Malinda Words

[This was written in 2006. There's a warning embedded here. Have things changed over the last eight years? I think not. The lesson is therefore still relevant]

In a perfect world there would be no wars, no threats, no fear of sudden and violent death being encountered on the way to work, on the way home from school. In a perfect world there would be no criminals, no law-enforcement officers, perhaps no need for laws and of course no prisons.

Perfection is always a place one can at best be travelling towards, never a residency. And so, in the imperfection that we all inhabit, there are transgressions of norm and law and perforce mechanisms to prevent and minimize the harm that the transgressor can cause the rest of society. These mechanisms, captured in the broad canvas called the judicial system, are themselves imperfect, which is why societies often come up with countervailing institutions and mechanisms to ensure due process, the safeguard of fundamental rights and so on.

We know that transgression is not the private property of pickpockets, petty thieves, smugglers, thugs, murderers and terrorists alone. Even a cursory glance at Supreme Court decisions on applications pertaining to the violation of fundamental rights would tell us that of the government officials found guilty, those responsible for upholding law and order have often acted in ways that make us wonder who the worse transgressor is. This is why Joan Baez, in her song ‘Prison Trilogy’, cries out, ‘We’re gonna raze, raze the prisons to the ground!’This is why young and idealistic revolutionaries cannot be faulted for asking, ‘why should we respect the law when the law-makers and law-enforcers themselves violate their own laws?’

We are talking about prisons here, and one prison in particular, the Kuruwita Remand Prison, where Sunil Perera was tortured. Sunil Perera, a man with no known record of any criminal activity, was arrested and held in the Kuruwita prison from June 29 to July 4 on suspicion of having given a nuisance call to Mihindu Maha Vidyalaya, Kuruwita, ‘warning’of an imminent bomb attack. Sunil Perera was released after his innocence was established through relevant records of phone calls. Someone erred when he was arrested. That error could be put down to understandable human fallibility. After all, mistaken identity has resulted in worse consequences than mere arrest, as in the case of the West African immigrant Amadou Diallo, who was shot some 44 times by New York policemen who had been repeatedly decorated for service excellence. The unforgivable error occurred after the arrest.

Even if Sunil Perera was guilty, he could cause society no harm from within the prison. Even if he had information that would lead to securing society from other such hoaxes, torture is not a sanctioned form of extracting it from the man. Sunil Perera died and although it is not established conclusively that he succumbed to his injuries, that is a mere detail. The point is, he very well may have; he may have been one well-directed blow away from a death attributable to assault! He was robbed of the right to due process. This robbery was not a petty crime, it was a theft of a much higher order for the transgressors are none other than people sustained by the tax payer to preserve the peace and to protect the citizenry from these and other violations.

Admittedly we live in times when all social life is enveloped in the fear of terrorist attacks, for we are living with a tyrant who does not think twice about massacring civilians, destroying economies and livelihoods and disrupting day-to-day life. As such it is only human to be edgy, to act without circumspection and to let passion overrule reason. The arrest can be justified under such circumstances, but taking out other frustrations on the suspect is nothing but deplorable and indeed criminal.

Sunil Perera obviously did not have the political or social connections necessary (unfortunately) to protect himself from assault, battery and other humiliations as such are perpetrated in prisons. There have been numerous instances where the ‘connected’ got off scot-free after committing punishable offences, where detention was based not on suspicion but on established fact of transgression. What does Sunil Perera’s fate tell us about the protection that Sunil Pereras of this country can expect from the police and indeed the judicial system? Why is it that people try to contact someone of influence in any dealing with the police, even to lodge a complaint? The simple answer is people are not sure if they’ll come out alive when they enter a police station. Many are to blame for this state of affairs, including the police itself.

And what does the behavior of the law enforcement officers in this case tell us about ourselves? If the police cannot rein in frustration when encountering a detainee who has absolutely zero capacity to harm, does this not indicate that a mob, if similarly frustrated, is probably capable of causing mayhem and more?
We do not live in a perfect world, we know. This, however, does not prohibit the search for perfection or, in the very least, a commitment to ferret out imperfection and institute remedial measures. Sunil Perera’s story must sober us all about the unexpected but probable consequences of living in these times. It should embolden all of us to exercise discretion to the utmost and that a concerted effort should be expended to ensure that we do not succumb to the instinct to panic. But more than all this, it should alert us to the fallibility of the human being, a condition that should be read as ‘I may not be right’, and therefore persuade us to think not twice, but many, many times over, before we act in such situations.

In our imperfect world there are wars, threats, there is fear of sudden and violent death being encountered on the way to work, on the way home from school. In our imperfect world there are criminals, law-enforcement officers, a need for laws and of course prisons. In our imperfect world we have to understand that while being careless about our security is dangerous, a million times more dangerous is being negligent about our freedom.

Maybe this is what Sunil Perera’s tragic story tells us. It is a small consolation and perhaps of no consequence to his wife Chitra and sons Anoj, Lashan and Ashan, and this too we should not forget, for if we do we would only be feeding that primordial instinct to destroy all prisons, something that, unfortunately, has no logic, living as we are in an imperfect world.

Tomorrow’s Sunil Perera could be you, don’t forget. The IGP, the Prisons Commissioner and all of us have our work cut out. We cannot afford to do nothing. Not if we don’t want to be tomorrow’s tragic headline.

*First published in 'The Nation' on July 9, 2006

My five year old daughter, like any five-year old I suppose, frequently amazes me with random observations and I am never sure if she understands fully how philosophical she is. A few days ago she made a confession: ‘langak venakal mama hithuwe ratak kiyanne toy ekak kiyala’ (until recently I thought “a country” was a toy).

Floored me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that she had been right all along, at least as far as most countries are concerned. She will probably learn that in time and will, I hope, explain to me the relevant political economy.

Countries are toys. The word itself is a toy, come to think of it. Whenever it is used without proper reference and substantiation. A name, after all, is nothing but a particular configuration of syllables when that which it refers to is ignored. The term ‘my country’ for example easily legitimizes all kinds of things that could be detrimental to ‘our country’. ‘My country’ when it is spoken of with pride merely romanticizes because no country is as saintly as is often claimed. Histories are bloody and messy, never unblemished. Toys, one observes, are never perfect; they have life-spans, they break down, they often fail to fulfill their promise.

Forget the name, even the substance associated with ‘country’ often consists of toys in the way they are engaged with. Puerto Rico is a plaything of the USA, and this is true of many unhappy ‘countries’ in this world. The Soviet Bloc was the plaything of the Russian Communist Party, except perhaps for Albania and Yugoslavia. Afghanistan for a long time was a toy over which both the USA and the USSR fought. There are other examples.

I remember reading about a version of King Lear where the old man took a map of his kingdom and arbitrarily tore it up to divide the land among his daughters. What are maps but pieces of land upon which reside people, families, communities, animals and animals? Resident in them are rivers and hills, valleys and waterfalls, minerals, precious stones, soils with certain fertilities, crops and memories.

‘King Lear’ is a play. It says a lot about ‘countries’ and the unhappiness that results in the play of power.

Let’s take a more ‘real’ example. Take the continent of Africa. Check it out on a world map. Observe how straight some national boundaries are. Nature is never so clinical as to design river or mountain in the kind of geometry that allows for such perfect demarcation. For someone Africa was a toy. For some it still is.

What was Vietnam and Cambodia, what is Iraq today and what will Iran be tomorrow? Countries? Forget it. Playthings, toys.

Take globalization, that process which is supposed to turn us all into inhabitants in a global village. It is about erasing boundaries, obliterating difference and diversity. What meaning, then, can we attach to the label ‘country’? None. If the World Bank, IMF, the WTO and ADB (not forgetting of course USAID) design national policy, what then of nation, what then of national reconciliation, national question, national consensus?

I want my daughter to learn all this and maybe she will. I hope also that she will someday learn that countries are toys for a different reason as well. She will perhaps understand what her grandfather meant when he said ‘the sky doesn’t become less private although it belongs to everyone’.

The air that passes through her fingers, catches her hair and brushes against her face, she will someday learn, has a certain percentage of oxygen but this does not prevent it being described in terms of fragrance and temperature. Countries are like that. They are other people’s toys, true, but they are our toys as well. Toys break, but they can be made again. Toys can be carelessly handled, but they can be taken care of, loved, treated like one treats an old friend, made to interact with one another, caressed.

Toys are not inanimate. They are not devoid of character. So too countries. Pieces of sky are no different from kites. Ships no different from paper boats. Dolls and dolls houses are people and housing schemes. My daughter knows this for she has endless conversations with her little pink teddy bear about who she says ‘eya pinky bear nemei, eya pinky baba!’ (she’s not “pinky bear,” she’s “pinky baby”).

Toys can be abused, countries too. Toys can be taken apart and the broken pieces thrown away. The same with coutries. Toys can be the greatest source of joy, the greatest friends. Countries too. Perhaps the little girl will re-learn that a rata is actually a toy and that this fact shouldn’t bother us too much as long as we are careful about how we touch, pick up and otherwise interact with and understand our little paper boats, sand castles, kites, kos kola crowns and the hundreds of other joy-givers we loosely call ‘toys’.

*First published in 'The Nation' in October 2006

Now available at Surasa (Maradana),
Sarasavi and Vijitha Yapa

It is customary for the winner of the Grataen Prize for Creative Writing to deliver an acceptance speech. Accordingly, on Saturday May 24, 2014, as the recipient of the prize I addressed the audience. In previous years, The Nation has featured those shortlisted for the award as well as the eventual winner. Naturally, I excluded myself from these exercises. This time, however, for reasons that do not require elaborate, when the Features Editor wanted ‘something’ I said I would write what I remember of my acceptance speech. Later I realized that I might not remember everything and also that in the rush of the moment I left out certain things I ought to have mentioned. So in this piece I will write what I said and in italics add that which I did not but ought to have.

It occurred to me that 29 years from now, I would be just one of fifty Gratiaen Prize winners. Now had I not won, 29 years from now (who knows?) I might be the only one to have been shortlisted on five occasions. I’ve submitted to the Gratiaen six times over the past seven years. Looking back, the high point has clearly been winning the H.A.I. Goonetilake Prize for the Best Translation, that of Simon Navagaththegama’s Sansaaraaranyaye Dadayakkaraya. That was special becausethat text is an important literary landmark and because Simon Navagaththegama was one of the best writers in Sinhala in the second half of the last century. It was special because of who Ian Goonetilake was. He was an adornment to the Gratiaen.

In the past seven years, thanks to the Gratiaen, I encountered many good writers. Among the poets whose work I am acquainted with, there was Vivimarie Vander Poorten the winner of the 2007 Gratiaen. Ramya Jirasinghe, to my mind, is the most outstanding poet of my generation. There is Marlon Ariyasinghe who wrote a book called ‘Froteztology’ some years back. He was not shortlisted. There is Dhanuka Bandara, again someone who was not shortlisted. He has a kind of confidence in expression, wit and ability to dissect that is rare in one so young. Inosha Ijaz, shortlisted this time, is clearly the poet of tomorrow. Her mastery of metaphor and her ability to connect disparate things in new and thought-provoking ways is amazing. There’s another poet I must mention although he never submitted for the Gratiaen. Rasika Jayakody writes about love in poetic form in a way that no one I know can.

Among those who write prose, there’s of course Shehan Karunatilleka and there’s Asgar Hussein. I was impressed by Ruwanthi De Chickera and Nadee Kammellaweera for the script of their play ‘Kalumali’. There are probably others whose names I’ve missed.

There have been strange moments too. For example, on one occasion we were told that ‘unfortunately there was very little engagement with political themes’. I had thought that what was being assessed was literary worth of texts submitted. The judges may have their preferred topics, but that’s largely irrelevant. More seriously, when one yearns for the political what is implied is that there are political preferences which, naturally, factor in to decision. By the same token there would also be political positions opposed or even abhorred. I’ve often wondered, I must say, about the politics of the Gratiaen or rather its key players.

It was stated once that perhaps the Gratiaen Trust should consider having separate prizes for poetry, short stories and plays. Again, this surprised me. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been given not only to novelists. It’s a position that has been echoed by others, some writing to newspapers. The claim is that writing novels is somehow tougher. Well, more sweat does not necessary deliver better literature, if indeed there’s more ‘effort’ in writing a novel as opposed to a collection of poetry. Pablo Nerud, Octavio Paz, Rabindranath Tagore are among several poets who have won the Nobel Prize, I told myself.

