BILL MAHER, probably America’s most famous atheist, must have mixed emotions today: on his first week of holiday from Real Time until next January’s new HBO television season, the world throws up – it is the apposite verb – a religious human interest story into which Bill Maher could have sank his secular figuaritve teeth: in deeply pious rural India, a teenaged girl died literally because she was a teenaged girl born into an Indian form of mumbo-jumbo.

A Coda to Ainsley & the Snails

Hard to say which was a more Trinidadian moment: last Saturday’s fatal ploughing into a group of cyclists by a motorist (probably, allegedly) considering only his own momentary driving advantage; or the question put to the (white) president of the Arrive Alive road safety pressure group, that, if it were brown or black people who’d been killed, not white folks, nobody would care.

No surprise that, 100 years after, World War I should dominate European minds when, closer to 200 years after Emancipation, our own attitudes to race & colour in Trinidad remain the ones forged– no, the ones we were branded with – on the plantation.

I would be a hypocrite to fault TV6’s Fazeer Mohammed for asking a race-based question: in 2006, despite my editor Keith Smith’s repeated direction not to raise it at all, the first question I asked pan legend, Andy Narell (who probably comes from Belmont as much as Brooklyn), was, “So, what’s it like, being a white boy come to play pan in Trinidad?” (It’s a reflection of Andy Narell’s dignity and decency that he answered the most shameful question I’ve ever asked.)

Today’s Number One Film:

*No Country for Old Men, 7.30pm Paramount Channel.Watch this if you liked Apocalypse Now,The Three Burials of Melquiades Estradaor any film by Sam Peckinpah. Part thriller, part Western, as upsetting as it is intriguing, this modern-day drug money heist flick is Cormac McCarthy’s bleak 2005 novel brought to life. It was a natural fit for the Coen Bros’ dark humour and deadpan violence, but it is so overwhelmingly hopeless

YOU FLING YOUR SOUL as you throw the dice on a last-ditch bet, chancing the children’s school fees against the mortgage payment and the Christmas presents, and you hold your breath, waiting for those little cuboid firetruckers to bounce off the wall; two or three seconds as long as forever when everything is riding on them; you don’t have to go to Vegas to know an everything-or-nothing risk is never a thrill for anyone but Maverick.

You brace yourself for sevens or craps and you remind yourself, perforce, of how little you need, in truth; but you will always forget, except at these heavy little moments, when you watch those dice like a month in jail, and you’re praying for everything… but your gut has already told you you’re going to come up with nothing.

Today’s Number One Film:

Inception, 10.29am HBO Plus BEST FILM OF THE DAY. Watch this if you liked Shutter Island, The Matrix or Pan’s Labyrinth. With Best Cinematography, Best Sound Editing & Mixing Oscars and Best Director, Screenplay, Music, Special Effects & Best Sci-Fi Film Saturns, the most imaginative American film since Adaptation