Sri Lanka must redeem itself from racist mania

“The APRC is a typical symptom that is now moving towards the terminal stage. The Cabinet of a Hundred Clowns is another example, well illustrated by the Rupavahini Drama and now a continuing saga of peculiar deviant and aberrant behaviour of those afflicted with this illness; it has certainly assumed plague proportions and Minister Mervyn Silva may be a carrier of this virulent virus.”
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by Catapult Thangavelu from Sleuth Street, Slave Island

(March 16, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) There was a time, and what a time it was, when we took the Night Mail from Jaffna to Colombo with a pack of drumsticks wrapped in fresh banana stem folds and even a bottle of virgin gingili oil from Pirampathai and later Anaicottai and at times even a box of delicious karuthakkolumban mangoes. Some would of course be for relatives, some to our dear Sinhala colleagues, neighbours and friends and some of course for pandankaraya purposes. After all we have to get our promotions and transfers too and Sri Lankan bureaucracy was by that time getting oriented to tikkak tikkak corruption.

We normally carried our dinner that would be usually string hopper briyani, a kind of forerunner to kottu rotti. Men usually changed to sarongs on the journey, and should the train be crowded, with a newspaper spread out would sleep the journey through at least unto Kelaniya southwards and Pallai northwards. Ladies travelled all the way with what they had on while boarding. When the Sinhala Only monster was let loose, these habits changed dramatically; Tamils became nervous travelers.

At the main stations like Madawachchiya, Anuradhapura, Maho, Kurunegala and Polgahawella station vendors sold orange barley, coffee, tea, vadai and at times during the season, pears, oranges, rambuttan and mangosteens.

A later addition to the travelling fleet was the Night Express pulled by Canadian locomotives, even the Super Fast dayers, Yal Devi and her sister Uttara Devi running in opposite directions all displaying unfamiliar Canadian provincial logos but incredibly, today they are our household names and even places where our kith and kin live. Ontario, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Quebec and even Alberta are more familiar to the Sri Lankans than Sabragamuwa and Uva up in the hills, our own loftiest and most beautiful provinces. How can one compare the Canadian Rockies to our Nuwara Eliya, Pattipola, Land’s End and the regions around the Adam’s Peak? And of course the Sinharaja Forests too.

In Sri Lanka everything is so beautiful but unfortunately, as a great parson once said, “man only is vile.”

There are no Night Mail now, no Night Express, no Yal Devi neither her sister Uttara Devi and not even a trace of their steely tracks from Kankesanturai to Vavuniya and that is the kind of “reversing the progress” Sri Lanka has made in fifty years all because some politicians wanted Sinhala as the only official language and Buddhism, certainly it would have been much against the wish of Buddha, as almost an official state religion even ignoring that it is not a religion as such but a way of life good for every human being to adhere to whatever faith they may belong to in the first place.

Our political brain must be strangely unique: negatively, eerily, depressingly and harmfully! It is called a Destructive Dense Syndrome (DDS) believed to be incurable if not arrested in time. It is more potent than the one that made the cows go crazy in the United Kingdom and the United States. The APRC is a typical symptom that is now moving towards the terminal stage. The Cabinet of a Hundred Clowns is another example, well illustrated by the Rupavahini Drama and now a continuing saga of peculiar deviant and aberrant behaviour of those afflicted with this illness; it has certainly assumed plague proportions and Minister Mervyn Silva may be a carrier of this virulent virus.

As for the Jaffna guy, what has happened now? Now drumsticks and pomegranates are grown in Queensland, Australia, and also found in many African countries, gingili oil has proved to be better than canola and this has created quite a sensation among the cultivators of the Canadian grain. Even mangoes are plentiful everywhere and in Mexico thousands of acres have become mango orchards.

Some entrepreneur somewhere in the world is on the verge of introducing the first mango wine and one wonders whether he is from Inuvil, a Red Zone highly fertile area in Jaffna and now covered with an Ipil-Ipil jungle. Within a generation the guy from Jaffna has virtually made himself a global wonder; the miracle man. His women and young ladies do not have to slave in Middle East; nor anywhere like the kith and kin of Sinhala politicos.

Sri Lankan governments became petty with university admissions to Tamil students. Today, within a generation, they are in so many universities in the world pursuing a great variety of career for themselves even in many of the prestigious universities. One of them is the President of a well known university in North America.

So, how did this change come about and what was the Jaffna guy doing all these 20 centuries on the peninsula? Well, well, they merely became doctors, engineers and civil servants and collected fat dowries and lived happily ever after from generation to generation to generation. They filled up paddy fields and built concrete houses to last 200 years and little by little ignored productive life and hoarded up their money in gold and lands and hardly invested in agricultural or industrial development pursuits. They merely opted to be consumers.

