How about a leeeetle bit of integrity, people?

Gamini Gunawardane, Retired Senior DIG, wrote an excellent article in The Island of November 12, 2009: ‘How men of integrity saved Sri Lanka’.  He was paying tribute to all the individuals whose contributions, especially their commitment and integrity, paved the way for the nation’s most glorious post-Independence moment, the historic victory over terrorism that few believed was possible. 

In this excellent exposition of the term ‘integrity’ in terms of this overall effort of utmost national interest, the following paragraph caught my attention and provoked deep reflection. 

“Rather than eulogizing personalities, the purpose, is to illustrate how even a few people could make a huge difference with a modicum of integrity in a fleeting situation despite flourishing corruption, which could produce such astonishing achievements for a nation.’

He hopes that such fleeting moments be more frequent and that there will be more people of such courage.  That’s a wish that many would share, I believe.  We know that there are serious flaws in our institutional arrangement and there’s a woeful lack of integrity all around, not just among politicians and public servants, but in the private sector, the informal sector, religious orders of all faiths and also the general public. 

Last evening I went to see Rajitha Dissanayake’s award-winning play, ‘Veeraya Merila’ (the hero is dead).  Rajitha explores, with characteristic wit, humour and amazing insight, the issue of integrity in the media, its political economy and in the process enumerates the numerous booby traps that make for easy purchase of well-intentioned journalists. 

Having been in this field for almost a decade, I have enough reason to endorse what the late Ajith Samaranayake once said: ‘when you read newspapers you might think journalists are people with a strong sense of justice and that they embody the virtue of integrity, but we who work in newspaper officers know this is not true’.  Rajitha elaborates extremely well and does it with theatrical finesse for the most part.  The fact that he can provoke more than a few laughs indicates that the public is not unaware.  Indeed he has shown a lot of courage in saying out loud that which people in the media industry pretend does not exist or that it is an affliction someone else suffers.  

The truth, however, is that we all have a price.  Some go cheap, some are expensive. Some cannot be purchased and they are killed or die, metaphorically and sometimes even literally.  The truth is that all journalists have to operate within more or less clearly defined frameworks.  The truth is that in most cases, journalists operate at a considerable distance from these limiting lines.  The truth is that in most cases, journalists fight shy of stating bias, trying to show the world that they are ‘neutral’ and somehow ‘objective’, both untenable propositions when you come to think of it.  And sometimes, there is ‘virtue’ in the written word but in life it is absent and this is probably what Ajith alluded to. 

On the other hand, one never gets integrity in a nation-wide sense and even in an individual it is a ‘now and then’ thing, predicated on issue, moment, location etc.  What Gunawardena points out is that this reality does not rule out the intersection of integrities at key moment/situations and that when this happens, it is not an issue of whether there is majority-integrity, so to say, but that there is critical-integrity. The coming together of key personalities with shared vision, commitment and unrelenting purpose can produce wonders and compensates in a way for decades of compromise and servility. 

Integrity, it must be understood, is not something that one calls upon only in terms of crisis, although at such moments its absence or presence will produce tragedy and triumph respectively.  I believe that it is in the ‘micro’ that integrity is possible and also lacking.  I am thinking of trade union action in particular. Someone referring to the current work-to-rule campaign launched by some unions, made this witty observation yesterday: ‘productivity levels might have gone up because it means they are actually working!’ 

What is he saying?  He is saying that in the general we have a labour force that does not do justice to contractual agreement.  This is why the public views unions in unfavourable terms and even curse them for the inconveniences they cause.  On the other hand, this ‘public’ also works.  The public is made of a millions of working people, all with some form of contract with employer.  Do they ask themselves if they have the moral authority to question the absence of a decent work ethic in a striking worker?  Do they possess that modicum of integrity Gunawardena speaks of to have the write to point fingers at those who lack integrity?  Aren’t these questions we need to ask ourselves?  Can those who show a gap between rhetoric and practice find fault with others who are similarly ‘gapped’?

Rajitha’s play reminded me of that telling exchange between Galileo and his student Andrea Sarti in Brecht’s play.  Galileo, having recanted the truths he had discovered under pressure from the Vatican which included the threat of torture, is taunted by his student: ‘unhappy is the land that has no hero’.  Galileo’s reply is a classic: ‘no Andrea, unhappy is that land that needs a hero’. 

