On things lost in the matter of winning and losing

History is written by the winners, this is well known.  In other words, chronicling is an exercise that is framed by power realities.  Those who win and those who wield power frequently bend the story in ways that glorify them.  It is the exceptional historian that would paint things in colours closest to the truth and resist embellishment as well as footnoting or even blanking out.  The author of the Mahawansa, or the Great Chronicle, is an exception. 

Today, the business of reporting is exactly that; a business. Those who have power are able to frill as well as ignore and thereby offer versions that appear to be true but in fact are a fair distance from accurate reportage.  

On the other hand, even the most meticulous chronicler tends to conflate nation or collective with personality and regime, with scarce mention of the complexities contained within broad categories.  Wars are won and lost by leaders and nations, not soldiers and populations. 

In Sri Lanka, naturally, it is the political and military leadership that won the major share of accolades for ending a 30 year struggle.  The troops and many who contributed in non-military ways were duly recognized. Some were honoured with word. Some were rewarded materially, with medal, promotion, house and diplomatic position.  In time, these names will fade and only the names of the political and military leadership will be remembered.  Unavoidable.  Few apart from immediate family and other loved one will remember the dead of the defeated, the names of the leaders being the exception. 

There was heroism.  It is however not the preserve of the victor.  There are those who fight valiantly and die or are maimed on all sides of every conflict.  There are courageous people in lost causes too.  History generally tends to un-note them or else frame courage or heroism in political terms, i.e. mentioning the ‘treacherous’ nature of the cause and leadership on behalf of whom that heroism found expression.

It is easy to pin ‘lunatic’ on a suicide bomber, for example.  An individual ready to die for a cause is certainly not ‘normal’ in that your average citizen would just not put his or her hand up to die, even if there was identification with the cause or the objective.  ‘Brainwashed’ is an easy tag too and perhaps not undeserving either.  Still.

When I think that 100,000 people died over the last 30 years, that 60,000 did between 1988 and 1999 and that another 20,000 perished in 1971, I feel we have not won anything but in fact lost too much.  Even if we assume that just one percent of this number (1,800) were endowed with courage, discipline and other skills, that’s a massive blow to the overall human resources of a nation of our size.    

But apart from all this, I am wondering who would ever chronicle the little acts of courage, heroism and humanity that went beyond political and ideological commitment from among those who lost, the vanquished.  I remember that even today, among the most memorable moments of the Olympic Games is the determined run by the Sri Lankan running the marathon, even though he was placed last by several laps.  That was in 1960, the Tokyo Games.  He lost.  Vanquished.  And yet, Ranatunga Karunaranda’s example continues to inspire.  So too the image of Derek Redmond, limping to complete the race after pulling his hamstring in the 400m race in Barcelona. 

We learn not just from the heroics of the winners, but the courage of those who lost.  They all add colour and beauty to the rocky, flawed, tragic and nevertheless remarkable human story, that tapestry we all weave thread into, whether we like it or not. 

I don’t know their identities.  I might never know their stories.  Perhaps all I will have is the fact that they did exist and must have done something that made someone remember with thanksgiving, even if that someone also perished in the losing cause. 

Seven years ago, I asked a question: ‘If the shattered pieces of a human bomb were put together, would we recover a trophy called Triumph or a nondescript shell called Pathos?’

Seven years later, I don’t have a satisfactory answer.  Perhaps I am a fool to ponder over questions such as this.  All I know is that I feel there’s something missing in the story and that knowing might not hurt, but in fact empower and heal.  I am willing to compile, if you are willing to tell.  That’s all I need to say about things lost in the matter of winning and losing, as of now.

Read more

Maybe it is important to listen to some ‘Outspoken English’ now and then

Thirty four years ago I planned with a friend to explore the entire island of Sri Lanka and unearth all archaeological treasures yet to be discovered.  Ruwinda Gunawardena, the last I heard, was playing with something called serial and parallel robots at Rice University, but back then he was determined to explore heritage.  We even mapped out the journey, to be made on mo-peds and over a period of a month, if I remember right. 

This island is larger and holds more secrets, archaeological and otherwise, than we believed back then.  I lost touch with my friend after leaving school and anyway, I think the explore-bug left us not too long after we planned our trip.  I don’t know about Ruwinda, but for reasons of curiosity, politics and philosophy I’ve continued to be fascinated with who we were, perhaps in order to figure out who we are and who we can become. 