So it’s been a long seven years. Let me begin with the first time I submitted. I was thrilled to learn that I had been shortlisted. That year, however, I was disqualified. I found out who had moved for my disqualification and was not surprised to learn that he is someone for whom the Gratiaen was an adornment. Let me not say anything more about that. That same year, I remember clearing someone’s name. In public. That someone, when the opportunity came, did not clear my name, even though that someone knew (and acknowledged to me later) that I was in the clear. I lost a friend that night. I gained a lesson.

I was disappointed. I didn’t want to submit to the Gratiaen again, but on the 30^th or 31^stof December 2008, I decided I would rag the next set of judges by forcing them to read something I had written. I had some poems but the collection seemed too thin. Fortunately I had another collection. I had been inspired by a beautiful book by Pablo Neruda, ‘The Book of Question’. It was to these questions that Inosha had provided those beautiful answers in her Gratiaen submission. The book inspired me to write my own questions, some 250 of them. So I broke them into groups of five and inserted each set between the poems. That gave me a volume. It was shortlisted. I remember Michael Meyer mentioning that it was a unique format. I told him how that unique format came about. He said ‘So you tricked us!’ and I replied, ‘it would seem I have!’ Shehan won that year. I feel privileged to have been shortlisted with him. When I listened to the excerpt he read out when the shortlist was announced I knew we had something special. Shehan also had the humility to pick my brains about sports journalists and newspapers later on. I believe some of what I said went into a later edit of his text.

I had a collection the following year too but the recipient of all those poems didn’t want them shared.

I submitted for the 2010 prize too. As I listened to the names being called out when the shortlist was announced, I remember texting Marlon, ‘No poets this time, brother’. I remember coming out wondering I knew what poetry was and whether I knew what prose was. I leave you to figure that one out. I remember Rajpal Abeynayake, the much vilified, asking me why I even bother to submit. I said ‘I want to indulge in a fantasy, that of what I would say in the event I win’. He asked me what I would say. This is what I would have said and I will say it now.

Good as these submissions are, they are nothing compared to contemporary Sinhala literature. The poetry of Sunil Sarath Perera, Bandula Nanayakkarawasam, Rajee Welgama , Sandun Lakmal and to a certain extent Sunil Ariyaratne….is far better than anything I have written. There is also (how could I have forgotten!) Ariyawansa Ranaweera, Nandana Weerasinghe, Ratna Sri Wijesinghe and many other lyricists. Masimbula, Mohan Raj Madawala and Manjula Wediwardena come to mind among the novelists. There’s no one who writes short stories in English that can match Jayatilleke Kammellaweera. The plays of Rajitha Dissanayake and Udayasiri Wickremaratne are exceptional. Indeed, I can’t think of anyone writing in English in Sri Lanka who can match Udayasiri for sheer versatility. I don’t know Tamil but my hunch is that the same can be said of contemporary Tamil literature.

I submitted in the following three years as well. As I mentioned on the first two of these occasions, upon being shortlisted, it was just poetry I had written in the relevant year. I was less and less thrilled, naturally, about being shortlisted. This is not to say that I didn’t want to win. Of course I did. I didn’t have great expectations and what expectations I had diminished from year to year. This year, and I did not intend any insult to the Gratiaen, I chose to attend an event by Bandula Nanayakkarawasam focusing on Mahagama Sekera. I just felt that was more important than attending a ‘shortlisting’.

Ok, I have to say ‘thank you’ now. First of all, I want to thank the Gratiaen Trust. If not for this prize I would never have collected my poetry. It is thanks to the Gratiaen that I was able to publish all my submissions. This year was to be the last, whatever the outcome. I had already got ‘Edges’ published. The other five all came out yesterday. I believe I am the most published English poet in Sri Lanka. It happened just list that. I wasn’t two days ago and now I am.

I must thank Prem Dissanayake of Fast Ads and Surasa for publishing ‘Edges’. No one ever offered to publish my poetry but when I asked him, Prem Aiya immediately offered to do so. Sandra Mack of Ketikatha (Pvt) Ltd designed all the books. I am extremely grateful to Sandra for taking so much trouble at very short notice. It is thanks to her efforts that the books are there at the back of this hall. I must thank, also, Amarajeewa of Neographics for agreeing to print the books. I told him I will pay him slowly, but he merely told me not to worry and that I can pay in kind by doing some work for him

There were some occasions when people who read my poetry blog www.malindapoetry.blogspot.com would complain that I hadn't updated in a while. I would respond by saying, 'ok, give me a word and I will give you a poem'. It was a fun exercise. Marianne David, Rifka Roshanara and Randim Attygalle have in this way inspired me to write.

I want to thank all the judges of all the panels. It’s a thankless job. I have been a judge myself and it is not easy to read through all the books, especially those that are really, really bad. Judges make just one person happy or perhaps two. They disappoint a whole bunch of others. Writers are vain creatures as Ashok Ferrey pointed out a couple of years ago; we think we write very well and when we are young we even think that we write better than anyone has ever written. This is why I will never sit on a Gratiaen panel of judges. But I thank them all.

My father gave me words. My father, Gamini Seneviratne, is a better poet than I could ever be. My late mother, Indrani Seneviratne gave me heart.

I want to thank all of you, those in the audience, who have supported writers by coming here, showing appreciation for literature, year after year. It means a lot. Thank you.

I must mention now that there has not been any inspiration as wholesome, stimulating and critical in my poetic endeavors as the word of Siddhartha Gauthama the Buddha. To me, he is among other things, the greatest literary figure ever. His doctrine, or rather what I understand of it, has guided and framed my explorations with the word. If there’s any thread or recurrent theme in all the poetry I’ve written it is that most liberating of philosophies, Buddhism.

It’s seasonal. Devolutionists have their ‘on’ days and ‘off’ days. There was a time way back in the early 1990s when Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu was scared to use the word ‘federal’. He called it ‘The F Word’. Then there came a time when those who were not impressed by the ‘F-Word’ were called war-mongers, hawks, Sinhala Buddhist extremists and other such names. After May 2009, when the biggest objectors to the unitary state, the LTTE that is, were defeated, reduced circumstances forced such people to operate with lesser aspirations. No ‘F Words’ thereafter, but there was a concerted effort to resurrect the 13^th Amendment to the Constitution.

With the rise of Narendra Modi and the Indian Prime Minister’s friendly-looking but nevertheless stern ‘advice’ to President Rajapaksa that Sri Lanka should implement the 13^th Amendment to the letter and go even beyond that document, there has been an understandable joy among devolution-wallahs.

Some make much of President Rajapaksa’s ’13 Plus promise’ made to Modi’s predecessor. No mention is made of the context, i.e. a critical stage of the struggle to eliminate the LTTE in a political environment of intense international pressure including then Indian Premier Manmohan Singh’s need to adjust tone and word to keep Tamil Nadu happy considering upcoming elections. Those who want to push President Rajapaksa into a corner based on this promise, naturally adopting a holier-than-thou tone and a principled-strut, say nothing of promises made and broken by India with respect to the Indo-Lanka Accord which essentially birthed the 13^th Amendment in the first place.

While these little machinations show up the ‘principled’ none of this really matters in politics. It is, after all, not about truth, justice and fair play but about power. On the other hand, sleight of hand has to be called just that. These pathetic morality moves (shall we say?) are often accompanied by undisguised fear-mongering, another tactic frequently used to push agenda through.

‘Modi is not Singh, BEWARE!’ people scream. ‘Time is running out!’ they add. ‘Do it or else!’ they warn. Absolutely nothing is said of a) the violation of sovereignty by the Indo-Lanka Accord, b) the irrelevance of the 13^thAmendment in the matter of responding to any ‘minority grievance’ (that can be substantiated) or ‘aspiration’ (that is ‘reasonable’) and c) the total eviction of the majority of Sri Lankans in the entire decision-making process. In other words, what’s called for is akin to kicking Sri Lankans in their behind and letting India call all the shots. Put another way, it amounts to turning Sri Lanka into a client state of India, ‘the Bhutanization of Sri Lanka’ as Rajiv Gandhi envisaged in undisguised salivation when the Indo-Lanka Accord was thrust down Sri Lanka’s throat.

President Rajapaksa, at this point, can call the bluff decisively. He can tell all those who toss around words like democracy, representation and accountability at every turn that he will put the issue to the people. He can have a referendum on the 13^th Amendment. That would win back some degree of respectable citizenship for the people of Sri Lanka.

He can also make capital out of Opposition Leader Ranil Wickremesinghe’s call for the scrapping of the 1977 Constitution (along with amendments, the 13^th included, let us not forget) and get cracking on writing a new document. That would be a fresh start for everyone, those in power and those aspiring to unseat them. He has the numbers but he would do well in these times of bickering and besieging to come up with something that not just has two-thirds support in Parliament but the unanimous approval of all parties. Indeed, if he is brave enough, he could ask Ranil Wickremesinghe to chair a ‘Constitutional Council’ tasked to write a fresh document.

That would also amount to playing the ‘Modi Card’ for Sri Lanka’s benefit. It would also stump those who would have President Rajapaksa see Modi as some kind of gonibilla.

msenevira@gmail.com

Writing on the occasion of launching ‘The end of war in Sri Lanka, five years on’ by www.groundviews.com, Sanjana Hattotuwa refers to a review of the collection of essays by Channa Wickremesekera, military historian and novelist.

Wickremesekera makes some observations: ‘The most cursory glance at some of the websites that showcase opinions from those whose first language is truly Sinhalese will show that it it still the Wimal Weerawansas rather than Kalana Senaratnes who make opinions of Sri Lankans, even in cyberspace. They are still dancing the victory dance, expecting the Tamil in the room to join in singing Sinhala bailas or to leave the room altogether. Groundviews, I am sure, has no pretensions to having the power to shift heaven and earth which is what, it appears at times, is required to change the direction the country is heading in. Yet, despite that seeming impotence, the collection of articles also presents a pleasing prospect. It shows that there are still at least a few of us who recognize that the end of the war has not ended the conflict as long as we do not deal with the Tamil in the room, fairly and justly. It may make a few other decent people stop and think, even feel. That would be a modest victory but a victory nevertheless.

Before we get to what Senaratne has to say, let us dissect Wickremesekera’s angst which, needless to say, mirror’s Hattotuwa’s angst, birds of a feather, fellow travelers, bedfellows and all that. There are many lines missing in Wickremesekera’s observation. He does not say, for example, ‘…as long as we do not deal with the Tamil in the room, fairly and justly, with justice and fairness defined a la the Paikiasothy Saravanamuttus, Sanjana Hattotuwas and of course Channa Wickremesekeras.’ These people are ‘decent’ and anyone who has different definitions of justice and fairness, different notions of what ‘victory’ was and is celebrated, and even a more nuanced and politically fleshed-out notion of what Wickremesekera calls ‘the Tamil in the room’ are naturally ‘indecent’. They, moreover, are not the kind to ‘stop and think’. They don’t ‘feel’.

All this can be traced to one thing: the fact that preferred outcome did not materialize, not in May 2009 and not thereafter either. The preferred was and is about devolution, at one time (when the LTTE was riding high) talked of with a liberal spewing of formations such as federal, confederation and even separate state. In reduced circumstances the rhetoric revolved around the 13^th Amendment. In clutching-at-straws times, it was about implementing LLRC recommendations where the term ‘power devolution’ was salivated over with absolutely no reference to the most important rider, ‘acceptable to all communities’. If logic, decency, sense of history and pragmatism informed rhetoric then Groundviews and its hurrah boys and girls would have revisited the vexed question of arbitrarily drawn boundaries which Eelamists (some of whom were terrorists) used to define ‘traditional homelands’ (again, poorly supported by historical evidence or demographic realities, back in the day or even today).

This side of that preferred set of outcomes in their optimal or minimal articulation, for these people, there can only be indecency. This amounts to careless and preference-provoked rubbish clothed as ‘academic’, well-thought-out formulae.

Let’s move on to Senaratne. His piece is titled ‘The search for a political solution five years after the war’. He begins by quoting from TNA leader R Sampanthan’s voice-cut to Al Jazeera on March 26, 2014: ‘The sovereignty of Sri Lanka is very much intact. And we want it to remain intact. We are Sri Lankans…And we don’t want Sri Lanka’s sovereignty to be impacted upon’. Now that’s rich. It’s almost like saying ‘We want a just and fair solution in an undivided, united Sri Lanka, and it should take the 13^th Amendment as a starting point’. ‘United’ cannot be scripted into constitution in any meaningful manner, to begin with. This is not the place to get into all the flaws and pitfalls of the 13^thAmendment, the pernicious divisional designs embedded in it have been commented on adequately. Starting off with a man who salaamed someone like Prabhakaran and saluted a manifesto that is diametrically opposed to the submission made to Al-Jazeera takes away much from Senaratne’s piece which contains some very valid points, especially with respect to the weaknesses of the LLRC.

