Un-cluttering is an art

This is the fiftieth and final piece of a series  for the JEANS section of 'The Nation'.  The series is for children. Adults, consider yourselves warned...you might re-discover a child within you!  Scroll down for other articles in this series. 

There’s a story about carving an elephant out of a block of wood.  The craftsman was asked how he did it.  He simply said, ‘I took a block of wood and took away everything in it that was not elephant’.  That’s the beauty of art.  It’s also the beauty of life.  It is not always about what you add but what you take away or, put another way, what you leave behind.

Most of the time we want to start from scratch.  We want a blank sheet of paper.  On this paper we will write or we wish we could write amazing stories or poetry.  On a blank canvas we want to draw pictures that will make people gasp in wonderment.  But when we are very young our art teachers tell us that one doesn’t really need a blank sheet to create something beautiful.

It’s an old exercise that we have all done at some point in our lives: take a piece of paper, color every inch of it using crayons.  Don’t think about doing it in some order, but randomly color.  Now you see not a blank sheet but one with all kinds of colors in a random mix and without any specific form.  This is when you start working.

All you need is a sharp object.  A coin would do.  So could the nib of a pen that has run out of ink.  Whatever can cause a scratch, that’s the basic idea.  Instead of using color to create a form, we take out color to make outlines.      

And it’s not just about a piece of paper, a stack of crayons and a paperclip.  Just empty a box of matches on a table.  Now pick up some so that what remains forms a picture.  Think of things that bother you.  Now remove from all those thoughts things like anger, regret, disappointment and envy.  What’s left is probably something that’s calm and beautiful. 

There are two ways of doing things.  You can pour beauty, love, friendship and understanding into someone’s life.  You can always take away his or her hurt.  You can paint beautiful flowers on a wall.  You can also pick up a crumpled piece of paper that someone tossed on to a pavement.  Either way you leave things better than you found them.

Here’s something that the grandparents did to the wall of a room.  Their first grandchild’s bed had been against this wall.  She had doodled all over that wall.  When the little girl’s parents built a house of their own and moved out, the grandparents decided to repaint that room.  But first, they pasted a large rectangular piece of paper in the middle of the wall, about a food above the level of the bed. Then the wall was painted.  White.  Then they removed that piece of paper.  What was left was a beautiful painting that would always remind them of the first color-strokes of their first granddaughter. 

There are many ways to un-clutter the world around us.  There are many ways to un-clutter our lives.  Sometimes when we remove, we are in fact adding something that makes things better and more beautiful  It’s all about what we remove and how.

Other articles in this series
It begins with the first soiled spoon

You have loads of time, you know

A puddle is a canvas
Venus-Serena tied at love-all
Some jokes are not funny
There's an ant story waiting for you
And you can be a rainbow-maker
Trees are noble teachers
On cloudless nights the moon is a hole
Gulp down those hurtful words
A question is a boat, a jet, a space-ship or a heart
Quotes can take you far but they can also stop you
No one is weak
The fisherman in a black shirt
Let's celebrate Nelli and Nelliness
Ready for time travel?
Puddles look back at you, did you know?
What's the view like from your door?
The world is rearranged by silhouettes
How would you paint the sky?
It is cool to slosh around
You can compose your own music
Pebbles are amazing things
You can fly if you want to
The happiest days of our lives
So what do you want to do with the rain?
Still looking for that secret passage?
Maybe we should respect the dust we walk on
Numbers are beautiful 
There are libraries everywhere 
Collect something crazy
Fragments speak of a thousand stories 
The games you can and cannot play with rice
The magic of the road less-traveled
Have you ever thought of forgiving?
Wallflowers are pretty, aren't they?
What kind of friend do you want to be? 
Noticed the countless butterflies around you?
It's great to chase rainbows
In praise of 'lesser' creatures 
A mango is a book did you know?
Expressions are interesting things
How many pairs of eyes do you need?
So no one likes you?
There is magic in faraway lights
The thambilil-seller of Giriulla
When people won't listen, things will
Lessons of the seven-times table

Read more

Combine the energies, dear rebel

This is the fifty first (and last) in a series of articles on rebels and rebellion written for the FREE section of 'The Nation'. Scroll to the end for other articles in this series.  'FREE' is dedicated to youth and youthfulness.