The truth is everyone can be a hero, not necessarily in ways that are nationally recognized, but in the everyday.  Having integrity, in these time and circumstances, one can argue therefore is heroic.  There is heroism then in being honest to job contract, in practicing that which one preaches, in making such that one doesn’t find fault with someone for doing or not doing something that one does or does not do as the case may be. 

We have moved from the ‘mega’ to the ‘micro’.  The world has rebelled against ‘big’ and brought it down to size. These then are ‘micro’ days.  We have microfinance as the new mantra of development and poverty alleviation.  There’s talk of ‘micro justice’.  ‘Micro integrity’, then, is perhaps a remedy for the ills of our times. 

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Kumarigama, Ampara: 1988 and 2010

A revisitation

The year was 1988.  September, if I remember right.  I was on a private bus, going from Kandy to Ampara.  Uhana, actually.  Kumarigama to be precise.  One of the villages that sprung up thanks to the Gal Oya Project.  I was with a university batchmate, Premasiri, who was from Kumarigama.  This was ‘LTTE time’.  This was a time of unexpected attacks at night and even during the day.  LTTE ‘freedom fighters’ setting up booby traps, stopping buses, shooting passengers, storming into villages murdering children, pregnant women, the sick and the elderly in cold blood. It was a time of butchery.  

I was at the back of the bus.  We were approaching Arantalawa, where the LTTE had killed some 30 odd Buddhist bikkhus traveling in a bus.  A fellow passenger, a student from the University of Sri Jayawardenapura, seated at the left end of the back seat of the bus, i.e. next to me, told me (in jest): ‘This is a dangerous stretch; the LTTE can come out from the shrub jungles over there (pointing towards the East) and shoot. We are used to it.  We have our palms to protects us (he lifted his left hand, finger outstretched and together, indicating that this was how a bullet that might otherwise hit the head would be stopped).’  I saw the humour but couldn’t really laugh.  Humour. That’s all they had.

That night, seated outside his house, Premasiri told me how the LTTE had attacked a village close to his: ‘They came in the night.  Everyone was asleep.  Before anyone could do anything, they had killed dozens of people.’ 

‘The following night, some young men from the next village retaliated; they stormed into a Tamil village, the closest one, and killed innocent people.  I saw the dead.  The Sinhalese who died and also the Tamils.  They all looked the same. All poor.  The same kind of impoverishment. The same bellies carrying the same amount of rice. Not much.’ 

Today, August 5, 2010, I came down the same road.  There were no jokes about LTTE attacks, stopping bullets like Baron Munchausen.  There were some bunkers here and there, but not every 50 m or so.  There was one check point at Maha Oya.  I remembered a different time.

I remembered getting down from the bus on several occasions, walking through check points. Having bags checked. Having soldiers running their hands all over me. Necessary inconveniences. Happily suffered.  That was a different time, a different country. 

Twenty two years ago, almost, I spent a night in Kumarigama.  I remember thinking that there was no one who could guarantee that there wouldn’t be an LTTE attack that night.  I remember thinking that there was nothing that anyone could do.  Life was a lottery.  It was to become a different kind of lottery not too long afterwards when the JVP and UNP thought it would be fun to see who could wring the necks of the ordinary citizenry more effectively, but that night fear had a name: LTTE. 

Right now, I am in Kumarigama. Same house.  I didn’t come with Premasiri.  Premasiri’s father, one of the first ‘settlers’ is no more.  His brother, Weerasinghe, ‘Loku Aiya’ to all of us, is now the principal of the ‘village school’, Kumarigama Maha Vidyalaya.  His other brothers, Oliver and Kumara are out in the fields, harvesting paddy.  Loku Aiya’s son, Isuru, at the time a mischievous little baby, is now repeating his A/L exam.  He took my 9 year old daughter, along with his 12 year old cousin Samadhi and her brother, 9 year old Nipun to watch their uncles at work.  This is post-LTTE Sri Lanka.  It’s a post-war Sri Lanka. 

I don’t know the name of those villagers who were slaughtered in those terrible days.  If that was alleviating grievance or countering terrorism, I’d much rather live with grievance and terrorism.  I know we are not living in a perfect world, but this imperfection is good.  Premasiri’s mother, M.D. Babynona, now 69, seems not to have aged.  Same affection. Same warmth. Same simple loveliness of being.  There is electricity now.  There’s harvesting.  Life is good. 