The fundamental predicate of federalism is that of two distinct entities coming together. Scripted in, ipso facto, is ‘separation’. So the qualifier, so-called, ‘within a united country’, has nothing to do with either a federal or unitary formulation. The people of South Asia can be united, the people in Colombo 7 can be united, Senaratne and I can be united. It’s just a description of a relationship, its political worth doesn’t rise above rhetoric. So if Kalana argues (as he seems to be) for something that ‘ideally culminates in a federal form of governance structure within a united country’ and endorses a separatist’s view that such a structure ‘is the least that Tamil-speaking people can demand,’ he is unpardonably careless. The rhetoric sweeps under the political carpet relevant facts pertaining to history, geography and demography. The political manipulations that generated a ‘majority’ that allowed for what came to be called ‘APRC – Majority Report’ should not be ignored, as Senaratne has. It is not too different from calling Sri Lanka ‘multi-ethnic’ and ‘multi-religious’ (which country is not?) without talking percentages. I endorse Kalana’s celebration of ‘recognizing the quality of Tamil people without translating that equality into con-federalism and their self-determination without transforming that idea into secessionism’ although a closer examination of that Report would reveal that the substance does not match rhetoric, especially given history, political realities and reasonable extrapolations based on these.

The logic of such a ‘political solution’, Senaratne strangely offers, is that it could ease pressure on the issue of accountability. He even applauds Sampanthan for talking in these terms. Talk about using a politician’s headache (Mahinda Rajapaksa’s that is) to get some purchase for one’s own outcome preferences. These are two separate issues. They are linked because politics spills among spheres, yes, but if justice and truth are what accountability is about and if one holds these things as sacred (as Wickremesekera and his ilk appear to do), there can be no give-take, i.e. give some land, get some pressure off or something like that.

To be fair, Senaratne thereafter proceeds to detail the difficulties and most importantly in flagging the danger of submitting oneself to realism or pragmatic realism, whichever way defined, on account of such difficulties. Senaratne’s contentions of the 13^thAmendment are valid. Regardless of his fascination with power-devolution, he does recognize the inherent flaws of the document and its operation as a mechanism that does not resolve what he calls ‘the ethnic question’ (again a problematic term, but still one which will not go away; the term, not the problem; and therefore needs to be addressed and best done so by discussing the claims).

Senaratne, like Hattotuwa, Wickremesekera and others in the devolutionist camp, makes the mistake of using the word ‘autonomy’ in conjunction with community, in this case ‘Tamil’. This easy mix totally ignores the glaring fact that communities are not flat and that certain solidarities (for examples those wrought by the play of capital) cuts across them. It forgets that there’s a difference between those spoken for and those speaking for. Forget the fact that the majority of Tamils live outside the North and East; even if there was devolution of the 13+++ kind moving to confederation or even outright division, we still have the problem of ‘self-determination’ not percolating to the powerless and poor, that it is a preserve of the rich and powerful.

And yet, there’s no getting around ‘popular perception’, i.e., as a community, Tamil community that is, where, as Senaratne points out, there is ‘specificity’ pertaining to Tamils, a feeling of being lesser citizens, let’s say. Devolution would give the appearance of factoring this in (did all Indians and all Pakistanis win ‘self-determination’ with Partition?), but we are in this for substance, right? Or are we not? One can, as Senaratne points out, go for a politics where Sinhalese, Tamils and others ‘stand firm in the face of both regional and global imperialistic forces’, without, again as he observes, letting the politics of that solidarity gloss over oppression of any kind by one over another or at least perception of such differences. Either way, there is no getting around the key element of the discourse: grievance. That remains un-fleshed and I suspect for pernicious reasons. The likes of Hattotuwa will not delve into that perhaps because it would force the discussion to include boundary lines, uncomfortable histories (or lack of it even) and unfrill from demands things like myths and legends.

The fact remains that such a conversation is not possible now for several reason and not necessarily those that are trotted out by the Wickremesekeras and Hattotuwas, i.e Sinhala-Buddhist intransigence, and not because such ‘intransigence’ so imagined is consecrated at the higher echelons of power, but for the simple fact of a constitution so flawed that it rebels against any decent notion of citizenship.

Let us return to ‘the Tamil in the room’. That’s a neat formulation. It would appear that we have a room full of raucous, victory-drunk, hardline Sinhala-Buddhists with just one innocent, harmless, wronged Tamil among them. That is caricature. It is not only a crass vilification of the Sinhala Buddhist but a beatification of Tamil. Human beings and communities are not saints or saint-made. The Tamil in the Room, if he represents the Tamil Community, is made of innocence, helplessness, victimhood and such, true; but so too are the Sinhalese. That Tamil is also part made of intransigence, murder-intent and murder, child-snatching and pernicious political deals as is his/her Sinhalese counterpart. Wickremesekera and Hattotuwa are deft in the politics of obfuscation here.

They are free, of course, to read celebration as per their political preferences. A victory parade could be read as a subjugation of Tamils. It could also be read as celebration of the end of bombs, child-snatching, check-points and wondering if you will see your children again after bidding them goodbye as they took off to school. There were many members of the security forces participating in the celebrations. Let us not forget that they are citizens, human being in their own right. Let us not forget that had the war not ended in May 2009, some of them would not be with us. And for every soldier alive because of ‘May 2009’ there is a Tamil citizen who is also alive but might not have been had we not come to ‘May 2009’.

None of this, Senaratne would agree, means that conflict is over and done with. Wickremesekera is right too, ‘The Tamil in the room must be dealt with, with fairness and justice’. What he misses is that there are Sinhalese in the room who too have been denied fairness and justice. The delivery of justice to one and not the other, the delivery of justice to one at the cost of the other, is not delivery of justice, but delivery of outcome-preferences that have little to do with justice or fairness. Wickremesekera and Hattotuwa and others of that club would do well to understand that one reason they remain where they are, marginal that is, is because there are others who will not purchase their ill-informed and half-concealed arguments. It has nothing to do with Weerawansas and Senaratnes or their relative strengths. That’s just another misleading analogy. I would go with Senaratne, but certainly not for the reasons Wickremesekera and Hattotuwa trot out. There are Sinhalese in the room and not only are they not singing, they don’t even know the song or like the tune.

msenevira@gmail.com

I should be celebrating my party’s unprecedented electoral victory. I am not saying I was disappointed, don’t get me wrong. I am thrilled that the BJP took the Congress Party to the cleaners. I am thrilled that Narendra Modi whipped Sonia and Rajiv Gandhi. I raised a cheer or too. I welled up watching my leader being sworn in as Prime Minister. I had my euphoric moment. But now is now, euphoric moment has passed and the morning after has dawned.

I would be lying if I said I expected to be made a minister. There are so many of us and even if we had a bigger cabinet, I would have been surprised if I was one of the chosen few. Still, there’s a tinge of sadness even if I resolve to be reasonable about it. For once, my nationalism took a step back and I looked wistfully at non-Indian realities. My gaze, in particular, shifted from Narendraji’s face to that of one of the guests, Mahinda Rajapaksa. My thoughts left Delhi and landed in Colombo. I closed my eyes and started comparing and contrasting. That cabinet and this, that constitution and ours. If only I was a member of the Sri Lankan Parliament!

People might compare our 45 minister with the dozens and dozens of ministers in Sri Lanka, but they should also divide the number of MPs by the number of ministers. That would show that we have a tiny cabinet which might fit one of the drawers in Sri Lanka’s massive ministerial chest. If only I was a politician in Sri Lanka, I can’t help thinking.

After the ceremony I went home and did some research. I figured out why Sri Lanka has so many ministers. It’s about the constitution, the electoral system and about a landmark decision of the Supreme Court that helped MPs cross from one party to another. I should qualify the last: it’s about one-way traffic – from Opposition ranks to those of the Government.

The proportional representation system, I found it, made it virtually impossible for any party to get an outright majority on its own at any general election. Coalitions were necessary. Coalition agreements naturally included pledges of ministerial portfolios. It gets even better after elections. Governments that want to consolidate can move from a simple majority to enjoying a decisive advantage in numbers, even to the point of having a two-thirds majority. All they have to do is to coax some opposition MPs to cross-over. That’s on the surface. I found out that the carrots offered are unbelievable, that they are rich in and of themselves and also have the potential to generate many more benefits.

I found that the President can appoint a minister from any party represented in Parliament. In other words any MP is up for grabs, subject of course to the particular MP being willing. Well, who would be unwilling if the offer made is tailored to stated requirement? Heck it doesn’t even matter which party one contests from. That political heaven, folks. There’s always a good chance of being offered a place in Ministerial Paradise in Sri Lanka.

Small is beautiful for many reasons, I’ve concluded. India is just too big a monster. Sri Lanka is perfect. I don’t know the name of the judge but the man who sanctioned a pathway to a destination called ‘Minister’ ought to be called the Patron Saint of Politicians.

I am in India. I feel underprivileged, all of a sudden.

*In a parallel universe of course

Long years ago I was associated with an organization called ‘The National Movement Against Terrorism’ (NMAT). This was at a time when those who called for a military offensive to rid the country of the terrorist menace were called racists, chauvinists, bigots, warmongers and other such derogatory names. It was also a time when dollar-hungry, Eelam-touting, LTTE-loving academics, NGO racketeers, human rights activists who did not see victims of LTTE terrorism as ‘humans’, LTTE proxies masquerading as journalists and other such creatures had the ear of the highest in the land. It was, indeed, a time when the highest in the land were pathetically compromising themselves and the nation to the whims and fancies of the nation’s detractors.

The NMAT’s effectiveness was such that people like Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu publicly stated that it was dangerous because ‘among its membership are prominent academics, professionals, politicians and Buddhist monks’, when in fact there were just two professionals (a doctor and a lawyer) and one academic (the academic was also a qualified lawyer), but no politicians or ‘Buddhist monks’ and none who could be called ‘prominent’.

The NMAT, at the time, did what they could. We solicited small contributions from like-minded people, put up posters and held demonstrations. The NMAT also put together several publications that countered the malicious, misinformation campaign of pro-LTTE elements. These included ‘The LTTE: Terrorism Unlimited’ (a photo essay), ‘BULL’ (an assessment of claims such as the LTTE being the sole-representatives of the Tamil people, is engaged in a liberation struggle and was invincible), ‘Portraits of terrorism’ (a pictorial record of the LTTE’s crimes against humanity in Sinhala, Tamil and English), and ‘Some tears are not newsworthy’ (a critical essay on the pro-LTTE slant of some sections of the media).

The NMAT didn’t have bucks. The NMAT had the arguments, though. The NMAT could substantiate argument.

These were what differentiated the NMAT from those who were hell bent of giving legitimacy to the LTTE and according to it parity of status vis-a-vis the government of Sri Lanka.

Most important was the fact that the NMAT could call upon people who had integrity and skill ready to help in whatever way possible. They provided time, ideas and material free of charge. Some wrote, some translated, some provided photographs, some gave information, some were layout artists, some had motorbicycles and some ran errands. Payment, for all of them, was the privilege of contributing.

I remembered one of the principal contributors yesterday as I was wading through photographs from those terrible times we’ve left far behind (to the chagrin, I may add, of those who preferred a different outcome and who, even as I write, spare no pains to turn back the clock). I remembered the photograph used on the cover of ‘Some tears are not newsworthy’.

It had been taken immediately after the LTTE attacked Kalyanipura, a village in Welikanda, killing 12 villagers. The photograph was of a little girl, Danushi Nayanika, around 10 years of age. Her father, Thilak Dhammika, had been killed in the attack.The entire story was in her tear filled eyes. One tear had escaped and marked the path of sorrow and loss down her left cheek. Another was balance on eyelash.

The photograph went around the world. The graphic designer, Amarajeewa, a gentleman and one of the most talented artists of his generation, played with the image. He turned it into a black-white picture and cropped it so that only the eyes were shown. To me, it was a classic. Both photograph and the play on photograph.

That photograph has been used many times by those who wished to tell the world the story that the LTTE and its apologists were silent about. It spoke of tragedy, loss, meaninglessness and also about the heart (or lack thereof) of the tear-giver. Few mention the photographer.

Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi worked for Reuters at the time. One of the most skilled photo journalists this country has produced, Anuruddha possessed an eye that could extract the ‘human’ in the things he surveyed through lens and mind. For reasons that are still not clear, though, some people claiming they were from the Criminal Investigation Division (CID), entered his house on December 11, 2007, interrogated and intimidated his wife. That was unwarranted harassment and to date the perpetrators of that dastardly act have not been brought to book.