I remembered Ruwinda and the trip that got tripped by time, growing up, and other realities that cut down ambition, when my friend Udayasiri Wickramaratne, poet, playwright, novelist and may I say, part-time copywriter, explained what made him produce the highly acclaimed and genre-expanding play, ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’ (A white man addresses you!). 

‘We have shouted against the ‘White man’ for a long, long time, but have achieved little or nothing by this.  Although we complain and vilify, we in fact follow or mimic them in many spheres if not in every sphere.   They lead, we follow.  I am not saying that we should become masters of the world, but I believe we should be able to choose our ways independently without being mere followers.   This we have not achieved by our complaints and screams.  This is why I thought of trying a different way of obtaining mental independence.   In ‘Suddek’, I praise the white man to the maximum in order to unravel every bit of servility in ourselves, revealing the dimensions of our dependence.  I believe this the first step towards true independence or our emancipation. First we have to accept what we are before starting to fight.  This is what I do in ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’.’

‘Suddha’ or ‘white man’ is a catch-all synonym for all things associated with the colonial project and as such glosses over the full range of differentiation of project and implementing creatures, while footnoting or ignoring altogether those elements that not only rebel against project and creature but are victims of the same in different ways.  Udayasiri has a point, though.  His caricaturing is deliberate.  His most recent poster/ad for the performance on August 14^th at the Tower Hall, has the catchy line ‘OUTSPOKEN ENGLISH’.  It is multi-layered in meaning.  There’s the play on the current fascination with ‘Spoken English’, widely exploited by quack English tutors.  There is the hint of the blustering, self-righteous colonial ready to extract and to justify extraction in the name of the ‘White man’s burden’. 

What does in ‘Suddek’ is to use all the anger, all the easy characterizations, all the blame-shifting to get us to question ourselves through the voice that we love to hate and hate to love but nevertheless listen to, that of the colonial, the voice of the oppressor, enslaver etc.  Perhaps that kind of jolt is necessary for all those among us who believe that naming and shaming is enough and are too lazy or ignorant to understand that the oppressor or enemy is not only in some ‘out there’ far away or close, but inside us.  We nurture it.  This is the point that’s made in the story of the ascetic Siddhartha final battle with Mara, who appears not as some terrifying demonic form but as mirror image, a point echoed (and naturally celebrated) by Louis Althusser, the French Marxist, more than 25 centuries later.

If what takes us to embark on a journey to discover the rich heritage as well as tragic history of our past, as collective and as individual, is a ‘sudda’ barking outspoken English, so be it.  What’s important is to understand that take issue as we must against oppressors and oppressions, it is also an integral part of the emancipatory project to recognize and duly expiate those elements within us (in thought, word, action etc)  that are part of that oppression and which therefore help perpetuate it. 

There was a journey pledged to be undertaken thirty four years ago.  A journey of self-discovery.  It was made of mopeds and dreams, naiveté and boyish thirst for adventure.  Thirty four years later, I would not say ‘impossible’.  It is a continuing expedition that any nation seeking to better itself must undertake in one form or another.  Ours has not sidelined it as ‘unimportant’.  And yet, thirty four years later, listening to Udayasiri and having seen ‘Suddek’, the play and heard ‘Outspoken English’ the reality, I am convinced that there’s a here-and-now expedition we can all undertake and must too.

Read more

The British Fall: London (cosmetic) must negotiate with London (real) right now!

There was a Prague Spring and recently an Arab Spring, the terms coined by those who wanted change in the relevant regions that suited particular interests of particular global actors, especially Western capitalist countries.  What should one call the current developments in Britain, then, I wondered. 

The Western media, so ready to use the rag ‘rebel’ on any group, organized or otherwise, rising up against the establishment of unfriendly or less-friendly nations, have opted, understandably for the negative ‘rioters’ in the case of Britain.  The truth is, apart from name and location, the modus operandi, the nature of the violence and the costs are identical.  The summer’s over and ‘spring’ seems too sprightly and flower-filled to use on a landscape marked by fire, broken-class, overturned vehicles and smashed shop interiors.  I know that the British still call it ‘Autumn’, but ‘Fall’ seems to be the appropriate noun. 

As I write Germany, France, Australia and Austria have issued travel advisories to citizens currently in Britain or planning to visit.  David Cameron has issued the all-means-necessary warning.  Plastic bullets will be used to stop the rebels, the authorities have warned.   It’s almost as though London has pinched the political script of dictators around the world it has befriended only to help overthrow after their respective use-by date has passed in favour of a replacement-tyrant. 

