Welcome to the wide wicked world of “waterboarding”
View(s):As the week started, I heard the voice of one crying out in the wilderness. It was a plaintive cry, a woman’s wail. She was bemoaning the almost unbearable fate that had beset her. That water cut. No water to cook, clean, launder clothes, or conduct usual ablutions. Meant to last a mere thirty-six hours, it had had its life excruciatingly extended by a seemingly callous Water Board.
As the clock ticked agonisingly past the seventy-two hour mark, a bevy of voices – mostly female – added their ululating cries to the social media landscape. One lady exploded in some evident heat, “Arghhhhhhh! Wathura néhé ney bung!!!” (No water, no, mate?) Another posted in icily frigid tones, “Now approaching 70 hours without water. At which point is it appropriate to start mobbing the Water Board?” A madam at middle temperature was a tad milder: “It’s beginning to feel like the Middle Ages, what with all this dragging buckets around. Still, we’re the lucky ones. Know lots of people with tanks who are now in dire straits because motors have packed up after sucking air for hours instead of water.”
The caterwaul of complaints continued, justifiably enough: “My aunt who lives in the suburbs says people are on the roads with buckets and basins. It’s really a nightmare.” When there did not seem to be any immediate respite in the offing, a high and (literally) dry consumer suggested sarcastically, “People at the Water Board should just pack up and go home. Thirty-hour delay (and counting!) restoring supply following 36-hour cut.” One desolated uncle was utterly disconsolate: “This is madness. The response from NWSDB customer service when we called to report the problem was: ‘Our GM gave a voice cut to TV stations explaining about the water cut already.’”
(In a not unrelated aside, let me suggest – in the same spirit as the late Christopher Hitchens – that “water-boarding is torture”. No dears, if you didn’t get it, you’ll have to look it up on the WWW!)
To add further insult to this injury, it was revealed that the apocalyptic lack of water on tap – which was supposed to have been for the purpose of repairs – was in point of fact to facilitate the works on a proposed water park for the idle rich in parliamentary environs. Mused one mystified citizen, “Oh! Leisure boats, while some 1.5 million souls in 8 districts are affected by drought and famine? And all so that some [insert un-parliamentary appellation in the plural] can sail yachts? Sickening!” Another irate rate-payer on whom the light was beginning to dawn riposted, “Oh, wow, if true this would be another low for SL! Thank God we kept our well… although I wonder how long it will be before we lose that right as well!?” These were some of the kinder comments culled on what one tweeter called “our VVVIPs’ overall gentrification plan”.
While one couldn’t help but sympathise with the plight of these damsels and grand dames in distress – and the households and the domestic duties they represent – one can’t also help seeing the bigger picture, and the irony of it all. True, parts of Colombo were badly and unexpectedly affected by a prolonged water cut. But the facts presented in a rather well-written midweek editorial helped this reader and peruser of sundry blogs to put matters more in perspective. While women in the capital wailed the misery of absent amenities at home, women in the Dry Zone walked miles through a dry and cracked up wasteland – in the merciless heat of a scorching sun – to fetch a mere bucket of water for their mud huts. One intrepid soul even reportedly climbed precariously down the inside of a bottomless well – suspended by a rope, to the depth of thirty feet – to eke out a few precious cups of the life-giving water.
What’s wrong with this picture? The way yours truly sees it, there are three eyes (“I”s) missing.
We are not informed. Well, we are – or were – informed about the original water cut. But, as time passes and the plan changes and the planned schedules undergo a sea-change into something rich and strange, information (like water on tap) becomes scarcer and scarcer.
We are not interested. Denizens of Colombo fall into two camps on this one.
In one, those who were not desiccated by the water cut couldn’t care less for the plight of the poor dirty un-wiped dears who had to trudge about in search of a soupcon of the liquid stuff. That’s hardly the sort of enlightened self-interest we’re looking for now, is it? Who knows – next week, or month of Sundays as the “gentrification of the powers that be” progresses apace – it could be you, dear! And it would behoove you to have sat up and taken note of happenings now; not only when you have a stake in the welfare and well-being of the citizenry.
In the other are the dried up prunes who came to know about the alleged high-profile water-park project, but did not have the oomph or what-you-may-call-it to pursue the injustice or unfairness of the matter any further. Perhaps, because water-boarding as a very real possibility of a punishment was held up as the way things would develop if suburbia protested too much?
We are not instrumental. Could it also be that no one in the scenario watered with our tears above had a water molecule in hell’s chance of amending the state of play – much less the state of the nation? And that is why we grinned (or grimaced and grunted and groaned) and bore it? Lacking instrumentality or sincere representation by our people’s champions in the face of stronger and mightier “people’s champions”, we had to like it or lump it or run the risk of being well and truly water-boarded. (Oh, do look it up, dears.)
Worst of all, now that Colombo’s suburbs are back to their liquefied comfort and complacence, we’re willing to wager no one’s looking out for the woman at the bottom of the thirty-foot well in our hellish dry zone. We’re not that enlightened, simply self-interested.