I am aware that Anuruddha’s photographs are used without acknowledgment by those who for reasons best known to them have pinned the ‘traitor’ label on him. I needed to use that particular image, so I wrote to him. He replied promptly. I quote, without editing:

‘I am appreciate your request because at least you have ethics more then others who was used my picture without my knowledge as when I inquire it they called my traitor. Our life still pay back for this pictures but I am not expecting money for it. This images no more belongs to me, its belongs to our country. These images show us part of our undeleted history. I believe at least you keep small space your book for mention to who was captured this images. Good luck!’

Some might call this patriotism, but it is not. It goes beyond patriotism. There is understanding of reality and there is compassion, humility, generosity and equanimity here. This, perhaps, is what gives depth to the two-dimensional thing that he produces with a click. It is what paints humanity into the three-dimensional story that he captures, I am convinced.

Anuruddha was not a member of the NMAT. He may or may not have shared the preferred political outcomes of the NMAT. He may have not thought that he was doing a lot, but he did.

This country has survived two insurrections, a debilitating war against terrorism, horrendous constitutional enactments, lived through multiple crises, suffered the arrogance and ignorance of rulers, weathered the machinations of forces intent on destabilizing, and consistently fought above its weight. It must have something to do with what kind of civilizational drives and philosophical preferences brought us to where we are, I believe. I believe also that we have survived and will continue to defy all odds for these same reasons. And I believe that such things manifest themselves and become relevant in the hearts and minds of exceptional individuals who enhance several fold the worth of the talents they are born with or the skills they acquire.

Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi contributed and will, I am sure, continue to contribute. Just by being who he is. Affiliated only to professionalism and empowered by a deep sense of humanity.

Who does not look back at schooldays without a smile? Few, I would venture. Schooldays, if we look back in sober reflection, wasn’t all about bright sunny days, fun and camaraderie. Most school children have suffered their general quota of bad days where homework was not done, preparation was too poor to yield correct answers to questions directed at them by teachers, being bullied by class bullies and older students and so on. And yet, by and large, we look back less with anger than with wistfulness. There are times we wish we could go back. Time has a way of dulling the bad times and accentuating the happier moments. We are left with nostalgia.

There are two songs about ‘school days’ which became very popular. The first is Clarence Wijewardena’s ‘Sandak besa giya avara gire…’ Later, we had, Shalitha Abeywickrema’s ‘Sulange lelena'. The latter was written by Vipula Dharmapriya Jayasekera. It’s a simple song that draws from the ayanna-aayanna of memory as it pertains to school days. It speaks of the innocence of that time of ‘Sama’ and ‘Amara’, the dreams that were dreamed (which naturally did not turn into realities later on) and observes that there were countless other ‘Samas’ and ‘Amaras’ from this class or that, who later occupied those very same seats in those very same classrooms, dreaming similar dreams. It is a smile-provoking song. Soft. Just like the lyricists.

We know songs. We know vocalists. We rarely wonder who wrote which songs. We know the names of ‘well-known lyricists’ simply because they’ve written so much and are talked about a lot. But there are songs we love, songs that are part of our growing up, songs that mark key moment in our lives for one reason or another, songs whose words we know by heart and whose melodies we can and do hum now and then and yet the names of whose authors escape us.

Vipul is not known the way Mahagama Sekera is known, for obvious reasons. Perhaps Sekera is not the person we should compare him with. We know, however, that there are one-hit wonders, lyricists (just like vocalists) who are celebrated no end just because some song was a ‘hit’ (never mind the fact that it could be forgotten a few months later). We know that mediocrity can be erased by the right kind of publicity. We know that being pushy and having money and contacts can help. The better lyricists are known by the discerning but not always do they become household names. Some are not helped by the fact that they are humble and self-effacing, but then again they are the type for whom work counts and reputation is of little value. Like Vipul.

The near and dear know. Colleagues know. Those who have for one reason or another encountered them, they also know. Vipul passed on a few days ago. His facebook account is flooded with appreciation that clearly he did not enjoy while alive. They celebrate his word and more so his ways. They grieve his passing.

He was simple and simple too are his words. And yet, just as his life clearly spoke of profound understanding of the world around him and more importantly the human condition, simply on account of his simple ways, so too did his ‘simple words’ or rather their easy configuration gave us insights into the eternal verities. He knew how to work music into the lyric. His mastery of rhythm would have made the task of composer that much easier. It is as though he was writing the rhythm of his world view and his preferred manner of engaging with world and human being had found in lyric a mirroring medium.

He was relatively young, this unassuming man about whom many said ‘you would never forget his voice and ways if you ever got the chance to listen to him or meet him’. He was so young that his passing shocked one and all. And although he’s written countless songs, the youthfulness of his ways and the goodness that was apparent in countenance, voice, words and his doing as well as not-doing, probably provoked the following widely held perception: ‘oba liya ivara nethi kaviyaki (you are a song that is only part composed)’. Such songs ironically and sadly make for constant commemoration that what might be called ‘completed work’. His work was not finished, is the conclusion, but that’s only a reflection of commemorator’s grief. Vipul lived. Completely. We, incomplete in many ways, lament his passing.

msenevira@gmail.com

Many years ago, a friend told me about Al Hallaj, the Sufi mystic who was stoned to death because the Islam Orthodoxy found him guilty of heresy. My friend told me that according to legend, he was laughing even as the stones rained on his body. He just danced along the streets, repeating over and over again, "Ana al-haqq" (I am the truth, i.e., God). According to my friend, all of a sudden someone in the crowd had tossed a rose at the man and it was at this point that Al Hallaj wept.

The story made me wonder what invokes greater sorrow, solitude or knowing that someone understands the depth of one’s solitude. And then again I thought, how can anyone who knows "god" or in other words has achieved a spiritual union with all things, ever be alone? How can such a man weep? Or laugh? Maybe these emotional expressions are indicative of other things which seem confusing only to the confused. I let my confusion gestate. For a long time.

Today, more than ten years since I heard that story, I learnt that Al Hallaj, just before being put to death, had said:

"Now stands no more between Truth and me

Or reasoned demonstration,

Or proof of revelation;

Now, brightly blazing full, Truth’s lumination

Each flickering, lesser light."

Husajn ibn Mansur Al Hallaj, this Sufi master who lived between 858 and 922 AD and had lived the life of a dervish wanderer, had observed long ago that, "when you become obliterated, you arrive at a place in which nothing is either obliterated or confirmed; it is the divine erasings and effacements, and it cannot be expressed in words."

If "God" is everywhere, then it is logically possible for one to identify with that divine entity. God, then, can theoretically be "me". God being "all-knowing", I too can be "all-knowing". There probably is no dissonance is expressing the joy of realising this unity, even though it simultaneously negates the very idea of "self" and makes "I" redundant.

The notions of "realisation" or "enlightenment" that come in Buddhism, I believe, speak to the same condition. "Buddha" literally means "Realisation" or avabodhaya lath. If the universe can be seen in a grain of sand, the universe is also contained in the very same grain of sand. Extrapolating, "comprehension" can be found on the petal of a flower, in its pollen, in the process of pollination, in the transformation of nectar into honey and so on. The difference between the notion of "god" and "enlightenment" then is really a difference of idiom.

Al Hallaj says "obliteration" takes you to a place where there is neither erasure nor confirmation. Closer readings of the Maha Satipattana Sutta would show that the Buddha said the same thing.

But I did not want to write about philosophy or comparative religion, but poetry. Not of Al Hallaj, but someone who was greatly influenced by him. His name is Jalaluddin Rumi. My father gave me a book called "The Mystical Poems of Rumi" almost twenty years ago. For weeks, my thoughts danced to the songs of this other Sufi saint. Rumi’s outpouring of creative energy had to be gathered by scribes who travelled with him. He sang about love, about god, about the love of and for god. Perhaps it is my atheist persuasions that prevented me from associating Rumi’s poetry with divinity, but I doubt it. His poetry whirled within me, his word wrapped my thoughts and made them fly to wonderful places. And for all this drama, the one thing that remained was what appeared to be, at least to me, Rumi’s obsession. Silence.

I found out today that Rumi owed much to Al Hallaj. I don’t know the first thing about the Sufi tradition and its philosophical tenets. All I know is that when Rumi, using a million words in a million ways, paradoxically says "Set not fire to the thicket my tongue; be silent, for the tongue is a flame", there is no difference between him and Al Hallaj. When one understands something salient about the unspeakable or unexplainable, words become meaningless. Except for us who belong to the hordes of that sad category, "Are Not Worthy". For words give direction. And hope.

Rumi was born in Wakhsh (Tajikistan) under the administration of Balkh on the 30th of September 1207 to a family of learned theologians. Escaping the Mongol invasion and destruction, Rumi and his family traveled extensively in the Muslim lands, performed pilgrimage to Mecca and finally settled in Konya, Anatolia, then part of Seljuk Empire. When his father Bahaduddin Valad passed away, Rumi succeeded his father in 1231 as professor in religious sciences. He was introduced into the mystical path by a wandering dervish, Shamsuddin of Tabriz. His love and his bereavement for the death of Shams found their expression in a surge of music, dance and lyric poems, `Divani Shamsi Tabrizi’.

The name Mowlana Jalaluddin Rumi stands for love and ecstatic flight into the infinite. No different from Al Hallaj, I can’t help thinking. Rumi is one of the great spiritual masters and poetical geniuses of mankind and was the founder of the Mawlawi Sufi order, a leading mystical brotherhood of Islam. His influence on thought, literature and all forms of aesthetic expression in the world of Islam is tremendous. When Rumi died on December 17, 1273, men of five faiths followed his bier. That night was named Sebul Arus (Night of Union).

Who were these saint who clearly knew things most people know nothing of, these men of god, if you will, who even though lacking what we call indriya sanvaraya, nevertheless were obviously residing in places close to if not at the very end of what we call thesansaric journey? My mind is a blur. It is a song. It is a dance. It is a flower called Al Hallaj and a reed called Rumi, complaining of separation and celebrating union in the same breath.

It is almost midnight now and a cacophony of voices waft from all the byways I have walked and every book that I have read. They swirl around my intoxication. I close my eyes and a beautiful man smiles to me from a long ago that I am certain will dawn again in some tomorrow I will be blessed to live in. He is singing and slowly his words kiss a rose that he brings to his lips. I know it is time to be silent, for, as Rumi said, "a mouth is not for talking, it is for tasting this sweetness". So I will let Rumi speak instead.

"Those who don`t feel this Love

pulling them like a river,

those who don`t drink dawn

like a cup of springwater

or take in sunset like supper,

those who don`t want to change,

let them sleep

This Love is beyond the study of theology,

that old trickery and hypocrisy.

If you want to improve your mind that way,

sleep on

I`ve given up on my brain.

I`ve torn the cloth to shreds

and thrown it away.

If you`re not completely naked,

wrap your beautiful robe of words

around you,

and sleep."

*First published on July 28, 2002 in 'The Island'

Society has for a long time trapped itself in dichotomies. We have the rich and the poor; the strong and the weak; the big and the small; the enlightened and non-enlightened; god and the devil. It is a neat way of categorising this complicated world, the equally complex thing called life and of course the mercurial thing called social process. Dichotomies are for the most part misleading. Then again, if you were to play with that line for too long, you don’t get white you don’t get black but you are left with ‘f***ing grey’ as my friend the Bard of Thimbirigasyaya once said.

Among the many things that come out stark these days, is the interesting phenomenon dichotomised as "buddy-mega". A long time ago Dr. N.M. Perera recommened that the State Distillaries Corporation start selling arrack in quarter bottles so that low-income earners could get a clean drink within their budget. We have come a long way since that particular buddy-sized delight hit the market.

Today we have buddy-coke, buddy-fanta, and in fact a whole range of buddy-drinks. In addition there are a number of products which now come in a "hurubuhuti" pack, i.e. budget packs. We have toothpaste, butter, powdered milk, shampoo, chocolate, and I am sure many other things that the supermarkets are stacked with. After a carefully calculated length of time, the cost of the "buddy" product is raised, and soon we are paying the "mega price" for the smaller pack.

I am pretty sure that the companies that put out these products are not operating under the illusion that the vast majority of the people are somehow endowed with smaller stomachs, shorter intestines or smaller appetites for the good life. Being in business, it is more likely that they are acutely conscious of what the average income earner can afford.

The buddy-syndrome is something more than benevolent businesses wanting everyone to get a slice of high living, so to speak. Just like god becomes "great" in relation to the devil, the worth of the "buddy" can be measured vis a vis its opposite in size and volume, "mega". Mega, we are told, is meant to quench the big thirst. The problem is that it is not only the rich who have parched throats. It is just that only the affluent can afford to consume in mega proportions.

