Farm Hounds and Moose hunting by a leading Eelam existentialist.

By Sebastian Rasalingam, Toronto

(March 01, Toronto, Sri Lanka Guardian) Roy Ratnavale, the leading Eeelam Existentialist thinker and leader, has written a piece (see ) on moose hunting and farm hounds. The real ( that is, not the existentialist) Tamils left behind in the Vanni have no mood or chance to sit around the fire pit and eat morsels of moose meat. Instead, they are eating the bullets bought by the money of the existentialist Tamils, and getting blown to bits even when they cover inside a bunker. Roy Ratnavale, well oiled in prairie hospitality and that last glass of Cognac or Cointreau can retire to his comfortable queen bed which supports his body with a thousand coils to each square foot. But the "vrai Tamouls" who live in the Vanni, constricted to a few kilometers of false Eelam forced on them with the finances and funds of the Thimpu Tamils, can only sleep under a piece of plastic, perhaps under a tree, or in a hastily dug trench, with a few snakes coiling around them.

Roy Ranavale dreams of moose hunting and imagines that his hounds are charging, or barking. The Vanni Tamil has neither sleep nor wakefulness - both are a nightmare. His nightmare do not deal with mooose or hunds, but with Eelam Tigers. Tiger operatives push them around, order them to fight with makeshift weapons, terrorize them in every way possible, and prevent them from escaping their clutches and moving to the safety zone. Even when they escape, they send suicide bombers to kill the escaped Tamils. That is not moose hunting.

Why doesn't Roy Ratnavel understand or empathize with the Tamils? At first I thought he was a man of French extraction, with all his quotes from Jean-Paul Sartre and now, Victor Hugo. After all, Vedanayakam Pillai, a contemporary of Hugo or Subramania Bharathi, a contemporary of Jean-Paul Sartre would not seem to come to his mind. He is firmly fixed in the wester world. In fact, he is very like some Colombo Sinhalese who are ever so buried in western culture that they do not know the "vernacular languages". Although I called Roy Ratnavale an ersatz "Le Roi Rainville", I had clearly made a mistake. The name is clearly "Ratnavel", and not "Rainville". But then, in Tamil grammar, no good Tamil word can begin with the letter "r". this is well laid down in the "Tolkappian" and well respected in Jaffna Tamil, even today. So, if he had been a Tamil gentleman, his name should have contained the stem "Iratinam--". The word "vel" has many Tamil meanings and is good acceptable Tamil. It can mean "chieftain", and occurs in the wrod "Velllala" as well.

Hence, if our Eelam existentialist truly exists as a "vrai Tamoul", i.e., if he were a true Tamil, his name should have been some form etymologically related to "Iratina-vel". However, the form "Rantnavel" lets the cat out. This is the Tamil adaptation of the Sinhalese name "Ratnapala", where the letter "p" makes the well known transition to "v", together with a shortening of the syllable to "vel", where "vel" also means some sort of "chieftain", cognate with the sinhala or Pali form "paala". Thus "Ratnavel", and many other names beginning in "Ratna-" (but not, say, Rajaratnam where it does NOT begin in "ratnam") are non-Dravidian. We only have to read father Rasanayagam, or Velupillai and other historians to realize that "Ratnavel" was, only a few generations ago, a Sinhala Chauvinist who must have fought against our Jaffna chiefs, and got thrown out and forced to adopt a Tamilized name. Tamil culture and Tamil up-bringing are clearly not a part of his ethos. These faux-Tamoul were the ones who were most ready to collaborate with the successive foreign invaders - finally the English. This gave them Anglican baptism, education and high-level jobs in the British administration, as long as they looked after the needs of the British and undermined the locals. My parents escaped the shakels of the caste system by compromising our belief system and taking refuge in the church. But this does not mean that we should remain within the narrow grooves of our up-bringing after we have grown up.

So people like "Roy Ratnapala", having totally distanced themselves from the language and culture of the people, and having embraced and betrayed the Sinhalese, Tamils, and the English, succeed in going to the west, to enjoy the coffers they have made in their investment business or medical glass houses or what ever. But money is not enough. It is power that the "vel" needs. It is in search of power that the expatriate rich gravitate to politics. By being the big wigs of the expatriate community, they now mingle with local politicians, control the political process of a far away land, participate in Pongal events held at the Hilton - in short, they find a raison d'etre for quenching that existential yearning for being some body. Henri Bergson had explained all this beautifully, with this doctrine of the "Elan vital". May be, le Roi Rainville has read Bergson, and imagined (wrongly), that "Elan" had something to do with "Eelam".

Instead of reading Victor Hugo, our existentialist Tamils should read Kailasapathy. It is not the Canadian prairies they they should visit, but the Vavniya Vanni. They should work with the village temples and village schools, because the school masters are ordinary Tamils who are actually very educated people of the soil. Avoid the NGOs and the church fathers like the plague.
Finally, i want to tell Mr. Roy Ratnapala that Rasalingam is indeed a hound, a hound that does not let go the iniquities that he and others of his sort have suffered from the discrimination that exists within traditional Tamil society. That is a form of discrimination sponsored by the Tamil leadership. The rise of a fascist like Prabhakaran was possible entirely because of that mental attitude of worshiping the "Vel" that dominate our Tamil society -today we have it implanted in Scarborough.
-Sri Lanka Guardian