Thrift and credit are blue in colour

A few days ago I wrote about village ‘tanks’.  Some call these ‘ponds’. Considering that there are reservoirs of Parakrama Samudra dimensions there is a certain logic in naming most facilities holding water in villages as ‘ponds’.  Peter Wise believes that ‘wewa’ is not about water and that a fixation with dimensionalities can dilute meaning and de-value function.  I agree.

When I wrote about ‘wewas’ it was in a larger context of ‘developmentalism’.  Today I want to be more specific.  The other day I spoke of ‘wewa’ as symbol of thrift and credit.  I fear I did not elaborate enough.

Today whisper the term ‘microfinance’ and you will hear an echo: ‘Grameen’.  To those who are out of the loop ‘Grameen’ is a system pioneered in Bangladesh by Prof. Muhammad Yunus.  It is based on the assumption that people can save.  The model, crudely put, would be about giving small sums of money to poor people. Prof Yunus believed that people can repay manageable amounts and that in time, when they acquire the saving/repaying habit they can handle larger loans.  That’s one model. 

There is nothing ‘Grameen’ about our traditional ‘wewa’.  The focus is self-help.  There’s no dependency on ‘foreign aid’.  The village tank or weva is typically a larger irrigation facility and built through collective effort.  People pour their labour into the ‘earthwork’, construct the sluices, the spill and the canals.  They divide the dam-length by number and extent of cultivation plots downstream and apportion sections for maintenance to each household.  In times of emergency, the entire village gets together to do whatever is necessary to protect the weva.  There are times when flawed construction and/or unexpected volumes of rain cause rupture. Dams break. People weep. Villages are abandoned. Nature reclaims her traditional homelands. 

There are key elements here.  The first is thrift.  Labour is congealed in the construction.  There are no wages paid, not for construction and not for maintenance.  The entire collective, i.e. the village, benefits.  Apart from there being water for cultivation, the weva helps raise the water table. The wells around the wevas get filled.  There’s a swimming pool for the children and for the adults a place to immerse in liquid flavours that take away the day’s weariness.  There is water for the cattle.  There is fish.  There is aesthetic beauty.  The trees are greener. 

Embedded in the weva is the notion of credit.  One borrows water for the fields, and repays by doing everything possible to ensure that there’s water again the next season.  This includes keeping intact the watershed.  Tree is not seen as timber but a necessary player in an ecological system whose health one’s livelihood is inextricably linked to.  Trees are harvested for firewood. That’s dry branches and not mindless chopping. 

We are talking here about micro ecologies.  Microfinance.  Little things.  Disavowal of greed.  The recognition of the greater worth of the collective. 

We’ve done our little experiment with the lies and poisons of the Green Revolution. We’ve tried state-led and growth-led.  We’ve deferred to the private sector.  Failed.  We rubbished cooperatives. We have come a full circle.  We have come to Little Drops of Water. We are at Little Grains of Sand. We are at a gate called ‘Microfinance’. The way I see it, it is a buzz word and nothing else.  A stolen concept, twisted beyond recognition. 

We have spent our bucks and those of our children too, ecologically speaking. We have come to ‘thrift’ the hard way.  We cannot borrow any longer.  Let us save. Ourselves.  It boils down to water.  A weva.  That’s the microfinance, the thrift and credit if you will, that sustained our ancestors and built a civilization that we gave us some bragging rights. 

And if you think we’ve gone past all this, that this is too idealistic and a city man’s romantic flirtation nothing else, here’s a story that might inspire. 

I know of a man called Dissanayaka Mudiyanselage Punchi Banda (‘PB’ to all who knew him) living in a village called Alutwela situated about 6 kilometres off a place called Veherayaya, a bit north of Kuda Oya on the Thanamalvila-Wellawaya road.  PB’s property is swept by dry winds of the South East Dry Zone and also by a coolness that floats down from the central hills and through the waters of the Kuda Oya, the blending of the two producing a distinct ecology where literally anything can be grown.

