Columns

Asoka Ranwala

After Cyclone Ditwah had left these island shores to a visible sight of great relief that the worst was over and the enormous task of rebuilding a new Sri Lanka could begin, a myriad more storms, not from the skies but from an earthly political realm, awaited to break at the government’s door in a catastrophic deluge to wash away the thousand and one hopes and promises the JVP gave to ride the wave to power.

The first storm to lash the JVP’s Pelawatte Headquarters is its dogged insistence on being unaware that a cyclone was heading toward the island and was expected to make landfall on November 26.

This was despite Athula Karunanayake, the Director General of the Met Department, which comes directly under President Anura Kumara, stating on Ada Derana TV on November 12, of a buildup of cyclonic activity over Lankan skies that may well develop and climax as a full-blown cyclonic storm towards the tail end of the month.

The Sunday Punch stated last week, ‘The Indian Express, a leading newspaper in India, reported on 2nd December that the Indian Met Department had first predicted the formation of a depression as early as November 13 and issued an alert over the possibility of cyclogenesis on November 20. From November 23 onwards, IMD issued three-hourly and six-hourly weather updates of the system, indicating its development around November 26. All the information was shared with Sri Lanka in a routine manner.’

With the world’s media joining the chorus that Lanka received advance notice, it was pathetic to see a senior government minister accusing the opposition of not warning the government of the impending storm and shamelessly telling the media, ‘We will take the opposition to court and charge them with criminal negligence for failing to save lives by warning the government in advance.’

Two weeks after Cyclone Ditwah had passed, they were still claiming that they had been kept totally in the dark until it gatecrashed Pelawatte’s roof and made its takaran fly off.

Two days after the cyclone battered Sri Lanka and destroyed or damaged thousands of homes, the President caused a political row to break out and develop into a major political storm by pulling out, like a Santa come early for Christmas, a motley of relief presents in Parliament for those whose homes had been partially damaged and a million bucks, even if the damage was only to a metal sheet.

Although the news bolstered the spirits of the flood and landslide victims, it dashed their hopes two days later when it was announced that every loss would be assessed according to its value.

DITWAH FLOODS: No clear answers on early warnings

And then comes the case of Ranwala, the highly learned scholar who misled Parliament last December and, like Jack in the box, cannot be stopped from popping out this year as well. He had passed himself off as a man of letters with a doctorate to boot from Japan’s prestigious private Waseda University when he was nothing more than a quack.

His impersonation was so successful that he deceived the Gampaha electorate into voting overwhelmingly for him at last year’s elections. He had deceived the entire lot of JVP members, including the Prime Minister, who had been so impressed with his Waseda doctorate, she had nominated him for the highest post in parliament and had even personally escorted him to the Speaker’s chair and proudly introduced him as Doctor Ranwala.

He was forced to resign from the Speaker’s chair but, surprisingly, not from his parliamentary seat. Had he been forced to resign from Parliament, he would have lost his shield of immunity and would have been liable to have been charged with criminal impersonation with the intention to fraudulently deceive others. Beginner’s luck?

Then comes the sequel to the first episode of the Ranwala saga. He is involved in an accident with an oncoming vehicle carrying a mother, her daughter and her 7-month-old baby. He is not breathalysed at the scene of the accident because, lo and behold, the police find they have run out of breathalysing balloons.

Oh, Lucky Man!

He is taken to a private clinic in Kiribathgoda, from where he is directed to the Ragama hospital. Due to a mounting protest against his presence, he is transferred to the National Hospital. He is admitted for high blood pressure. The police take a breathalyser test more than 14 hours after the accident. But no blood test nor a statement is taken.

The magistrate comes to his hospital bed to grant him bail within 24 hours of his accident. Two women lie on their hospital beds awaiting surgery for broken legs, and the little baby girl of just seven months lies in a Ridgeway ward with a serious head injury with a massive bump at the back of her head and, as the news reports state, vomiting most of the time.

Ranwala’s luck holds steadfast, for when the vehicle report arrives before his medical report arrives from the lab, it shows the car has faulty brakes. He is, it seems, born lucky.

Then in the wake of all these storms comes the shocker. The serious medical storm.

Two people have died in government hospitals after being given inferior drugs from India that, however, met the standards of the Indian Pharmacopoeia, the new medical bible of Lanka, after the Health Ministry disposed of the British Pharmacopoeia early this year, having experienced a revolutionary change of faith.

