Break chain, make necklace

Cover page of a collection of essays on Gamini Haththotuwegama, edited by Kanchuka Dharmasiri

December 1987 was a time when the University of Peradeniya was, contrary to the stone-etched hope of Ivor Jennings, ‘more closed than usual’ and even when open was marked by class boycotts.  I remember walking up to the WUS Canteen from the rugger grounds and finding a bunch of my friends taking part in a drama workshop.  I recognized Gamini Haththotuwegama, GK to some, Gamini to others, Hatha to still others and ‘Haththa’ to us.  ‘Haththa’ was my parents’ contemporary at Peradeniya and was therefore someone I had known from the time I was very small.  I joined.

At some point during a break in rehearsals, Haththa related a story.  On March 16, 1978, one Piyadasa (later appointed as a Director of the Hardware Corporation by Cyril Matthew) led the gang who were sent to tame the anti-UNP union at Kelaniya, supported by JSS members of the Tyre Corporation.  A lot of blood was spilled. A thug named Christopher Hyacinth Jayatilleke was literally stoned to death by the students after the student body saw some union members bringing out from the ‘battleground’ a much loved leader, blood pouring from his head.  Haththa had been a witness.

That workshop yielded a collage-production, aptly called ‘Sarasavi Kurutu Gee’ or ‘Campus Graffiti’, played just once between showers on the wet ‘stage’ of the Sarachchandra ‘Wala’.  It was a snapshot album of university life, academic issues and student politics, held together tenuously and deliberately so, by reference to the political turmoil that not too long after bled to what came to be known as the Bheeshanaya. 

One of those ‘snapshots’ was of a student held in a dark room for so long that he loses his eyesight.  There is an album-flip and the next scene is of the student, dead, being carried on the shoulders of friends.  The university system closed down a few months later.  We couldn’t carry all our dead.  We couldn’t even bury them.  They were slaughtered in their thousands, tortured and burnt on tyres, sent down waterways or just left to rot on roadsides.  Among the 60,000 ‘disappeared’ in those brutal 2 years was a member of the troupe, Atapattu, a first year medical student. 

Looking back that ‘snippet’ was prophetic, even though it did not require a prophet to predict what was to unfold.  Looking back, 25 years later almost and almost 3 years after Haththa passed on, I realize that he had an acute sense of the political moment; he knew what needed to be communicated. 

Haththa was an exceptional observer.  He had a memory for incidents that had dramatic potential, however trivial they may have been at the time.   Almost every little thing he wove into the many stories he developed with his players contained real life play-outs he had observed.  He would regale us with such anecdotes all the time and not really being a student of theatre it took me years to understand that there was no magic to the genre called street theatre, that ancient tradition which 

Haththa rebirthed in 20^th Century Sri Lanka.  All we needed to learn was that theatre is not recounting of life but life itself, a device made for communication as well as self-clarification, to teach as well as learn, to object and assert, to hold ground and recover lost territories of truth.  There was, after all, as much dramatic-nuance in the indelible image of Haththa going on his knees on that slippery ‘Wala’ and worshipping an obdurate and appreciative audience as anything in the entire script.  

His was not the only street theatre group in the country, but every outfit that followed carried his signature.  The exercises, wit, costumes, songs, props, themes and even (or should I say ‘especially’) the audacity evident in street theatre productions contain a strain of unspoken homage to this man. 

He was a scholar when he wanted to be.  He was a lazy scholar.  He took refuge in a defensible argument: ‘there’s no longer anyone competent around to supervise my thesis.’  He laughed then, knowing that he wasn’t fooling anyone.  He laughed a lot at himself and in doing so taught us how important it is to laugh at ourselves in order to be more effective in fighting the fights we believe we cannot shy away from.  

He taught more by engaging in theatre and through his ways of being than he did in classroom or academic paper.  That said, ‘Streets Ahead with Haththotuwegama’, a selection of his seminal articles on theatre and cinema in a single volume, due to be launched on July 26, 2012 at ‘Sudarshi’, promises to be a treat for all those associated with theatre and of course those who are interested in all kinds of histories, not just particular genres of theatre but of people and processes, challenges and resistance, being pinned against a wall and fighting back.  He was, after all, not exactly liked in academic circles.  He didn’t lose any sleep over it.  He won the respect of the academy anyway for when he did put paper to pen in non-script exercises he could put pen-pushing academics to shame. 