PB after serving a prison sentence for involvement in the JVP insurrection of 1971 had been given a 2 acre plot in the area.  He was one of some 70 plus beneficiaries. The others had tried, tired of it and left. PB did not.  He found a small weva, repaired it, and started growing vegetables. He has since acquired more land and constructed two more wevas. 

He knows thift, PB does. He knows microfinance. He knows wevas. He knows that it is all blue in colour.

[First published in the Daily News, September 23, 2010]

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Have you ever been tripped by word into silence and forgetting?

Is it true that on certain nights, mountain and ocean exchange places and that in the monumental moving, man often finds man? 

I have thought many times that all the problems of the world can be put down to inappropriate definitions and descriptions.  Labelling has a way of ascribing values and attributes that are either not present or not as pronounced to deserve mention in the terms expressed.  I have thought many times that nothing is more violent than framing.  I think that it is the prerogative of the slothful and cowardly to name things, define them, set out parameters that are supposed to contain and thereby give meaning while at the same time banishing other attributes to keep definition intact, tenable.

A world without lines is hard to imagine.  A world without definition would render conversation impossible because each and every word would have been divested of meaning immediately.  We need description and definition. We need to be able to conjure a mind-image the moment we hear a particular combination of sounds. ‘Tree’ for example, would make us think leaf, trunk, bark, root, branch, flower, fruit, canopy, shade, timber, furniture, money, investment, paper, global warming, climate change, natural disaster, death, destruction, hunger, famine, impoverishment, habitat loss, biodiversity depletion and the immense solitude that is at the core of the human condition.  All these words and terms have meanings.  Each of them can trigger thought-train in innumerable and unpredictable directions and to unforeseen destinations. 

Words didn’t fall from the sky. They were coined.  They contain histories. They are the landmark products of thought processes, the rest-signs of journeys.  They move on, long after we die.  They were something else centuries ago and they will be something else centuries from now as human being twist, turn, defined and redefine as appropriate to moment, place, culture and prerogative(s) at hand. 

Words, we are told, we tell others and we like to think, are about communication; about expressing something to someone or to the world.  They are supposed to be lubricants of sorts that make smoother the commerce that occur among human beings.  They are about making someone understand where one is coming from and where one intends to go so that adjustment, if necessary, can be arranged, so that agreement can be reached. They are there so that when someone says ‘paper’ someone else won’t imagine ‘rock’ and a third person imagine ‘scissor’.  They are about lies too.  Aren’t they?

I am not sure if anyone has ever undertaken a study of words and their (ab)uses, but if I were to hazard a guess I would say that each word that expresses truth, empowers, celebrates, enhances clarity, is also used an equal number of times to lie, deceive, silence, insult, humiliate, compromise, subjugate and impoverish.   I used words, so I know (to a certain degree) their uses and abuses, their shining moments and dull, the embellishing and stripping naked, the truth-value and falsifying power.  I use so many words that I have to confess that each time I finish writing something, I am convinced that I have said nothing.  I wonder, for example, whether I have said what I wanted to say. I wonder if people read what I intend that they read. I wonder if my words have taken my thoughts in directions that I desire them to travel or to places that I would be horrified if they ended up at.  The truth is that I have no control over the cartographying that word-travel could produce once they leave my fingertips, once they heart-exit. 

I am so in awe of words that I find them utterly contemptible.  This is why I like to jumble things up at time.  This is why I wrote that line at the beginning of this essay.  Sometimes I am convinced that this kind of thing happens; sometimes before our very eyes, so apparent that we don’t see it happening. 

Just consider mountain and sea exchanging location.  Consider violin as voice and voice violin; a house as prison and a prison as residence, truth as a lie and falsehood as truth, god as man and man as divinity, the earth as sky and cloud as soil, line as space and space as time and time as line.  It is not too difficult.  A tree is not a tree, didn’t you know?  It is a face.  It is my tomorrow.  My daughter’s yesterday.  Speaking of children, are they really ‘little’?  Isn’t it true that nothing turns an adult back into a child than an infant, that a man learns more from his daughter than his parents, that teachers learn and students teach? 