Coming at the height of a people’s fury and anger against the government for not minimising the damage caused by Cyclone Ditwah by claiming it was not aware of its coming, if the government fails anymore inferior drug deaths, of which two deaths have given advance notice, then next year will be the year of reckoning for the government.

Tavish’s black and white quest to express life on eastern frontTavish Gunasena’s maiden photographic exhibition at Colombo’s Barefoot Art Gallery drew to a successful close after a three-week run last Saturday.He had not followed the catwalk trail to photograph life at its colourful best, nor had he sought recourse to tread the cobbled streets of old Anuradhapura’s glory and fame, nor ventured to capture through his camera lens the towering stupas that adorn the ancient capital’s name.He had, instead, chosen to adorn the walls of Barefoot’s Gallery of Art with a collection of exhibits taken after his first foray to the eastern coast of Arugam Bay as a teenager, a decade or so ago. HIGH NOON: Shawled to bear the heat of the sun Around the age of 16 or so, he had spent the school holidays with his friend Yevin and his two brothers at the ‘Hideout’, the pioneering tourist hotel their grandparents had set up in the early sixties on the Arugam Bay strip, long before Arugam Bay was on the world’s surfing map. It was probably here on the coastal areas of the east that the early promise Tavish had shown of becoming a talented photographer of note received its baptism of faith; and confirmed that his schoolboy interest was no passing fancy but a serious commitment for life, a solemn pledge to the Muse of photography beside the Pierian Spring. Furrowing his photographic path to the shores of Lanka’s eastern coast, where beneath the carefree and bohemian life of travellers as they sunbathe and surf on rising waves, he sought to tell, through his photographic eye, the tale of endless misery, of the toil, the sweat and the pain of fishermen and their families, not in a dazzling array of vibrant colours but in stark black and white. GOD GANAPATHI: Worshipped in a forest abode It is not only the weather-beaten, dried-up, and wrinkled faces of the people of Arugam Bay – victims of a harsh sun risking their lives on a perilous sea – who monotonously hear the roar of the rising wave and its soft splash on some untrodden shore that his camera photographed. It also turned its piercing focus on the bleakness of its surrounding landscape, where withered trees stand alone as silent sentinels of the East. But those who went to view Tavish Gunasena’s debut photography collection at the Barefoot Gallery, expecting to behold photographs bathed in a riot of rainbow hues, may have been somewhat taken aback to find that he had traversed off the beaten east coast track and shot the grief and tears of the hard life the people lead in the dry, rainless scrublands of the East. Where colour would have been only a distraction, black and white brought with greater force the grimness of the East. As Sunday Times feature writer Yomal Senerath-Yapa wrote in his review of Tavish’s monochrome photography exhibition in the paper’s Magazine Section in the Sunday following its opening on 20th November: ‘Beware of expecting beaches, jungle glades and leopards and bears when you walk into Tavish Gunasena’s latest photo exhibition, ‘Scrubland: East Coast Essays’. Here, beauty is not classic; it is subverted purposely. It’s different from the romantic photographs of the Magul Maha Vihara’s ancient statues by the beach, Bambaragastalawa with its reclining colossal cave Buddha in the jungles or the silhouette of a lone leopard in the sand dune beaches at dusk…’ As Barefoot’s exhibition brochure on ‘SCRUBLAND: East Coast Essays’ says of the photographer Tavish Gunasena, ‘His work is centred around humans and their entanglement with their natural, built and virtual environments, with a focus on themes of Sri Lankan heritage and traditions, South Asian identity and social documentary.’ It adds, ‘His work has been published internationally in print and exhibitions. He has exhibited in Dhaka, at the Pathsala Institute in Toronto at Maximum Exposure (part of Contact Festival), twice as part of group shows at Rencontres d’Arles and most recently at Angkor Photo Festival. He was also selected for Pathsala Institute’s yearlong mentorship programme ‘New Waves of Documentary, Practice and Research’ in 2021. Furthermore, if Tavish had shown some inborn talent for photography from an early age, the stone was cut, polished and made refined at Toronto’s Ryerson University in Canada, known as one of the world’s best universities for art photography, photojournalism and cinematography. In 2022, Ryerson underwent a name change and is now known as Toronto Metropolitan University, or simply TMU. When he came to the crossroads to choose a career, he recalled an anecdote told to him a long time ago. Confucius, the ancient philosopher, was once asked by a disciple, ‘Sire, what is the kind of work I should do in my life?’ The sage stared at him for a moment and replied, ‘A kind of work you love to do, and you will never have to work for the rest of your life’. Tavish, it seems, has got the message.