Rakesh Mo­han

The re­port of fe­male stu­dents at a high school in south Trinidad si­mul­ta­ne­ous­ly strick­en by a mys­te­ri­ous ill­ness, which had them faint­ing and flail­ing on the ground scream­ing, is right­ful­ly a cause of great con­cern and fright for many.

Giv­en that T&T is a land ruled by the or­gan­ised su­per­sti­tion we call re­li­gion, there is now the typ­i­cal talk of de­mon pos­ses­sion, pa­gan dev­il­ry and spir­i­tu­al forces at work in the school. Ac­cord­ing to one dai­ly, a par­ent is quot­ed as sug­gest­ing the Di­vali pu­ja held at the school was to blame. This oc­cur­rence brings to mind a re­port I once read about a group of lo­cal stu­dents who were tak­en to church to pray for suc­cess in their ex­ams, on­ly to be­come ter­ri­fied when they all thought they saw the stat­ues–not idols, this is a church not a mandir–be­gin wink­ing and nod­ding at them.

Sim­i­lar events like this have been record­ed through­out his­to­ry but it is on­ly now they can be ob­served and scru­ti­nised with the light of sci­ence and rea­son. In a piece in the New York­er mag­a­zine, Mal­colm Glad­well writes about a Bel­gian case where over 100 chil­dren were hos­pi­talised for nau­sea, dizzi­ness, and headaches af­ter drink­ing Co­ca-Co­la with in­fin­i­tes­i­mal traces of sul­fur com­pounds, which would have ef­fects no worse than a rot­ten egg smell.

The Econ­o­mist writes about a De­cem­ber, 2005, out­break among stu­dents in a par­tic­u­lar school in Chech­nya of "con­vul­sions, nau­sea and breath­ing dif­fi­cul­ties" which then spread to oth­er near­by schools. Ex­perts in­volved in the Chech­nyan case found no ev­i­dence of in­fec­tions or poi­sons.

The dif­fer­ence be­tween the lo­cal phe­nom­e­na and its for­eign ana­logue is that Trinida­di­ans seem to favour vac­u­ous, re­li­gio-su­per­sti­tious ex­cus­es where­as the Bel­gians and Chech­nyans seemed to pre­fer some­thing more close­ly re­sem­bling a sci­en­tif­ic ex­pla­na­tion, such as taint­ed drinks or chem­i­cal war­fare re­spec­tive­ly.

The strange thing with the Bel­gian event is that on­ly half of the af­fect­ed kids drank any Coke. Ac­cord­ing to Si­mon Wes­se­ly, a psy­chi­a­trist who stud­ies mass hys- teria, oc­cur­rences in schools and among chil­dren is typ­i­cal of this sort of thing.The news­pa­per re­ports state that when the stu­dents in the south high school be­gan act­ing up a priest was called and along with teach­ers they be­gan pray­ing with the stu­dents. This may have had the ef­fect of ex­ac­er­bat­ing the in­ten­si­ty of their symp­toms.

Be­cause the stu­dents may have be­lieved they were un­der spir­i­tu­al at­tack the prayers would have fed their delu­sions and made their con­di­tion worse. This in­ci­dent al­so shows the lev­el of en­light­en­ment of our teach­ers.

I ask the cit­i­zens of T&T to re­sist the temp­ta­tion to fall back on out­dat­ed, prej­u­diced be­liefs about black mag­ic and idol­a­try. I don't mean to sound elit­ist but for Pe­te's sake, peo­ple, pick up a book and read some time. It's about time you leave the Dark Ages and join the 21st cen­tu­ry. Let peace, rea­son and com­mon sense

reign.

THOUGHTS

n Sim­i­lar events like this have been record­ed through­out his­to­ry.

n Trinida­di­ans seem to favour vac­u­ous, re­li­gio-su­per­sti-tious ex­cus­es.

n I ask the cit­i­zens of T&T to re­sist the temp­ta­tion to fall back on out­dat­ed, prej­u­diced be­liefs about black mag­ic and idol­a­try.

n It's about time you leave the Dark Ages and join the 21st cen­tu­ry.