We are made of the people who have touched our lives.  We are scarred by the scars we inflict. We are beautified by the beauty we’ve welcomed into our lives. We spit on ourselves when we spit on earth, we are nothing when we have everything and are all-powerful when we shut the door on power.

Have you seen sunlight streaming from the moon?  Aren’t fireflies but the coming-to-earth of constellations to dance for awhile?  Aren’t reservoirs made of the tree I spoke of at the beginning of this piece? 

Words are like water.  Cannot be stopped by sword.  Like sorrow. Cannot be drowned by alcohol, which only helps us understand that sorrow obliterates intoxication.  In the end, both word and silence are utterly incompetent in the alleviation of pain.  In the end, we are confronted by mis-naming, deceit, disguise and other things that confuse and cloud, not illuminate and clarify. 

We were not born to be happy, were we?  We get nowhere until we sit under that tree called ‘Me’, bathed in the sunlight called ‘Me’, contemplate a universe called ‘Me’ and recognize in all things ‘Me’. And we become so tender that word and silence blend into tree and shade and colour breaks into melody, texture into fragrance and prerogative into ‘rubbish’ and impossible into possible. 

Too many words here. I shall stop now.  I hope I’ve confused you enough because I am convinced at this point that it might help clarify. Something. Anything. Or even, who knows, everything!

[first published in the 'Daily News' of June 14, 2010

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The play of time and face

I remember reading an interview with a film director.  This must have been about thirty years ago. I can’t remember the name of the director, the reporter or the newspaper. I do remember him being asked, ‘don’t you believe in past, present and future?’  I remember the response: ‘Of course I do, but not necessarily in that order!’ 

Time has fascinated me ever since then, not just in films where there is dream, envisioning, in-the-moment, flashbacks and even other kinds of time-travel that has nothing to do with the fact that we can imagine and remember.  I suppose it is something that fascinates a lot of people; for we all dream and we all have memories. 

There was a time, when I was very young, when I would pick random faces, narrow my eyes and try to imagine how that person would look once they die and their flesh decay, i.e. just bone, without even skin.  I used to see skulls. I used to imagine coffins.  I can’t remember when I moved out of that morbid phase, but something about time and face remained with.  Call it a pastime, a hobby, an eccentricity or an idiosyncrasy, but I like to study faces and wrinkle and unwrinkled them with the touch of the time-axis. 

I remember a poem by Khalil Gibran. Well, a line.  Or, to be more precise, a thought (memory fails): ‘and bring the lamp closer so I can read on your face what my time with you has written.’ 

Faces are pages.  Upon them are stories, written and waiting to be written. Yes, both; the former apparent and the latter expressed in rare languages that do not have a script.  It is fun, really.  You can take for example a middle aged person and trace backwards to youth, adolescence, childhood and infancy.  You could take the other direction: envisage aging, the movement from the decade of innocence to that of confidence, self-doubt, wisdom, infirmity, dependence and senility. 

Look carefully, it’s a tapestry of multiple story-threads. You won’t get it all, but you’ll get some of the pathways from somewhere to where that person is now, or you can engage in a weaving of your own.   

Take a baby and chart life-map, from mother’s breast through school pranks, heart-throbs and heart-burn, anxiety and relief, abandonment and resignation, parenting and slippage, midlife and crisis, the descent to incapacitation, the withering and slowing down, down, down and out.  Take old person and do the reverse. Do the following, for example: 

UN-OCTOGENARIANING

There must be mind-forceps

and heart un-wrinkler

to take out

time’s intricate signature,

line and scar

and other blemishes

one at a time;

an un-suturing

that thereafter hangs

line as encounter,

scar as love-note remnant

and bit by bit

layer after layer

year after year

the lines of wisdom

those of regret

the hurt of the path un-taken

the ungracious dismissal

of decision’s poor givings,

the coarseness of encounter

the tenderness of un-intersecting orbits

or those that were so touch-and-go

they were inevitably petal-made. 

