Colombo and politics from New York New York
NEW YORK NEW YORK: In New York there is an unlikely edifice, and it is called the United Nations headquarters. In this big city of consumption and excess, the United Nations building, or rather what takes place inside it, must be incongruous. Today there is a meeting here of indigenous people, and Thalif Deen the IPS correspondent at the UN - and columnist to the Sunday Times - gripes that only the Veddahs are missing.

The US economy is just picking up, and maybe that's the reason that production and consumption is on overdrive here, and everything is touted in this city, except perhaps indigenous peoples. As you enter the Big Apple from New Jersey, you feel advertising has entered a new realm. There is one big hoarding that shouts "are you divorcing?'' If so, the hoarding says, come to us, we will get you the fastest cleanest divorce. Another billboard touts a common brand of liquor, saying 'it's the official drink of everything that's unofficial.''

Somebody says the indigenous people are being sold also. Down the drain that is. It's only a quip. Of course when the United States first called upon the nations of the world to "give us your tired and huddled masses,'' a great many indigenous people had already disappeared from territory such as Long island and Statten island which form New York's disjointed land mass.

But the tired and huddled masses are tired no more, they are just more security conscious these days. Entering the United Nations is a Sri Lankan experience of yesteryear. You need to leave your identity card at the reception and pass through an airport type metal detector. Soldiers in military fatigues at the Grand Central train station - men and women -- walk around with guns that should properly belong in Mosul or Tikrit in Iraq. Some of the African Ameircan women soldiers don't look like they belong in this urban jungle; they resemble Naomi Campbell and should perhaps have been recruited to model those fatigues rather than wear them.

At the Sri Lankan mission here at the United Nations, there is a driver who has to be given all written instructions in Sinhalese before he embarks on a journey. Or he has to be taken on a dry run. There is also the case of the protocol officer, a diplomat, who became a driver, and the driver who became a diplomat in his place. Sri Lankans will regale you with these tales from the absurd, as they should.

So, when one sees soldiers with powerful guns at the Grand Central station wearing military fatigues and looking like they are Naomi Campbell, there is this little apprehension that when you stepped into New York you actually stepped into the theater of the absurd. It's Broadway in a different sense - Broadway gone batty.

New York is big, and as they say in the travel books, it is as big as they come. But Colombo is bigger for the Sri Lankans who live here and it looms larger in their minds, and therefore looms large in my mind though a few days in New York is supposed to be a getaway from Colombo's desperado whirl of politics and skullduggery. Not even a drive- by shooting in Maryland engages the attention of Sri Lankan's as comprehensively as the beating and abduction of a Buddhist monk who entered parliament in Sri Lanka. Talk about the theater of the absurd…

Ordinary people here have ordinary concerns, but they are not as rooted in hard reality as they are back home, particularly in this election year here. Nobody is bothered really about George Bush winning the elections as they are about whether it's going to be a rainy day or a sunny one in the city. There is baseball on the television screens and those who are jaded by that are suddenly being made curious about a relatively new game called soccer. True, a soccer World Cup took place in America, but soccer still ignites enough curiosity to keep anyone away from the boring bit of shadow boxing that's called the US Presidential elections.

Compare and contrast that with the election in Colombo. Sri Lankans here at this end still cannot help but ruminate about that. They ask me about how difficult it is to get into the Wanni, or how well the JVP is settling down in office. I'd rather take the Staten island ferry than revisit the tedium of Sri Lankan politics in my mind, but for New Yorkers the Staten island ferry is a bit of a bore also. Times Square can excite them perhaps with its riot of colour and lights - and a hint of dissipate decadence that hangs about the air competing with a slight chill that blows even this fairweather season of spring…

It's not a pastime this feeling of wanting to juxtapose the Sri Lankan reality and the New York reality. Every tourist worth his name must be doing it in their minds, at least at the level of the subconscious when they leave their everyday concerns and visit a place which to them is exotic. New York is anything but exotic to New Yorkers however, and of course there is something understandably funny about anyone describing New York as exotic anyway.

But why bother about semantics, when it's clear as the lighted spire of the Empire State building at night that people in New York all do have everyday concerns, even though politics rarely enters their equation as it does in Colombo Sri Lanka. But the women must be worrying how to keep up with the felt needs of this place -- the mushrooming fads and fashions which a New Yorker ignores at his or her peril. So, a New Yorker's wallet maybe fatter than a Sri Lankans but there are a million different demands on it every day, every incremental minute. Now if that's not worrying to anyone be he an Ameircan or Sri Lankan, what is?

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