The Future

On this last but one day of May, it seems clear to me that Lankans have chosen, or been condemned to suffer, the trauma of state disintegration right to the bitter end, all the way to anarchy and warlordism. Not everyone sees it yet. To me it is patent.

     Even at this late stage of the crisis, everyone is too busy protecting the past to deal with the present, far less prepare for the future. Nobody seems able to abandon their own self-interest or put aside the divisions among us long enough to make an honest, peaceful effort to see us through this calamity. 

      Those in power must surely understand that they have to go before anything can be done. They are standing in the way of Lanka’s recovery. Their last duty should be to ensure that the transition is orderly and peaceful, and with that they should leave, helped on their way, if necessary, by assurances of future safety. But they cling on, exacerbating and prolonging the crisis. In doing so, they guarantee that Sri Lanka will collapse to her very foundations. There will be starvation, violence, warfare, despair. The long-surviving administrative structure of the nation-state will cease to exist. There will be no country at all.

     The collapse is well advanced. For years – no, decades – the institutions of government, administration and public welfare have been hollowed out from within. The current regime completed a job begun in the Fifties. Now public utilities are ceasing to function. Trains and buses run sporadically. Schools and hospitals, too, are barely working. Businesses are doing no trade. The necessities of life are vanishing one by one. 

    The nation-state is dissolving. Whatever state the people of Lanka next create will have to be built from scratch, for there will be nothing left of the elaborate modern polity the British left us. All squandered now.

     There is a part of me that insists it is necessary. The nation-state that had been Ceylon and later became Sri Lanka was tainted with inequality, communalism and injustice from its very conception. The elite quarrels over constitutional reform in the 1920s were already infused with them. Even before Independence, Ceylon’s very first Parliament disenfranchised the ‘Indian’ Tamils. It took less than ten years from the grant of independence to the first ethnic-supremacist government and the beginning of systematic persecution of minorities by the state. Only two years more to the first of many ethnic pogroms. If the state of Sri Lanka has to cease to exist to put an end to all this hatred and violence between the peoples of the island, perhaps that is just. We can build another.

    But surely it could be done with less trauma? Somehow install a caretaker government in which all stakeholders are represented, give it the powers it needs for a strictly limited period, impose the necessary economic reforms and start to solicit foreign help? Institute a truth and reconciliation commission, hold inquiries, bring everything out into the open? Air the dirty linen, but then declare a general amnesty? Call a constituent assembly and build a new country, just as the South Africans did after apartheid?

    I honestly cannot see it happening. Far more likely is an attempt to patch up the current state and keep it going. That attempt will fail, and chaos will ensue.

     Whatever the solution for the people of this country finally turns out to be, it seems obvious to me that we have a long way to go – years, perhaps generations – before we find it. Those whose purposes and agendas the dying state served are doing and will do their best to prolong its life; they cannot see that it is doomed. Because of their grim resistance to the inevitable, the old state will die by violence – maybe in one last bloody paroxysm, more likely in a squalid death by a thousand cuts. In the meantime, inflation, famine, plague, death for Lanka’s people.

    There is no guarantee that things ever will get back to ‘normal’. Normal went away months ago and it isn’t coming back. We may eventually restore some kind of normality – a new normal as people like to say – but it will look nothing like this. I pray it will look better.

Belated Bollocks

If you’ve ever received a birthday greeting from me on social media, chances are it contained a personalized verse, image or video, in addition to (or in place of) the actual words ‘happy birthday’. I do this because I want to show the person I'm greeting that I care enough for them to make a bit of an effort, even though I didn’t remember their birthday till Facebook reminded me.

These days, though, I have begun ignoring that little Facebook reminder: ‘So-and-so’s birthday is today...’ So and so what?

To greet a person on their birthday used to be a sign that they were special to you. Family. Close friends. Childhood friends you never lost touch with, even though they are now far away. Folk for whom the effort of writing and posting a letter or a greeting card, or making a long-distance phone call (expensive), or sending a telegram (even more expensive) was worth it. When you got a birthday wish from someone, in those times, you could be sure it meant something.

(Of course, there have always been the greetings people send to teachers and other gaolers, to bosses, patrons, clients and debtors. Unfelt warmth, extorted felicitation, flattery driven by the fear of a beating, of losing a job, a promotion or a contract. The saddest and most worthless birthday greetings of all, but luckily we don't need to talk about them any more in this post.)

Let’s get back to the twenty-first century, and the practice of private citizens putting their birthdays on Facebook. I never could understand why anybody would do that. Who could be so insecure that they yearn for birthday wishes from strangers and minor acquaintances? ‘Happy birthday’, in some cases, from people they’ve never even met in real life?

Who knows? Anyway, some of us do it. We put our birthdays on Facebook. And FB, which is nothing but a computer program, duly reminds our online ‘friends’ when the date comes round. Then in come the greetings – dutiful, effortless, insincere: sent in the time it takes to type thirteen letters and a space, forgotten before the sender has even scrolled down to the next post.

Pretty pathetic, no? But some of us can’t even manage that. We can’t spare the minimal engagement required to post a two-word greeting on our friends’ actual birthdays. Maybe we don’t visit FB that often. Maybe we have so many online ‘friends’ we can’t keep track. Whatever the reason, we don’t notice the Facebook notification till a day or two have passed. Oopsie.

But wait, there’s a fix! Just wish the person, whom you didn’t care for enough to remember their birthday, a ‘happy belated’. Don’t be shy, everyone does it. Quick, quick – you can still jam yourself into the Elevator of Appreciation before the doors slide shut. Earn a few brownie points for your ‘friendship’, that’s what it’s there for. Hell, it’s probably a bit more sincere than a greeting on the actual day, because there’s at least a drop of feeling involved. No actual affection for the birthday girl or boy – don’t be silly – but fear of looking bad on social media.

That, dear reader, is what ‘happy belated birthday’ means. The grammatical error I complained of in a Facebook post yesterday (and no, it wasn't my birthday) is nothing compared to the hypocrisy and insincerity of a ‘belated’ online birthday wish. All you do, when you send one, is tell the world how little the person you’re greeting actually means to you. And that realization – however belatedly it sinks in – may mean the end of whatever vestigial relationship you two actually had.