Robes and Cudgels

I wonder if the people currently attacking churches and mosques in Sri Lanka have ever considered the damage they are doing to their own faith—Buddhism.

Christianity and Islam are strong world religions. Some buildings and valuables will be lost in these attacks, there may even be some martyrs, but persecution in Sri Lanka will only make them stronger. No Christian or Muslim is going to abandon his belief or practice because of these attacks.

In contrast, Buddhism itself will take generations to recover from the damage inflicted on it by these extremists. It may never recover at all.

Buddhism gets a good press, by and large, in the non-Buddhist world. In the twentieth century, it enjoyed perhaps the most felicitous reputation of all world religions. Buddhists were thought to be peaceful, kindly, reasonable people: a little unworldly perhaps, as befits those who practise detachment as a spiritual discipline, but certainly none the worse for that.

Many non-Buddhists—some religious, others not—have found great wisdom in the teachings of the Buddha, as well as practical instruction on how to live calmer, less stressful, more peaceable lives. I am one of these people, and although I will never be a practising Buddhist, I have a great deal of affection, sympathy and respect for the religion. There are millions like me around the world.

Sri Lanka’s latest gift to world Buddhism—the image of a robed monk at the head of a violent, thuggish mob—is going to change all that. Indeed, it has already begun to do so. The world media are carrying such images, and the story of crimes committed in Sri Lanka in the name of Buddhism, into hundreds of millions of homes around the world. Buddhism has lost its innocence. It will now be obliged to face the same charge of crimes against humanity that Christianity, Islam and Judaism have faced for centuries. It will be judged, like those faiths, and like them it will be found wanting. Its hitherto unstained reputation will be sullied and tattered.

I have heard many concerned Sri Lankan Buddhists disavow any fellowship with the extremists, insisting that the latter are not true Buddhists. They may well be right, but this defence won’t stand up in the court of history. Faiths—like political institutions, like social movements, above all like people—are correctly judged by their actions, not by their words. As far as any non-Buddhist is concerned, these people are what they profess to be: Buddhists. What they do, they do in the name of Buddhism. This will never be forgotten by the world. These people are making history, and it is their faith which will bear the stigma of it for all time to come.

There is only one escape from this judgement and the opprobrium that will follow from it. Sri Lankan Buddhists, both as individuals and as members of various Buddhist social groups and communities, must publicly and unequivocally condemn the acts of the extremists, repudiating them as unBuddhist.  They must demand that the persons bringing Buddhism into such disrepute be spurned by the Buddhist community, and any who commit violent and criminal acts in the name of Buddhism should be brought to justice and punished. Above all, they must state clearly and publicly that as Buddhists, they recognise the right of non-Buddhists to their own religious faith and practice. And they should apologise, unreservedly, for the wrong that has been done in the Buddha’s name.

Only if these things are done can Buddhism ever hope to recover from the damage presently being done to it in Sri Lanka, by people who claim to be Buddhists and to speak for Buddhism.

Toys in My Attic

A bit of inspiration from, of all people, Rod Stewart

The creative mind works in mysterious ways. At least, my mind does when it’s trying to be creative.

Recently, I accepted an assignment to write a video script for a very large, very blue-chip firm. As such things go, it was a plum assignment in reputation terms – and the money was pretty good, too. Besides, I have a bit of a history with this particular firm, and their asking me to do this was a sort of vote of confidence on their part. Of course, all this desirability meant the assignment put a lot of pressure on me, and in my present semi-retired condition I have grown unaccustomed to pressure.

I nearly cracked under it.

For many days I tossed the problem about in my head, trying to think of a thematic approach that would be different from the hundreds of other dull, boastful videos that infest this particular corporate genre. I had a few ideas, hardly better than clichés. Nothing worth sitting down at a keyboard for. And as the deadline grew closer my procrastination grew more obsessive and desperate.

Three days ago the deadline went whizzing by, making that sound the late Douglas Adams used to like so much. I must admit it’s a sound I hate. The only sound more hateful to my ear is the tone I hear my voice assume when I call up a client to beg for more time to complete an assignment. Which, of course, is what I had to do. I must say they were pretty decent about it.

Yesterday evening, after yet another pointless day spent idly surfing the internet while the tide of suppressed panic rose higher and higher within me, I decided, ‘to hell with this. I’ve been mooching around for days trying to do this and it’s just not working out. I’m going out to get drunk.’