Is it wrong to call them ‘rebels’, someone might ask.  Right, because that’s London-speak for those who attack governments, fellow-citizens and shops and in engage in arson and violence if it is all happening in some other country. I am not a British subject.  To me, therefore, following London-speak, they are ‘rebels’.  The second reason is that these rebels are not venting anger without a cause.  There’s chronic unemployment in that country.  There’s been lots of spending cuts.  And it’s not ‘out of the blue’.  There has been sporadic rioting in that country for the past 30 years. 

True, it is not all black and white, but black-white is also part of it.  It can’t be ‘news’ to the BBC that London is a racist city where non-whites have been attacked regularly for decades.  The early eighties saw a ‘high’ of over 5000 attacks on blacks every month on average.  It is also true that certain section of the rebels are targeting facilities owned or run by people they consider to be ‘foreigners’.  There are lots of issues and the BBC and other media outfits operating in that country are glossing over them all. 

BBC might not want us to, but people are taking notes.  Here’s one: ‘Note how they call it 'riots'...maybe it is for regime change?  And where is Channel 4?  Notice that all the footage is from behind the riot polize....the queen's point of view’ .  I know there’s a lot of tongue-in-cheek in it, but the statement issues by the Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson, Ramin Mehmanparast might help some self-righteous politicians in London (and in the BBC and cash-strapped Channel 4) look in the mirror and see ‘Sanctimonious Fraud’.  This is what Mehmanparast said:  The British government should exercise restraint and avoid using violence; instead it should talk to protesters and listen to their requests’.

BBC might tell the world a tall tale.  The rebels won’t buy it and not all the directly affected will either.    It is now clear that London (cosmetic) must come to terms with London (real), that London (pretty-face) must negotiate with London (real-face).  If not, this British Fall will drag and hurt and hurt and hurt and hurt.  Burn, burn and burn.   Shouldn’t, shouldn’t, shouldn’t.   It should all be resolved peacefully.  Amicably. Through negotiation.  Cameron would do well to go for power-sharing with the rebels right now.  Later, might be too late. 

[Courtesy Daily News, August 11, 2011]

Read more

Let sanity prevail in London!

I am deeply traumatized and concerned about the recent outbreak of violence in London.  The news has been hugely sobering.  Although it started with a more or less peaceful protest in Tottenham on Saturday following the fatal shooting by police of 29 year old Mark Duggan in an assassination-style execution with shots to the head, it quickly snowballed or rather fireballed into wanton destruction of public property, looting and arson. 

Rioting has quickly spilled over to other suburbs.  The residents, i.e. those who are not taking part in the violence, are naturally shocked.  ‘It’s like a war zone; I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Ealing resident Chritian Potts said, echoing sentiments those of residents in other townships. 

Several fires had broken out in Croydon, including one at a large sofa factory, spreading to nearby buildings and tam lines.  Police cars were severely damaged in Hackney.  Looters raided a Debenhams store and row of ships in Clamham. A Sony warehouse in Solar Way, Enfield, a shopping centre in Woolwich New Road, a timber yard in Plashet Grove, East Ham and a building on Lavender Hill were all set on fire.  A Tesco store was looted in Bethnal Green.  Cars were set on fire in Lewisham.  A bus and shot were set on fire in Peckham.  Football matches in Charlton and West Ham have been postponed.  Looters attacked shops, smashing windows and stealing items in Birmingham City Centre.  Windows have been smashed in McDonalds and Jessops near Birmingham Cathedral.

When violence spread in this manner and the authorities find it hard to do anything about it, it is perhaps natural for the media to focus on the criminality.  Google ‘London Riots’ right now and click on any link that appears.  Now press Control-F and type ‘Mark Duggan’.  You might get ‘no result’ or else find that the name has slipped into footnote.  What we are seeing is not righteous anger about some individual being killed by overzealous policemen.  That may have been ‘spark’, but the violence and criminality speaks to deep seated discontent and frustration among a significant section of the population. 

Social media, mobile phones and other such devices are being widely used to alert people to places marked for violence.  One would assume this allows the law enforcing authorities to step and take preventive measures, but what has happened is that the mobs have come nevertheless and indeed have prevailed over the police. 

Britain is clearly in trouble.  Sri Lanka is a member of the Commonwealth and as a citizen of Sri Lanka, I sincerely hope that the relevant authorities don’t stop at stopping the wave of rioting but seek to understand its root causes and take corrective measures.  I am indeed relieved that no one has tried to make it out that Islamic extremists had orchestrated it all. I hope sanity continues to prevail on this count.   