You hear this a lot in cricket commentaries.  It was Michael Holding who used the term most frequently.  He would say, if a batting side was not doing enough in the middle in an ODI, ‘someone has to come to the party’.  Sometimes, someone does.  A game-changer.  

The problem is that you can’t really count on ‘someone’ doing the honors in the case of a rebellion.  Sure, there are match-winners like Muttiah Muralitharan, but by and large battles are rarely won singlehandedly.  

There are individuals with that extra something by way of endowments. There are sharp-shooters, people with extraordinary reserves of determination and such.  They do count.  They can make a difference.  On the other hand, expecting the ‘exceptional’ to get you out of a hole or deliver victory indicate bad and incomplete preparation.  

It’s like putting all your eggs in a single basket.  If the person carrying it trips, you lose all the eggs.  That can happen.  

Think of the great cricket teams, for example the West Indies in the eighties.  They had a seemingly inexhaustible pool of quicks.  After Andy Roberts there was the foursome quartet Malcolm Marshall, Michael Holding, Colin Croft and Joel Garner.  If one of them was injured there were others like Sylvester Clarke ready to breathe fire.  Later there was Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh.  You could think of the Australian ‘academy’ of great batsman too or India’s spinners in the early 1970s. 

Such resources are luxuries that rebels rarely have.  In any case, if you rely too much on an individual he/she invariably gets overworked and burns out.  Michael Jordan would readily say, for example, that his individual brilliance would not have helped the Chicago Bulls win so many basketball titles if he didn’t have Scottie Pippen and the rest of the support staff including coach Phil Jackson.  

It’s a long journey and one or few people cannot carry the entire army across the finishing line.  Pick the right individual for the specific job by all means, but remember that one individual cannot be employed in multiple operations.  The more efficient way is to look to maximize the output of combined energy.  

If you want another sporting example, think of the ‘rolling maul’ used by the rugby team of Royal College this season.  Sure, it’s one individual that scores the try, but it is the team that gets him to the try line.

Sampath Agalawatte, the captain of Royal’s invincible team of 1984 puts it well: ‘It was all about 14 players working together to make sure that the 15th will score a try.’  It doesn’t always work in reverse.  

Other articles in this series
Think of roots and wings

Crawl into the enemy's brain

T is for Trivial

There are nights in the middle of the day

Don't hold back when you groom

The sun will never set
When the enemy expands consider inflation
When you are the last one standing
Targets visible and targets unidentified
When you have to vote
So when are you planning to graduate?
The belly of the beast is addictive
When you meet pomposity, flip the script
When did you last speak with an old man?
Dear Rebel, please keep it short
Get ready for those setbacks
The rebel must calculate or perish
Are you ready to deceive?
Dear Rebel, 'P' is also for 'Proportion' 
Dear Rebel, have you got the e-factor out of the way?
Have you carefully considered the f-word?
It is so easy to name the enemy, right?
The p-word cuts both ways
Cards get reflected in eyes, did you know?
It's all about timing 
Heroes and heroism are great, but...
Recruiting for a rebellion
The R, L and H of 'Rebellion'
Pack in 'Humor' when you gather rebellion-essentials
When the enemy is your best friend
The MSM Principle of Engagement
Dear Rebel, get some creature-tips!
Dear Rebel, get through your universities first
Read the enemies' Bibles
Poetry, love and revolution
Are you ready to shut down your petrol shed
The details, the details!
Know your comrades
Good to meditate on impermanence.
Time is long, really long
Learn from the termites 
Be warned: the first victory is also the first defeat
Prediction is asking for trouble
Visualize, strategize and innovate
How important is authority?
Don't forget to say 'Hello!'
It's not over until you clean up!
Have you met 'PB' of Alutwela?
Are you sure about those selfies?
Power and principles
'Few does not mean 'weak'

Read more

On the blindness of those who will not see

‘Talk is cheap’ is an ancient expression with multiple versions in multiple literatures. ‘Put your money where your mouth is,’ is an oft-seen line in the USA. The descriptive katen bathala hitavanawa (planting sweet-potato with your mouth) is a Sinhala ‘frequent’. There are other variants on this theme of course. We see it happening all the time in multiple locations including those that are close to us and ones we are resident in. ‘Self’ for example. The expression came to me after reading the following observation.

