. It will not necessarily have to be scripture-based but it will definitely be more fact-based. And this will lead us to practice something more important than religion and that too on a very large scale: kindness.
Numero Uno. The brand new Sputnik Nasal Vaccine. Both as a booster and as a 2-dose regimen. We know for a fact that different vaccines not only don’t have the same effectiveness in keeping us away from hospitals and the morgue but they are also not terribly good at preventing infection and transmission. As Israel found out even after a fourth dose of Pfizer. That’s because we have no soldiers to prevent Covid-19 from living rent-free in our noses and spreading around. But as the diagram shows – pulled from Sputnik’s Twitter handle along with the pic of how it is administered – a nasal vaccine changes all that by building a wall of immunity at the top of our airways. It would also make our vaccination campaigns a lot more efficient and provide most Mauritians with a better immune response through heterologous boosting. Plus as it’s a spray no needles are involved.
That’s how people will call the Sir Harold Walter Urban Terminal if the VUT is renamed to honour the memory of one of our land’s finest but completely forgotten sons – SHW built our first and some say still our best motorway which also makes him associated with our transportation network. It’s true he was a pillar of the Labour Party (pictured above with a famous colleague) and we don’t have a Labour PM right now. But we know what happened when we last had one. He actively tried to rewrite the history of the LP and of Mauritius, placing a sycophant at the head of the MBC with a contract that had even a “clause de conscience”. And two of the three Presidents he nominated were not personalities from the oldest political party of Mauritius.
Pravind Jugnauth has everything to gain in making this move. He would rise in stature as a head of government and reap quite a bit of sympathy from hundreds of floating and not-so-floating voters. These are always handy in any election. Besides if I’m not mistaken SHW was the lawyer of SAJ at one time.
We definitely don’t want to have Victoria in the name of that terminal. That too for several reasons. We’ve been an independent country since 1968 and a Republic for 30 years. Plus Queen Victoria was the monarch on who’s watch at least two famines occurred in India. One such famine is the Great Famine of 1876-1878 during which between 5.6 million and 9.6 million Indians lost their lives – shipping a record amount of wheat to England during that famine didn’t exactly help (Wikipedia). That’s a lot of people. Without blue eyes.
Most of that range exceeds the 6 million of Jews who are assumed to have died in the hands of Nazis of Germany in WWII. Add the one million who died during the Indian Famine of 1896-97 and we’re definitely talking of someone who was the head of state of a colonial power with more blood on her hands than the little guy with a famous moustache. By this yardstick calling it HUT would be a big improvement.
Furthermore just imagine how embarrassed we’ll look when movies on these famines à la Kashmir Files come out as they inevitably will in a few years. Speaking of embarrassment isn’t it wonderful that we now have a national bird which is alive? Which means we can now think of redesigning our totally irrelevant Coat of Arms.
Finally, we don’t want a statue for the victims of Covid-19 in Souillac. We want it in one of our busiest spots. We’ll be spoilt for choice once we pull down those associated with slavery.
While it was good strategy to have several vaccines in Mauritius last year there’s quite a bit of local data available now to narrow down our choices until better and in some cases more classic ones become available or Covid morphs into an endemic. More information is also coming from the jab manufacturers themselves.
Kher Jagatsingh who was born nine decades ago today left a massive legacy. We look rather briefly at some of his accomplishments and offer clues as to how he managed to do so much so fast.
He left a job in the colonial civil service to co-found The Mauritius Times at 23 (see timeline). That’s a pretty daring move if done today. Just imagine in those days. But the voracious and curious reader that he was obviously had other plans and a big part of these was to serve his country to the best of his abilities.
These initially took the form of a series of battles in his weekly to retaliate against all forms of injustice and to steer national debates in a direction that was good for Mauritius. One such battle was the “Down With PR” campaign so that Mauritius ended up with a far superior electoral system, the FPTP system.
KJ was quickly noticed by that team-builder extraordinaire, one SSR, and he was soon standing as an LP candidate in the general elections of 1959 to taste his first electoral victory. SSR must have been quite impressed by his protégé to have the 28-year old as Secretary-General in such defining times two years later.
After an electoral setback in 1963 he returned to parliament after the oh-so important 1967 independence elections and was sworn in as Minister of Health. That was a crucial time to be in charge of that Ministry. The demographic bomb – a topic he wrote extensively on – was being defused. And going through his speeches in that period – a good example is when the SSRNH was inaugurated in August 1969 – leaves us with the unmistaken impression of someone who thought very deeply about public health.
His next stop was a five-year stint at the Ministry of Economic Planning & Development ending in 1976. KJ again used his beginner’s mind to look at economic development and pioneered a new approach, launched the much talked about RDP and in the process, we learnt from Manou Bheenick’s excellent 1999 Memorial Lecture, transformed the ministry into a superministry.
![]() |
World Bank President Robert McNamara and KJ shared the view that bean-counting has little to do with development. |
The Ministry of Education and Cultural Affairs was KJ’s final cabinet position. Everybody knows who implemented LP’s 1976 electoral pledge for Free Secondary Education. What may be lesser known is who put it in the manifesto.
The then 45-year old considered it his biggest challenge yet. Many schools were built, the MIE produced schoolbooks that were more suitable for the 10-year old nation and several components of the education sector were integrated into a coherent whole to help push Mauritius to greater heights.
![]() |
His excellent work has been recognised by many. |
Kher Jagatsingh has lived a very meaningful life. He took on the mighty, educated the masses and strengthened the Labour Party with his off the charts organisational skills, charm and intelligence before delivering solid performances in three different ministries at junctions that were crucial in the history of a young nation. A non-negligible part of this impressive track record can be traced back to the fact that he and his biggest fan, the great leader of the LP, happened to be on the same wavelength on most national issues. These included progressive and sustainable taxation, the FPTP system, the importance of a good welfare state and the necessity of building great teams so as to be in the best possible position to handle difficult problems.
But a lot of his success came from working on himself, travelling extensively, meeting the great men and women of his time (Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Chou-En Lai and l’Abbé Pierre during a 17-month 1950s trip), not letting too much schooling get in the way of a first-rate education (a precious perspective in these times of disrupted schooling), putting in long hours and staying very humble and empty.
![]() |
Keeping the fan base happy. |
![]() |
SKJ with his comrade-in-arms and fellow pillar of the Labour Party, Sir Harold Walter (on the right), in the VIP Lounge at Plaisance Airport. |
![]() |
Petals of Dust which gives us a good idea of how much KJ loved his fellow compatriots was published in 1981. |