I am not living in a Perfect Sri Lanka.  This is however a New Sri Lanka.  In a way a consolation prize and nothing more, yes.  Looked at from another angle, this is good enough, one could say. 

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Thank you Dilshan!

When Tillakeratne Dilshan was conferred the captaincy of the Sri Lankan cricket team, Kumar Sangakkara the outgoing captain said that his successor will probably come up with some surprising decisions and noted that Dilshan had a way of ‘making things happen’.  This is true.  Some of his decisions surprised, yes, and he did make things happen at time.

Dilshan had his work cut out for him.  The poor record he has to show since he took over can certainly be attributed in part to skill-lack in skippering, but one must take into account the fact that he took the job without the two men who were instrumental in Sri Lanka’s success over the past 15 years, Vaas and Murali.  For all the great batsmen that we’ve had, winning text matches involves bowling out the opposition twice.  What Vaas and Murali have done in ODIs and Tests is a major part of our success story.  Dilshan began without both. 

Leadership, however, is about getting the best out of the human resources one has.  For all his enthusiasm and flamboyance, Dilshan cannot be said to have squeezed the best out of his team.  In hindsight it might have been better to appoint Angelo Matthews instead, but for reasons best known to the then selectors, Dilshan was given the job.  Looking back it is easy to say that he was never captaincy material.  Perhaps he himself didn’t know he was not, but he did back himself and did things his way.   It didn’t work and maybe it could never work anyway.  What’s important is that Dilshan took on the challenge.

Dilshan never said ‘no’.  When it was thought he fitted best in the middle order, he went in and did his best. When asked to open, he opened. When asked to keep wickets, he did that.  When asked to bowl, he broke partnerships.  He entertained.  He contributed to the team and the game.  One doesn’t have to elaborate on the ‘Dilscoop’.  He made things happen.  He was not his brilliant best, but he was no more erratic than he was before 2009, his watershed year when he scored 11 international hundred and won the World Twenty20 Player of the Series prize.

Now, as just another team player and unburned of captaincy, we might see him flourish once again.  A Test average of 40.89 (at a 65.94 strike rate) for a player of his caliber is nothing short of wonderful.  With close to 6000 runs in the ODI format at a strike rate of 87.03, the man has a lot of runs still in him, it is clear. 

He didn’t do a great job as captain and that’s not only due to lack of personnel.  He was and is still a great player. Let us thank for taking on a thankless job at a thankless time.  Let us wish him well.

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What kind of hero do you want to be?

There are two kinds of radicals in universities.  Well, to be honest, I can’t speak for today’s undergraduates.  Back then, in the eighties there were two kinds of radicals and I suspect these two categories exist today as well, wearing different clothes, speaking different languages, screaming different slogans etc., but beneath it all, the same two individuals I noticed when I was an undergraduate. 

The first kind was the more numerous and naturally the more visible.  Here’s a profile.  He is easily swayed by rhetoric.  Has very little analytical skills.  Prefers slogans and sloganeering to persuasive and substantiated argument.  When challenged ideologically or on any theoretical point, slips into ‘action’ (over ‘talk’) and readies to employ fist and not intellect.  Loves revolutionary trappings such as Che Guevara t-shirts and other iconography.  Would readily purchase the full works of V.I. Lenin (at rates heavily subsidized by the Soviet Union), set it all out proudly on table or bookshelf but would be hard pressed to quote him in any relevant, context-bound manner. 

These are those who at the time wore red on ‘strike days’, red on days commemorating students who had been killed, red on May Day.  They were the shobana viplavavaadeen or show-off revolutionaries.  To this day I am not sure why they did this; perhaps to feel bigger than they were or maybe a cover for some insecurity.  A lot of them were very poor students, ‘poor’ meaning that they were not very keen on the learning part of university life.  There were very few ‘revolutionaries’ of this kind who were good at sports or excelled in some creative field.  This ‘lack’ didn’t save them when the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya arrested our land.  They were killed. 

Then there were those who deliberately keep to the background, coming out only if and when necessary.  I would call them ‘doers’.  They didn’t talk much and were not interested in the trappings or the show.  This does not mean of course that they were better read than the other type of ‘revolutionary’.  Indeed many of them were as averse to intellectual engagement.  Some had a theory: we’ve talked and talked and talked but never done anything; now it is time to act.  They took refuge in Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: ‘The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.’ They knew enough of Marx, Engels and Lenin to throw quote and book at a heckler, but it was mostly about designing plan and using text to justify act.  They still thought they were revolutionaries. 