As a pastime, they went to courts to fight for a square inch of land but on that they would not produce even a seed of grain. They bred second class and third class citizens even lower down the scale and created a parallel class hierarchy to the caste system. Sons of the super class went to Seemai (England) obviously never to return but only to seek a bride at inflated dowry, with several plus points reckoned in thousands for overseas habitation.

Some of course returned; there was Kanapathipillai Kankesar Ponnambalam (K K Ponnambalam) who became Ganapathipillai Gangesar Ponnambalam – G G Ponnambalam – and an instant politician who betrayed the Tamils at the first opportunity and joined Don Stephen Senanayake’s first cabinet of independent Sri Lanka. In celebration of this event, thousands of Hill Country Tamils lost their rights to vote and became stateless.

A major fault of the Tamil community was that the richer class did not involve itself in the development process by investing in projects in their traditional homelands of the north and east and this denied opportunities for less fortunate ones, and the vicious caste system kept them dependent-bound on the high caste rich.

Once Banda set on the Sinhala Only track, the Jaffna guy said, to hell and he now speaks English, German, French, Italian, even Spanish and Danish like his own mother tongue; some even gave up Tamil! He has even taken to Bharatha Natyam, Kuchchupudi and Carnatic music which he hardly did ever before; thought they were persuasions of the lower castes. What an explosion it has been since Sinhala Only took roots in Sri Lanka!
Of course he as taken to other things too, using his ingenious expertise to involve in unwholesome activities teaching a thing or two to experts how to make them feel helpless and clueless about some not so salubrious activities. But let’s not talk about it now. What one sows, he will reap and better such people learn it the hard way.

As for us, we miss that train journey, the temple-slaughtered velvi he-goat meat from Jaffna, the Saturday oil bath and relaxed, stress-free life of the Jaffna man. But what we have seen of him during the last 30 years is that, you step on his toe, he will conquer the world. Wanni has been a somewhat bad experience for him partly because of an overdose of Jayawardene racism, much more than what Banda forced on his people. Now Rajapakse’s brew is being finagled and foisted on him and eventually it will be Sri Lanka that will be the loser. Racism has virtually wrecked the country.

And there are still engaged in racist ideas, racist talks, racists schemes and racist goals a vast array of racists and they are all supposed to be leaders of the community.
Our team left Kappang Highway not so long ago and soon afterwards we lost our favourite target Zoo-Pah and since then Wanni has lost its challenge for us. Constable General, that is Nadesan, is a poor substitute for Thamilselvan. Though we were hard on Zoo-Pah, we recognized him as loyal to the cause better than any in the movement and that includes the Big Guy too. But Zoo-Pah thought the Norwegians were gods on earth; we thought otherwise.

Nadesan’s appointment was an indication that the LTTE is extremely short of good leaders. The Big Guy never allowed smart guys to survive in the movement and Zoo-Pah must have had his nightmares even about his own safety. Mystery still surrounds as to how he happened to be spot on where he was killed; it was not his usual habitat.
Colombo and its surrounds are our new challenge and here we will be looking for people who are bent on destroying our country. We will do what we did on Kappang Highway. We are a team committed to peace and goodwill among all our communities and development of the country. We made a name for ourselves conducting our operations within the high-risk intimacy of Felineland and we are proud of it. Only once we came very close to our mask being ripped off; that was too, too close.

We bared the operations and maneuverings of the Norwegians, their secret rendezvous though at times strangely obvious too, how children and young people were conscripted and young girls sexually abused to become suicide killers and a lot of other Wanni shenanigans.

Now that we are in the metropolis we will miss many of our favourites in Wanni especially the Lord Bishop of Mannar who has entertained some of our colleagues without knowing our media identity. It was from him we learnt that some of the retired Norwegian army personnel, who served in Sri Lanka in a friend-by-day and enemy-by-night role, felt our pen was sharper and more decisive than any of the guns they have produced in their armaments factories. We had no sympathy for people who were only there to promote US interests and also to destabilize India

While in Wanni we looked up to Major General Sarath Fonseka a great deal and now wonder why he had not finished his work yet and liberated the people of Wanni and in the process, the Tamils from the Tigers. Why is the war lasting so long and with such awful destruction of civilian lives? Is it because more weapons of destruction have to be imported yet to serve corrupt intentions and contracts or even develop bastions against India on Sri Lankan soil? We will look for answers in Colombo now that we are here.

- Sri Lanka Guardian