Failure can lead to success

“IF YOU FAIL to prepare, prepare to fail.” That is the adage often repeated to young students. It is a saying premised on the idea that it takes industry, willpower and agency to achieve goals; effort is rewarded. Except, in some situations one sometimes fails regardless of how much one has prepared. What is one to do then?

“No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” That is another adage, this time from the pen of the famous dramatist Samuel Beckett, and it might as well be the mantra of Rikki Jai, who on Tuesday issued sterling advice to young people as he accepted an honorary doctorate in fine arts from the University of Trinidad and Tobago.

“To the younger ones out there, I will just say: originality will help you a little bit into getting into that upper atmosphere,” the famed chutney singer and cultural icon said.

“Try some original stuff. Be adventurous. Be prepared to fail, because if you don’t fail, you don’t know how to succeed. Don’t take the easy road all the time. Try the path that is untrodden.”

Rikki Jai’s career is an example of the importance of running the risk that you might not succeed. Born Samraj Jaimungal in Friendship Village, Debe, his path to chutney music was surprisingly circuitous. Young Rikki Jai was exposed to Bhojpuri folk songs, but was also introduced to Christian hymns, encouraged to play the piano, and came to love calypso so much he would memorise them.

It is little wonder he ended up straddling several genres: soca, chutney and everything in between.

In 1988, with Sumintra, Rikki Jai announced himself within the cultural sphere. The song, in which a woman urges her lover to “hold the Lata Mangeshkar, give me soca” became a hit, but it also caused upset within the East Indian community who felt it trivialised often overlooked East Indian culture.

There was the opposite problem in 1998 when the singer received a frosty reception while performing at that year’s National Soca Monarch competition as an invited guest. Perhaps he was seen as an interloper in a field perceived as Afro-Trinidadian. The large Port of Spain audience was hostile. Nowhere, it seems, would he easily fit.

But Rikki Jai’s love of music kept him going. And before the term became popular, he became a living embodiment of what we mean by “crossover artiste.”

“This is about walking with faith and not by sight, because everything I’ve done in my career is all faith,” he said this week, looking back at his storied career. “I didn’t know where I was going.”

He was going up that podium to collect, amid applause, his honorary degree.