Teresa May, the Home Secretary has quite rightly said that the criminals would be brought to justice.  She adds, ‘There is no excuse for violence, looting and thuggery’.  It is hoped that these sentiments are endorsed by her counterpart in the Foreign Office.  Perhaps also, the British media would take a cue and begin to see the startling similarities between what London has seen over the past few days and what many countries have seen and are seeing the British do: violence, theft and thuggery.  There cannot be excuses, Ms. May is absolutely correct. There is no place in the civilized world for what Ms. May calls ‘sheer criminality’ and we heartily agree that those responsible should face the consequences of their actions.


Mrs May condemned the riots as 'sheer criminality' and said those responsible would 'face the consequences of their actions'. I support her without reservation.


Once again, I sincerely hope that normalcy returns to London.  I sincerely hope that sanity prevails.  I call upon all relevant authorities as well as the general citizenry, including those disgruntled sections currently perpetrating these criminal acts, to exercise the utmost calm and patience and resolve all grievances in a dignified and civilized manner.  As a fraternal state in the Commonwealth, Sri Lanka stands firm with Britain on the side of democracy and civilization, or so the relevant authorities in Colombo should state.  I hope the Government of Britain will take all necessary steps to bring to justice Duggan's killers and that if it is felt that local precedures are inadequate, will submit itself to the scrutiny of a team of independent international investigators.


All things considered, all of Britain would I am sure understand that given the ground realities, it is incumbent on countries like Sri Lanka to do the needful in terms of ensuring the safety of Sri Lankans living in Britain. I quote here a 'Travel Advisory' drafted by my friend Vinod Moonesinghe: 

'We advise against all travel to the United Kingdom. Sri Lankan nationals in Britain should leave now by commercial means whilst these are still available. Those who choose to remain in Britain, or to visit against our advice should be aware that it is highly unlikely that the Sri Lanka High Commission would be able to provide a normal consular service in the event of a further breakdown in law and order and increased violent civil disorder. Evacuation options would be limited because of likely communication and travel restrictions. If, despite our clear advice to leave you choose to remain, please make sure you and your family have a valid exit stamp on your travel documents if you need one to leave Britain.

This advice to leave Britain is because of continued violent disturbances in urban centres across the country, including the capital London'.

‘No part of Britain should be considered immune from violence and the potential exists throughout the country for hostile acts.

‘You should be vigilant and take extra care, particularly in and around landmarks and places where large public crowds can gather. Hotels, shops and restaurants used by the international community have been attacked in the past and it is likely that there will be further such attacks.

‘Britain has a high threat of terrorism and specific methods of attack are evolving and increasing in sophistication.

‘We advise against all but essential travel to Birmingham and Liverpool

‘We advise against all travel to areas within Greater London.'

Again, my heart goes out to the whole of Britain, fraternal country in the Commonwealth.  Let there be peace in London.   Let it begin with thee, ye brothers and sisters in Britain.

Read more

The legacies Ranil Wickremesinghe can leave behind

People have their moments.  They have their highs and their lows.  They are cheered and sometimes jeered.  They win some, lose some.  They enjoy themselves at time and are sometimes sad.  There is praise and blame.  That’s the way of the world, the ata lo dahama, or the eight vicissitudal nodes, so to say.  They are all born, they all decay and they all perish, sooner or later. 

They are remembered for a while and duly forgotten. Even if history mentions their name, it hardly describes in minute detail nor captures fully the lives chronicled.  Not even biographies or autobiographies are devoid of slant, omission and frill.  Even memory, in the fullness of youth, recounts only in part.  So what is legacy then, one may ask. 

Well, the incomplete and frail human being, burdened with memory and ego, like to think well of themselves.  The weaker like others to like them, remember them with fondness and appreciation.  I am thinking of a particular individual, Ranil Wickremesinghe.

I don’t know him personally, and am hardly competent to pass judgment on how far he has to go in his sansaric sojourn or, if you prefer, what awaits him in a theistic afterlife, hell, heaven or Purgatory.  I don’t know if he wants to be remembered and if he does how he would want to be marked by history or at least by contemporary Sri Lankan society or the membership and supporters of the political outfit he leads, the United National Party.  I am neither member nor supporter

Years ago, I offered in jest to lead the United National Party.  Considering the track record of that party since, I am convinced that would not have done worse.  I doubt anyone else would have done worse either.  To be fair to Wickremesinghe, I doubt if anyone could have done better either.  Considering all other factors, it is hard to imagine the UNP being anywhere other than in the opposition from 2004 onwards.   True, there was a slight chance in the Presidential Election of 2005 and perhaps a candidate more appealing to the Sinhala and nationalist electorate may have pipped Mahinda Rajapaksa at the post, but that’s all conjecture. 