Moment-line, event-line, person-line

thought-line and love-line

the sorrow-cut mad criss-crossing,

take it all away,

extract histories, and

trash in an unrecoverable folder;

wash away wrong-doing and pain

guilt and grievance

desire and defeat

cleanse face of makeup

and foreboding,

roll back, roll back

charted pathways and random stroll;

there’s a little girl

at the end of the day,

kite-made and dolled

line-free and smiling.

Did you see her, did you not?

What’s easier?  The ‘oldering’ or the ‘infanting’?  Is it easier to read and write someone you know or a stranger? Can you do unto yourself what you would do to others, with or without their permission? 

Is it possible to let mind jump around like a kangaroo, from infancy to middle age, middle age wisdom to the sophomoric stage of wrong word at wrong time, back/forward to the first moment of ‘grandparency’, the grimace at being piddled on?  Can one slip easily from diapers and diaper rash to that embarrassment of first incontinence and the gradual acceptance of such drips as life-part?

Do we play with time on face enough? Or are we just too bored and do it too much?  I don’t know. I like faces because I like to read. I like people because they are epics.  I am a keen reader, when I choose to read.

Time is a neat devise.  It tattoos and un-tattoos. Faces. Other things too.

Malinda Seneviratne is a freelance writer who can be reached at malinsene@gmail.com

[First published in the Daily News of November 11, 2010]

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On eggs, tenderly

Life is like an egg. This I read in a one-line intro to a poem written by my father which appeared in a collection called ‘Twenty Five Poems’, published about 35 years ago.  Life is like an egg, according to the proverb he was quoting; if held too tight it would be crushed and if held too loosely, would slip between fingers, fall on the ground and break.  Life, then is made for a delicate handling, between grip and carelessness. 

Twenty five years later, I read the Satipattana Sutra under the guidance of Ven. Athureliye Rathana, and realized that the above proverb captured the essence of the concept of upaadaana (attachment) and relevant commentary.  I was struck by the importance of understanding that ‘grip’ and ‘neglect’ are two sides of the same attachment-coin, that tight embrace and callous disavowal can both birth sorrow.  ‘Caress’ was the operative metaphor that touched my sensibilities during those discussions. 

It is eminently applicable to all things; objects, persons, political preferences, friends, parties, ideas, discussions, love etc.  If we grip anything too hard, it ends up possessing us. We go nuts.  The ‘other side’ is about rejection; throwing everything off the table with a swift, firm sweep of hand.  Bliss results? No.  Just a lot of stuff on the floor to pick up later. 

The point is, it is not a black or white proposition, but a black AND white one where intersection does not necessarily produce a dull, vague and blurring grey but a vantage point that allows us to see colour, colour separation, colour-mix and most importantly beyond colouring. 

We are fragile, imperfect, flawed creatures though, blundering along from one ‘grip’ to another, one ‘rejection’ to another, believing erroneously that we are doing the enlightened thing by rejection.  With passion and with dispassion, with enthusiasm and apathy, bull-headed objection and with meek submission, we perpetuate tyrannies of all kinds, including those which thanks to our fascination with them help lengthen our sansaric journey. 

We are imperfect and perhaps our karmic energies are of volumes and tenor that prohibit meaningful journeys on enlightening pathways.  Perhaps we can only hope to aspire to general comprehension and not vigorous application of principle.  Perhaps we are lazy.  Perhaps we entertain the wrong set of images whenever we consider the relevant philosophical dilemmas.  Perhaps we are waiting until we encounter the pathaagena aapu bodhiya (the tree that we’ve earmarked in the cosmic forest to shade under in anticipation of obtaining map to emancipation) and have forgotten that ‘tree’ is metaphor. 

The truth is that we are called upon to grip, kick aside or caress this or that every moment and most of the time we get agitated about nothing.  We grip tight the things we love (our life, our political projects, our work, our dreams etc) or we boot the things we can’t stand.  The former makes for sore fingers, the latter for sore toes.  And the things we love suffer grip-burn while the things we dislike get covered with foul odours that eventually will return and hover just near your nostrils when the ‘rejected’ comes seeking ‘unwanted embrace’, as is often the case.

