you could call it mobile radio

So there we were taking the scenic route down to the south of the island.  We were driving through the plains of Central Trinidad, enjoying the breeze and the sight of gayaps - a collective effort in which residents of a community come out and help a neighbour build a house.  Food and rum and music flow freely and everyone is doing something.
I'm  not sure exactly where we were and then all of a sudden I caught sight of a some commotion in the middle of a field. I thought it was a Hindu wedding, but it was just under a tent literally in the middle of a canefield, one side shooting up fire blackened stalks, the other dotted with white egrets picking gracefully through the freshly ploughed dirt for lunch. One of the fellars in the car says it's a mike competition. Huh?  Us town people never hear about that. We keep driving but of course by now half my body is hanging out of the car.  So we forget about the meeting that we're already half hour late for and head back to check out the mike competition.
It's the strangest thing. Anybody who's ever lived outside of the city should be familiar with the cars and their loudspeakers. They are particularly popular for funeral announcements but they really kick in around election time. It's really the ultimate form of noise pollution, which is why, I guess they have the competitions for these in the middle of a canefield. It's also a kind of mobile radio station that caters to the peculiar needs of the community it serves.
In the mike competition it's not just about the power of the mike.  Some of the speakers atop the cars are slamming. Fancy paint jobs and interesting depictions of life.  Some carry the name of the owners, others say things like 'No Fear' and 'Bomb'.  It's a very masculine space, rum and beers flow and there's a lot of loud shouting.
However they were all blasting the sort of nasal and elegiac Bollywood film standards that took me    back to my childhood growing up in San Juan, listening to Lata Mangeshkar and other luminaries popular Indian music that filtered into my experience of life. 
We walked in, in the middle of a heated discussion about if judges from the audience should be used.  Would the audience ajudicators be clued into what the main judges were listening for?  I couldn't really tell.
It's a really refreshing to discover a whole new aspect of Trinidad culture by accident. I mean I knew these mike cars existed and they are still a very formidable means of communication in rural areas, but I didn't know this was an art that was taken so seriously by its practitioners.
It's a little surreal to be in 33 degree heat in the middle of a canefield with ghazals blasting into the universe. It would be interesting to investigate the connection of this form of communication to India. Was it always an exclusively  Indian Trinidadian thing?
Seeing as I was one of three women in the field I was invited to the finals of the mike competition, which is going to be held at the Hindu Credit Union's headquarters at 10.30 on Tuesday, which is Indian Arrival Day. No coincidence surely.   The melancholy tunes, the New World men with old world inflections.  Displaced people making a new life for themselves having crossed the Kala Pani.
My cultural education continues...

Comments

[ricky]

100% support to all the mike men of trinidad, and a special thanks to my technician raj for all his years of quality work and great accomplishments ...