Politics is not about winning elections alone.  It is about retaining and thereafter expanding support base.  Political leadership is about holding party together in tough times more than during easy days, taking the inevitable losses, not panicking when battered by storms beyond one’s strength and most importantly grooming a successor or being sufficiently aware of one’s mortality to do the needful so that one fine or sad day when leaving cannot be avoided there are shoes for someone to walk in and that the particular someone’s feet have grown in a way that they fit just right. 

Ranil Wickremesinghe was not born to lead.  Even if he was, he became leader of the UNP by default and perhaps (in retrospect) unfortunately before his time.  It was known that his uncle, J.R. Jayewardene was grooming him to take over the party reins at some point.   The uncle couldn’t have known that the more senior contenders, especially Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake would be assassinated not too long after he died.  Perhaps Ranil might have become leader at a point when maturity coincided with seniority had D.B. Wijetunga not thrown in the towel when he did.  We don’t know. 

What we know is that he wasn’t ready.  He wasn’t secure.  He was left hanging the baby of 17 years of high-handed (mis) rule and so on.  He had to pay for others’ sins and of course ones he had backed or at least supported in silence or by refusing to object.  He had to deal with a formidable and for a time charismatic opponent in Chandrika Kumaratunga and a far more astute strategist after her in Mahinda Rajapaksa.  He had to hold the party together and to fend off attacks from within.  He might have done his best, he might have not, we cannot tell. 

It seems quite apparent that Ranil Wickremesinghe will never become President of this country.  It seems clear that the UNP will not win a major election under his watch.  Does this mean he has to pack his bags and leave?  I think not. 

Today, he’s the longest serving Member of Parliament, not having lost his seat since 1977.  That’s experience, whatever his track record in policy-making or policy-objecting has been.  No party leader in his or her right senses would want him completely out of the scene.  He was very young in 1977. There are a few who are older to him in the party, but all things considered he is undoubtedly the senior citizen of the UNP.  He has black marks against his name, but then again who does not?  

There are two options for Ranil Wickremesinghe. He could stand firm, using a parochial and anti-democratic party constitution he has amended to his personal benefit and engender periodic distractions such as leadership crises, entrench mass demoralization and produce further erosion of vote base.  He will leave, sooner or later, and would be remembered as the most ineffective Leader of the Opposition this country has known. 

He can also leave. He would not be leaving the party, but the position.  He would not be leaving at the height of glory, but not at the dull-coloured lowest either, if he makes the correct departure speech.  Ranil Wickremesinghe, if he is the democrat he claims to be, can serve the expansion of democratic space in this country that is burdened with the made-to-make-dictators constitution authored by his uncle by uniting the party, boosting the image of the opposition and indeed making it possible for the opposition to be the best it can be.  Just by stepping aside.  He will be cheered by one and all in the United National Party.  And by those outside it as well, who want a decent opposition, not because they have faith in the UNP but out of conviction that a strong opposition will bring out the best in the Government. 

I am waiting to cheer Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe.  He doesn’t have to indulge me of course.  He could however do it for himself if not for the party.  

[Courtesy Daily News, August 9, 2011]

Read more

Towards a post-complicit moment for those in pre-sleep slumber*

The Sri Lanka Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (SLACLALS) titled their annual conference ‘21^st Century Postcolonial: Issues and challenges in literature and languages’.   Professor Ashley Halpe, delivering the keynote address at the annual gathering of deliberated on the validity of the term ‘post-colonial’. 

This took my mind to a previous such conference where a friend observed that there was never a commonwealth, only a common thief and that talking about it won’t get our loot back.  I ran into him this year too, and he said ‘there never was a commonwealth, there’s only a common welt’.  He related a story about walking into the British Museum and bumping into someone he thought was from Africa who had asked him where he was going. My friend had responded, ‘I am going to take back some of the loot they robbed’.  The man had said it wouldn’t work: ‘they will just rob it back all over again!’ He had added, ‘rob something they can’t rob back!’  My friend had responded, ‘such as?’  The man had said ‘Jesus Christ!’ 