The buddy size is meant only to give a taste. It ensures that the poor consumer actually gets to "thola gaanna" the mega lifestyles of his/her dreams. It can by no means satisfy his/her thirst, but it will give just enough hope-juice to continue believing that someday the mega will be within reach.

"Buddying," I would venture is just another indication of the fact that people have been forced to tighten their belts. It is interesting to note that as our incomes rise, our purchasing capacity declines. I am not saying that people are stupid, and that they don’t know what this buddyism is about. For it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that there’s a point beyond which a belt cannot be tightened; you just run out of space to punch a hole to insert the frog of the buckle. You can’t sell "sips" of packeted Nestomalt or Milo. You can’t market toothpaste saying "just enough to brush your teeth in the morning!"

How are people to react? There are two ways. First, one can resolve to say "to hell with this buddy-mega joke, I will grow my own food". Tough, but worth a try, I would say. Such a strategy would include a reconsideration of our culture of consumerism and might even succeed in putting a little perspective on things.

Another way in which the buddy-mega bubble might burst is through protest, i.e. a more direct kind of response that aims to attack the syndrome of unequal distribution from the root. With buddy strategies, buddy agitation, or a buddy insurrection? I doubt it. The word "buddy" is not in the dictionary of desperate people. Do we want our buddy-mega world to be obliterated through a bloody revolution? Someone once said "those who make peaceful social change impossible, make violent revolution inevitable". Time for such people to start taking a buddy step backwards from their mega worlds and reflect, I think.

*First published in ‘The Island’ on June 20, 2001

Yes, we went to 'Thanamalwila' and had a lot of 'curd'

There’s an anecdote I’ve heard tell of Ajith Fernando, who along with a dozen others, ‘went around the pearl’ not too long ago. This had happened several decades ago. Ajith and a couple of friends, probably just out of school at the time, had decided to go to some random destination.

The story went thus: ‘They had got into a bus with the strangest sounding destination they could imagine. They picked Thanamalwila.’

Tales, when told and re-told, invariably gather story-strains which make narratives richer even as it robs. I don’t know if Ajith and Co. actually thought ‘Thanamalwila’ sounded strange. When I heard about it, I laughed. The narrator just said ‘they found that the only thing to eat in Thanamalwila was curd and so they camped somewhere eating nothing but curd for three days’.

It could not have been that way. I’ve never asked Ajith but I am pretty sure that there were other things to do and eat in Thanamalwila, if indeed that’s where they went and indeed if Ajith and his friend actually did take a trip to a random destination.

Some people travel like that though. They are very different from what could called ‘checklist travelers’. There’s obviously many benefits that flow from checklists. You cover a lot of ground when there’s meticulous planning, there’s no doubt about that. Sometimes, if traveling with many people, it makes absolute sense to plan ahead. You can’t after all have twenty people on Day Two of a trip suggesting 20 different places to visit or 20 different things to do. And if you want to bring down overall costs planning is what you should do if it involves a whole bunch of people. Add to this the fact that some people like to do things with friends and you get a compelling argument for checklist traveling.

There are other kinds of travelers. Like Ajith who may have not done that Thanamalwila number but knowing him might very well have gone there or somewhere else and consumed a lot of curd just for the heck of it, ‘curd’ of course being metaphor for ‘whatever goes’.

I remembered the Ajith-Thanamalwila story a short while ago when I saw a Facebook post. It was a Lao Tzu quote: ‘A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving’. And immediately I was transported back to April 14, 2014 and another Ajith-Thanamalwila type journey. I wrote about it not too long afterwards in an article titled ‘The true location of Kala Wewa’.

To recap, I picked up my friend and self-proclaimed ‘professional rastiyaadukaaraya’ Wasantha Wijewardena from Thalawathugoda around noon that day and suggested we go somewhere far away from Colombo. We picked Kala Wewa. I told him that I had friends in Galgamuwa I would like to see, so he suggested we first go there and then decide what to do next.

I didn’t quite remember where my friend lived. I didn’t have his phone number. I knew that he travels a lot and the chances were that he would have chosen to spend Aluth Avurudda with friends or family rather than staying alone in his house (he’s a bachelor, a teacher and quite a good singer). I told Wasantha (in Sinhala) ‘the chances of actually hooking up with this guy are about 0.001%’. Wasantha said ‘don’t you think that things which have a 0.001% chance of happening are exactly the things that do happen’? I agreed, subject to the caveat ‘certain kinds of things’. This was ‘that’ kind of thing.

We couldn’t find the house. It took several calls to get a number where we could reach him – a mutual friend’s niece was married to our friend’s youngest brother. We had to call the mutual friend, get his sister’s number, get from her the niece’s number and finally our friend’s brother’s number. It was not as confusing when we actually did it, because all we had to worry about was writing a singled number down on each occasion. He was not home. He was far away. Partying, he said. We laughed.

Wasantha and I didn’t go to Kala Wewa that evening. The Kala Wewa came to us. It came to us in Madadombe, a small village about 9kms from Galgamuwa. We were greeted as brothers greet brothers by my friend’s brother who I hadn’t seen in many years and who had never set his eyes on Wasantha. My friend called several hours later and said he would come to Madadombe – he had arranged for someone to give him a ride to a place close enough for us to go pick him up.

We bathed in the Maha Wewain Madadombe. Then we picked him up. We took shelter in a random house (naturally a distant relative of my friend) until a herd of elephants prowling near his house had wandered back into the shrub jungle. We had dinner, we talked. Some might say we were both crazy. We had no plans. We had a vague idea of destination but we didn’t have a clue where we would end up that night. We were not unduly worried. But we ended up in Madadombe, sorry, ‘Thanamalwila’. We consumed a lot of curd too. ‘Curd’ that is. Ajith would understand, even if he never went to Thanamalwila and even if he’s never had curd in his life.

Sachithra Senanayake was booed each time he came up to bowl, each time he touched the ball. This is after he ‘Mankaded’ Jos Buttler. A lot has been said and written about the incident. There has been self-righteous indignation, there’s been ‘titting-for-tatting’ arguments and there has been sober reference to ICC laws.

Ravi Bopara said ‘It is definitely not within the spirit of the game. I wouldn’t say Jos was stealing yards, he was just casually leaving the crease. It is just the done thing.’ He adds, ‘if that’s the way Mathews and Sri Lanka want to play their cricket then it’s up to them; hopefully we don’t step to that level.’

Oh! Wow!

Now Bopara and Buttler had almost brought England a hard-to-imagine win in the 4^thODI. There were some 20 plus occasions when ones were converted into twos. ‘Good running,’ the commentators said. They weren’t watching Buttler doing the ‘done thing’ though. However, the only difference between this ‘done thing’ and running in a manner that compels the umpire to signal ‘one short’ is that the former happens at delivery point and the latter post-delivery and post-stroke. If one is the ‘done thing’ then the other is too.

According to Bopara, though, stepping out early is morally superior to being punished for doing so after being warned more than once. Should we not say ‘fiddlesticks!’?

The last word on the issue, to my mind, came from my colleague Callistus Davy: ‘It is not something that players should sort out. It’s for the umpires to decide.’ True. The ‘spirit of the game,’ frequently alluded to with reference to this incident is way too subjective to come to any conclusion one way or another. ‘Laws’ are more robust and they are pretty clear on this matter. If you are deliberately taking cover under ‘spirit of the game’ to steal a few singles and with it a game, that’s the worst kind of violation of this ‘spirit of the game’.

The warning should have come from the umpire, not the players. The umpire watched for no-balls and is required to ascertain if a run has been completed. People get run out by fractions of an inch and therefore gaining a couple of yards by ‘doing the done thing’ is cheating. What Bopara is therefore saying is ‘We cheat and that’s the “done thing” as far as England is concerned’. In this instance Senanayake, by warning, was being kind. Rightfully, though, Sri Lanka need not refer to the warning to buttress justification. Mankaading is legal. That’s it.

The ‘booing point’ however is that Senanayake’s action was brought into question before the final game began. He was the most successful Sri Lankan bowler in the series. His action has been cleared by many on many occasions. This of course doesn’t mean that he cannot or would never again err, but the timing of the complaint is significant. It coincides with England facing a decider.

Is this cricket? Is it politics (as usual)? Here’s an analogy. Sri Lankan security forces were about to vanquish the LTTE in the first few months of 2009. ‘War crimes!’ was the word for ‘Mankaading’ in that context. ‘Not in the spirit of the game’, was the argument, the relevant reference being the Geneva Convention, never mind that the said document is like used toilet paper if the USA and its allies (the UK included) are involved. That match was won, but the Bopara-like whines didn’t stop. In that instance, apart from ‘tokenist’ objection to LTTE’s preferred methodologies of ‘playing the game,’ there was largely silence on what the other side was doing. Like holding some 300,000 civilians hostage, for example. That was the equivalent of doing Buttler’s ‘done thing’. Calling a probe on bowling action, then, is also the ‘done thing’, as ‘done’ as trying to steal a single and as ‘done’ as being horrified when the thief is caught napping.

One thing is certain. The call to hang Sachithra Senanayake will continue. There are Navi Pillays in the cricketing world too, after all. Obamas and Camerons too. It’s called ‘doing the done thing’. That’s polite-speak for getting away with cheating and what better way than to pass the cheat-buck back to the enemy, huh?

Nestled below the Haputale hills, cradled by the rocky outcrops characteristic of the Uva-Wellassa, is a farm where the trees and the vegetable plots are tinged with a green uncharacteristic for a region in the throes of one of the harshest droughts in years. If the dismal browns of a dusty August is the signature of that region steeped in history and folklore and home to a tradition of unrelenting struggles for freedom, both against foreign invasion as well as hunger, then this particular place, even to the casual passer-by, would appear to have been touched by divinity. For water is the parent of any verdant landscape and water is the god that seems to have failed the people that populate that territory.

Alutwela, is a village made up of solitary families eking out a living through chena cultivation and, when the monsoons do arrive, paddy cultivation. It is situated about 6 kilometres off a place called Veherayaya, a bit north of Kuda Oya on the Thanamalvila-Wellawaya road. The dry winds of the South East Dry Zone relentlessly brush over this place. These fires are countered by the coolness that floats down from the central hills and through the waters of the Kuda Oya, the blending of the two producing a distinct ecology where literally anything can be grown.

The particular plot of land I referred to belongs to one Dissanayake Mudiyanselage Punchi Banda, "PB" to all the people in the area. I got to know about his through an old friend, Wasantha. Wasantha is a wanderer, a searcher, a deeply spiritual young man who has dedicated his life to understand those eternal verities that occupy the minds of the true shamans of this world. We ran into each other after a gathering of what our confused modernist social scientists call "native intellectuals". We talked about the state of the nation, the problems of "development" and discussed the pertinent issues associated with the eternal question which Lenin presented as a directive, "What is to be done". He suggested that it might be worthwhile visiting his friend PB.

PB is a man in his late fifties hailing from a farming family in Diyatalawa. He had been attracted by the revolutionary rhetoric of the JVP and had spent a year in prison after the insurrection failed in 1971. Whereas other JVPers chose to do their A/L exams while in prison, moving on to university careers, NGOs and newspapers, PB had learnt English. After being released, he had, together with 73 other young men, formed a farmer company and obtained land in Alutwela, two acres each. What they had moved into was a thick jungle, infested with wildlife.

Clearing the jungle, asweddumizing, dealing with disease, isolation and other hardships had not been easy. Many gave up and returned to their original lives. Some struggled on for longer. In any event, by 1977, only one person remained from the original 73 who had come to blaze new paths in that forbidding region. PB.

When we got there in the late afternoon, PB was on a hill with his family, his wife, three daughters and son. They were breaking pieces of rock to be used in the foundation of a new house he was planning to build. Recognising Wasantha, he stopped his work and started chatting, moving from subject to subject, interspersed with attentive silences as we asked questioned or expressed an opinion. Over the next two days he filled out many of the gaps in the deliberately sketchy story that Wasantha had related to me before we went to see PB.

He attributed his adhishtanaya to remain there while his comrades abandoned the place to the hard experience that is prison life. Endowed with a natural propensity to learn things quickly and to adapt, PB has, over the past quarter century turned the place into a veritable Eden.

Wasantha once told me that it is because people don’t understand the forest that they fear it, and because they fear it, they cut it down. According to him, the forest is actually a benevolent, living thing which protects and nurtures those who seek to understand it. PB’s ganudenuwa has been like that. He has walked every inch of the region. He has discovered caves with ancient rock inscriptions and archaeological remains, discovered the ways of wild life and how to live in harmony with the flora and fauna, how to give and take without hurting.