Unlike the earlier type, many of those who belonged to this category were highly gifted.  They were very articulate, both in the one-on-one of daily politics and the politics of thundering from stage.  There were many who could write.  Poets. Artists.  They too died. 

    

Together they were no more than a handful of students.  And yet, in the late eighties they decided what would and would not happen in the universities.  They were big on rights and small on responsibility, but tried to convince others that they were being more responsible than anyone else in view of the fact that they were putting their lives on line for country, class and history.  That’s another story altogether and one which will be explored some other time.  

What did the others do?  I am not talking about those who were very serious about politics, i.e. those who were affiliated to other political parties or organizations and subscribed to this or that ‘ism’.  I am talking about the led, the vast majority of students who were held to ransom by both ‘revolutionary’ and ‘reactionary’, who was asked to choose one mad adventurer over another. 

Well, they went along.  When the universities were open, they made up numbers in processions and demonstrations, they carried placards, shouted slogans and put up posters.  When the universities were closed they were pushed by local realities.  This was a time when those born in the sixties were seen as ‘JVPers’ and so they were hounded by the police and paramilitaries.  Some joined the JVP because ‘one had to go stand with someone who was strong’.  Some fled. Some were slow. Some are dead.  

Now, twenty years later, I look back at the various kinds of ‘revolutionaries’ of our ‘political moment’.  Some of the show-offs are dead and I feel sorry for them. They were young and wearing a red shirt is hardly cause for assassination.  The ‘doers’ are dead and that’s even sadder for they had far more commitment, integrity to cause and love for country than the fops and more than their assassins.  There are those who were taken for a ride because they were ignorant or were in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Many died.  I lament. 

But when I look back twenty years and look at who survived and what the survivors did and did not do, I find the greatest contributors were not those who were ‘red’ or ‘revolutionary’.  The self-effacing, politically laidback or disinterested have done far more than the ‘political personalities’.  This utterly colourless creature was the one who did the hard work, at home, village, community, workplace and indeed wherever he/she happened to be. 

It is good to speak and good to speak up, speak out.  It is good to match deed with word, to put your money where your mouth is.  It is good to do.  It is not so good to talk about doing, or planting bathala with the mouth as our villagers put it.  It is best, I think, to do and be done with, without making a song and dance.  That’s radicalism at its best. 

I remember the unnecessarily murdered. I salute the commitment and integrity of those who were powered by a need to inhabit a different time, a different country where the terms of exchange were not as skewed against the poorer classes as they were then.  I bow low before those apolitical ladies and gentlemen who never used the words ‘comrade’, ‘sahodaraya’ or ‘sahodaree’ and was not addressed or referred to in this way, but who did the ‘little little things’ that made a different. 

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A short story about Route 167 and parallel lives

Way back in the seventies, according to P.K.S. Wijeratne, classmate in Grade 8 and 9, there was no school bus plying between Royal College and Kotahena.  Those who went in that direction would have to wait for the Dehiwala-Kotahena bus, Route No. 167.   More than twenty years later, when I was working at the Sunday Island, I would take this same bus, getting in from Town Hall.  Waiting for that bus, sometimes for more than half an hour, I have often told myself that certain things don’t change.  All I remembered about the 167 from that seventies was that there were very few buses and therefore long waits for the commuters.

PKS confirmed all this when I met him five years ago.  This was a few days after I had met him at one of our group-gatherings.  I hadn’t seen him in over twenty years and he was for a few minutes unrecognizable.  He was bearded.  When he spoke, though, his voice, smile and eyes turned him into a 14 year old schoolboy who once whacked several sixers off me in a home-and-home class match.  No one knew he could bat until he came in at the fall of the 5^th or 6^th wicket and took the game away from my team.  He never played leather-ball cricket.  He was a presence in class but not a giant. Not a dwarf either. 

Time takes us in various directions on various vehicles, some of our choosing and some not. His life rolled on those parallel lines made for movement, poetry, romance and of course death. PKS is an engine driver.  No one claims unhappiness in public and he didn’t either.  We all live with the choices we make, the circumstances we create for ourselves or which are created for us and convince ourselves and others that this was how it was all planned.  PKS told me that his father wanted him to work in the public sector and that an opening in the Railways brought him to where he was.  No complaints.  Contentment was written all over his face.  I remember being happy for my friend and I remember this happiness being stained by a tinge of envy. 

