Sunday Times 2
Detected in India and Lanka: An anti-intelligence virus
Women in bread queues have been hailed as trailblazers of the Russian February Revolution. Also called the March Revolution, according to the Gregorian calendar, it broke the back of the Czarist regime.
Robert Goldstun in his much acclaimed book, The Russian Revolution, writes: On March 1, 1917, bread rationing was introduced into the Petrograd (St Petersburg)…. Long lines of women could be seen, sometimes waiting through the icy night for a chance to purchase a few ounces of bread. March 8, International Women’s Day…. When women in textile factories threatened to strike…, Bolsheviks warned them against premature action. Getting the men who worked in the huge metal works to join them, they took to the streets… they chanted ‘give us bread’ as they marched somberly through the streets…. The police tried to repel them but they succeeded in reaching Neveski Prospect…. There were ninety thousand men and women on strike that day. Some of them reached the palaces of the Duma demanding bread….
Those were the beginnings of the Russian Revolution that changed the world while the legendary Trotsky, Lenin and other revolutionaries were still in exile.
In November 2021, in Sri Lanka, women were in bread queues shouting obscenities at those whom they elected to power not very many Poya moons ago. The men were there too but in this age of Gender Equality men were there of their own volition, perhaps giving some kind of satisfaction to gender activists. Right now bread queues have disappeared. With a loaf of bread costing well over Rs 100 (brown bread at Rs 175) most people can’t afford bread anymore.
Around four decades ago, too, Sri Lankan women were in bread queues. This was during days of hybridised socialism of Sirima Bandaranaike and the Samasamajists while they attempted to lead us along the ‘Jayamawatha’ (Victory Road) but ended in a disastrous rout at the 1977 General Election.
A quotation of Aldous Huxley, an acknowledged British intellectual of the 20th Century, on lessons of history would be relevant in this instance. “The one lesson about learning from history is that we don’t learn from it at all”.
The months of October and November this year should go down in Sri Lankan history (in whatever version the Mahavamsa is written by whoever) as the period that witnessed the record number of queues that proliferated throughout this paradise isle.
Besides bread queues, there were supermarket queues for all varieties, CWE queues, booze queues (following weeks of closure of liquor outlets during the lockdown) vegetable, petrol, kerosene, passport, and gas cylinders queues and then the grand finale with a total power blackout islandwide.
Of all the queues, biologically and historically of most serious concern should be the gas cylinders queue.
Ever since Man, Homo Sapiens parted company from his fellow beings swinging from branches of trees — the Homo Erectus or Homo Ergasts –as biologists call them — and landed on earth around 2 million years ago, he (Homo Sapiens) has been using fire to keep warm and cook food. However, under the Lotus Bud or Pohottuwa government of the Rajapaksas, 20 million of the species in the island of Lanka were left without the means of cooking their food.
The use of traditional firewood from the jungles, neighbour’s gardens etc was out because all such kinds of fuel had been exhausted and Lankans had been induced by geopolitical winds of trade and local politics to adapt to using ‘natural gas’ in cylinders.
Gas from Lanka’s own petroleum refinery and imported Laugh Gas and others brands were singing merrily in kitchens even under the now much maligned Ravi Karunanayake, when he drastically reduced the price as the Finance Minister.
But in November we got the horrible feeling of Deja Vu that days of terrorism were back again with bombs exploding in most parts of the country. They were Kitchen Bombs — gas cylinders in kitchens exploding injuring innocent housewives and even house-husbands blowing up their kitchens into smithereens.
Pundits, scientists, and experts from universities, research institutes, academia and media pundits all gave their opinions freely .The Rajapaksa Government put together their team of experts. The consensus on exploding Kitchen Bombs appears to be that the mixture of ‘natural gases’ in the cylinders in the exploding ones is not the same as what it is supposed to be. The bigger cylinders, some pundtis said, were of lighter weight than smaller cylinders.
To this writer, it appeared to be a question of weight and volume – density, the discovery of Archimedes of yore in his bathtub that made him sprint out in his bath tub and run around the streets of Athens shouting Eureka (I have got it). Experts do appear to be convinced about the question of the composition of the mixture of gasses in the exploding cylinders not being in correct proportions.
While the hunt will be on for the culprits behind the explosions — whatever the cause may be — it makes us wonder, considering the state the country is in, should the nation’s efforts be directed to find out the reasons for the origin of the debacle or immediately stop the rot.
It brings to our mind the lines of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Charge of the light brigade:
Theirs not to reason why
Theirs but to do and die
But this is the Age of Reason. And Sri Lanka we think is not still in the Valley of Death that the Light Brigade found itself in. We have to find reasons for the descent of paradise into a madhouse.
A conspiracy theorist whispers that a secret organisation U-NO-WHO — United Nations Organisation for World Hotheads Offensives — has detected an anti-intelligence virus that destroys that rational capacity for human intelligence has been detected in South Asia and is affecting particularly political leaderships of nations in the region.
The most recent case cited is in India where the ruling BJP government locked horns with farmers attempting to control all Indian agricultural activity with a set of new laws. The farmers declared that they would oppose ‘root and branch’ of all such legislation and the dispute lasted for over one year with farmers blocking main highways and even those entering New Delhi. Stubborn farmers camped out in the open though 700 of them died in the process.
Two weeks ago, the omniscient pundit Narendra Modi announced out of the blue that all the proposed laws will be withdrawn. The reason is not agricultural but political: he wants to win main state legislative elections which are to be held shortly and support of farmers is crucial for that.
Sane political observers say the thinking of the BJP leadership had been attacked by a deadly virus paralysing their intelligence and giving hope that the farmers who will decide the fate of elections will vote for Modi’s party. On the other hand the virus would have to attack the intelligence of the millions of Intelligence of farmers to back the Modi government that attempted to grind them into dust.
Many other instances such as demonetisation of Indian currency, beef eating issue, attempting to be a world power while trying to build toilets for the toiletless Indian community and also attempting the conquest of space by planning to send missions to the Moon, Mars and other planets, are cited for the anti-intelligence impact off the virus which has been identified as Antiintel Indica 2000.
U-NO-WHO sources have told our source that this virus is a variant of the virus anti-NUT Lanka which had originated in Lanka and spread to the Indian sub-continent. Evidence of the origin of the anti-Intelligence virus’s origin in Lanka has been noted when the Central Bank Governor cleaned out his Bank and the president sacked his prime minister and appointed the Leader of the Opposition as Prime Minister.
Anti-NUT virus in Lanka is mutating rapidly as evident from the many crucial decisions taken locally that defies logic and reason.
(The writer is a former editor of
The Sunday Island, The Island and
consultant editor of the Sunday Leader)