But right now, as has been the case these past three years, there’s nothing that haunts me more about Haththa, than the story of the student leader in Kelaniya and its recounting in the ‘Wala’, because my last memory of him is the astounding spectacle of his students and fellow players carrying him from the Kala Bhavana to the Kanatte, along the street as always, singing all the songs he taught and/or sang with them, tears pouring down their cheeks.  That final ‘send-off’ captured his life, teaching and art: igillilaa gihin ahasa badaa ganin….rankurulo…rankurulo (O Golden Bird go….soar high and embrace the sky). 

That was an exit, and the most dramatic moment in the theatre-history of this country (so far) which made Antony’s demagogic line, ‘Here was a Caesar, when comes such another!’ seem insipid and weak.  That was enactment, this not so.  He was a man, after all, and not a king; he rebelled against the crown.  And he made us all streets ahead, not of other people, but the ‘ourselves’ he taught us to leave behind. 

DEATH NOTICE*

Every character scripted in

the kings, queens and ghosts

the jester and the prince

the pothe gura and the purohitha

clothed in wit and meaning

comment and critique 

armed with song and slogan

literary allusion 

and flipping of text,

they were there

on the street

in the street

with and for the street:

and every line and lyric

gesture and glance

and all the props and make-up

that turned player into audience

made street stage and stage street

float like ghosts behind a king and citizen

teacher and student 

it is the unscripted theatre moment

the mortalizing of the immortal,

the flight of he who never would flee,

the cremation of he who would not die.

*Written upon the death of Gamini Haththotuwegama.

This article was first published in 'The Nation', three years ago.

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Meditation on Gamini Haththotuwegama

Gamini Haththotuwegama is no more.  The man, known to some as GK, to others as ‘Gamini’, ‘Hatha’, ‘Haththa’ or simply as ‘Sir’, hailed as the Father of Street Theatre in Sri Lanka, will take his final curtain call this evening.  As befitting such a colossus, the Ministry of Cultural Affairs has come forward to give him such honour as is his due, with deference of course to the wishes of the family.  In a meeting to discuss funeral arrangements, a Ministry official said that the route that the funeral procession will take from the ‘Kala Bhavana’ to the ‘Kanatte’ will be lined with white flags.  Rajith, the son, remarked with the wit, smile and acute consciousness of things human so reminiscent of his father, ‘eya aasa rathu paatata (he preferred red)!’  Like the father, again, Rajith and his sister Chamindu displayed a healthy disregard for ceremony and like their father once again showed a deference to the will of an innocent public want (in this instance the need to demonstrate grief).  They did not protest.

Red. Yes, that was his colour and ‘redness’ was the theme song that meandered as an unmistakable thread tying together all the things this remarkable man took on.   He is called the Father of Street Theatre and rightfully too, but theatre was but one of the many mediums he used to articulate his insightful reading of the social, political and cultural.  He was dramatist, actor, critic and human being. And he was a teacher through and through. 

He will be remembered fondly.  Remembrance and grief are largely personal things and one should leave it to the individuals whose lives were touched by the man to remember and lament as per their personal preference. He was a deeply sensitive man but not one given to tearing in public except on extremely rare occasions.  That’s a cue I suppose for all of us.

Who was Gamini Haththotuwegama though?  What was the ‘red’ in his life and work?  As I browsed the web for a picture of the man, I came across a lengthy comment by Ajith Samaranayake, perhaps the only other person who was as articulate as Haththa (that’s how my contemporaries at Peradeniya referred to him) in both English and Sinhala on the vast range of subjects that come under ‘literature and arts’.  Ajith, alas, predeceased Haththa by a few years (and what a loss!). 

Ajith was referring to a lecture delivered by Haththa titled ‘Unreasonable postulates and treasonable practices correlative to English’.  It was, as Ajith points out, a rather portentous title and come to think of it, quite un-Haththa like.  What caught my eyes was a quote.  Haththa had approvingly read out something that Ernest Macintyre had written:

"…when one grows into another culture through the intensive root-cutting education in English, the creative urge to truthfully turn it back on the soil you were pulled away from, the sentient world of the indigenous culture, is a magnificent compensation, the quality of which is not sometimes available even to those with unmoved roots, in a world of much movement."