PKS remembered old times and recollection made him want to reconnect with people who had gone far away on different wheels, endowed or acquired.  Among them was someone whose life path was invisible.  He is a big name now in the mobile phone service industry.  Let’s call him Nishad Thambimuttu.  Laksiri Chandana Kurukulasuriya, who sat next to PKS in our Grade 8 class and earned his ire once for scribbling the word ‘Caribbean’ (in Sinhala) on PKS’ desk (PKS didn’t know that the word was a proper noun and referred to a region; he thought that ‘Kurukulaya’ had deliberately written filth), used to call him Nishad ‘Bikki’.  This was forced evolution: Thambimuttu to Thambi to Thambikki to Bikki.  I am not sure if it was Kurukulaya’s coinage or something that Buvendra Kumar Ketagoda Gamage (‘Boovalla’) had come up with.

Anyway, PKS wanted to talk to Bikki.  I had his number, but warned that Bikki was a busy man and that on the one occasion when I had called him to seek sponsorship for a chess tournament he had been brusque.  He did remember my name but said, ‘We don’t do indoor sports,’ he said. ‘Why not?’ I asked.   ‘I don’t have to tell you that.’  ‘Oh dear!’ I thought to myself and told him that if there is a policy change to kindly think of chess as a possible beneficiary of his corporate largesse.  I didn’t call him ‘Bikki’.  I told all this to PKS and also mentioned that Bikki was now ‘Perera’. 

A few days later PKS called me.  He was in shock.  He had called ‘Perera’.  This is what he told me (in translation): ‘I didn’t call him to ask any favour. I don’t need any favours.  I called him only because he was the only one in our class who lived in Kotahena.  For two years.  We would sit on our suitcases and wait for the 167 bus. We talked. Everyday.  For two years.  He might have thought I was in need of help or something.  He did not remember me or pretended he did not.  He said “mata mathaka nehe, mata mathaka nehe” and hung up. How could he not remember?’

I didn’t have an answer.  I remember saying that we have not been privy to his life, that he might have his reasons and that in the end these things matter very little.  We laughed about it.  We talked of other things and he insisted that I bring my two little girls for ride in the train so they could enjoy the rare ‘driver’s view’. 

A few days ago I ran into ‘Perera’ at the launch of a new sports television channel.  Someone introduced us (!).  I said ‘we were in the same class.’  ‘Perera’ said ‘Yes I know him’ and turned 180 degrees. He must have had his reasons.  I wondered, driving home that night after the function, about what was important in life and what kind of value one ought to attach to human being and why.  We cannot demand friendship or acquaintance. We cannot request or plead for remembrance.  I won’t pretend that I was affected by what happened, after all it made me remember a lot of things, especially a conversation that had taken place 5 years previously. 

I remembered our school song and a particular line in it: ‘we will learn of books and men and learn to play the game’.  PKS taught me. ‘Perera’ too.  About playing the game.

I don’t know when I’ll see PKS again but one thing is certain.  I am going to take my girls on his train.  I must thank ‘Perera’ for reminding me about that invitation that has gathered a lot of time-dust. 

There are lives that run on parallel lines but they do not forbid togetherness. There are also lives that are about connectivity but are so tragically disparate.  It’s a wonderful world isn’t it?

    

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Matha: a different kind of ‘war story’

Half way during a private screening of Boodee Keerthisena’s ‘Matha’, i.e. during the intermission, someone asked me what I thought about the film.  My necessarily quick response was ‘too much war’.  Perhaps this is because we did indeed have ‘too much war’.  Thirty years is a long time in a man’s life, after all. 

‘Matha’ is not the first ‘war film’ based on events in Sri Lanka.  We’ve had Ashoka Handagama’s ‘Me Mage Sandai’, Prasanna Vithanage’s ‘Purahanda Kaluwara’ and ‘Ira Mediyama’, Vimukthi Jayasundera’s ‘Sulanga Enu Pinisa’, Sudath Mahadivulwewa’s ‘Sudu Kalu Saha Alu’ and a host of other films which drew from or drew in ‘the war’, at times in tasteful and appropriate ways and at times as an add-on that jarred.  That’s how it is, I suppose, when one lives in what appears to be a perpetual war zone, so to speak, and in certain cases when vilifying the state makes for brownie points from high places where white men and women expiate participatory guilt by rewarding those who speak of other horrors in other places, real or imagined, true-dimensioned or exaggerated. 

