| The Rajpal Abeynayake Column By Rajpal Abeynayake | ||||||
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But this latest punctuation mark in Sri Lanka's story of conflict politics ("another jolt in Sri Lanka's peace process'' screamed one headline) should not be invested with too much significance. When Prabhakaran moves, the pundits in the South seem to go off balance. But what he really does is well worth waiting and seeing. Until then, the conflict will meander in its usual scurvy way and give cause for more headline copy, as it has always done. Newspaper Editors were never more blessed. But in the meantime history happens, and how much of it is chronicled and how much of it goes un-recorded is worth some serious contemplation. Political developments on the way no doubt will be recorded with almost hyperbolic devotion to facts and their minutiae. The rest of it will be dismissed as quotidian and not rigorous enough for academic scrutiny -- but that's the history that will eventually tell how we live in the future and how the next generation lives, and it has more than a passing interest for people who do not necessarily live by the guideposts of passing politics. A friend was recently ruminating about how Wellawatte came to be a Tamil enclave. Even that description "Tamil enclave'' may be provocative and politically loaded, but it's worth the provocation, because this article seeks to at least provoke the chroniclers of the passing scene to see the significance of the passing 'ephemeral" reality. However, what was meant to be an exclusive Tamil residential area in Ratmalana is now almost exclusively Sinhala, after the Tamils gave up their idea of a middle-class Tamil residential estate in the appropriately named Hindu College Square in the aftermath of the 59 riots. But to a Wellawatte that's now pockmarked with cyber cafes, and Internet phones for easy access to the diaspora, the idea of a planned Tamil residential estate in Colombo is not quite conceivable. Wellawatte is the last buffer between the disapora and the Wanni. Though Tamils live outside of Wellawatte in Colombo suburbia, Tamil culture in Colombo today is defined in this small metropolis where Tamil youth get cyber-connected -- and live the life of their brethren in the diaspora at least in a vicarious way. For the Sinhala youth, life seems to be even less anchored. They have no diaspora as such to relate to, and all their cyber dreams are connected (via Tamil owned internet cafes of course) to Western cultural icons and the common totems of success by Colombo's upwardly mobile standards -- such as computer degrees abroad, and for the "lucky ones'' a chance to migrate. Some migrants may be coming back - - disillusioned, alienated, and feeling rejected by Western society, but those realities are forgotten by a sub-culture that has essentially no anchor and very little sense of historical perspective. This may be seen as too harsh an assessment -- to see the majority youth in the majority community as being rootless and drifting, an idea not so becoming in the eyes of those who have always held that the Sinhala have it good in a Sinhala majority nation. But recent history has not provided any kind of sustenance to that kind of idea, especially to the urban youth for whom names such as Colvin R. de Silva for instance are from the history that even their fathers have discarded, and even D. S. Senanayake evokes images of a jolly old gentleman who was all about top hat tail coat and a quaint proclivity for hubris. To think aloud again and repeat myself, that may be seen as a harsh assessment. But the fact is that there is no Gandhi or Nehru, no leader who had expounded a national credo that's enduring -- in short, no hero, no icon, no anchor. In the midst of it all, there has been a war (insurrection?) and there exists the overwhelming feeling that the generation of our fathers somehow made such a soup of their situation that it's impossible now for us not to stew in their juices. Particularly for the urban dreamer (you can call him the urban flotsam and jetsam if you insist on being unkind) there isn't much in contemporary history that provides by way of identity. It is difficult to identify with leaders who have failed consistently to inspire, as opposed to, say, leaders such as Nehru and Gandhi in India who have articulated a substantial national vision. All this is not to say that India is a paradise for the hopeful. It will be futile to ruminate on those lines, for instance, while waiting, say, for a bus in Bombay not knowing when the next bomb will go off. But to put
our own condition in context, it is useful to keep India as a reference
point. India was the 'functioning anarchy'' whereas Sri Lanka was
the model colony that was full of promise - - and as if that story
has not been told a hundred times already --- it is the place that
Lee Kwan Yew wanted to model his Singapore after. This is true whether it is N. M. Perera that's being written about, or Jayewardene or any of the Bandaranaikes. So, anchorless we remain - - and yet, while seemingly rootless urban youth worship at the altar of the cyber-god, things change in and around our own quotidian lies. People in curious ways realise the futility of living in residential estates. They now strive to live in cyber -space, but even as they are doing that there is more authentic ulundu wadai and masala dosai to be had in Colombo today than there used to be 20 years ago. As for the young
among the majority community, they have got used to a trial and
error kind of leadership, which even at the best of times is only
called 'resilient. This article undoubtedly has been a meandering essay. It was not planned that way -- but somehow, it befits the kind of milieu it seeks to describe -- one that moves on, haltingly almost, one day at a time. And moves on despite itself… |
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Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
Residential
estate to cyber-space - a contemporary chronicle?