It was natural that Haththa saluted this observation because Macintyre could very well have been talking about him for he, more than anyone else, embodied the creature described; he cut back through the layers of mis-education, sought his native soil and danced on it with all the grace and confidence that the process ingrained in him, in terms of ideological prerogative, nuance to cultural difference and the ability to pick and choose his waters from the many wells he had encountered and make thereafter a heady cocktail that could jolt his audience with audacity, tasteful humour and creative genius. 

Haththa knew his English.  He was acutely aware of its power, its coercive and violent potential and its other ‘kaduwa’ quality of marking distinction, leaving out and cultural political manipulation.  He used it against itself, so to speak, disrupting thereby the entire hegemonic discourse.  I remember him telling me in the terrible days following the UNP-JVP bheeshanaya that the JVP could have told the people that English is a necessary part of the revolution.  His point was that English, one of the many weapons at the disposal of the enemy, should be picked up and turned against the oppressor.  The beauty of his disposition was that when he used the kaduwa he dealt with ‘kaduwaness’ with both unforgiving and subtle strokes, equally effective as per occasion.  

He was respected, yes; tolerated even, but Gamini Haththotuwegama was never embraced by English Departments in our universities.  Why not? The answer can be obtained in the following observation:  "What's the point of giving English at university levels, feeding the students with the highest academic equipment available - the most radical, nay revolutionary cultural theory, by presumably some of the best literary-linguistic brains in the business, yes feeding students whose acquaintance with our culture begins and ends presumably with 'Thannane naa - thana-naa' sung by Ba and Sa (and a herd of tune-repeating umbaas) who have been successful as no others have in setting a price to our folk rhythms, as a street drama actor put it so succinctly?"

There is then a marked distaste for doing ‘The Macintyre Number’ among those who study, teach, write, do business, brag and in other ways and for a variety of reasons think that their ‘fluency’ in the language gives them automatic membership in that dubious club called ‘The Elite’.  As such these creatures are clearly part of the problem and are sadly compromised in the neo-colonialist project even as they speak on behalf of and champion the subaltern (how presumptuous!) and rile against hegemonic discourse. 

The fact of the matter is that Haththa, even as he called them out for intellectual sloth and ideological confusion was far better at what they believed they were good at: teaching and writing.  A few weeks ago someone told me that no one at Peradeniya writes as well as Gamini Haththotuwegama.  I don’t know because not many at Peradeniya actually write, but it would be hard to find someone of whose writing it could be said ‘Streets ahead of GK’. 

This is true not only of academic writing and also creative work.  Haththa was not given to spending too much time on producing academic treatise, but when he did, it was always cogent, illuminating and wonderful to read.  His essay on Lakdasa Wikkramasinha is a case in point. And outside the lecture theatre, as a creative artist, he was peerless.  No one at Peradeniya can claim to have done as much to the development and understanding of theatre, except perhaps Ashley Halpe, probably the only person in that Department who respected and admired Haththa and moreover was able to have a mutually beneficial conversation on a wide range of topic related to literature and arts.

Ajith puts it best when he remarks on that lecture thus: It is also a lecture which only GK could have delivered because if there has ever been a teacher of English who has effortlessly related himself to the wider Sinhala socio-cultural milieu without pandering to populist whims or compromising his intellectual integrity it has been Gamini K. Haththotuwegama.

His ‘redness’ was of course not limited to a battle with ‘kaduwaness’, he touched all aspects of social injustice in his work, stood with and for the oppressed, and taught them not to hate but to effectively challenge the structures that kept them down. He gave us all a sense of dignity and thereby empowered us in the most important element in that oft-caricatured thing called ‘agitation’. 

Every man’s life is an epic.  Haththa will be remembered for that endearing line that has become a veritable tag-line to the street theatre scene in the country: yadam bindala gejji maala thanaganin (break your chains and make anklets and necklaces out of them).  It is imperative that his students (and their numbers are legion) understand that the chains referred to are multifaceted and not limited to class-related politics (as per the quote in the Communist Manifesto, ‘the proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains; they have a world to win’).  He was larger than that.  And this is why Gamini Haththotuwegama will live long and we will hear and be empowered by the drama that was his life long after his ashes go cold.  Some curtains refuse to fall, or do so slowly and only after the drama is really, really, done. It is not yet. Gamini Haththotuwegama plays on and we hear his voice; and his words reverberate with wit, insight and a rare kind of love.  

This was first published on November 1, 2009 in the 'Sunday Island'. 

