28 August 2020

10:38

By Malinda Words

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The bubble didn't burst because there wasn't one in the first place


William C Rhoden, writing for theundefeated.com captured it well: 'Players were moved into a bubble to protect them from this deadly virus. Turns out that it will not be the coronavirus that possibly burst the NBA bubble, but the virulent, persistent virus of racism.’

He was writing about the premier basketball championship, currently at its (postponed) playoffs stage. He was writing about how the bubble burst or rather what shot it to shreds and made it impossible to play. Or live in the bubble, so to speak. He was writing about the players’ and teams’ reactions to the brutal shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Blake, a black man, was shot seven times in the back. He is reported to be paralyzed below the waist.

Almost all the players currently or rather formerly ‘bubbled’ in Bay Lake, Florida, have expressed their frustration and anger. Fear too. For that’s what has always been part of being black in the USA and is only now being recognized. The Milwaukee Bucks, scheduled to play Orlando Magic, decided to boycott. This was the first time ever that an entire team ‘walked out’ in protest in a major sporting encounter in the USA. The NBA then postponed the remaining playoff games scheduled for the day. The future of the playoffs is uncertain.


The Bubble. That was new. It was a Covid19 product. And yet, the true bubble was that rarified space insulated from the violence, the persistent violence in fact, of racism in the USA. It’s a bubble which allowed some people to pretend that such things didn’t happen or were random; they could not have been systemic, they convinced themselves or allowed themselves to be convinced.

Well, the truth is that for most if not all black people and other non-white minority communities in the USA, there was no bubble which they could crawl into and escape the horrors of this world. They were living the horror, day in and day out, 24/7 as they say.

The ‘war’ we referred to did not start a few months ago when a white police officer kneed and killed George Floyd. It’s been there for years, decades, centuries. They call it different names at different times.

Rhoden has heard all the words inspired by heinous acts of state sponsored violence. Well, right now it is not just the police but vigilante groups acting in concert with the police. The USA is in flames. It is at war with itself.

That’s one way of putting it. Rhoden, as mentioned, has heard the words. This is how he put it:

‘Billie Holiday painfully sang “Strange Fruit” in reaction to seeing the horrid aftermath of lynchings. There has been Don’t Shoot, I Can’t Breathe, Say Her Name and Black Lives Matter. Now there are angry sounds coming out of the protective bubble.’

The players have objected, one way or another. They’ve taken a knee. They’ve worn black armbands. They’ve tweeted. They’ve marched. They’ve objected with thousands and thousands of others.

And now what? Well, I can do no better than defer to Rhoden for perspective:

‘What do you say when words are not enough, when gestures are no longer sufficient? What happens when your actions are no longer seen, your words fall on deaf ears and all that is left is unsatisfied justice?’

What do you say? What would you say? What do you do? What would you do? What should the basketball players in Bay Lake, Florida do and say? What happens now?

‘Don’t play,’ Rhoden suggests. There’s a bigger battle out of the court in places that cannot be bubbled. If it’s a game, then you have to play it. Hard. And, ironically, the way to start playing THIS GAME is just that. You stop playing. And certainly not by the rules of the enemy at the gate.

Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News']   
 
Eyes that watch the world and cannot be forgotten 
 Let's start with the credits, shall we? 
The 'We' that 'I' forgot 
'Duwapang Askey,' screamed a legend, almost 40 years ago
Dances with daughters
Reflections on shameless writing
Is the old house still standing?
 Magic doesn't make its way into the classifieds
Small is beautiful and is a consolation  
Distance is a product of the will
Akalanka Athukorala, at 13+ already a hurricane hunter
Did the mountain move, and if so why?
Ever been out of Colombo?
Anya Raux educated me about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
Wicky's Story You can always go to GOAT Mountain
Let's learn the art of embracing damage
Kandy Lake is lined with poetry
There's never a 'right moment' for love
A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles
A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody
How about creating some history?
How far away are the faraway places?
There ARE good people!
Re-placing people in the story of schooldays  
When we stop, we can begin to learn
Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry
Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 
Sriyani and her serendipity shop
Forget constellations and the names of oceans
Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?
Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons
Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane  
Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often  
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer
malindasenevi@gmail.com

27 August 2020

15:53

By Malinda Words

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Black and white AND/OR color?


First of all, contrary to popular assumption, black and white ARE colors.  ‘In black and white’ of course has connotations that have little to do with color. This, then, is about metaphor.

Ajith Fernando has penned a pertinent note on an old theme: ‘If one’s world is black-white then coloring it is your responsibility. If you lament the lack of colors, the first accused in this crime is no one else but you.’