Right now, as I write, and in the ‘right-now’ of your reading, someone is desperately trying to cling to an article of faith (let’s say ‘pertaining to constitution’).  Some cling to some articles, others to others.  Some want to flush this article down the tube while some others want to drag it out of the cesspit.  Someone’s getting covered in a lot of gooey stuff. 

Sure, it’s all for the common good, the ‘people’, the majority, as we are told.  We know, however, that no one owes anyone any favours, or, to put more accurately, few would acknowledge that favours are owed.  Someone is gripping an egg.  Another is looking the other way thinking ‘not my business’ even as an eggs slips through his/her fingers, falls and breaks.

Eggs.  That’s the future.  The baby.  I wonder if these agitators (of either sway) are aware.

[first published in the Daily News, September 8, 2010]

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The church is the state

[The sixth of a series of articles on the US Presidential Election 2004, written while in that country as a member of a team of international election monitors]

The constitution of the United States of America says, “We hold these truths as self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights…..”  Bill Scott of Vassalboro, ME reminds the people of Central Maine, in a “reader’s view” carried in the Morning Sentinel, that George Washington himself had said “It is rightly impossible to govern the world without God and the Bible”.  The “world”, mind you, not just the USA.

Bill Scott “invites” all atheists and agnostics to leave the United States.  If Bill Scott does not have any African American or Native American blood in him, then he has a lot of gumption!  The ancestors of those who rule the USA did not come to North America by invitation.  They slaughtered the native populations and called it “Thanksgiving”.  There are other ironies, but let us brush them aside.  Let us focus on church and state, and the constitutional contradictions that are ever present and constantly re-affirmed in real life politics.

The Bill Scotts of this unhappy country know that the church and state are inseparable entities, regardless of what the constitution promises.  They are constantly reminded of this fact as they buy and sell bit and piece of what they believe is “life” using currency notes and coins issued by the United States Federal Reserve System.  “In God we trust” is the operational grist of the mill that facilitates life in these “united” states. 

The founding fathers made a fundamental mistake when they wrote the constitution.  They managed to separate the church and state in a way that did not really separate them, and this is commendable and indeed symptomatic of the schizophrenia that plays havoc with political practice.  Unfortunately, when they wrote “church” into the political practice that flows from constitutional edict, they forgot to state which church they meant.  They forgot to name the god on whom they are so dependent.  And so the history of the United States can be read as a struggle to define for itself a church and a god. 

Unable to reconcile the schisms of Christianity, the sons and daughters of the founding fathers chose the path of least resistance: they chose to focus on one “Other” or another in the hope that this violent encounter would yield as by-product a religious self-image. 

In the beginning, this fledgling “democracy” was shy about naming the project.  So shy were they that even the enemy’s name was coded in secular terms.  And so it was that this country fought wars, hot and cold and sometimes lukewarm, against The Evil Empire, the Drug Empire and Terrorism.  The rhetoric was about establishing democracy, about eradicating the violation of human rights, about making the world drug-free and free of fear, never mind the fact that these initiatives were patently anti-democratic, that they violated human rights and that they were fought by a nation that is the capital of the world’s drug lords. 

Disguises come off sooner or later, pretensions slip, and when you have accumulated enough money and guns it doesn’t really matter that you are a mass of contradiction and that the world sees you naked and ugly.  And so, today, even though it continues to define self by bouncing off a vaguely defined “other”, we see the United States finally dealing with its congenital schizophrenia regarding church and state.  Today the war is fought on behalf of Jesus Christ, flouting the ten commandments and making a mockery of the Sermon on the Mount, in ways that would have made Jesus Christ, re-invented as a blue-eyed, blonde-haired, Caucasian born somewhere in the “Red States” of the United States, refuse resurrection.  Today the enemy is a “heathen”, no different from the “unbelieving heathen” that was converted or slaughtered by Bible-toting missionaries and their gun-toting comrades-in-arms in the first centuries after Columbus mis-navigated his ship and caused so much confusion about Indians, West Indians, East Indians and Red Indians, as so beautifully outlined by Roy Shah in Hyde Park, London a couple of decades ago. 