Three ‘socially sensitive’ students engaged in an impassioned discussion about the sad plight of the homeless: two homeless individuals are within a few feet of them; the individuals remain ‘unseen’. An example of the importance of ‘discussioning’.

My friend Tanya Ekanayaka had made this observation somewhere close to a Tesco supermarket in Edinburgh, Scotland.

‘Importance’, I assume is partly tongue-in-cheek, but it could also indicate the exaggerated and misplaced value that ‘talking’ has acquired (as opposed to ‘doing’).

There is a lot of literature about how scandalous sums of money are spent on talking about poverty, poverty alleviation, etc., in plush convention facilities while children starve a few kilometers away. Homelessness is a buck-making business for some, one observes.

It can’t be that people are stupid. The global (and local) political economy demands the oppressor to act as though he/she has only the interests of the oppressed at heart. In certain situations the oppressor even argues that oppression is actually liberation or liberating.

The oppressor even appropriates the language of the oppressed, especially its emancipatory elements. There are prisons called ‘Liberty’, torture chambers called ‘Justice’ and other hellish places called ‘Freedom’. The architects, movers and shakers of the dominant and destructive paradigm of development talk of ‘sustainability’; tyrants talk of ‘participation’. The ‘doers’ make scandalous amounts of money. The ‘talkers’ don’t get that much, but still make big bucks.

The key difference in the ‘homeless’ observation is that it reveals a malady or let’s say a condition that is far more insidious than that captured by ‘talk is cheap’. A simple extrapolation tells us that talk can be blind, that it can be a convenience indulged in by the blind and perhaps that it has a way of inducing blindness.

The observation, at the ‘talk is cheap’ level reminded me of something that happened in a media institution a few years ago. There was a petition doing the round in the editorial office demanding stern action be taken against a fellow-journalist. That petition was authored by a person who held a grudge against this journalist. The author had considerable ‘political power’ within the institution and apart from two people everyone else signed the petition.

They had no option. One of the drivers is said to have told some of the ‘petitioners’ some time later that they should stop writing about injustice (as they frequently did) because they had all caved in come crunch-time at home.

This can be put down to self-preservation and therefore pardonable. What is harder to forgive is the complete blindness to things under one’s nose even as one writes/talks extensively on under-the-nose things, condemning them, advocating alleviation of relevant anomaly and even agitating on its account.

Theorizing is easy; doing, harder. Neither makes any sense if nothing is done about the blindness. Some say that only those who suffer truly understand the particular suffering. I am told there is a condition called ‘epistemic privilege’, which holds that unprivileged social positions are likely to generate perspectives that are less partial and less distorted. Hence, only gays and lesbians understand gay/lesbian issues, only the minorities truly comprehend the conditions they inhabit, and only the poor understand poverty. A corollary would be that others are naturally blind to these perspectives. In other words, they can’t help it.

Of course none of us can really know everything about someone else, but there are things that are in your face that you really can’t pretend not to see and defend the unseeing by saying ‘I am not that person’. ‘Unseeing’ is an acquired taste, I believe. It is a happy dismissal, a convenient untruth (or ‘de-truththing’) and a neat guilt-ridding device that beautifully complements the comfort zone called theoretical abstraction. Talk is not just cheap, it is fashionable too. There’s something foul smelling in teaching/advocating social justice and looking the other way when one is confronted with injustice. I am not saying one should not pick one’s quarrels or prioritize, but cultivating 360-degree blindness has a way of giving hollowness to words, irrelevance to sermon.

