SHAR­LENE RAM­PER­SAD

The Down­town Own­ers and Mer­chants As­so­ci­a­tion has said the Taste of Car­ni­val event should have been held lat­er in the year, to al­low for bet­ter plan­ning and con­sul­ta­tion with stake­hold­ers.

DO­MA pres­i­dent, Gre­go­ry Aboud told Guardian Me­dia the cap­i­tal city’s busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty will not be able to par­tic­i­pate in the event as they are still un­sure about what it en­tails.

“I think that per­haps it is quite a dif­fi­cult propo­si­tion to plan any strate­gic re­sponse or any ini­tia­tive re­lat­ed to the pro­posed Taste of Car­ni­val, main­ly be­cause of the short­ness of time be­tween now and then and be­cause we re­al­ly aren’t quite sure what ex­act­ly is go­ing to oc­cur,” Aboud said.

Al­though Aboud said DO­MA was un­sure about whether the planned events will be suc­cess­ful, he sup­ports the Na­tion­al Car­ni­val Com­mis­sion (NCC) idea to have Car­ni­val events.

“I do not want to give the im­pres­sion that we do not ap­pre­ci­ate the ini­tia­tive, the ini­tia­tive it­self, which has been couched as a taste, is quite a good idea in my opin­ion to at least re­vive the coun­try’s in­ter­est and to re­vive our con­nec­tion to this art form that we have and this won­der­ful time of na­tion­al uni­ty that we en­joy.”

How­ev­er, Aboud said there were op­por­tu­ni­ties that the NCC would have missed to im­prove the Car­ni­val ex­pe­ri­ence.

He said there are lo­cal band­lead­ers, DJs and pro­mot­ers who plan and ex­e­cute Car­ni­val events in oth­er coun­tries. He be­lieves the NCC could have ben­e­fit­ted from their knowl­edge.

“You don’t need to go Mi­a­mi to dis­cov­er what is go­ing on there, you need to ask the Trinidad or­ga­niz­ers who are right here.”

He said he had hoped T&T would take a page from Ja­maica, in hold­ing Car­ni­val events af­ter East­er.

“Ob­vi­ous­ly the NCC could not have known so far in ad­vance that the coun­try’s sta­tus would have al­lowed this event to be con­tem­plat­ed so it’s not about blam­ing any­body or point­ing fin­gers but maybe it would have been a good idea to get more in­volve­ment of stake­hold­ers and maybe have con­sid­ered hav­ing this event as they do in Ja­maica right af­ter East­er.”