John Agitation

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His father was a cocoa worker in Caratal, who fired five shots into the wee hours that morning in 1927, when his son Ramjattan was born. In years to come, he would read the newspapers to his father, and at night he would tell him and his siblings stories about socouyants and douens, around a kerosene lamp, leaving them "frighten like hell". When a friend smuggled him into a beauty pageant at the Queen's Park Oval, Ramdeen was more fascinated with how comedian Jack Spector got laughs than the beauty queens on show.

In 1951 at age 24, another comic, Landy de Montbrun, introduced a nervous Ramjattan to an audience at the Oval. The audience laughed and a comedian was born. He was one of the first non-white comedians to perform at such a venue. The name John Agitation came from a character in a script he had written for a church bazaar.

As a comedian he drew inspiration from the people of his village who were either always laughing, or always telling jokes. He is the only comedian in the Commonwealth of Nations to win an election. And if that were not enough, Agi is a citrus farmer, cultivating 10 acres of land in Cumuto. The Grandmaster of Comedy recently celebrated fifty years as a stand up comedian.