What’s the point in contributing to a fund for people with disabilities if one does not see that the architecture of one’s office is positively unfriendly to such people in terms of access? There must be some ‘bottom-lines’. Here are some suggestions. If you prefer to be blind, then don’t talk. If you want to talk, fine; but then make sure you do some ‘doing’ about it.

Sure, some of the blindness can be acquired involuntarily. But there’s nothing to say that one cannot divest oneself of such myopia and acquire the necessary eyes. Self-inflicted blindness is an insult to things one talks of as though they have been caressed and their contours meticulously mapped. As for the related ‘discussioning’, as Tanya puts it, some would call it ‘bullshitting’. I would not disagree. 

Read more

Reflections on the unp-slfp curse IV [with Sudat Pasqual]

The Nation' started a series on what could be called the curse(s) of the slfp and unp.  Sudat Pasqual reflects on the slfp and the need to put it out of our misery and I pen the notes on the unp.  Sudat's notes are in blue and mine in Green. Note: we've moved pretty fast from query to assertion!

Time to put lower case slfp out of our misery 

What does the slfp bring to the table in terms of policies? Does it offer a clear set of ideas that address pressing issues facing the country like how to tackle post war reconciliation between the 3 main ethnic groups in the country or how to tackle the high rate of unemployment among the youth in Sri Lanka? The most charitable answer to those questions one could give would be to say that the upper case SLFP of the pre-Sirisena/Kumaranatunga II era did address those issues. The truth of the matter is the lower case slfp of Sirisena/Kumaranatungadoes not seem even interested in formulating any national policies of its own. slfp of today is piggy backing on the policies of the UNP or what has been spoon fed to Sirisena/Kumaranatunga duo by whoever is their favourite of the moment. One day it could be a position paper submitted by a think tank and on another day, it could be a whimsical notion forwarded by a leftist hang on from yesteryear.  But mostly slfp has latched on to whatever policy positions fancied by RanilWickramasinghe.  slfp of today is a koha bird when it comes to adapting policy positions. That is to say, like the brood parasitic koha bird that uses the nests of other birds to lay its eggs, present day slfp is a policy parasite that poaches or latches on to the policies of other parties.

The slfp today is sorry excuse for a political party.

Time to put the lower case unp out of our misery

What does the unp bring to the table in terms of policies? Does it offer a clear set of ideas that address pressing issues facing the country like how to tackle post war reconciliation between the 3 main ethnic groups in the country or how to tackle the high rate of unemployment among the youth in Sri Lanka?  If we go by track record dating back to JR’s march, through complicity in the 83 riots, the legitimation of fictional claims via the Indo-Lanka Accord in 1987, the arming of a bunch of communalist terrorists in the late eighties, to the CFA of February 2002 and now the scandalous co-sponsorship of resolution designed to wreck possible resolution and reconciliation, the unp is the pits.  As for the economy, it’s all about copy-pasting World Bank and IMF dictates, vetted of course by USAID.

The unp today is sorry excuse for a political party.

Read more

Pigging out on grubby finger-printing

Someone sent me a wonderful line from Nadine Gordimer recently: ‘The country of the tourist pamphlet always is another country, an embarrassing abstraction of the desirable that, thank God, does not exist on this planet, where there are always ants and bad smells and empty Coca-Cola bottles to keep the grubby fingerprint of reality upon the beautiful.’ This is as robust, as-it-is and unpretentious as it can get when it comes to being honest about a place. It would sober up the most starry-eyed patriot without offending. All quite healthy, I believe.

Let’s forget the tourist pamphlet which is after all just another advertisement; advertisements are not true confessions, we all know that. We can be glad that our country is real, following the Gordimer characterization. Yes, our reality is a fingerprint that contains enough grubbiness to take the gloss off the paradise we tell the world that we are. Of course none of us desire the ants, flies and bad smells, but there is something appealing in the overall imperfection. It is this defective nature of things that spurs all of us to do things; we would die of boredom otherwise.