[I am not sure if he meant the blond-haired, blue-eyed appropriate of the bronze-coloured  individual mentioned in the Bible.  I do know that the looters robbed and slaughtered using convenient misquotes from the Bible to justify it all, in accordance with the interpretive authority that sanitized and helped vanquish doubt and remorse; i.e. from the killers, Buddhist and Hindu temple-destroyers, book-burners, rapists and looters.  I doubt if those who did receive Jesus were offered the real version, although some, theoretically speaking, may have outwitted the peddlers of ecclesiastical counterfeit.]

Let me continue, post-parenthetically.

I responded with my common-thief, common-welt, commonwealth story, about how Juliet Coombe had protested against the decision of that museum to do away with free entry for students.  She admitted that the building held loot from other countries such as Sri Lanka, but didn’t tell the audience (who were attending a book launch on the outside, literally and metaphorically, of the Galle Literary Festival earlier this year) if she had demanded that the loot be handed back.  ‘White men don’t kill,’ was the title of an article I wrote recently about the mis-naming or non-naming of Anders Behring Breivik as the terrorist he is (ref the recent attacks in Oslo).  ‘White men don’t rob either,’ my friend observed, in different words.

Liyanage Amarakeerthi, speaking on what he called a postcolonial moment in the modern Sinhala short story, suggested in passing that the ‘Centre’ of colonial is no longer clear.  True, the headquarters of mind-control, resource extraction, subjugation etc. etc. is now all over the place and strangely peopled, even though, as I pointed out, it can be called ‘Rupert Murdoch’ too. 

I don’t know about literature.  Don’t know about political literature that academics talk about.  Common-thief makes sense and common-welt too.  I don’t know about post-isms.  All I know is that I would like some people to wake up, post-sleep. 

I am talking about people pretending to sleep and pretending to sleepwalk.  I am thinking of a man called Alan Keenan, supposedly a senior ‘analyst’ for the ‘International Crisis Group’, who has deliberately lied when referring to the document released by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), Sri Lanka, on the humanitarian operation to liberate the country from the terrorist menace.  Keenan says that the MoD claims that there was absolutely no use of heavy artillery or aerial bombardment, when in fact the claim has been that once all key LTTE heavy weapons were taken out of the equation and no-fire zones demarcated, the military was instructed not to use such weaponry and tactics.  The reason was simple.  It was necessary to save the vast majority of the close to three hundred thousand people that the LTTE had taken hostage.  Keenan needs to sleep for until he does no one will be able to wake him up.  I would like him post-slept, so to speak.

I am thinking also of Elaine Pearson, Deputy Asia Director, Human Rights Watch (HRW) who on June 30, 2011, wrote that the Channel 4 film ‘Killing Fields of Sri Lanka’ adds weight to what she erroneously calls a ‘UN Report’ (i.e. the document submitted by a panel of highly discredited, intellectually dishonest and politically compromised people appointed by the UN Secretary General to advise him about Sri Lanka) and ‘conclusions’  therein that 40,000 civilians were killed in the final stages of the war.  The Channel 4 film and claims therein have been effectively countered by a recently released documentary titled ‘Lies Agreed Upon’.  She needs to sleep, so she can wake up.  I want her post-slept too.

Then there’s a man called Charles Haviland, working for the BBC, whining about a former LTTE cadre complaining that he is finding it difficult to find a job in post-LTTE Sri Lanka, post-rehabilitation.  I hope this person does find a job soon, but doesn’t Haviland have a sense of proportion?  Would he write heart-rending pieces about a rehabilitated Al Qaeda operative finding it hard to get a job, I wonder? Sorry, I forgot, Al Qaeda operatives are not rehabilitated and integrated into society, they are either summarily executed or else subjected to endless torture.  Anyway, Haviland might do well to take a nap, a real one.  I want him post-slept.

Professor Halpe, ended his presentation with a poignant reference to Mozart’s ‘Requiem’.  I didn’t quite catch the entirety of his comment, but I distinctly heard him mention the term ‘liberation from our complicities’. 

We know that those who pretend to sleep cannot be woken up.  They are essentially comfy in their complicities.  Now were they fall asleep by accident, then there is possibility of lie-rupture; a wake-up to a post-complicit reality, if you will. 

*See also, 'HRW and Brad Adams need to get some sleep': http://malindawords.blogspot.com/2011/08/hrw-and-brad-adams-need-to-get-some.html 

Read more