IT’S around eleven minutes to 11 am and I am prepping myself to start writing by playing a game of Solitaire on my computer. In the background, Chutney music (which I can't stand) is playing on the radio interspersed by some idiotic DJ droning on as they tend to do. The DJ. says "Good morning caller…" and a woman's voice comes on and says "Good morning, I'd like to say Happy Indian Arrival Day to all my friends and co-workers", or something to that effect (you know how much memory tends to ad lib).

Casually, I hover my cursor (to the uninitiated, that little arrow-thing that you use to click on stuff on your computer screen) over the time display and a little display box that says "Monday, May 05, 2003" comes on. I search my memory bank (at my age it's actually more like a largish safe-deposit box) and I find miscellaneous items like "Labour Day", "American Independence Day", "Aunty Mavis' birthday" popping up. I realise that all my little tags don't quite fit the date and I jump backward a bit in time (well with Aunty Mavis it's not really that far back) and Christopher Columbus jumps out at me.

But that's not what I'm looking for is it? Then it hits me; May 5th is the day that the first group of Indians came to Guyana. Hence `Indian Arrival Day’. I flashback to the woman's voice over the radio, and what do I detect? A little quiver, a slight tremble that stays with you, that implies that though most of what she actually said can be heard on any of the legion greetings programmes that litter the radio and television airwaves ("I'd like to say hello to my loving husband, Rakesh, who's looking at me right now at home in our living room"), there is something else within there that implies a passion, a cause, if you will. Within that voice, there is a tremor of conviction. And it is precisely at this point that a shadow, an enormous overarching cloud, of absurdity looms over me. It is Indian Arrival Day, and there is no holiday.

Now, I for one have no sympathy for any sort of ethnocentric extremism; the rabid paper tigers, the professed cultural agitators, the agents provocateurs, the ethno-political ginger groups of both sides of the ethnic divide, all eerily remind me of what I call the Klan sans pillowcases, the suit-and-tie wearing promoters of Aryan supremacy who preach a racial self-love that is so illogically intense that is tantamount to hate for other races. Nation of Islam orator, Louis Farrakhan also comes to mind.

Largely behind the most vocal calls for Indian Arrival Day to be a holiday is this same sort of "ethnic pride". The socio-cultural and political marginalisation that Indian immigrants (bharatiyas) and their descendants in Guyana have experienced throughout most of their inhabitance here has been picked up and translated into what I term an academic and political emotionalism. Both real and imagined injustices have been lumped into one, and a system of ethnic mythopoeia has been consciously set in motion.

Within this system, Mother India shines brighter than she has ever shone, her caste system and other social aberrations have been erased from her history; within this system, people of Indian origin are the saviours of the world and contain the genetic and cultural code for the enhancement and survival of all humanity. Indeed, they may just be the only humanity, and the purity of the Indian race must be kept sacrosanct at all costs; within this system, every Indian is a victim; within this system, Indians in Guyana paradoxically have achieved everything and nothing at all.

An academic paper by someone named Thomas Hylland Eriksen, a thesis on the Indians in Mauritius and Trinidad and Tobago (there are obvious implications for this my lovely native land) reads:

"What is sometimes referred to, simplistically, as the cultural adaptation of Diaspora Indians, is better viewed as the ongoing interaction between Indian and non-Indian social and cultural systems, where values, norms and forms of organisation are continuously negotiated and where the cultural differences within a statistically defined "population segment" or an "ethnic group" may be of greater significance than the systematic differences obtaining between the categories. Finally, inter-ethnic contexts can never be reduced simply to either conflict or compromise. While Indian communities of the "Diaspora" are conditioned, culturally and socially, by the "host society", the influence exerted by Indians themselves on the societies in question is never negligible, and lines of communication and power are always two-ways, [although power may, of course, be asymmetrically distributed.]"

Take away all the sociological gobbledygook and what this means simply is that there is an ongoing social dialogue within multi-ethnic societies such as ours, which cannot be defined in absolute terms, or with paradigms that employ absolute elements or terms of reference. Instead of being perceived in terms of a patchwork quilt, our society is a complex tapestry. The stronger, the more boldly defined each thread is, the richer the work looks for it.

The issue of Indian Arrival Day being a holiday is one that is, according to one professed political analyst, "a political hot potato"; it should be not. It is simply an issue of conscience and should only be viewed as that. The political bean counters who attach an electoral/demographic significance to every action need to be pulled from any decision-making body concerning Indian Arrival Day. And so should the local Louis Farrakhans.

A multi-ethnic commission should be set up to investigate the best way to commemorate the historical invent that was/is Indian Arrival Day. The fact that one hundred and sixty-five years after the first Indian labourers came to Guyana they have yet to be given the official nod when so many of their descendants have achieved so much, is a shameful state of affairs.