Panday says he has no enemies

The political lion, who often donned a red beret and uttered such memorable quips as, “Politics has a morality of its own,” yesterday announced he was a changed person who did not have anyone he could identify as an enemy.

Former Prime Minister and UNC political leader Basdeo Panday made the statement while delivering the feature address at his alma mater, Presentation College, San Fernando, whose annual prizegiving and awards function took place at the school’s auditorium yesterday.

Panday attended the school when it was known as St Benedict’s College; it later became Presentation College after the arrival of the Presentation Brothers from Ireland.

He told the boys he had not imagined entering the political arena, having instead entered the legal profession as a means of escaping poverty.

“I was born to a poor peasant family in St Julien and I believed that education was the way out of my poverty,” he said, adding that after leaving school, he worked at a variety of jobs, both in Trinidad and England, to finance his education.

Panday told the students they should not be too apprehensive if they had not identified their profession of choice, saying he had studied drama and economics before entering politics.

“Whatever you are doing, just be the best at what you are doing,” he said, adding, “You cannot change the past, you have no control over what will happen in the future, but you can control what is happening in the present, in the now.”

He admitted that after he left politics (or after politics left him, he quipped, to the amusement of the audience, who seemed to be hanging on his every word), he had searched the various religious books for the “purpose of life.”

“The main objective of the religious texts is the happiness of mankind,” he said, “but how does one acquire happiness?”

“I have learnt that the secret of happiness lay in the heart and the mind, and the source of unhappiness also lies within the person,” he said, adding that to be truly happy, he had to find a solution to his having “many” enemies.

And while he did not say how he had dealt with his enemies, political or otherwise, or whether his statements regarding the morality of politics had changed he however observed that he had changed.

“Today, I do not have a single person that I can identify as my enemy,” he said, “and I do not have a spiteful bone in my body. Today, I can say that I am a changed person and I am happy.”

And as if to mark his transition to the “happy” phase of his life, the school presented Panday with a black beret with the Presentation College emblem attached by Open Scholarship recipient Joel Ryan Kissoon, who placed first in the Caribbean at the CAPE 2017 examinations.

Principal Dexter Mitchell said while the school had copped five open scholarships and ten additional scholarships, he would be asking the Ministry of Education to review the grades of three students who had been overlooked for scholarships.