Hidden in the jungle, he found the remains of the hydraulic civilisation that had thrived in the area in the form of abandoned tanks, canals etc. He has renovated one weva and built another two small ponds in order to irrigate his fields and vegetable plots. The Kuda Oya, which carries the water that cascades down the Diyaluma to the Kirindi Oya, passes close to his piece of land. With great determination, PB had organised the villagers, lobbied local politicians and government officials, brushed aside red tape by offering to do the designing and the construction, and built a canal to take the water from the river to the paddy fields of their village and a couple of others as well. He has put in place over 9000 feet of pipes to divert water into his fields and his tanks. Even in the harshest period of the dry season, there is enough water to irrigate his vegetables and enough in the weva for the cattle belonging to the villagers and the wild life in the forest.

His homestead, is a lush green patch, shaded by a grove of coconut trees, Tamarind, Jak, and Kohomba. The well still has water. His wattle and daub hut, with its iluk laid roof is cool and comfortable. He has put up a solar panel which allows him to light three bulbs and watch TV.

"Some of those who came with me are now successful politicians. The boy who made tea in our wadiya is a big mudalali now. Had I too gone back, I might have ended up like that.

I am happy I stayed back." He was smiling as he explained. He was smiling most of the time. I have not met a more relaxed man in my life.

And yet, this relaxed man is also hard working. One morning Wasantha and I took a walk into the jungle. After walking along a jungle path for about an hour, we stumbled on to the river. We walked up until we came to place where a weir of sticks and stones had been put up so that water could be diverted along an irrigation canal. There were three men in the river bed just below the pool that the "dam" produced. They called us and wanted us to help them shift a large rock. Apparently they were looking for an illama. Gem mining is done in the area, but not extensively. When inquiries revealed that we were friends of PB, they treated us with tea, offered us ganja and told us not to tell him that we met them. On the way back we ran into PB, his son and another young boy. Apparently someone had accidentally cut the pipe that carried the water to his fields. The entire morning was spent repairing the damage and attending to other repairs.

The respect that the gem miners had for PB is understandable. Wasantha told me that PB is a king for all practical purposes, not in the arrogant way of the modern day monarch who is badly named as President or Prime Minister, but in the mould of trustee which was the original role for the leader. A couple of years ago, the government had sanctioned a German company to grow babycorn in 5000 acres of land in the area. The villagers protested, arguing that it would cause irreparable damage to the environment, producing a tragedy the same proportions of that which resulted from the ill-fated and still ongoing disaster that is sugar cane cultivation. PB was the natural leader of the struggle. He went around to all the politicians in the area, all the relevant officials, produced reports, did an inventory of the flora and fauna in the area and made a comprehensive argument against the project. He remembers with gratitude the help he got from Krishna Wijebandara of that newspaper who helped champion his cause in that newspaper. Together they stopped the Germans.

"Just look at the Kuda Oya, it is almost dry. If they had sunk tube wells, it would have destroyed the water table. This drought we are witnessing would have been thousand times worse."

Even today, PB is busy gathering relief for the most seriously affected drought victims, running around talking to people, organising relief and making sure that racketeers don’t hijack the contributions of good hearted people.

PB is an unassuming man, but well versed in the rough and tumble of power politics. He is courteous to every politician who passes by, and everyone with any ambition in these things makes it a point to visit him regularly. He never commits himself one way or the other. During the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya time, a group of young men had come to ascertain his loyalties. They had chastised him for having given up on the revolutionary idea. He has said "Ithin umbala mava marapalla. Mamath me inne merenna one vela" (So you can kill me, after all I am waiting to die).

"One day a Buddhist priest came by and I took him around, explaining to him the dharma of this region. He told me that he is convinced that in a previous life he had been a monk or a king in the area. I am convinced that I used to rule this land." He still does, clearly.

Over the years PB has taught himself the secrets of curing snake bite victims. He is also an accomplished eye specialist. He has devoured countless Ayurvedic texts and tested their worth in practise, making his own medicines from the herbs that abound in his garden and in the surrounding jungle. While I was there I was suddenly seized by a stomach ailment. I complained about the malady and he first suggested coffee as a remedy. A few more questions and he diagnosed my discomfort as a kidney ailment resulting from the different density of the water. He brought me some red onions and a glass of water. "Peel these and chew on them while we talk" he said. Within 10 minutes, I was cured.

"I have treated over 300 snake bite victims. In a couple of instances they were brought to me late and the victims died. Sometimes they are beyond my help and I ask the relatives to take them to the hospital as soon as possible." In addition to this, PB also lectures the commando trainees at the Kuda Oya camp about survival in the jungle. These lectures are not just about survival but speak of a broader logic of the natural world and the appropriate engagement with it.

In his garden there are all kinds of vegetables, some of which have not taken root as "natural" vegetation. Thus for the most part he engages in "Do-nothing" farming, the technique that was perfected in many parts of Asia and popularised in Japan in recent times. In addition, due to the particular climatic conditions, he is able to grow beetroot, cabbage and other upcountry crops as well as the traditional Dry Zone crops. Recently, he had decided to grow katuwelbatu, a plant used in a lot of Ayurvedic medicines.

Katuwelbatu is imported from India and PB might well be the first large scale cultivator of this important plant. Through Wasantha’s contacts he has arranged to supply the Ayurvedic "shop" at the Mt. Lavinia Hotel, and together they have already transported some 40 kilograms and made arrangements to supply a further 200 kilos, all at 80 rupees per kilo. But perhaps his success as a farmer is best demonstrated by the fact that PB has enough stocks to last his family for over 5 years!

Amidst all these engagements with the physical world, PB is a deeply spiritual human being. In fact his farming, his medication and everything he does, is coloured by a deep understanding of the Dharma of this world, a logic that is heavily laden with Buddhist philosophy. He has practised meditation, attends to all the religious matters of the village with the same intensity that he gives his time and energy to make the local farmer organisation work. His dream is to establish an aranyaya for bikkhus and lay persons who need the peace and tranquillity to engage in meditation. "There are enough caves in this area. I can clean it up. I believe this place used to be a aranyaya for such people. All the signs tell me this. Who knows, maybe one day I will also give all this up and devote myself to such pursuits."

As is his custom he treated us lavishly with food and conversation and invited us to visit him again. I have read a lot about sustainable agriculture, traditional knowledge systems and a different kind of world view that is less arrogant and less damaging to the natural cycles. I have met experts and other advocates of such doctrines. I have also heard tell that an ounce of practise is worth a ton of theory. In PB’s case the practise comes in tons. And typical of such people, it is written only his smile and his gentle eyes.

There was a time, way back in the early 70s when Sri Lanka, then Ceylon, had a Milk Board that provided fresh milk and yoghurt far superior in quality and taste to anything that wealthy milk companies offer today with all the technology and additives at their disposal. There was a Kiri Hala or milk outlet at the Royal Junior School. Children could order milk – unflavored, chocolate or vanilla – and it would be delivered to the class at the interval. One pint of total goodness a day for those who wanted it.

Time passed. The local milk industry was destroyed by the ‘robber barons’ that J R Jayewardene opened the country’s doors to without any qualms. Out went fresh milk. In came powdered milk. There were soft drinks too back then. Lanka Lime, Necto, Orange Barley, Cream Soda and Ginger Beer. These gave way to Coca Cola and Fanta. Things changed and it’s hard to say if it was all for the better.

Today it looks like powdered milk is no longer chic. It’s the fresh stuff that is demanded. Maybe the consumer is getting wise. The problem is that there just isn’t enough fresh milk to meet the demand – part real and part artificial of course. Maybe this is why Royal College has started to go green. Maybe it has nothing to do with the relevant political economy, but just a good plan by a good man. Whatever the reason, if there’s one drink for which there is a big demand and a demand that’s growing day by day in Royal College, it’s something that Royalists did not really talk about, let alone enjoy in the canteen, during the 70s, 80s, 90s or even in the first decade of the new millennium. Kola Kenda.

If you go to the West Wing Lobby of the main building of the school you will see a process that school has not witnessed in all of the 178 years of its existence. It all begins around 3.00 am.

It begins, as has been the tradition in this country for millennia among the vast majority of the people, with solemnity. Five men gather at a small shrine, hands clasped, reciting the five precepts. Malinda Niranjan, H.M. Kelum, W.P. Rajindra, Anura Chaminda, Badhawa Raju and Suresh Dep make the kola kenda team.

It’s not just rice and some leaves as one would find in kiosks in all parts of the main cities and along main roads these days (again, that’s not something that was in vogue in the past). It’s made of traditional varieties of rice. That’s incomplete. It’s made of traditional varieties of rice that are organically grown. No chemical pesticides or weedicides, no chemical fertilizers. There’s madathavaalu, paccaperumal, kahavanu and kalu heeneti. The mix is flavored by an ingredient mix that includes rare herbs of immense curative value boiled with gotukola, pumpkin and radish. It’s thick. Wholesome. It has a flavor that is very addictive.

When the Principal of Royal College Upali Gunasekera began his kola kenda project some six months ago, it was a first for Royal. The Principal recalls those early days: ‘We made just one large pot of kenda; there are just 25 servings’. Now, on average, approximately 800 children come for kola kenda, some in the morning before school starts and some during the interval. It’s just 15 rupees per cup and that’s about half the ‘market price’. ‘We do this as a service and don’t make any profit,’ the Principal explained.

They are finding it hard to meet the demand, apparently. Malinda Niranjan said that the work is all done by 6.15 am but lamented that there were days they just don’t have enough to give to all those who come. But there are days when they make a second batch, he said. Apparently it’s not just the children. Some parents, come with their children to have a cup of kola kenda.

‘We also have rotimade of traditional rice varieties. For most of the non-teaching staff breakfast consists of roti and kola kenda. That’s Rs 15 for the kenda and Rs25 for a roti. They say it’s their favorite breakfast meal.’

The idea has caught on. Children in the first three grades get a weekly cup of green goodness. There are plans to expand this so that children in grades four and five will also benefit.

‘They love it. Parents tell me that their sons show unusual enthusiasm about getting up and going to school on their particular kola kenda day of the week. If a child falls in and a parent offers to make some kola kenda, the child would ask if it’s going to be like what he gets at school or so I am told,’ Mr Gunasekera says with undisguised pride.

There’s a story here that goes beyond providing a health drink for school children. Theoretically, 10 years down the line Royal would have produced thousands of students who not only love kola kenda but know its value as a drink that gives energy and enhances immune systems. From there to wean the nation of its powdered milk dependency would be far less difficult. After all, even in this relatively early stage there are children in the primary school and there are very senior boys too who wouldn’t miss their daily dose of kola kenda. ‘The Deputy Head Prefect is one of them,’ the Principal said.

The teachers are part of the story too. Renuka Vidyaratne is one of them.

‘I’ve suffered from migraine and gastritis. I found it difficult even to climb the staircase. Everyone morning, when I woke up, I would ask myself whether or not I should go to school. Kola kenda changed all that. Now I have four cups a day. I don’t feel fatigue. I stopped all the medicines I’ve been taking for so many years now.’

The cure of course is in the packet of ingredients -- the rice and the particular vegetables. Those who produce the kola kenda ‘packets’, Mr Gunasekera says, have agreed to provide enough to feed close to 100,000 students in areas in the North Western Province that have been hit by CKDu (Chronic Kidney Disease of Unknown Causes). ‘Unknown’ of course is qualified designed to facilitate the continued poisoning by agro-chemicals. The ‘project’ if you want to call it that is therefore ‘national’ in both potential and logic.

If Royal is ‘greening’ these days it is not only because of the kola kenda. Upali Gunasekera has made quite a name for himself as an advocate of hands-on learning with children getting involved in school-gardening. Chemical-free gardening that is. There’s a comprehensive solid waste recycling program in place. Lighting will pay for itself in a few years time courtesy solar power.

It is unlikely that the Blue-Gold-Blue of the flag will change with one blue stripe being replaced by green. The school, however, is slowly but surely being encased in a ‘green’ frame in thinking as well as practice. It is not hard to replicate. It’s not, after all, as bit a challenge as getting dubious powdered milk multinationals replaced by local dairy farmers organized into cooperatives.

Royal has taken a ‘greening lead’. Other prominent schools lose nothing but would benefit much if they too went green. Who knows, there might come a day when that pernicious habit-changing putting-down-the-local question‘thamuse kenda beelada inne?’ (have you had kenda?) would be replaced as it should be (and as Prof Nalin De Silva recommends) by the far more pertinent dismissive, ‘Why do you look as though you’ve just had powdered milk?’ It would amount to a (healthy) greening of the mind and indeed, one might say, ‘a healthy greening of the nation’ –an unshackling from incapacitating and subjugating colonial ideologies.

