From across the table that's the way things are

The reigning top song on the billboard charts then was Whitney Houston’s ‘I will always Love You’ which I believe is still played over the radio. The highest grossing movie was Jurassic Park – about dinosaurs. The computer was getting its first Pentium and mobile phones were still a luxury only the 1% of the world enjoyed.

The world - the people who lived in it then thought - was on a first track trajectory. In a short span the world has gone topsy-turvy; the computer has thinned from a large monitor board to a hand-held device in everyone’s pocket. Music has left the wire-string tapes, gone onto DVD and come to the mobile phone and if you walked to a producer to make a movie about dinosaurs, you’d probably belong to their generation – a gone one.

 So understand how hard it is for a column like this one, which starts out today and comes every Friday, to put the world in context for a very young age group.

From the font of poverty that Africa’s streets are dyed in darkened by a calligraphy of theft, hustle and back-breaking dreams, we shall try to explore life and its topics – writing them out from across the table and in conversation with you, the reader.

Our generation is living through detestable displays of income inequality where patrons in bars on Bandali rise, Tom Mboya street or even Nyarutarama, without a flinch, spend the annual salary of their waiters and waitresses in one swipe to the loudest gongs of ‘Monalisa’ and slum dwellers without access to clean water are hired marksmen to drain swimming pool water into sewerage.

There must be a method to explain this madness – some of it political, some of it social and maybe a chunk of it in lifestyle.

The harder questions of whether the hardest workers earn the most pay will be defied in this column with across the table conversations with porters whilst the easier questions of why white coats of paint aren’t purchased downtown will be talked out with seasoned painters.

I don’t know if we’ll honestly explain it all but I can hazard a guess; we shall try.

So come with me on this journey of sitting across the table every Friday to understand why things are the way they are. And maybe, just maybe, why they should be a little different.