The notions of the paradisaical tourist pamphlet and reality’s grubby fingerprint lends well to a reading of our political milieu. The tourist pamphlet is of course our much talked about democracy. It is also the comprehensive defeat of the LTTE. It is the fact that despite 500 years of foreign domination, we’ve kept our identity relatively intact. It is also our resilience; our ability to take blows and remain standing (tsunami, floods, droughts, two bloody insurrections and a 30-year war).

The grubby fingerprint pertaining to politics would include the following: the gap between rhetoric and practice, the flaws in the institutional structure which make for power abuse and Treasury theft, a constitution that opens the citizen to all manner of exploitation and humiliation at the hands of the powerful and corruption at all level and the fact that we are yet to resettle all the persons displaced internally courtesy the LTTE. None of these are insufferable.

We know, we live with them and as we do, we still try to wipe away the grubby marks that intrude on the overall structures of democracy.

There are other examples: the fact that there exist among us anti-intellectual frauds deliberately and happily engaging in a project called grubbiness-enhancing; that certain people think that a job is a reward to be enjoyed and not something related to a job-description, a contract and terms therein and a work ethic that weighs on the side of a notion of responsibility rather than right; all this is acceptable grubbiness.

What is important to understand is how grubby is grubby, i.e. beyond which point is grubbiness insufferable. A related question would be, ‘are things as “grubby” as some people make them out to be?’

The truth is Sri Lanka has been trashed way out of proportion both locally and internationally. This is quite ok if trashing was deserved and was done by men and women with integrity. Unfortunately and paradoxically the bad-mouthing has been the vocation (yes!) of people who more than anyone else deserves to be called ‘trash’.

I am thinking of shady characters like Sunanda Deshapriya and his rag-tag team of dollar-hungry social misfits all paid to throw garbage around and manufacture a ‘grubby fingerprint’ that is many times larger than reality. And I am thinking of all those petty thieves and two-bit politicians masquerading as human rights activists and media rights advocates who spared no pains to vilify Sri Lanka in international forums not because of any palpable guilt but that they didn’t like certain faces (e.g. Mahinda Rajapaksa, Sarath Fonseka, Gotabhaya Rajapaksa etc).

Their objective was not social clean-up to acceptable levels of grubbiness mind you. Their project was and is one of obtaining by hook or by crook regime change. Regime change, let me emphasize, not as a necessary instrument to ensure that garbage remains at acceptable levels but to a) to reverse the gains obtained from the comprehensive military defeat of the LTTE, b) put in power a set of traitors who could be counted on to act against the national interest and c) getting revenge from the Government for treating them as the jokers that they are.

We have David Miliband, Bernard Kouchner, Navi Pillai grubbing away with gay abandon with special interest. King Midas’ touch turned all things to gold, legend says. People like Hillary Clinton on the other hand could not help but leave faecal-trace on everything they choose to touch. That’s gross, I know, but there is politics in this business of grubbing beyond reasonable levels. That’s how and why the ‘failed state’ notion was orchestrated. That’s probably why there’s a lot of noise about the EU going to withdraw the GSP Plus concession.

This is not ‘reality-grubbing’ as per the Gordimer observation. This is fantasy-grubbing. We must not forget, however, that at times such defacing exercises have serious consequences; the grubbiness can often stick as per the Goebbelsian approach.

Sure we don’t really need tourist pamphlets and can do with some grubby-fingerprints but only up to a point. Beyond that, Gordimer would understand, we really cannot be expected to twiddle our thumbs and let idiots with nefarious agendas defacate all over us.

Today we do have a ‘real’ country. We also have people trying to over-dose us with reality. That’s a heck load of grubby fingers; some of the ‘ok’ kind and some not. There are too many piggeries. Good to be alert.

First published in the Daily News (October 22, 2009).

