This was first published 5 years ago and refers to remembering and forgetting LTTE Leader Velupillai Prabhakaran's birthday.
Early last Friday morning I hopped a bus and came to Kandy. Peradeniya, actually. I came for ‘SLAM 2010’ a literary event organized by some enthusiastic, energetic and extremely creative set of young people. I spent two days in and around Peradeniya. Right now as I write it is Saturday night, i.e. the night of the 27th. There a lots of things to write about. Vihanga Perera, one of the live wires behind the event quipped, ‘good for 30 articles, right?’ ‘That would be overkill,’ I texted back. This is not about literature or the interesting proceedings I was privileged to be a part of, though. It is about a single comment made over a cup of tea after everything was over.
Ranjith Wijekoon, teacher, colleague and friend of almost 25
years, asked a question in his inimitable way, i.e. a quaint mix of wit, humour
and political alertness: ‘did you know it was Prabhakaran’s birthday
yesterday?’ I didn’t have to answer, he
read the reply on my face and gave voice to it: ‘you didn’t’.
Time was when the politicians and columnists viewed the 26th
day of November with foreboding, warning the general public to be extra alert,
assuming that the LTTE could very well be planning to give Velupillai
Prabhakaran a fitting birthday present by exploding a bomb in a crowded place
or taking out a high profile target, either on that day or during the week that
followed, dedicated by the terrorist outfit to honour and celebrate the
so-called martyrs.
This year, like last year, there is no Prabhakaran to gift
blood and dismembered flesh as birthday gift. Last year, at least, there was
mention about the man if only to make the point that the war was over,
terrorism roundly defeated and things had never been this good in thirty
years. T.V. Sriram, writing for the PTI
had an article titled ‘No more security alert on Prabhakaran’s birthday in
Lanka’. This year, nothing.
I checked the internet.
I googled, ‘Prabhakaran+birthday+2010’.
That’s how I found Sriram’s note.
Most references were more than two years old. There were two that caught my attention, one
a blogpost by Indi Samajeewa titled ‘Prabhakaran’s Speech (Yawn)’ and another
by P.K. Balachandran titled ‘Prabhakaran on a day-long fast on his
birthday’. The latter was written on the
occasion of Prabhakaran’s fiftieth birthday. There was a third, a note sourced
to the Daily Mirror which had an interesting final para and I will get to that
later.
First Bala’s piece. He
paid reasonable tribute to Prabhakaran’s sense of self-sacrifice, at least
compared to other Tamil leaders. He quotes Prof. Karthigesu Sivathamby, who
praises Prabhakaran and the LTTE to the maximum and who overbalances in the
process of hero-worshipping that he says ‘the Tamils need Prabhakaran more than
Prabhakaran needs the LTTE’. The last
days of the way may have sobered this so-called internationally recognized
Tamil scholar, one notes. Eventually,
Sivathamby said at that time, the LTTE will have to revert from military to the
political and that Prabhakaran would have to be like Arafat. Bala goes on to quote Dayan Jayatilleka to
balance things off, even conferring him the title of spokesperson for the
Sinhalese (strange, given the man’s ideological leanings). That was 2004.
Indi’s views were naturally
more irreverent, sharper and to the point. Worth a long quote: ‘Uncle P has
hung around way too long and totally f****** sucks at his job. I mean, maybe he
was a supercool terrorist once, but that shit is passed and he A) now sucks at
being a terrorist and B) hasn’t improved his peoples lives one bit. He’s like
Arafat or something, some f****** irritating historical footnote that you have
to live with in the present.’
That was in 2008. The man
was still alive. He was strutting around promising death and destruction and
still managing to convince his cheer-leading boys and girls in Colombo and
elsewhere that he was indestructible to the point that those innocents and
not-so-innocents would issue dire warnings to the Government of Sri Lanka about
what and what would and would not happen if this and that were done and that
and this were not.
The third piece
(‘Prabhakaran’s destiny after 54’) was somber.
The author opined, ‘if Prabhakaran was assassinated in Wanni, not only
Tamil Nadu, even the entire Tamil population of the whole world will point an
accusing finger at Delhi’.
Events proved that Bala
picked the wrong people to pluck a quote from.
There were some whimpering noises that came from Tamil Nadu and some whines
from the pro-LTTE Tamil Diaspora in the West but no one pointed fingers at Delhi and a 18 months
after the fact not many seem to have remembered Prabhakaran’s birthday. In the year 2010, ‘footnote’ seems to be what
the man’s got.
He was supposed to be
indestructible. Divinity was conferred upon him by a chauvinistic and ignorant
set of followers. The sun set on that
violent adventure that gifted death and destruction to the Tamil community. The
Sun God, so-called, was ‘mortalized’.
And footnoted.
Birth, decay and
death. Inevitable. Bomb-exploder and newsmaker yesterday,
footnote today and forgotten tomorrow. God
today, gone tomorrow. There’s a lesson
for many therein, I think.
malindasenevi@gmail.com
This was first published in the Daily News, November 30, 2010.
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