A single film cannot do a capture-all of any war.  Wars are about death, destruction, displacement and dismemberment. They are about history and narrative, politics and machination, brinkmanship and error.  Through it all there is countless human stories made of tragedy and triumph, solidarity and betrayal, tough choices and tears, loss of childhood and innocence, growing up and growing hard, times of determination, stoicism, pity and pitilessness.  ‘Matha’ speaks to these things but is inevitably incomplete in narrative.  And yet,  ‘Matha’ is different and refreshingly so because it captures a human story or human stories rather against the backdrop of inevitable horrors of war, a ‘backdrop’ which moreover inexorably invades and intertwines with the unfolding of the human story. 

Wars are not happy things and the world can very well do without them.  Now that’s a truism that need no elaboration.  Most of the films mentioned above played on that theme, using the human angle.  Left out of the idealist posturing is the hard and sobering fact that a people don’t always have the luxury of making easy choices.  To put it bluntly, we can opt for no-war (because wars are terrible things) and have a gun-toting maniac walking all over our lives.  You won’t want a thug doing the ‘as I please’ in your house and to your property and what is logical for the individual is not illogical for the collective. 

There were close to 300,000 people held hostage by the LTTE.  The LTTE, in fact, had held the entire country hostage for three decades.  When terrorists held people hostage in a Mumbai, they had to be taken out.  It was not pretty, but had to be done nevertheless.  Same principle.

Saying is easy, doing tough.  It is to the credit of the script-writer, Ariyaratne Athugala, and the Director, Buddhika (Boodee) Keerthisena, that the film captured the toughness not just of executing the twin operation of taking out a terrorist and saving a captured people but the ‘tough’ of being, suffering, getting wounded, dispossession, exploitation of vulnerabilities, loving and caring even as bullets whizzed by, and dying. 

I did get the sense that the script tried to do it all.  Key aspects of the war were woven into the story (the LTTE massacring hundreds of Muslims at worship in Kattankudy, for example), admittedly tastefully, but putting everything in is impossible and selection always raises questions about that which gets left out (inevitably).  Parvathi was not a willing recruit.  She was, unlike her younger brother, did not hold the LTTE in awe.  She had no admiration whatsoever for the Army either.  This cannot be put down to ‘brainwashing’.  When she urges Yoga to cross lines, it is only on account of concerns for the baby in her womb. 

The film accurately portrays the LTTE’s brutality and captures much of that organization’s inhumanity that other film-makers essentially pussy-footed around.  While reiterating that no one can do a capture-all in a single film, one notes that two very important and signature elements of the LTTE have been left out:  goading the wounded and disabled into buses and them blowing them up since the LTTE couldn’t treat them and couldn’t afford to let them leave, and the shelling of a church that housed orphans and hundreds of children in order to ferret them out for recruitment.  A third, that of fathers impregnating their daughters to save them from recruitment, is a film in itself.  

On the other hand, ‘Matha’ leaves out the unnecessary violence unleashed on innocent peoples by the security forces, especially in the first two decades of the war.  These acts helped the LTTE recruit people.  As much as the Tamil people in these areas hated the LTTE or else supported it grudgingly, they had little love for the Army.  When they finally fled into liberated areas, they came with many questions, doubts and a lot of fear.  The question is ‘Why?’ and it hasn’t been adequately addressed.  The humanity of the Sinhala soldier who ultimately steps in to save a Tamil woman he had known in a different time and different context is also real.  The humanity of a Tamil combatant to a Tamil is evident, but I am sure that humanity was not put on hold at all times when Tamil combatant encountered a Sinhala soldier in reduced battlefield circumstances.  I didn’t see that in ‘Matha’.  I am not for a single moment advocating a scripting of artificial ‘balance’, but I did feel a slant that worried. 

At the end of the film I didn’t think ‘too much war’.  I thought ‘as much war as reality warranted or warranted by the needs of portraying reality’.  I took a couple of other thoughts away.  First, that this film, more than any other production that refers to the conflict instilled in me the conviction that we cannot afford go back there again.  Secondly, by laying out the human condition in all its glory and all its frailties, the desperation and the resolve, even in the throes of intense battle, ‘Matha’ told me that we can never conclude ‘all is lost’. 