Black-white, needless to say, is color-poor. Richer would it be if things were splashed with a full palette. Ajith’s mild admonishment is for those who bemoan but do nothing, not even the can-be-done parts of dispelling the gloom.

In essence, it’s a different way of saying ‘stop cursing the darkness and light a candle.’  But no, even when there are candles around, there are those who will suffer the darkness until power is restored (in the case of a power failure in the middle of the night, for example). We never have enough, but we don’t bother to consider the possibility of making do with what we do have. We don't say, 'it's not enough, but let's do our best to make it enough.'

We don’t have a full palette, but we are not completely without color. We can use them or wait for eternity for that magical set of crayons, pencils, watercolors or oils that can give us every conceivable shade. I am willing to wager that even in the unlikely event of being gifted such a complete range, we are unlikely to use them all. Think back on the first set of crayons someone gave you. Weren’t there some which disappeared from constant use, others that shortened to stubs and still others that retained original length? That’s how it is in coloring. We can color with what we have but we will complain until we are in possession of a wider set of option, to most of which we won’t give a second thought.

There’s a flip side to this as well. A lot of color is also a lot of noise. We are blinded to the details when we are forced to gaze on a bright flush of color. There are separating lines which define things, but color has a way of pushing them to margins of the invisible. What we are left with is a blur, a handsome swish of different brushes dipped in different cans of paint; and we lose the faculty of distinguishing one thing from another. We end up misnaming, misdefining and being misled.

There are times when we have to retire a lot of colors so we can obtain something at least half-way stark to facilitate comprehension. We need to break things down to constituent parts. Color, metaphorically, can and does gloss over a lot of injustice, for example. In fact color can turn falsehood into truth, injustice into justice, nightmare into the sweetest of dreams, vile and selfish intent into benevolent compulsion.  

Black-white to Color or vice versa, as Ajith would say, it’s all up to us. Well, we are not in total control of course for we neither have a complete palette nor a delicate eraser that can push aside lie and distortion. Nevertheless as long as there’s mind and heart, as long as we can imagine and have the strength to scratch away certain deceiving surfaces, we can unravel the real.
 
As Ajith’s observation implies, there could be more than one culprit for the crime of lamenting beyond reason, but we can only deal with that which we can control. Things are seldom completely out of control. There’s a brush and some colors we can use to turn life from dismal to palatable. There’s an eraser that allows us to get things or say things in black and white — just so it’s not all gray.

Up to us.  To the extent possible.

Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News']   
 
Eyes that watch the world and cannot be forgotten 
 Let's start with the credits, shall we? 
The 'We' that 'I' forgot 
'Duwapang Askey,' screamed a legend, almost 40 years ago
Dances with daughters
Reflections on shameless writing
Is the old house still standing?
 Magic doesn't make its way into the classifieds
Small is beautiful and is a consolation  
Distance is a product of the will
Akalanka Athukorala, at 13+ already a hurricane hunter
Did the mountain move, and if so why?
Ever been out of Colombo?
Anya Raux educated me about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
Wicky's Story You can always go to GOAT Mountain
Let's learn the art of embracing damage
Kandy Lake is lined with poetry
There's never a 'right moment' for love
A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles
A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody
How about creating some history?
How far away are the faraway places?
There ARE good people!
Re-placing people in the story of schooldays  
When we stop, we can begin to learn
Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry
Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 
Sriyani and her serendipity shop
Forget constellations and the names of oceans
Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?
Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons
Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane  
Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often  
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer 
15:39

By Malinda Words



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Three theras and a baby

Pic courtesy Daily Mirror

On December 26, 2004, just two days after Sri Lanka was hit by the tsunami, an infant was found among the debris on the Kalmunai beach. Abhilash was his name, but no one knew it. He was given a number, 81. There were various people claiming parenthood. The matter was eventually resolved by court and DNA tests.   


Now in the Ummagga Jathaka, the pundit Mahoushada, not having the benefit of DNA tests, resolved a dispute over maternity by asking each claimant to grab the child and pull. It appeared to be a test of physical strength but the pundit was depending on the strength of the heart to resolve the dispute. The ‘mother’ who let go was given custody of the child.   


This is a fable that cuts across time and place with slight variations, for example in the Judgment of Solomon in the Hebrew Bible. Bertold Brecht used it in his well known play ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle,’ but with a twist. A DNA test would have wrecked it and Azdak would have had to rule in favour of Natella, but Grusha, whose love for the child was true and unfettered by thoughts of estates and finance refuses to comply. She lost, technically, but won the judgment.   


