World book day is April 23, the birthday of William Shakespeare and Miguel de Cervantes. And yet we bibliophiles find the need for a day encouraging people to read almost incomprehensible. For what greater conceivable pleasure is known to man? To read is to soar through time and space, and to survey at will a limitless expanse of peoples and ideas. Books always respect the reader's own pace. Affordable and accessible to all, they offer an almost infinite variety of proven riches.

Manchester is widely regarded as the most orderly parish in the nation and its people are considered the most disciplined in Jamaica. As journalist Barbara Ellington, who grew up there, says “You can drive north, south, and west and you will see no slums or depressed areas or zinc fence type living. “

Cricket in the West Indies is more than a game. It is the region’s only unifying force, its only common touchstone. And in recent years the question of whether cricket can survive the onslaught of cable television has provided as much drama as the matches themselves. Last year at Sabina Park the very future of the sport seemed to depend on Brian Lara. And had he not been dropped on 44, the West Indies would probably have been comprehensively beaten. Coming after the massacre in South Africa and the 51 all out at Queen’s Park Oval, the entire region may well have given up on the team and the game. Instead Lara went on to make 213 and the Windies won the match and almost the series amidst the fervent support of a grateful region. No wonder the London Times called Lara’s innings “arguably the most important in the history of the game”. It literally saved West Indies cricket.

Travelling from Jamaica to the USA is as much a mental journey as a physical one. Whatever else it may be, America is a smoothly functioning society that minimizes life’s daily frictions. In Jamaica on the other hand,  matters rarely go as they are supposed to. It may be too harsh to say people here try to be difficult. But too often Jamaicans’ careless attitudes towards those they are supposed to help creates unneeded irritations.

Many claim the Privy Council right of appeal is an archaic colonial relic. But the 1997 World Development Bank Report - “The State In A Changing World” - argues otherwise

That the first modern democracy should still choose its head of state on grounds of birth defies common sense. But though man is a logical being in theory, he is seldom completely so in practice. Tradition is often a better master of passion than reason, and history judges not by what should work but by what has. For over 300 years constitutional British monarchs have reigned serenely in mankind’s most durable democracy. Every other political system known has been interrupted by coup, civil war and assassination. An institution which lasts so long and bears such fruit provides its own justification.

The Walker pay report leaves no doubt that something is rotten in the state boardrooms of Jamaica. It catalogues a pattern of abuse of government guidelines at the Bank of Jamaica, National Investment Bank of Jamaica, the National Development Bank, Jamaica Promotions Limited, HEART/NTA and Port Authority. It blames the problems on a failure to communicate adequately, ignorance of proper procedure, and silence on the part of government ministers from the various portfolios.

The originating impulse of the Rastafari millenarian vision is often said to be Marcus Garvey's directive 'Look to Africa where a divine black king shall be crowned, for the day of deliverance is near' - a prophecy supposedly fulfilled by Haile Selassie's coronation as emperor of Ethiopia in 1930. Yet Garvey never uttered such words.

Rastafarianism was strongly influenced by Kumina-Revivalism. But Revivalists’ main concerns remained personal salvation and ritual observance. In contrast Rastafarians protested loudly about economic hardships and racial discrimination. Rastafarianism was not a movement isolated from place, time and history. Rather it was an integral aspect of a continuous matrix of black nationalism, folk religion and peasant resistance to the Jamaican plantation economy.

Books are the carriers of civilization. “Scripta manet, verba volat” – what is written remains, what is spoken vanishes. To posterity, a people without a documented history might as well have never existed. And a 100 years hence those wishing to know about the Caribbean will be heavily indebted to Ian Randle Publishers. In the past few years they have virtually created a library of the region, including “The Story of the Caribbean People”, “The Story of The Jamaican People”, “Reggae Routes : The Story of Jamaican Music”, “Bacchanal : The Carnival Culture of Trinidad”, “A History of Caribbean Architecture” and “Contending With Destiny : The Caribbean in the Twenty First Century”.