Royal is going green. Will Ananda, Nalanda,Viskha, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Dharmaraja, Mahinda, Maliyadeva and other prominent schools remain ‘mis-colored’ as it were?

It was Alvis in Wonderland who got me going about white-ness, or the 'acting the suddha' thing and of course the whole black-and-white business of condescension and viceroy-posturing on the part of certain white people holding obscure posts in UN agencies, INGOs etc. Alvis had a response to my piece titled 'The black and white of the (mis) information industry'. I will get to it presently.

That article also elicited a comment (via email) regarding the issue of post-coloniality. The following question was put to me: 'Can ever we rid ourselves of the baggage of a colonial past in continuance to be 'post colonials'; can we ever be rid of that linkage which can transfigure as a form of mental bondage?' A possible answer followed:

Retired supreme court judge and once acting CJ, R.S Wanasundera who is a close friend of the family once said in the course of a conversation with my father that we should completely forget that we were ever under them (the Brits and the rest of the european bandits) and that even the Independence Day is a reminder which is structured in our polity to remind us of our former colonial past.'

Is it possible? I am not sure. The past is never packed up and 'disappeared' in some irretrievable archive. It is present and it is alive, one-way or another, sometimes in perverse ways. The 'solution' (in so far as this is a problem, and I believe it is one) is probably located in how we relate to that past, that very violent past of plundering resources, killing hundreds of thousands of people, forcible conversion, destruction of Buddhist and Hindu places of worship and other forms of attempted culture-erasure. All in the name of 'civilization' and 'civilizing', of cleansing the 'heathens' etc.

Unnecessary attachment to things, tangible and otherwise, is a recipe for discontent. This is what Siddhartha Gauthama taught. If we look back at the colonial era with awe and reverence (as some do even today) we are being toady, a bunch of no-good imitators at best or, more commonly, a nation of slaves. This is an inhibiting condition.

What of the opposite, the looking-back-in-anger option, so to speak? That too is an Upadana, an inevitable grasping of the act of rejection as well as the object rejected that inhibits clarity of thought, prevents concrete and meaningful unfettering of that past, its violence and its baggage.

It is something that has to be dealt with and not wished away, I believe. We have to look at the past, in what it did and what it does, we have to look at its articulation in this moment in time and we have to look it in the eye without flinching, without blinking. Here's where the irreverent Alvis comes in;

'It is rather very apparent here, where whites talk as if they live in paradise in the West (aka NATO land) and were hard put to come by here, the moment you ask them where they are from in the US or Canada and Australia and EXACTLY who lived on that land a hundred years ago, or if they had any black or 'Native Indian neighbours, mates or peers - they deflate...but its not their fault...it is our fault...'cos we let them...our ruling class lets them...and that class there (and here, though more covert) has long benefited from being their 'jobbers, 'and in the end, a loan here and a preference there, is all they need...to wipe out generations of people...'

The key qualifier here, to me, is 'we let them'. Yes, it is our fault. My friend Udayasiri Wickramaratne said it beautifully in one of his 'Arthika Vihilu' columns for the Irida Divaina: 'Some have cats as pets, some have rabbits and some have parrots; not 'some' but all of us, however, have a Suddha in our minds as a pet'.

There is most certainly a whole gang of such Suddhas that Alvis speaks of inhibiting our emergence as a proud and independent people without any unnecessary baggage, true.

There is the Suddha and the Kalu-Suddha. There are the innumerable structures that 'independence' failed to dismantle and which still keep us 'colonized' and 'beholden', make us cringe and grovel and ask for crumbs from tables laden with that which was robbed from us.

However, as long as we don't recognize that colonialism exists both outside us and within us, we will be clutching at straws in terms of trying to drop our colonial baggage. We have to look within, seek out all the Suddhas resident therein (in various disguises, colours and shapes) and tell them all 'get out!' if we are to move forward. This is a necessary prerequisite for getting the Suddha outside out of our hair.

*Written almost five years ago and published in the 'Daily News'. A Facebook status update about the 'crime' of 'writing in English' reminded me of this. So I dug it up. There's a follow-up piece as well.

My article, 'On the "sudda" resident within us'generated a lot of comments. Among them was one from a retired senior Police Officer (of a different generation and most definitely a different calibre), Gamini Gunawardena, a Sanskrit scholar and a batch-mate of my parents at Peradeniya.

Gamini Maama shared some thoughts with me. He observed that most of our conversations on the ‘sudda problem’ were in the sudda language, English.

He wrote, wittily, ‘incidentally, why do we write the address on the envelopes always in English? Because our postal peon is a sudda? Or are we testing his English knowledge?’ More pertinently, he asked why the work of the private sector is conducted in English and not in Sinhala/Tamil.

He remembered Anagarika Dharmapala: ‘In order to kill this sudda, Anagarika Dharmapala Thuma advised us to make a dummy of the sudda and spit at him every day. I think it should be done as a national exercise every morning like singing the national anthem. And particularly at the commencement of every English class!’

He also opined, ruefully, that when he left the University he had thought the next generation of undergraduates with a completely Sinhala education would be able to be rid of the inferiority complex that his, the last generation of the Ivor Jennings model, suffered from. He observed: they turned out to be worse.

The issue I think is not so much that we use English (I see nothing wrong in using the enemy’s weapons against him/her, especially if it is done effectively). It all depends on what we do with English. The Kaduwa (sword) can be used to keep at bay the enemy or it can be used to castrate ourselves. It can be used, as it is, to demarcate social status and acquire a superiority that is not in tune with intellect or skill. This can be done, let me hasten to add, only to the extent that we have allowed the sudda to inhabit our minds, our sensibilities.

I am not sure of the efficacy of the Anagarika’s proposal. It cannot be a matter of spitting on the sudda (literally and/or metaphorically) or else giving the sudda permanent residency in our minds and thereby submitting to ideological servility. Not choosing the former is not necessarily an embrace of the latter.

That would be a dialectic way of approaching issues and quite un-Buddhist. The alternative way is to engage the sudda without fear and without hatred (both of which inhibit fruitful exchange) with full awareness. Gamini Maama himself offers a possible ‘location’ of English by referring to a Raj Kapoor song in the 1951 classic movie, ‘Shree 420’:

Mera joota hai japani
Yeh patloon inglisthani
Sar pe laal topi roosi
Phir bhi dil hai hindustani

My shoes may be from Japan. My clothes may be from England and my hat may be from Russia but my heart remains Indian!

It is not in the trappings, then. I had heard this song quoted before and it always reminds me of a conversation that took place in Peradeniya about 17 years ago.

This was when I was called a jathika chinthana kaaraya by my political opponents. Someone had made this comment: ‘Malinda Aiya kathakaranne jathika chinthanaya, e unata yaaluwela inne lansi kellek ekka’ (Malinda talks jathika chinthanaya but is going out with a Burgher girl). My response: ‘honda sinhala bauddha kollo, honda Sinhala bauddha kello ekka yaalu wela innava, e unata eyalage chinthana lansi’. (There are good Sinhala Buddhist boys going out with good Sinhala Buddhist girls but their ideology is ‘Burgher’; ‘lansi’ being used as proxy for what I have been referring to as ‘sudda’ in the cultural colonization context).

The way out is not cultural isolation but active and informed inter-cultural association without operating from the extreme that vilifies the sudda or that which worships the sudda. To put it in a different way, we need to be proud of who we are, where we came from etc., celebrate that which is and which was good in our history, heritage and culture without falling into the trap of romanticizing the past.

The Buddha advocated the employment of reason. Makes a lot of sense.

A nation must cultivate its collective intellect so that it can separate grain from chaff, the inconsequential from the abiding, that which is worthy of acquiring and that which should be dismissed.

We have shown a marked inability to be selective and this flows from a wishy-washy approach to the task of self-exploration.

Since cricket is in the news and since Sri Lanka is to play England in the Champions Trophy before this piece gets published, let me use a cricketing example.

What is cricket? It is not home-grown. It is a sudda game. Does it not belong to us, though? A simple illustration would suffice to answer this question: the ‘Dil-scoop’, Tilakaratne Dilshan’s innovation, the audacious lifting of a delivery over the keeper’s head and to the boundary.

I like to think that in that stroke, in that innovation, there is ‘Sri Lankan heart’, even though the helmet is not Sri Lankan the game is not Sri Lankan.

As for the sudda within us, that creature is not un-tamable.

And there is nothing to stop us from visiting and taking up residence in the sudda’s head either. We need to be alert though. And we are not alert enough.

*This was first published in the 'Daily News' in September 2009. A Facebook status update posted by Pubudu Shiran

'Buttlering' gives a batsman an edge of a couple of yards while a bowler who errs by a fraction of an inch is no-balled.

These days batsmen who get out don’t always walk back to the pavilion. No, I am not talking about batsmen who having snicked a ball to the keeper pretending they have not, hoping that the umpire would have missed it. The rules have changed and sometimes the umpires ‘go upstairs’ to see if the delivery was legit. They let the cameras decide if the bowler has overstepped and therefore delivered a ‘no ball’, in which case the batsman stays.

What this means is that a fraction of an inch is all it takes for a wicket taking delivery to be penalized with a run to the opposition. It’s all good. There’s a popping crease marked on the wicket for a reason.

Still, it appears that the laws and traditions are very strict for the bowler but go easy on the batsmen and nothing shows this up better than what might be called ‘Buttlering’.

During the 5^th ODI between England and Sri Lanka Jos Buttler, the English batsman was declared out after Sri Lankan spinner Sachitra Senanayake ‘Mankaaded’ him; i.e. whipped the bails off at the non-striker’s end before he got into his delivery stride after finding Buttler out of the crease. Ravi Bopara, with whom Buttler put together a partnership that almost brought England a victory in the 4^thODI said ‘it was the done thing’. The ‘done thing’, let’s call it ‘Buttlering’ turned some twenty plus singles into ‘twos’ in that 4^th ODI. ‘Buttlering’ did not go unnoticed. Warnings were issued. Buttlering in the 5^th ODI prompted further warnings and was put to a stop by Sachitra ‘Mankaading’ Jos.

Now since batsmen often get ‘run out by a whisker’, an advantage of even an inch or two can make a massive difference. While a fraction ‘off’ can deny a bowler a wicket because it would be called a ‘no ball’, a fraction ‘extra’ secures safety for a batsman. In the former case, the bowler is penalized and in the latter the batsman is rewarded. Is this cricket, as the saying goes? Sadly, it is.

That’s a batsman vs bowler affair. But there’s inconsistency for batsmen too. If a lead of a few feet at the beginning of a run is fair (i.e. ‘the done thing’), why should a few inches short in the event of a batsman not touching the crease when turning for a second run be called ‘one short’ by the umpire?

The umpire is alert to where the bowler’s foot lands when he delivers. That’s part of his job. The umpire is not required to check if the non-striker is behind the crease (i.e. either a foot or the grounded bat) at the same moment. It can’t be too difficult to write something into the law to deter Buttlering, which is nothing but blatant gamesmanship and a deliberate abuse of a lacuna in the law. The umpire can take note and if a single (or two or three) is taken, declare ‘one short’.

As things stand, however, the bowler gets shortchanged while the batsman has the opportunity to steal a few coins. They add up, as the 4^th ODI clearly showed. If Buttlering is sanctioned then checking for no-balls after a wicket is taken must be done away with. Indeed, if the transgression is similar (in length) to done-thing-length or Buttler-Length, then no-ball should not be called. If someone really wants clarity, consistency and hard line rules, then an adjustment should be made to the length of the track, say 24 yards instead of 22. Don’t like it? Well then, let’s not treat Buttlering in international cricket as though it was something that happens in the village greens where coconut tree is a fielder and a ‘six’ into the grumpy neighbor’s garden is ‘out’.

Technology has invaded cricket. Rules have been fine-tuned. Players are required to show greater degrees of professionalism. Buttlerism persists though and is played down and even applauded by fellow cheats like Ravi Bopara while Mankaading is booed.

Something is wrong here and the ICC must do what’s necessary to correct it.

P.S. For an analogy in politics please read 'Doing the done thing'

I’ve always thought he was bright. He was and is his uncle’s nephew. I saw him first as a cub and I saw the fox he would eventually grow up to become. There are situations that are bigger than the man and he was a victim of bigger things. That’s all.

