The right time, the right person ~ Malinda Words

Rasika Jayakody, one of the more informed and articulate political activists of his generation with whom I don't always see eye-to-eye, having read with great interest Lakshman Piyasena’s biography of D B Jayatilaka (බාරොන්: මඟඇරුණු මඟ or ‘Baron: the pathway missed’) comes to an interesting conclusion: ‘When looking back the political history of Sri Lanka, I think that D.B. Jayatilleka is a right man who arrived at the wrong time.’

The right time, according to Rasika, would have been the moment of independence in 1948. The ‘man’ who did arrive was D.S. Senanayake. D.B. would have been the better ‘man.’ Rasika feels that the establishment of meritocracy would not have been shelved had it been D.B. and not D.S. That and many other things, I would add. This is not about all that.

It is about the right time and the right person. It is about ‘when’ and it is about ‘who.’ How can we ever determine ‘right time’ and can we ever figure out the ‘right person’? In hindsight, of course, but how could we ever know in the here and now ?

People often talk about events, leaders and moments as though it’s the one and only chance for redemption or glory. ‘When comes such another?’ That’s something we hear all the time.

We really don’t know enough, ever. That’s the problem. A recent example would be the massive protests that took place from March to July 2022. That was seen as ‘THE moment’ for radical transformation.

Notwithstanding agent provocateurs (of whom there were many, including agents of the notorious National Endowment for Democracy, the outfit to which the CIA’s overseas regime change/protection operations were transferred to and which even today offer training programs for self-labeled radicals/revolutionaries!), a sizeable number of citizens did in fact believe that the hour had come.

The man/woman was missing though. Taken as a metaphor, man/woman could mean some kind of potent collective endowed with vision and integrity. Didn’t really emerge from the circus it all turned out to be. Wasn’t even there in the first place, some might argue.

Was that a moment, though? Yes, some would say. A missed opportunity or as Lakshman would say, a මඟඇරුණු මඟක්. But how can we tell? How can we immunise ourselves from the romanticism that is often so much a part of speculation?

There’s nothing wrong in reflecting on things that happened, the moments that passed. Nothing wrong in assessing the true dimensions of ‘moment,’ i.e. moment stripped of rhetoric and other frills that are made for inflation. This is important because there will be other struggles, other moments which could very well be ‘The Moment’ and their arrivals may coincide with ‘THE person(s)/collective,’ making the right moment along with the right person as per Rasika’s formulation above.

We could work towards that moment. We could work towards creating the person/collective that shares the transformational signature of the moment.

That’s one way. There’s another. Hafiz of Shiraz, the 14th Century Persian Sufi poet, alluded to it in ‘The place where you are right now’:

This place where you are right now
God circled on a map for you.

An atheist who nevertheless loves the poetry of the Sufi mystics, I choose to focus on the ‘location’ indicated in these lines. This is where I am. This is THE moment, And, in all humility and intimately conscious of fallibility, ignorance and that rogue arrogance who slips surreptitiously into mind and heart, I say, ‘I AM the person with the moment’s signature.’

It’s easy to extrapolate. The time is now, and that’s the title of another poem by Hafiz, by the way. I am you and therefore we are one (that’s Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, the Sufi Mystic from Eastern Persia). We are DB, we are DS, we are both and neither. And there’s nothing to stop us from seizing this moment and forging from its many transformational metals a compassionate, egalitarian and just tomorrow that will resist all manner of bludgeoning.

Let us not waste time waiting for DB. Let us not waste time trying to be DB. There’s however a 23rd Century DB, if you want to put it that way, in all of us. There’s a 1948 that will emerge from the wings or rise from the immemorial poetry of revolution. Put another way, that 1948 is actually 2023 and if you want to be even more precise, it's the 23rd of May, 2023. Moment and time: they can meet upon an earth-stage that could be a ballot box, a barricade or systematic unlearning of heavily sugar-coated untruths about our lived reality and the futures that make sense to us.

I think I will meet Rasika Jayakody somewhere, sometime on that exhilarating platform.

['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series. Links to previous articles in this new series are given below]

04 June 2023

The right time, the right person

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