CARNIVAL, INFECTIONS AND DISEASE

By M. Faisal Rahman, Trinidad & Tobago.

Infections and Disease.

In seeking to diagnose the illness of patients, doctors pay particular regard to diet and lifestyle.

Careless excess in food and drink is a common recipe for disease and results in obesity, high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney failure, strokes and similar illnesses.

Entire nations suffer from pandemics that are the result of cultural tastes.

But we must also consider that just as the nation may suffer from excessive imbibing in its physical nourishment, so too must its body politic suffer from paucity of spiritual diet.

We bewail the state of the nation that now produces mayhem as the norm, yet we have not considered that the primal cause of this may well be the moral decay that we have embraced in public nudity and open wantonness, staged, telecast and published with religious fervor.

It is oxymoronic that we would seek to curb Aids through the very medium of its greatest facilitator. Promiscuity and licentiousness are the bedfellows of our nationally beloved festival.

Far from being Art, Carnival is its caricature.

The rhythm of our lifestyle now infects our souls and we can boast that we now export this poison to western soils where our diasporized citizens reside.

But like the glutton who digs his grave with his own teeth, we are incapable of admitting the evils of our ways. The pleasures are too great and addictive and they give a fleeting purpose to meaningless lives.

Majority religions here are mired in a quandary. How can we condemn the separate innocent parts that constitute the metamorphosed whole?

For surely wine is sacred, art is very life and music the food of love? Yet mixed together in this now unholy land, their fruits are promiscuity, Aids and rampant bastardy. To those who know their scripture, up to the seventh generation, pews shall be defiled in perverted continuum.

The disease continues to spread like cancer through the sinews of the society’s being and every depredation confronts us as a people.

Perhaps it is time for thinking people to seek out a “new” faith that prohibits alcohol, demands continence and disdains art and music. The athlete whose goal is fame and fortune gives up drink and excessive food and pleasure in his quest for Olympic Gold.

The goal beyond the inevitable grave is Paradise. Its path is an austere one and not necessarily ascetic. Its hurdles are hedonism and lust.

Shall we continue to respond to the beckoning of the other place where those who have lost Paradise shall abide?

MFRahman.
mfr1@tstt.net.tt

Tourist market in Ooty, Nilgiris, South India, Jan. 2006. ©J.S.2006.

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