The last days of the war were not pretty, but neither were the decades that Sri Lanka lived through before it got to that denouement.  It is much prettier now, but there’s nothing to say that ugliness is dead and buried for evermore.  ‘Matha’ to me is a reminder of what can happen and gently speaks about what might prevent it from happening all over again; the tenderness that is never extinguished, the humanity that survives all and has no colour, ethnic identity, language or religion. 

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Are we a terminally ill nation?

There are occasions when those afflicted with terminal diseases (e.g. certain forms of cancer and AIDS) are offered the option of being administered with experimental drugs. The desperate, i.e. those with no other choice, generally agree.  These are in reality clinical trials, typically couched as exercises in the larger interests of humankind.  While there is no doubt a positive aspect to such procedures in the development of cures to debilitating diseases, the seeming generosity tends to be marred by the profit motives of the primary movers.

Dr. Panduka Karunanayaka in an article titled ‘The banal face of medical research’ in these pages, details a ‘chain’ where scientists and professionals engrossed in the tasks they set themselves consciously or unconsciously serve the interests of those who command the chain.  He explains: 

‘A new Science Discourse is brought forth to legitimise the chain in our eyes; it appropriates the language of science, but serves the interests of commerce andfeeds upon our consumerism. We mistake the commodities – which is the form in which knowledge is packaged and delivered to us – for the science.’

In an earlier article, ‘Clinical trials: Cart before horse?’ (The Nation, December 25, 2011), Dr. Karunanayake comments on legislation under consideration with respect to clinical trials.  Many have warned that a bill proposed tolegalise or streamline the legal mechanisms of clinical  trials would reduce Sri Lankan patients to guinea pigs for drug testing.  Critics have pointed out flaws in the make-up of ‘regulatory committees’ and ‘expert panels’ while Dr. Palitha Maheepala, Additional  Secretary to the Health Ministry has claimed that the bill was drafted in consultation with experts and would be made available for public scrutiny.  The Government Medical Officers Association claims to be in the dark. 

Interestingly, the Department of Health and Human Services of the USA had admitted that clinical trials conducted in foreign countries for drugs intended for use in that country had increased by over 2000%over the past 20 years and that 80% of allocations for the registration of new drugs submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration were based on data from clinical trials conducted overseas.
The question arises, ‘why don’t US citizens offer themselves up for clinical trials to develop drugs that in the end are marketed as life-savers for US citizens?’  Since these companies are businesses, the answer must lie in costs and benefits.  Research subjects in countries like Sri Lanka could be ‘cheaper’.  On the other hand, it could be that US citizens are better acquainted with patient rights and reasonable compensationin view of potential risk, all issues that may not be understood or appreciatedby a population to which the language of clinical trials is patently foreign. 
The relevant authorities no doubt have taken into account the rupees and cents (or Dollars and Euros) of the matter, who stands to profit, the benefits that may or may not accrue to Sri Lankan patients and if they do at what cost.  In a world where pharmaceutical companies are known to be aggressive and doctors easily lured by the benefits of the particularities of prescription, however, caution makes a lot of sense.

As important is the fact that there are questions about the integrity, strength and independence of relevant ethics committees in Sri Lanka and their capacity to appraise proposals and monitor trials.  That the Ethics Committee of the Kelaniya Medical Faculty was scandalously dissolved and its replacement hurriedly given the green light to a clinial trial that the previous committee had not approved, suggests that interests other than science and healing are operating behind the scenes. 

Even though death rarely waits on us it is still better in the long run to exercise circumspection when it comes to this kind of legislation.  While the Government has the option of applying the ‘Urgent’ clause and hurry the bill through Parliament, such a move would naturally raise serious questions. Given the far reaching consequences for the ordinary citizens of this country and especially its most vulnerable segments, the more prudent measure would be to open the door to a comprehensive review of the relevant articles by the general public, including the broader intellectual community.  It is advisable that if the Government decides to table the bill, it will not use the minimalist option of a two week period for appraisal and objection subsequent to gazetting. 

It is also advisable that the Government actively encourages and uses its extensive media sway to educate the general public about all aspects pertaining to clinical trials.  This is imperative because an ill-informed or ignorant citizenry would be easy prey for drug companies that disguise profit-motive as scientific need.

The bottom line is that for all ‘globalisation’ we’ve received and suffered from,we are yet to become a ‘terminally ill’ nation. We are nation of human beings and not guinea pigs, let us remind ourselves.

[The Nation editorial of January 22, 2012]

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