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An invitation to ‘Ethics’

Dr. A.C. Visvalingam, President, Citizens’ Movement for Good Governance (CIMOGG), commenting on the horrific murder in broad daylight of Balavarnam Sivakumar, (reportedly a mentally challenged individual) by some police officers, argues for the resurrection of the 17^th Amendment.

It is a fact, as Visvalingam points out, that the 17^th Amendment was passed in a hurry ‘in a serendipitous moment’.  He is also correct in that it contained serious flaws. He is also correct when he says that it was nevertheless a step forward in the process of de-politicizing governance structures.  I lament with him and CIMOGG the fact that ‘flaw’ was read as ‘loophole’ and that pledges to ensure the setting up of structures robust enough to insulate citizen from overzealous and self-seeking politician have been compromised by foot-dragging, abuse of constitutional ‘outs’ and of course the distraction of other overarching issues.  Quibbling among parties who have marginal clout in Parliament and wording-flaws that foster chauvinistic drives have not helped either. 

For me, the 17^th was at best a ‘starting point’ in the long and arduous process of correcting the flaws of the country’s institutional arrangement.  The 17^th Amendment is dead as CIMOGG tacitly acknowledges by calling for its ‘resurrection’.  If it is dead and it can be resurrected, flaws and all, I would still support this. If one does not believe resurrection is possible, then it should be buried once and for all.  Burial of course will not resolve the problems that gave rise to the 17^th Amendment. Burial confers on all of us the responsibility of searching for an alternative, an 18^th Amendment perhaps, written in the same spirit but with greater attention being placed on plugging the kinds of holes that sank the 17^th. 

This is not an essay about constitutional reform, though.  My friend Pradeep Jeganathan, while appreciating my sentiments regarding the intent of the 17^th, also expressed certain reservations. His thesis, essentially, is that getting the wording right, fiddling with structures or even overhauling them, while not necessarily being useless, would not be ‘enough’. He strongly recommends a return to ethics. 

What struck me most in this incident was not the mindless brutality of the murderer and his accomplices but the silence and immobility of the spectators.  Apparently some people did ‘act’ in that the Police and a TV station were informed, but the footage didn’t show anyone intervening or even trying to intervene. 

Marissa De Silva, writing to the Groundviews website (‘We the spectator state’), elaborates adequately on the troubling horror of this spectatorship.  I am not in agreement with the parallel she draws with respect to IDP camps and the conclusions she draws about the Government, the international community and battlefield realities, but she does paint an accurate, vivid and horrifying picture of a kind of apathy that can only exacerbate the general problems this society is beset with. 

I remember seeing a man brutally assaulting a woman, apparently his wife, in broad daylight near the Pettah bus stand.  It was ‘spectacle’. There were spectators.  I saw a policeman on the other side of the street and quickly informed him. He casually and rudely asked me if I had a problem.  I told him that he is required to help maintain the peace.  He responded ‘just mind your own business and you’ll be ok’. The quarrelling parties had sorted out their problem by this time. 

A few days later I saw three blind lottery-sellers assaulting a man who they believed had robbed one of them.  The ‘suspect’ had been recognized by his voice.  This was ‘citizens’ justice’ to the spectators.  One of the blind men threatened to and even attempt to gouge the man’s eyes out.  Again, I told a police office and this person intervened and took all four men to the Police Station. This happened outside the Fort Railway Station. 

Even the best institutions and the most disciplined police force cannot prevent some nutcase taking the law into his/her hand and assaulting or poisoning someone.  And there aren’t any laws to forbid a witness from opting to look the other way.  That’s where ethics comes in, or should come in.  It is in these tiny incidents that we see the flaws of our societal psyche and it is this apathy that gets multiplied into a general ‘look-aside’ when it comes to matter of greater magnitude.  One can argue that it is the structures and political culture that promotes this kind of inaction of course but the chicken-or-egg discussion is meaningless.

An individual can plead innocence to the world and point finger at structure.  But he/she must live with him/herself and the choices he/she makes or does not make. 

I believe there’s a scandalous dismissal of or negligence of this thing called ‘ethics’ in our society and too often we get caught up in the supposedly overarching ‘political’ and defer a consideration of this simple issue.  Until it hits us in the face.  After that, we cannot be silent.  Not to our conscience at any rate.