He is vilified at every turn but then again those who vilify him are not exactly saints. They have their ambitions and for all claims about grave concern for the party for each and every one of them the party is but a vehicle for personal advancement. Not that he is not ambitious (who is not, after all?), but this holier-than-thou postulations really give me more cramps than those who authored me and amended me have burdened me with.

Yes, vehicles. He spoke of the 1977 model during the ceremony to felicitate Ranjith Maddumabandara upon completing 25 years in politics. He spoke of vehicles. Sorry, he spoke of a vehicle. He said that it is in pretty bad shape. Spot on. He pointed out that parts have had to be replaced. The vehicle continues to stagger along, falling into potholes, getting stuck in the mud and so on. He is right. A new vehicle is required. Ok, if you didn’t get it, he was talking about the 1977 Constitution,

True, it was his uncle that gave it to us. True, his uncle came up with it so that the UNP could remain in power forever. True, his uncle envisaged that one day his nephew would benefit from it. True, things didn’t pan out the way everyone thought they would. True, instead of benefiting from it, he is suffering from it. Ranil Wickremesinghe has ample reason to see flaw in the 1977 vehicle. Naturally, the beneficiaries of that document who for decades called it draconian and used all kinds of unkind words to describe its author are of the view that the vehicle is anything but imperfect. It works fine. For them.

All this is true. What is also true is that he, Ranil Wickremesinghe that is, is absolutely correct if he was speaking for the people. That car might be called any number of names but ‘Democratic’ is not one of them. Whether or not a new vehicle benefits my main man, the people of this country need a new one.

Non-negotiable.

I applaud him, this now-not-so-young fox. He deserves much praise. He speaks the truth. Even if he turns out to be the main beneficiary of a new vehicle (for example, getting to be in the driver’s seat), he has to say it simply because it is the truth. We need a new vehicle. We need a new constitution!

What I am sad about is the fact that while he went on and on and on about a new vehicle for the country, he didn’t utter a single word about the fact that the party vehicle (that’s me, by the way), is on the verge of being sold for scrap. I am in such a poor condition but he hasn’t had the eyes to notice the fact. I’ve had parts replaced. There’s been a lot of tinkering done over the years. ‘Beyond Repair’ is a town I will be visiting pretty soon.

He didn’t see me. Has hasn’t seen me. He will never have eyes for me. It’s almost like a man who has eyes only for some other woman. I don’t want to live forever. I know I’ve outlived my usefulness. I want to die. He is not letting me die an honorable death. I want to be replaced too! So kill me, Ranil! Now!

*In a parallel universe of course

[This is a love note unlike any other I've ever written. For Rukshan Abeywansha I would happily give all the words I have and remain silent forever, if it would mean that he walks again. If you want to help this amazing photographer to 'click' again with and without camera, please read to the end]

Some years ago a friend working in an International NGO asked me if I knew of a poem that described Sri Lanka. It would have to be in English or Sinhala or Tamil poem that was translated into English. Apparently, the organization had wanted employees from all over the world to share a ‘country poem’ with one another for purposes of greater familiarization.

I remembered ‘Call of Lanka’ by Rev Walter Senior but couldn’t find it. In the end I wrote something and told her, ‘this is the best I can do’. The following lines come to me now:

I have heard the heartbeat of my country

In the tolling of the bell on Samanala Kanda,

The healing drone of pirith weaving its way

Through tree and conversation,

In the call for prayer,

‘Allah O Akbar’

The church choir and hymn

And the chanting of the Poosari.

Why should I wrote about anything when Rukshan could say it all this way?

It was not, of course, one of those ‘mention all and pretend we are one’ kind of poem, but a simple acknowledgment of self and neighbor, individual and community, distinction and coexistence.

It all came to me and came together a few days ago.

One week ago, ‘The Nation’ had its darkest hour. Something happened that stopped the clock, stopped heartbeat and kept everything on hold through that particular hour and the hours and days that followed. An accident. Two young boys, Kavinda Vimarshana and Rukshan Abeywansha, the former suffering multiple fractures and the other…fractured in ways that broke each and every one of us at ‘The Nation’ and many in the ‘Rivira’ family, past and present, in unhealable ways.

He loves his work, his family, his friends

Rukshan is currently in the ICU at Central Hospital. Structural damage to his spine has been effectively repaired by Dr Sunil Perera who claims he’s no magician but who is widely regarded as a miracle worker. It is early days of recovery for Rukshan but he does not know and we do not know how long, if ever, it would take for him to regain sensation below his neck. We hope.

There were tears for Kavinda, a roly-poly boy who is, at 21, the baby of our team and adored to death by all for his cheerful ways. Tears for Rukshan too, father of two children yet to go to school, because he never lost his smile through all his many trials. Life bludgeoned him frequently but he absorbed the blows and never shared his woes. He captured life, this point-click man, in amazing ways.

He suspected he had suffered paralysis but wasn’t sure if it was that or that he had lost his legs. So he asked someone. Right up to the point where he was taken to the operating theater, Rukshan was more concerned about the problems of others. ‘Is your father better now?’ he asked. ‘Do you have a picture for the cover of JEANS?’ he asked. That’s him.

There were tears and there are still tears, but through all the blurring of event and sorrow there was clarity too.

The Nation came together. Those in our sister papers did not just commiserate, they also took the loss personally, inquired, called doctors and hospital administration, found out what was happening and what needed to be done and did it. That’s mainly because Rukshan didn’t belong to The Nation. He belongs to the larger Rivira family and more so to the family of rare human beings who go about their work and lives without a single dark thought.

We are best as human beings when we come together, we are best even in our solitary reflections and prayers when they have something to do with the collective.

Apart from the must-do of practical response, there were prayers; each according to his or her faith, and all together regardless of faith-preference in seeking succor from each other’s temples.

There were bodhi poojas at the Ode Pansala close by. There were prayers offered at St Anthony’s Church Kochchikade. U.L. Ranjith, a Rivira driver made a vow at the Pillewa Temple. Some went to the Kovil. The Quran was recited, Dua was solicited and Zakat was given. Merit was sought to be transferred. Divine intervention was sought.

The heartbeat of our country was evident in all these things but mostly in these heartbeats collapsing into a singular wish, that it all adds to that which it takes to keep Rukshan’s heart beating and beating in a body that moves, a body with eyes that saw and saw through the world and continues to see thus, a fingers that touched this world and made it come alive in ways few could imagine.

The heartbeat of our country, right now, at this moment and at this sad but hopeful place we reside in, has a name. Rukshan Abeywansha.

NOTE: Rukshan has just had life-saving surgery on his spine. He is still in the Intensive Care Unit of Central Hospital. If all goes well, he could leave and enter a less expensive rehabilitation facility for necessary treatment. He would have to pay a bill of around Rs 2 million out of which his insurance would only pay a fraction. Every rupee counts. Please donate whatever you can to: N.N. Abeywansha, Bank of Ceylon, Borella Branch, Acct No 71934217. Email me if you have any questions: msenevira@gmail.com.

The Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) holds a rally following an ‘incident’. A second, more violent incident follows. That’s an easy line to draw, i.e. from BBS to violence. It holds. The language, the whipping up of emotions, creation and/or exacerbation of apprehensions regarding another community do not add up to prthagjanas reverting to the foundational tenets, especially wisdom and compassion, or the inhabiting of the sathara brahma viharana(compassion, kindness, equanimity and rejoicing in another’s joys) but produce a quick slide to besieged mentality, persecution mania and the adaptation of ‘attack is the best form of defence’ thinking.

What are the ‘facts’ that we have here? There’s the ‘incident’ where it is claimed that a Muslim person had hit a bikkhu. Claiming is easy and this side of arahathood anyone, bikkhus included, can transgress precepts, including the fourth, the commitment not to utter falsehood). Not only are things lost in narration, lots get added on too in the process. A disagreement becomes dispute, dispute becomes argument, argument raises voices, raised voices lead to in-your-face closeness, proximity tends to contact, contact is read as aggressive touch, touch is blow, and blow is assault. What happens between two human beings is then an altercation between two persons from two communities, religious communities, that is.

The fact is that neither party can offer anything to conclusively prove their case. So they go to the Police. What can the police do? If the police are impartial, the police will weigh evidence and let the law take its course, either towards dismissal or indictment. The police, since it is also tasked to maintain peace, will take precautions to ensure that tempers are kept in check.

The Police may have done the best they could but ‘the best’ clearly has been inadequate. Muslims have been attacked in Alutgama. Houses and shops have been torched. The BBS rally could have been stopped (others have been on numerous occasions, after all). Outfits like the BBS thrives on ‘flash-points’ and are not averse to creating ‘flash-points’ which can be exploited. The ‘democratic’ argument; right to assemble, right to express opinion etc; is thin given histories that the Police and higher authorities are clearly not ignorant about.

It’s so easy to slide on the matter of ‘faith’. Someone says ‘I was hit’ and those who hear that will see robe and bikkhu, will see ‘Muslim’ and not another human being, will not stop and ask ‘is that true?’ and will not let the law deal with it. And when the law does deal with it, even in clumsy ways, if the ‘decision’ is perceived as ‘unfair’, there is frustration. The police and the government have not helped at all. There have been countless instances in these types of situations as well as in regular policing matters where the law has been a politician’s plaything and police officers turned into hapless implementers of orders ‘from above’.

In this context Buddhists will say (as they have – check FB posts) that the Government is turning a blind eye on ‘Islamic Extremism’ and Muslims will say (as they have) that this is a ‘Sinhala Buddhist state’ with tacit approval of ‘Extremist Buddhist outfits’ and their attacks on Muslims and Muslim establishments. Both parties can cite innumerable instances of ‘government support’ to the ‘other’. Buddhists will say ‘Kuragala’ and Muslims could point to state-run media outfits that have blown the Aluthgama incident way out of proportion, claiming that political mileage was being sought by stating as established fact what is, as of now, nothing more than an allegation, that of a bikkhu being attacked by a Muslim (whether or not religion was part of it is of course not even footnoted!).

Part of the reason is this whole ‘besieged’ discourse that is gaining ground across all communities based on identity, regardless whether they constitute the majority or are a minority. Identity assertion is not illegal. Sometimes it is not a matter of pride; it is a communal assertion that seeks safety from perceived threat. Sometimes it is defiance. Somewhere in this assertion business there is also a thread of threat.

Be that as it may, the ground that is made uneven and therefore made for tripping in multiple ways, is clearly a product of a break down in the entire institutional arrangement pertaining to law and order. It has made it possible for anyone to stake high moral ground claiming persecution and complicity of the police in the pernicious designs of the ‘other’.

For this, no one is to blame, but all relevant individuals and bodies in the government.

If the Government does nothing, then we are in a serious situation. However, even if the Government does nothing, it does not follow that the people should twiddle their thumbs. If ‘faith’ is at the center of these disturbing developments, then it would not be out or order to seek in ‘faith’ the appropriate response.

No doctrine needs defense. Political positions require defense, political organizations can claim that defense is necessary. Attack will be an easy option in the matter of defending these things. Organizations have their membership made of the like-minded. They rarely listed to advise from outsiders (why should they?). But not all Buddhists are members of the BBS and not all Buddhists support the BBS.

There is legitimate fear on the part of Muslims. No amount of assurances from the government or the police or the neighbors would succeed in removing these fears completely. It is necessary however for Buddhists to talk to their Muslim neighbors. It is not about saying sorry for crimes committed in their name by people they don’t even know or whose actions they did not and would not support. All that needs to be done is to say ‘I will not do this and I will do my best to stop anyone from doing anything like this to you or your family, my friend’.

It is not easy to argue with a mob, but I have seen individuals standing up to mobs. Reason, compassion, determination and everything else that one obtained or is strengthened by faith, will do it.

Aluthgama is a metaphor for a lot of things. A lot of things we really can do without. For this reason Aluthgama needs to be arrested forthwith, if not by the Government then by the decent, civilized, law-abiding citizens of this country, whatever their faith.

A death that speaks of our larger incarceration*

A country is a toy but that’s alright*

On winning the Gratiaen Prize

Playing the ‘Modi Card’

What do we do with 'the Tamil in the room'?

An Indian Parliamentarian is despondent*

A story of a girl, a photograph and a photographer

A part-composed song

Listening to mystical reeds*

It’s a ‘buddy’ kind of life*

The 0.001% chance of something happening

Doing the ‘done thing’

"PB" of Alutwela, Haldummulla: Farmer, king and shaman

The greening of the blue-n-gold

On the 'Suddha' resident within us*

More cuts on the 'sudda within'*

If there's 'Mankaading' then there's 'Buttlering'

Lament of the UNP constitution

The heartbeat of our country has a name

‘Aluthgama’ needs to be arrested forthwith