Puck répond à Dhaneswar Soobrah

1. Your reply to my French piece is in English. I?ll extend the courtesy.

2. You suppose I sign as PUCK for lack of courage. Actually in this wonderful island of ours, my name is too often amalgamated to that of my employer or the other ventures I am associated with and I do not want them to get hurt by ricochet. It has happened too often before!

3. You recognize that the questions were legitimate. Thank you.

4. So now we know that ?ALL such embellishments and lighting works? are financed by? the STATE, that is all taxpayers, including me. My opinion was never asked for on this one but I certainly do question the pertinence of such spendings given that this type of expenditure, if caught up in the spiral of attempted even- handedness will eventually spin out of control : Which religions? Where does one stop? Which type of spending? Have we succeeded so far in being even handed ? (hence the wish to have a transparent report on spending so far since SSR days?)

5. Then Mr Soobrah spins out of control in a hairpin of snarling innuendoes. I gave three pertinent examples of better alternative use of this example of religious pampering (for votes?) : a world class education, a traffic solution to the Port- Louis logjam and a few handfuls of decent lodgings for ?squatters en devenir?. Mr Soobrah drops the ?en devenir? and ramps off into a tirade against the culture of ?manger boire?, which is transparent code for any Mauritian, and smacks of the racism he tries to associate me with by referring to a purported remark made by whomsoever about the highways leading to Grand-Bassin some years back. This is intellectually dishonest.

6. Finally, he tries to justify the expenditure by referring me, an ?ignorant?, to the ?thousands of tourists? who are converging ?to take shots? and ?generate billions of rupees in the government coffers?. Now this really looks like a punched outline! So this is not a religious expenditure, after all, it is a grand tourism project ! And all it takes to fill government?s coffers is to build some gigantic divinities all over the place and have tourists take shots at them and maybe the state coffers will fill out so much that, as a taxpayer, I will get some divine relief?

This is what I really call nailing it. No wonder DWC went belly side up!

PUCK