It’s all about attachment. About true sentiments. And that’s the preamble to the matter at hand, that of the tussle for the solitary national list seat allocated to the Ape Jana Bala Pakshaya. In this case, there are three claimants, all of them bikkhus.   


There is Ven. Athureliye Rathana Thera, a veteran parliamentarian and a long-time activist on all kinds of issues including environment, chemical-free agriculture, countering terrorism and at times a Sinhala Buddhist nationalist. He played a key role in the regime change that occurred in 2015. There is Ven. Galabodaaththe Gnanasara Thera, the strident voice of the Bodu Bala Sena. Some would call both of them ‘extremists’ but one notes that the name-callers are loath to use the nomenclature when speaking of ardent advocates of terrorism and fundamentalism in other ethnic and religious communities. Then there is Ven. Vedinigama Wimalatissa Thera, the Secretary of the party, who is relatively unknown.   


Now we can have a discussion on whether bikkhus should be in Parliament. Well, they cannot be denied privileges that other citizens have if the Buddhist Order does not object. Anyway, if it’s alright for Eran Wickramaratne (a pastor) to be in Parliament, then it can’t be wrong for any of these bikkhus to be there; if there is a lay-clergy distinction that people want to have, it must be 
applied consistently.   


If it is alright for Pilleyan, it can’t be wrong for Ven Gnanasara. Pilleyan is a former terrorist, Ven Gnanasara has taken extreme stands and has infringed upon the law (and paid for it) but no one has accused him of forced conscription of children, deadly attacks on civilians and the like. If it’s alright for M.A. Sumanthiran and C.V. Wigneswaran, both with track records of either openly celebrating terrorists and terrorism or else being mouthpieces for the same, then it should be alright for anyone who speaks for his/her community, these three theras included. No, this can’t be about such things.   

At first glance it sounds ridiculous. Parliament can be a place where  any ideology can be articulated or where the interests of any community  (ethnic, religious, ideological) can be represented, true. However, to  imagine that having the seat is crucial is downright silly  

This is not even about who has the legitimate claim. It is not about who has what it takes, legitimacy notwithstanding. It’s about the why and why-not, the how and how-not-to, as per the philosophy and truth-ascertaining in the stories mentioned above.   


What do these theras want? Well, the seat. What do they say they want it for? Why, to represent Sinhala Buddhist interests. It’s a parliamentary seat that is being treated like a baby called ‘Sinhala Buddhist Interests’ or ‘Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism.’


At first glance it sounds ridiculous. Parliament can be a place where any ideology can be articulated or where the interests of any community (ethnic, religious, ideological) can be represented, true. However, to imagine that having the seat is crucial is downright silly, as is the perception that one is the best articulator of the particular standpoint. I recall the film director and senior journalist at the Divaina, Jayantha Chandrasiri, making an interesting observation about 15 years ago: ‘Hela urumaya naaganiddith sinhala bauddha jaathika mathakaya issarahata yanava [even as the (Jathika) Hela Urumaya messes things up in style, Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism goes from strength to strength].’   


Now maybe the JHU did play a role, but it would be simplistic to reduce whatever gains of this particular political project to their efforts alone. It just does not happen that way. Indeed the Ape Jana Bala Pakshaya is politically very much weaker than the weakest the JHU has been. Furthermore, they cannot claim sole ownership of the Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism brand. The Sri Lanka Podujana Peramuna (SLPP) makes no bones about being nationalist. The SLPP has in Parliament people like Sarath Weerasekera, Gevindu Kumaratunga and Anupa Pasqual (if you want to say that Mahinda Rajapaksa is a fake nationalist just like his most ardent followers in Parliament). The President of the country is a nationalist. The Leader of the Opposition, Sajith Premadasa and his party (Samagi Jana Balavegaya) have been badmouthed by those who have an axe to grind with anything Sinhala and Buddhist. Premadasa is by default a nationalist. None of them are anything like Ven Gnanasara Thera, but they all belong to the same school.   


The three theras are tugging (metaphorically) at a baby. They would like Sinhala Buddhists to believe that each of them is best suited to take care of the baby. They would like Sinhala Buddhists to believe that the baby is, indeed, ‘Sinhala Buddhist Nationalism.’ Well, it is hard to believe that Sinhala Buddhists would in the first place want to have an entire community reduced to a chair in a large hall. 

No, people and ideas, communities and identities have multiple addresses. These three theras are trying to make their loyalists believe that everything can be irrecoverably lost if the seat itself was lost. If they truly believe this, they are mistaken.   