Today the enemy is clearly identified as a person who does not subscribe to “Christian Values” and/or does not believe in the Christian God. This “enemy” includes not just the Muslim who asserts identity and proclaims faith in the Middle East and elsewhere, the Buddhist in Sri Lanka resisting unethical conversion of well-funded and fanatical god squads, and other pagans who find no reason to concede to Corporate Christianity a monopoly of the divine and/or spiritual, but it includes all Christians who are willing to accept that the divine speaks as many languages as there are peoples, is tolerant and essentially peaceful. 

All these “enemies” are defined as misbegotten doubters who are children of Satan, intent on erasing from human memory the notion of the holy trinity, the grace of the man from Galilee and the word of truth which they refuse to believe is written in a hundred different ways in the bible itself.  Yes, the “enemy” is a mad man and an aberration, a gargoyle and a fiend, a murderer and a thief, a beheader of democracy, a zealot and an escapee from hell who should be driven into his traditional homeland. 

This is the “enemy” of the America that refuses to see in itself the mirror image of the enemy, zealous, trigger-happy and willing to kill more than to die in defending not so much the message of the “savior” as protecting its corporate logo and the violence and misery it spawns globally. 

This is why this “America” references the need to resolve constitutional contradiction through a religious war, a Christian jihad, a 21^st Century Crusade.  And this is why this “America” has declared war on its own people, seeking to establish by force of gun and threat of censure a religious monolith that defines itself by defining away all that is best in the Christian tradition.  This is why the world clasps its hands in prayer and raises its voice in an universal appeal to the differentiated and numerous divine, “God Help America!” 

A man walked up to me this afternoon, a white man, middle-aged, wearing a jacket decorated with Christian iconography.  “Sir, can I talk to you for a minute?” he asks.  “Sure,” I say.  “Could you please spare me a dollar?”  “Of course,” I say, and give him a one dollar bill, stamped of course with the ideological statement, “In God we trust”.  “Thank you, thank you very much.  Please don’t misunderstand.”  I smile and am about to cross the street when he says, “I am not prejudiced or anything, I believe only in love”.  Maybe he felt he needed to say that because I am black, because I would be in appearance and by the law of averages to be a non-believer, and because he felt he needed to apologize for the un-Christian arrogance of Church-is-the-State Americans of the United States.  I don’t know. I liked the “love” note in his statement. 

What happened to that Church, I asked myself.  The church of love, the church of the Sermon on the Mount, the church of the Ten Commandments, the humble church of the prince-of-peace Jesus Christ? I do not know, but if I was pushed for an answer, I would say the following.

That Church exists all over the United States of America, in the “blue” states and the “red”, and even within the hearts and minds of the Bill Scotts, not only in Vassalboro, ME, but in every small town and big city, in urban landscapes and in the rolling rural which surround them.  This Church lies persecuted by modern-day Pharisees clothed in the much polluted clothes of that decent and cool human being called Jesus Christ.  Perhaps, this Church is already crucified.  But then again, if America really wants to give final and absolute legitimacy to the marriage of church and state in a meaningful and liberating way, there is nothing in the script to say that this Church cannot and will not be resurrected. 

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Unasked and answered questions will trip talks

The Tamil National Alliance (TNA) submitted a long list of concerns to the Government.  Most of these relate to day-to-day issues that they believed require urgent attention.  Many of them are legitimate even though not all of them can be said to be relevant only to the Northern and Eastern Provinces or the Tamil people living in these areas.  The TNA, given its ideological position, does have a legitimate case for inserting into the wish-list elements such as police and land powers, and the merging the two provinces. 

The focus has been, understandably, on the last, i.e. the most contentious of issues.  The Government has taken the position that these issues are irrelevant whereas the TNA claims that discussions are not limited to them, that Minister Keheliya Rambukwella’s articulation of the Government’s position is therefore misleading with respect to the status of the ‘talks’. 