This was first published in the Daily News, November 6, 2009

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Susantha Karunaratne’s animisa lochana poojawa

More than two millennia ago, an exceptional human being and according to some one endowed with the greatest mind ever, Siddhartha Gauthama, the Enlightened One, stood for a week in front of the tree Ajapal.  This was upon attaining Enlightenment.  The Buddha, we are told, paid tribute, showed gratitude and taught lesson by this simple but significant act of gazing upon the tree that given him shade in the long moments of reflection that resulted in the fruition of Nirvanic comprehension. Hour after hour, day after day, for an entire week, Lord Buddha gazed upon the tree, without blinking once. 

Tree. Inanimate. Symbolic.  One might say it was unnecessary for someone who has vanquished his kleshas, but then again, it also indicates ‘teacher’ and exemplifies the virtue of humility.

Gratitude is rare.  We prefer to indulge ourselves by believing that are achievements are self-wrought.  I am thinking of gratitude and remembered Lord Buddha’s sath sathiya (the Seven Weeks post-Enlightenment) and especially the first week where the focus was on unwavering appreciation because of a man called Susantha Karunaratne.

I met Susantha because his 7 year old daughter, Yathra, was representing Sri Lanka in the Girls Under 8 category at the World Youth Chess Championship. Yathra is the current Girls Under 8 Chess Champion of Sri Lanka.  This doesn’t say much because at that age, it is more luck than anything else that sees someone win and another lose.  It is more about the other person making a blunder than one’s chess skills.  Still, ‘Champion’ does have market value and parents do market such things to get their children into better or at least more popular schools. 

Yathra attends a primary school in Kurunegala.  Susantha, like his wife, is an artist. He used to do some work in advertising, graphic design and printing, but had ‘retired’ recently because he, like his wife, wanted to pursue his passion, painting.  They are not super wealthy and live frugal and simple lives, not necessarily out of poverty as out of choice.

I assumed that the girl was attending a big-name school in Kurunegala. ‘Maliyadeva Balika?’ I asked the father. He said ‘no’ and explained.

‘It is possible to get her into Maliyadeva because of her achievements, but we thought this was wrong.  She goes to a primary school in Kurunegala. It is a good school. The principal has done a lot of hard work to turn the school into what it is now.  He has helped Yathra a lot. He encouraged her and gave her a lot of recognition.  The entire school knows her.  It would be wrong to abandon this school for a big school now. It is a primary school. Once she finishes the 5^th year we can try to put her into Maliyadeva.  We are grateful for what this school has given our daughter.’

The Karunaratnes live in Kalugamuwa, located between Narammala and Kurunegala.  Yathra is a Grade 3 student at the S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike Model Priimary School in Wehera, Kurunegala.  According to Susantha, this was a school that had been on the verge of being shut down.  It had been revived 4 years previously and much work had been put in to make it a school that parents consider sending their children to. 

Wijayananda Dharmasena, the Principal of the school, I am sure, is old enough and wise enough to understand that people like to graze on greener pastures.  I feel that at the back of his mind, he must have wondered how long young Yathra would remain in his school.  He must be proud, though. 

Susantha Karunaratne is a self-effacing man who is highly talented. He can paint. He writes poetry. He is soft-spoken. He can crack a joke and he can laugh. He is simplicity personified.  He is not at all interested in changing the world to fit his dimensions of perfection. He is not a teacher. He is just himself.   

Susantha and his wife, I feel, gaze upon this school in a manner that is not too dissimilar from Lord Buddha’s gaze on the tree Ajapal. There’s gratitude. Humility. Example. A lesson.  Some would say, ‘bodhisatva gunaya’ or exemplifying the virtues of a to-be Buddha.  Susantha would laugh and say ‘you are kind and good-hearted’ to such a person. 

This was first published in the Daily News on November 6, 2010

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Curb your incontinency!

My good friend Dimuth Gunawardena chides me now and then when I use what he believes my late mother would have considered ‘bad language’. My mother, apparently, would express embarrassment to her friends and students whenever I used certain words or whenever I wrote a letter followed by a few asterisks to indicate expletive.  She herself, however, was not averse to calling a spade a spade on occasion (‘spade’, let’s say is code-word for p***, i.e. the Sinhala equivalent of bum).  I have heard her say, for example, ‘am I supposed to call a spade a spade or call it a parliament?’ 

She could laugh, loud and long and although she was the strictest of teachers and at time ill-tempered, her generosity and good humour always made all her idiosyncrasies and character flaws eminently sufferable.  I don’t want to offend her memory and so, with Dimuth’s permission, I shall proceed to use a four-letter word which although not exactly an expletive might be objected to by some. I am sure, wherever she is not, she will understand and cheer me on (in private she might say I embarrassed her of course, what do you say Dimuth?).