In any event, at some level, this side of the Buddha’s advocacy of treating things with equanimity, it is ‘true concern’ that is being tested, then the truly concerned will take a step back. The seat will be lost, but the right to represent community will be regained.   


malindasenevi@gmail.com  

26 August 2020

09:27

By Malinda Words

In:

No comments

Open spaces make for ‘wanderment'

 

I remember seeing a cartoon featuring a man and a little boy. They were standing at a point from where they could see a vast span of rugged desert below them. The man tells the boy, ‘one day, my son, all this will be infrastructure!’

The man obviously thought that such an eventuality would be a good thing. Maybe the cartoonist was being cynical. The man, however, had imagination. Few would extract a teeming metropole from a wind-swept dust bowl.  


That’s one way of repainting the desert. There are many other ways in which a mind-brush with heart-colors could create. Better pictures than infrastructure, one might say. Of course the ‘infrastructuralists’ would beg to differ. Takes all kinds to make the world. Or break it.

Open spaces. They make for reflection. Even a grain of sand makes for reflection of course. Anything and everything contains meditative seed. 

 

A good imagination can draw forth wonderful things from seemingly inauspicious elements, big or small, but let’s leave aside such philosophical objections for a while.

Open spaces teach us how enormous the world is and how tiny we are. And that's just one thing to wonder about. You can also wander all over such places, stop where you want, take off again, at your own pace. You could pick a flower and ask yourself how it got its colors and texture or abstract yourself from place and moment to float in its fragrance. Pick a pebble and and imagine the mountain it may have once been a part of or the riverbed it might line one day.

 

 

A clear sky is a canvas. It’s blueness that is a calm ocean turned upside down. And if there are wisps of cloud, that’s just the foam from breaking waves. The Book of Clouds is a mystical text that hasn’t yet been written, but strangely enough one that can still be read. There are monsters and fairies, all kinds of creatures, landscapes too.

Maybe it’s a beach that’s giving you the wide span for the imagination-brush to run riot, or work in serenity. Maybe it’s a weather-worn pathway cluttered with boulders and made too uneven for even the most rugged vehicle. Maybe it’s a mountain range. Maybe the vast expanse of a rolling valley.

What histories lie buried therein, do we know? Can we imagine? What histories in blood-rush or quietude are to unfold or will there be none, just slow-moving things that watch and keep opinion to themselves?  And what stories do solitary trees or those that are dead and yet with dried branches resolutely marking present against a vacant sky have to tell?

 

We can walk open spaces. We can see them as books yet unwritten or else as beautifully crafted epics which can be read if we decode the languages that have evolved over millennia.

In another time, another landscape of being, someone observed that whereas open wounds are for blood-letting, open words are for love-letting. There is openness all around us. It’s in a book or a garden, a flower and the feather lying on a sidewalk, a conversation interrupted and the words not said, a thought befuddled by other thoughts that arrived uninvited, in the time-smudged word or frayed edge of an old love letter and of course spaces uncluttered by the everyday that bludgeons with routine. 
 
You can go visit them or you can imagine them. Either way, an open space is a canvas for a mind-brush wielded by a heart open to 'wanderment'. Happy painting!

 
 
 
 
Other articles in the series 'In Passing...':  [published in the 'Daily News']   
 
Eyes that watch the world and cannot be forgotten 
 Let's start with the credits, shall we? 
The 'We' that 'I' forgot 
'Duwapang Askey,' screamed a legend, almost 40 years ago
Dances with daughters
Reflections on shameless writing
Is the old house still standing?
 Magic doesn't make its way into the classifieds
Small is beautiful and is a consolation  
Distance is a product of the will
Akalanka Athukorala, at 13+ already a hurricane hunter
Did the mountain move, and if so why?
Ever been out of Colombo?
Anya Raux educated me about Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis (JIA)
Wicky's Story You can always go to GOAT Mountain
Let's learn the art of embracing damage
Kandy Lake is lined with poetry
There's never a 'right moment' for love
A love note to an unknown address in Los Angeles
A dusk song for Rasika Jayakody
How about creating some history?
How far away are the faraway places?
There ARE good people!
Re-placing people in the story of schooldays  
When we stop, we can begin to learn
Routine and pattern can checkmate poetry
Janani Amanda Umandi threw a b'day party for her father 
Sriyani and her serendipity shop
Forget constellations and the names of oceans
Where's your 'One, Galle Face'?
Maps as wrapping paper, roads as ribbons
Yasaratne, the gentle giant of Divulgane  
Katharagama and Athara Maga
Victories are made by assists
Lost and found between weaver and weave
The Dhammapada and word-intricacies
S.A. Dissanayake taught children to walk in the clouds
White is a color we forget too often  
The most beautiful road is yet to meet a cartographer

malindasenevi@gmail.com