Given how crucial these matters are, however, one can conclude that with respect to ‘reconciliation’ and ‘resolution’, there is or will be an impasse.  Part of the reason of course is the crimes of omission and commission in the matter of articulating grievance and aspiration, both by the ‘aggrieved’ and well-intentioned and/or mischievous ‘brokers’, local and international.  Reconciliation for some is about the government submitting to the TNA’s proposals while for others it is about development and dropping all demands for devolution.

Those who were banking on the LTTE’s (largely inflated) might to wrest vast swathes of land and half the coast now talk of Tamils being impatient to move on, ‘moving on’ meaning ‘securing the North and East’.  Forgotten is the fact that a community and a nation that was held hostage began ‘moving on’ the moment the hostage-taker was removed from the equation.  It must nevertheless be acknowledged that aspirations, however outrageous and impractical they are, are not easily erased or abandoned.  For that to happen, a true sense of belonging to a nation has to be forged.  ‘Development’ will not do the trick for development is a responsibility on the part of governments and not an exercise in charity. 

We live in times where perception are treated as facts, where myths are clothed as histories and where lines drawn by invaders (the British in this case) for purposes of their convenience have been taken as relevant to communal-based demarcation.  These, as much as real (not imagined) acts of aggression and chauvinism (on the part of all communities), constitute the main stumbling block in the matter of meaningful reconciliation.  It is not only the Tamils who suffered.  One in ten Muslims were rendered homeless during the conflict. Thousands of Sinhalese were killed in LTTE attacks on civilians. They were not combatants nor were they victims of ‘crossfire’. ‘Closure’ is needed by all and truth on all counts, claims included, is a necessary ingredient in ‘moving on’. 

In this regard the questions studiously avoided pertain to history, demography and geography as well as the crucial issue of economic sense in power-devolution.  If historical claims can be substantiated then history has to be factored in when it comes to re-thinking structures of governance, constitutional amendment included.   If this is not possible then other means have to be found to correct citizenship anomalies relating to real grievances and reasonable aspirations of particular communities. 

The TNA must come to terms with the fact that more than half the Tamils in the island live outside the North and East and explain how devolution of power can redress the grievances of such people given the reality that these Tamils are not interested in returning to the so-called ‘traditional homelands’.   That is a question that the Government can ask but has not, so far.  As important is the fact that Tamils do not live in each and every inch of land in the two provinces.  The demographic data pertaining to concentrations must be taken into account. 

The Government can, given numerical strengths and considerations of political expediency, ‘do devolution’ in order to alleviate misplaced wrath (of big-name elements of the international community) and satisfy aspirational articulations of communalist Tamil groups which posit them as non-negotiable, but only at the cost of planting new seeds of chauvinism all around.  It could amount to the making of a blueprint for violence-outbreak that the next generation would have to deal with.  It would not be an exercise in statesmanship. 

In all this, the TNA has a formidable trump: a constitution that is heavily skewed against the citizenry vis-à-vis the politician, especially those in the ruling party.  The TNA can say, for example, ‘even if we were to agree that devolution is not the answer, the current constitutional arrangement remains anti-citizen; Tamils are citizens and therefore are victims of the anomalies that flow from a flawed structure: what is your response?’ 

The TNA can argue further: ‘Tamils are our constituency and if the constitution, even as it diminishes all citizens diminish our constituents then we have a justifiable claim to demand greater powers in areas where Tamils constitute the majority; we don’t have to wait for a resolution that serves the entire country’.  That would contain a communalist element, but to the extent that the TNA has refused to shed its communalism and considering that it represents Tamils in a country where tribalism is not the preserve of Tamils, it would still be a legitimate argument. 

There are questions that need to be asked and answered before moving forward. They are crucial to ‘moving on’.  They are located in the domains of history, geography and demography and are relevant to the discourse of development.  They cannot be dodged forever.    

[this is 'The Nation' editorial of December 11, 2011] 

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There are no tanks, only wevas

Ten years ago, covering an alleged ‘drought’ in the South Eastern Dry Zone for ‘The Island’, I came across a man called Peter Wise, who had spent around 30 years in the region.  All he did, this colourful man told me, was to plant trees and build wevas, ‘not tanks’ (he added).   He insisted that the terms ‘tank’ and ‘reservoir’ are woefully inadequate as equivalents of the Sinhala ‘weva’. 

