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]
Other articles in this series:
The silent equivalent of a thousand words
Crazy cousins are besties for life
The lost lyrics of Premakeerthi de Alwis
Consolation prizes in competitions no one ever wins
Blackness, whiteness and black-whiteness
Inscriptions: stubborn and erasable
Deveni: a priceless one-word koan
Recovering run-on lines and lost punctuation
'Wetness' is not the preserve of the Dry Zone
On sweeping close to one's feet
Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California
To be an island like the Roberts...
Debts that can never be repaid in full
An island which no flood can overwhelm
A melody faint and yet not beyond hearing
Heart dances that cannot be choreographed
Remembering to forget and forgetting to remember
Authors are assassinated, readers are immortal
It is good to be conscious of nudities
Saturday slides in after Monday and Sunday somersaults into Friday
There's a one in a million and a one in ten
Kumkum Fernando installs Sri Lanka in Coachella, California
Hemantha Gunawardena's signature
Architectures of the demolished
The exotic lunacy of parting gifts
Who the heck do you think I am?
Those fascinating 'Chitra Katha'
So how are things in Sri Lanka?
The sweetest three-letter poem
Teams, team-thinking, team-spirit and leadership
The songs we could sing in lifeboats when we are shipwrecked
Jekhan Aruliah set a ball rolling in Jaffna
Awaiting arrivals unlike any other
Teachers and students sometimes reverse roles
Colombo, Colombo, Colombo and so forth
The slowest road to Kumarigama, Ampara
Some play music, others listen
Mind and hearts, loquacious and taciturn
I am at Jaga Food, where are you?
On separating the missing from the disappeared
And intangible republics will save the day (as they always have)
The circuitous logic of Tony Muller
Rohana Kalyanaratne, an unforgettable 'Loku Aiya'
Mowgli, the Greatest Archaeologist
Figures and disfigurement, rocks and roses
Sujith Rathnayake and incarcerations imposed and embraced
Some stories are written on the covers themselves
A poetic enclave in the Republic of Literature
Landcapes of gone-time and going-time
The best insurance against the loud and repeated lie
So what if the best flutes will not go to the best flautists?
There's dust and words awaiting us at crossroads and crosswords
A song of terraced paddy fields
Of ants, bridges and possibilities
From A through Aardvark to Zyzzyva
Words, their potency, appropriation and abuse
Who did not listen, who's not listening still?
If you remember Kobe, visit GOAT Mountain
The world is made for re-colouring
No 27, Dickman's Road, Colombo 5
Visual cartographers and cartography
Ithaca from a long ago and right now
Lessons written in invisible ink
The amazing quality of 'equal-kindness'
The interchangeability of light and darkness
Sisterhood: moments, just moments
Chess is my life and perhaps your too
Reflections on ownership and belonging
The integrity of Nadeesha Rajapaksha
Signatures in the seasons of love
To Maceo Martinet as he flies over rainbows
Fragrances that will not be bottled
Colours and textures of living heritage
Countries of the past, present and future
Books launched and not-yet-launched
The sunrise as viewed from sacred mountains
Isaiah 58: 12-16 and the true meaning of grace
The age of Frederick Algernon Trotteville
Live and tell the tale as you will
Between struggle and cooperation
Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions
Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers
Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills
Serendipitous amber rules the world