I am talking about piss.  That’s 4 letters.  It’s a synonym of ‘urine’, the liquid ‘waste’ we pass from out bodies several times a day.  Technically, it is referred to as ‘liquid excretory product’.  It is also called pee, ‘water’, wee, choo etc.  The former Indian Prime Minister, Moraji Desai is supposed to have taken a spoonful every morning and this, some say, was the secret of his longevity. 

It’s not bad stuff, if one considers the composition of the average sample.  It is made mostly of water (95%). Considering the impurities and their proportion that probably exist in a random water sample, one might argue that drinking urine is better than drinking tap water in certain parts of the country.

The virtues of consuming piss aside (real or imagined) what really bothers people about it is the stench.  That’s probably due to the heady cocktail of the non-water components: Ammonia (0.05%), Sulphate (0.15%), Phosphate (0.12%), Magnesium (0.01%), Uric Acid (0.03%).  It’s a part of life. Like breathing. Part of our bodies and part of our bodily functions.  We have piss inside us and we piss.  We also piss-off some people, but that’s just pinning the stink to a phrase that is not very complimentary.  The important thing is that it’s not a foreign object. It is local.  The other important thing is time. And the third is place.  We can’t really piss anywhere we like and whenever we want. 

This is where the problem lies.  Take a short tour of Colombo and you might notice a sign that keeps popping up almost around every corner: ‘muthraa kireema thahanam’ (urination is prohibited).  I haven’t seen any Sinhala equivalent of ‘Piss-off’ or a play on those lines to dissuade would-be pissers from pissing at will and without permission.  I’ve see creative lines though, for example, ‘muthraa kireema ballanta pamanai’ (only dogs allowed to urinate) which is a piss-version of an anti-dumping line, ‘kunu demeema ballanta pamanai’ (only dogs allowed to litter).

What is upsetting is the need for people to scribble such warning signs.  It implies that we are an incontinent society.  It made me remember a conference on liberalization in India held at Cornell University in the mid nineties where a hardcore pro-liberalization Economist, Kaushik Basu, observed that although liberalization is good, it is not good enough to stop Indian’s from pissing in public places. He didn’t mention ‘shitting’ of course.  The liberalization logic was utterly flawed and was shown up by a couple of Indian Economists whose names I cannot remember.  Basu’s urine-angst gave rise to an interesting critique of his ideological position by my friend Kanishka Goonewardena. He called it ‘Urination and its discontents’. We turned it into a leaflet and distributed it among the participants under the name ‘Ravana Club’. 

It is not about liberalization or some other kind of economic system.  Kanishka’s pamphlet borrowed from ‘Civilization and its discontents’ written by Sigmund Freud in 1929 and first published in German the following year as ‘Das Unbehagen in der Kultur’.  The words belong to the same family, I now believe.

Pissing is part and parcel of the human condition. Pissing at will and without thought to fellow creature, however, is uncivilized. There is no excuse for a nation that had highly sophisticated sewerage systems two thousand years ago to act as though it has not been toilet-trained.

We are nothing like India in terms of what kinds of toilets we use and our sense of propriety in evacuating bodily waste and this by the way has nothing to do with the fact that we began ‘liberalizing’ more than a decade before our pals across the Palk Straits did.  That’s no reason to unzip and squirt each time we see a wall or empty space now is it?

It is not that houses don’t have toilets.  Even in the shanties (I believe in all 500 plus of these communities that live in not-seen-by-tourists places in Colombo), there are public toilets.  We are hospitable and friendly. If someone need to go, badly, and a request is made, I doubt anyone will shut the door in the face with desperation and urgency written all over it.  We are a nation that finds it hard to say ‘piss-off’.  That’s a cultural trait and one for which we’ve paid with our blood time and again.  We won’t exactly say ‘come, piss, be our guest,’ but we will be courteous and even offer a cup of post-piss tea as well. 

Piss. Stinks. That’s why there are designated piss-spots.  It is not as though there aren’t enough of these places or that they are located so far from one another for bladder-bursting to be a risk anyone should worry about. 

Ok Dimuth.  This is my piss-story. Once and for all. Forgive me brother, but pass it around, ok? 

This article was first published in the 'Daily News' on November 9, 2010

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