The weva is made of a dam, is designed to contain water, has a spill and a mechanism to regulate the release of water, i.e. a sluice.  That’s technical.  It is also cultural because even engineering structures have specifically social relevancies.  It is about the purposes of water conservation, the usage patterns and the philosophies that inform the methodologies.  The weva is not an artifact contained by the economic but something that both spills over to cultural domains and is also fed by lifestyles, values and ways of being. 

The ‘weva’ was never a single entity but part of a socio-economic-cultural entirety.  In a purely physical sense, they were always parts of systems, cascade in character.  It’s the last (and indeed the first) word in efficient water management; from the polkatu (coconut-shell) weva to the kulu (winnowing fan) weva to the kuda (small) weva to the maha (large) weva to the samudra (great/oceanic).  It was for irrigation as well as bathing and watering cattle.  It raised water tables and made for wells that continued to have water even during the drought.  It encompassed the waters this side of the diyaketapahana or the marker indicating levels when the weva was full (and thereby the no-go zone so to speak of highland cultivation) as well as the catchment. 

It was built collectively and maintained in the same manner while water-released occurred under the supervision of the wel vidane (superintendent of the tract of land).   It belonged to the village and indeed was the village, with countless villages taking their names from wevas and vice versa, such is the integrity of the two entities.  The well-being of the weva necessitated the protection of the forests that constituted its catchment.  The forests were harvested, true, but not in unsustainable ways.  Dead branches were cut for firewood, those plants that had medicinal value were sought and the relevant parts extracted. There was no abuse. 

All in the past?  All idyllic and not relevant to today?  I am not sure.  Deep down we are a nation of people that value trees, even the most modest of households, whether located in a shanty community or crumbling complex of ‘flats’, you will find a flower plant and most likely a chillie plant and a spinach vine.  

Way back in the year 2001 ‘drought’ was manufactured by an FM station and the South Eastern Dry Zone was literally hit with bottled water to a point where some who had an inside track on the largesse-business distributed bottles of water to guests at the weddings of their children.  I recounted thus:

‘In the midst of political maneuvers, racketeering and the intensification of old rivalries and the opening of new wounds, there are things that stand out, speaking of that which is noble in human beings. In Thanamalvila, some youths did not forget the salient fact that animals too are suffering and that human being need animals for their own survival and sense of ecological balance. These young people had taken barrels out into the jungle and filled the water holes so that the deer, the elephants, the birds and reptiles can slake their thirst. In certain places, people organised themselves to do the sustainable thing-they decided to offer their labour to construct or rehabilitate their village irrigation works.’

I will never forget what Peter said then: ‘Where the state doesn’t do, the people must’  And people, by and large, do.  Still.  And yet, there is always the danger of forgetting, the danger of succumbing to glitter, the dominant paradigms which are made of and for ‘here and now’ but typically vilify heritage and knowledge systems that have stood the test of time while compromising the future beyond the point of resurrection. 

All it takes, though, is to sit by a weva, big or small, sit long enough to watch the synergies between human and natural world, to realize how fragile we really are and how dependent on nature’s gifts.  All it takes is to see how certain natural cataclysms wreck man’s best laid plans to re-learn the humility so necessary for species survival. 

We don’t take enough notice of the weva. It is a civilization-marker, though.  It is who we were and who we are even now. It could very well be the who-we-are-not someday and who knows, that not-being could spell the end of everything that we can be for all time. 

The wars of the twenty first century, they say, will be over water.  It will be about access to waterways.  It will become more political than it is now.  Through it all, ‘weva’ will be more than ‘water’ and more than those who indulge in its bounties. It will be our past and the future that is at stake. 

When dams break, strong men weep. When dams break, villages are abandoned.  It is good to remember that there are many kinds of damns, many wevas.  It is good to know that they are not necessarily made for exhibitions but that their relevance in the final instance depends on they constituting a key element of our beings and the signature of all development thrusts.  That’s what I feel. 

 [Courtesy 'The Nation', December 11, 2011]

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