Read more

When text plays with the visual: Review of කුරුළු කවි (‘Bird Song’ but perhaps ‘Kurulu’s Verses’) by Kurulu Niskalanka

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words.  The flip is also true.  A single word can a thousand images conjure.  That’s what good writing is all about, especially poetry.  Not all pictures have 1000-word equivalents of course and not all words generate a 1000 images.  But some words do.  For example, love.  There are others: child, childhood, fear, sorrow, absence, yesterday, tomorrow etc.  

A good painting tells us many stories without a single word.  Similarly there’s writing that paint landscapes, feelings and histories among other things.  The two are sometimes merged and sometimes inspire one another.  Poetry after all was inspired by the Sigiriya frescoes and copy is enhanced by image in advertising.  

Now, the technological advancement and cheap internet access, we see a increased merging of word and image with photographs (for example) inspiring poetry and vice versa, with an execution that is made of a blending of the two.  Whereas in an earlier period there would be illustrations decorating texts, both poetry and prose, now a certain complementarity is sought.  We see this in poetry blogs all the time, but this year the mixed-media idea spilled over into print in two collections of poetry in Sinhala, Manjula Wediwardena’s පිටුවහල් පිටු (Exiled Pages) and Kurulu Niskalanka’s කුරුළු කවි (literally ‘Bird Song’ but perhaps ‘Kurulu’s Verses’).  They followed a brave effort in this format by Kumari Kumaragamage (නැසූ කන්වලට or ‘For ears that have not heard’).  

All three are excellently designed books where photograph and verse are both enhanced by the design.  Photoshop and Illustrator yield new dimensions obviously.  These publications are refreshing because a certain monotony has descended on this ‘photo-poetry’ if you will, with both image and text suffering from careless thrusting of one into the other.  And, in a world that has little patience where visual bombardment has dulled the compulsion to read and read carefully and deep, it makes good business sense, as the poet Saumya Sandaruwan Liyanage noted at the launch of Kurulu’s book.  

At the outset, let me state that these are all interesting products and of poetic quality that warrant comment.  At the same time it cannot be said that they outshine the visual-less efforts of other poets who, without image, still paint for the reader physical as well as philosophical landscapes.  One thing is clear, though: this could be where poetry is heading given market realities. 

The design element dominates or rather is made to dominate all else.  Makes sense because it is the eye that is most easily captured.  From the elegant cover with a title that also names author, through a creative and delightful dedication which allowed all friends and admirers to be part of the exercise, to the choice of image and its placement, Kurulu has produced something that will no doubt bring a lot of people to poetry and poets.  That has to be applauded. 

Kurulu perhaps due to his vocational predilections, advertising, knows how to turn a phrase.  He knows brevity.  And he knows the visual.  That’s apparent in the collection.  He is best when he is brief, no pun intended.  

දුක,

දුකට හේතුව,

දුක නැති කිරීමේ මාර්ගය,

මට,

නුඹම වූ විට,

-- දුකින් මිදීම --

ඉතා දුෂ්කරය…

Sorrow,

The cause of sorrow,

The pathway to eliminate sorrow,

when 

for me

this is you,

— escaping sorrow —

is extremely difficult.

This comes with the image of a single Araliya flower, white with yellow streaks.  Drawing as it does from Buddhist philosophy, marrying as it does Buddhist cultural practice, speaking as it does to the entrapment that is love (“A cure did I find for sorrow, in a sorrow without a cure” — Ghalib), the words and the image complement each other.  And yet, even without image the lines work (without line, however, the flower could be read in many different ways).  

Another example demonstrates some of the redundancy one finds in the collection.

ඔයා එනකොට 

'කොළ' පාට පත්තු 

කරන හිටපු හිතේ  

ඔයා ආවම 

මම 

'රතු පාට' පත්තු කලේ 

වෙන කාටවත් 

යන්න එන්න බැරි වෙන්න...

ඒත්  දැන්..

ඔයා ගියාම...

