You know the expressions uttered, to begin with, by one person and that later become part of the folklore? Expressions like ?vote for me and I?ll change your life? - a definite winner - or one of my other favourites, ?This is a winning formula to win elections.? I have to admit though that my all time favourite remains ?the police inquiry is ongoing.? But this ?non sequitur? is in danger of being beaten by my now new favourite, ?Mauritian realities.?

But it seems the ?Mauritian realities? are constantly in danger of being eroded. Many people qualified the current budget as ?out of touch with Mauritian realities?, going as far as to say that the people who have prepared the budget have no inkling of ?Mauritian realities.? When there?s talk of taking measures to reduce the flow of traffic in Port-Louis, civil servants start fidgeting and saying the solutions proposed are not in line with ?Mauritian realities.?

When the government ? finally and logically - decides to review the ?Bad Weather Allocation? given out to fishermen because they have finally realized that maybe when the weather is bad in the South and prevents fishermen from earning their daily living, the seas in the North of the island might just be good and instead of sitting at home twiddling their thumbs, the fishermen just might want to go to work to earn an honest living? wow! Have you heard the outcry? Why should they go to work even if they can - and should - while others are getting paid for not being able to work? Why indeed?

I haven?t heard the ?excuse-par-excellence? sentence being used yet in this case but it wouldn?t surprise me to hear trade unionists and fishermen start yelling soon, ?No, you are thinking logically but it is not about logic, it is about Mauritian realities!?

By the way, it seems the definition of ?Mauritian realities? just got enlarged; it now includes bringing your underage kids to demonstrate in the streets in your name, to protest against any proposed measure that doesn?t fit in with the ?Mauritian realities!?

We, Mauritians are experts at cutting off the nose to spite the face. We very happily believe our own made up bull to be used as an excuse when we don?t like an idea, we shy away from anything that?s remotely alien to our habits and threatening to what we consider as being our acquired rights. We think we can afford to be above internationally set standards and criteria, rejecting all reforms and new ideas disdainfully all in the name of the ?Mauritian realities.?

But we haven?t been paying attention, have we? No man is an island and this saying is proving to be more nightmarishly true that we could ever have conceived it to be.

The ?Mauritian realities? only exist in our heads and they will be our downfall because they will stop us from being able to earn a decent living, from thriving in a competitive world and from being the best we can. From becoming again a nation we could be proud of.

There is no Mauritian reality; there is reality full stop. Reality as it is today. And there is what we need to do to be able to face that reality, deal with it and come out of it the bigger and the better.

The rest, really, is just fallacy.