හිතේ 

'කහ' පාට විතරක් 

නිවි නිවී පත්තු වෙනව

එක එකාට ඕන විදියට 

ඇවිල්ල යන්න

When you arrived

the ‘green’ of my mind

turned ‘red’

so no one else

could now come and go

but now that you are gone

there’s only ‘amber’

blinking 

for anyone to come

and go

as they will.

The poem is accompanied by a photograph of a traffic light.  The first thing that comes to mind is not the traffic light but the question ‘why a traffic light?’ when it is a metaphor that is so beautifully embedded in the poem.  

Here’s another one like that:

පෝය 

හඳට Full Day! 

අපිට  Holiday!

[for the moon, a full day/for us a holiday]

Pithy.  The image of the full moon, beautiful though it is, is unnecessary.  The same could be said of his play with the suits of a deck of cards, unfortunately untranslatable for the twists of meaning in their Sinhala versions.  

ඔයාට අනුව 

විරහව තුනී කරන 

හොඳම මග 

කඳුල...

මට අනුව...

කවි...!

ඔයාගේ කඳුළු 

දැන් වේලිලා...

එත් මගේ කවි…!

Nothing diminishes sorrow

like a tear

you say…

I say

verse…!

Your tears 

now are dry

but

my poetry…!

This too does not need image, it is vivid enough.  And powerful.

The poet knows words.  He is sensitive.  He is excellent in description and in delving into the human condition.  He comes up with nuances that prompt meditation.  Sometimes he gets carried away, it seems, with the narration and becomes a slave of his chosen format, both poetic and visual.  For example, in the ‘casting’ of ‘you’ and ‘I’ as flower and rock respectively in a theatrical metaphor Kurulu offers a beautiful rendering of the perennial theme of unrequited love, but lyrical though he is, there is little poetic value apart from structure obtained by the ‘Enter’ key.  

However, one detects a certain easy rhythm which Kurulu might consider drawing from more extensively in his future poetic endeavors.  

පොඩි එකා ඇකයේ තියන් සිතුවම් එකින් එක ගොඩ ගසා 

හිතට නැගෙනා කඳුළු තම කුස ගින්නේ පදමට ගෙන අනා 

හීන කලවම් කරපු සිත්තම් පෙලින් පෙළ එක එක තබා 

කලා බවනෙක ඉදිරිපිට හිඳ හෙලයි සුසුමන් සිත්තරා 

කලාතුරකින් ලඟින් යන එන පෙම්වතෙක් පෙම්වති නිසා 

මිල ගණන් අසමින් සිනාසෙයි පෙම්වතිය සනසම් කියා 

ඉදිරි පිට ඇති ජෝන් සිල්වගෙ නිහඬ ගල් පිළිමය විනා 

සිහින හඳුනන කිසිවෙකුත් නැත නිතර මෙතනින් යන එනා    

The beat resembles those verses in the Guttila Kaavya that describe the effect of the music on the audience.  The lyricism is particularly strong here.  The story is of the nameless artists who ‘set up shop’ near the Vihara Maha Devi Park and notes their trials and aspirations. Poignant are the last two lines: 

‘No one recognize dreams among those who come and go

no one apart from the silent statue of John Silva’

Overall, Kurulu Niskalanka demonstrates a rare sensitivity to the social, cultural, political and even philosophical world around him.  The human condition prompts him to write in particular ways.  He delves deep and with a lot of ease offers us whatever he has excavated.  The images do not distract as some images in photo-poetry does, but neither do they always offer an ‘enhanced’ reading experience.  

Perhaps I am harsh right now simply because I am in the middle of reading Mahinda Prasad Masimbula’s new novel ‘Manikkaavatha’.  No images. Just words.  But how wonderfully visual!  Kurulu Niskalanka has a way with words.  He may think that they read better when they come with pictures and he may be right — his readers will judge — but most of these poems do not need such visual props for they are visual enough.  Poetry, after all is about economy and suggestion and not about reiteration.  He has consciously used the word ‘කවි’ (verse) in the title.  That must mean something.  In any event, he, along with Manjula and Kumari, has invited discussion on this format.  It should be interesting.

Read more