Well, I didn’t really get drunk. I went and visited my good friend Mr. Mountain, drank some of his generously-offered twelve-year-old single-malt Scotch whisky, shot the breeze with him and his lissome fiancée for a couple of hoarse and forgot all about the assignment. I didn’t even think about it after I got home – though I was aware, all too aware, that in sixteen hours or so my extra time would run out.

In the shower before retiring, still mellow from the whisky, I found myself humming Rod Stewart’s Do Ya Think I’m Sexy. Now, this was odd: it isn’t a song I like (indeed, it is a song I loathe) and I had cause to wonder why it should have popped unbidden into my head. But I didn’t think about it very hard, and ten minutes later, I was sound asleep.

This morning, while lying in bed half-awake counting cats (they silently foregather in their numbers at the foot at my mattress during the wee hours), I suddenly realized that the solution to my creative problem was sitting fully formed in my head. I could hardly believe it, but a little interior scanning and rewinding told me I pretty much had the whole damn’ shooting-script, complete with soundtrack.

The concept involved the extensive use of tabletop models, judiciously mixed with CGI. I can’t tell you any more about it for reasons of client confidentiality. It’s not a terribly original idea, of course, but it happens to be spot-on for this job. I had a winner! Leaping out of bed, scattering cats broadcast, I dashed downstairs to my computer. Six hours of intense labour ensued, at the end of which the script was complete and on its way to the client.

Now, so far, there is nothing particularly weird about this story. Creative people often sleep on a problem and find a solution to hand next morning. The weird part begins... with that Rod Stewart tune.

Here is a little-known fact about Mr. Stewart: he is an enthusiastic and highly accomplished builder of model railway layouts. In fact, his Three Rivers City layout is famous among the railway modelling fraternity. It really is brilliant, and exquisitely detailed. Of course, Rod can afford the best, but then, he makes a lot of the stuff himself, by hand, and the results are very impressive to say the least.

But never mind all that: the point is that I went to bed humming a Rod Stewart tune, and woke up in the morning with a solution to my problem based on Rod Stewart’s hobby. Obviously, the solution had already begun forming in my unconscious mind, all unbeknownst to me, the previous day.

Or, perhaps, earlier than that. As the morning wore on and my fingers wore down from typing, other sources of inspiration began to identify themselves. I recalled that, two days earlier, a friend had emailed me a YouTube video of an amazingly elaborate model airport made by some guy in Germany. And about the same time, I remember explaining to my girlfriend what ClayMation was.

So you see, the solution had been putting itself together in my mind for days, always somewhere below the threshold of conscious reasoning, while my conscious brain fretted and despaired and engaged in what seemed at the time to be near-continuous neurotic displacement activity.

I wonder if the agony was an essential part of the process.

Of course, this kind of experience is far from unique. Other people report similar occurrences and I’ve had a few epiphanies myself over the thirty years I’ve spent writing things for a living. But this was the first time I’d discerned the action of unconscious creativity even as it was being deployed. It’s far more common, for me at least, to see it in retrospect: to read something I wrote months or years ago and discern, for the first time, how it connected with my life or state of mind at the time of writing. Today, I experienced it in real time

Eldritch stuff, I tell you. If anyone has had any experiences of a similar nature, I would love to hear about them. Post them as comments below, anonymously if you feel more comfortable that way.

Oh, and before I forget: a merry Christmas and a happy New Year to all who read this.

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

I just put this book down, and as I did, I said to myself, ‘what a load of rubbish.' I was a little surprised at my own reaction.

Some of my favourite writing is by Vladimir Nabokov. Much of it is in his short stories. Of his novels, I loved Pale Fire and enjoyed its tricksiness. I read Lolita and was entertained, seduced and appalled. Other books, like Laughter in the Dark, were less captivating, but throughout it all the brilliance of the author’s style was there to compensate me when my interest in the content flagged.

Maybe I have grown old and cynical, and also perhaps a bit too much of a hack, to appreciate the art in this novel. Unfortunately, the art is all there is to appreciate – the plot is haphazard and the characters repellent or uninteresting. Sebastian Knight, the object of his own half-brother’s biographical quest, is a pretentious, neurotic snob. I found it difficult to take an interest in such a character when it is presented by the narrator as wholly admirable.

Mind you, the narrator – ‘V.’, Knight‘s half-brother – shares at least two of the above qualities. No surprise, since it is Nabokov’s humour to make us wonder whether the two are actually the same man, and if so, whether the man is Sebastian or his semi-sibling, or some monstrous literary Siamese twin. Doubtless it was also the author’s humour to portray a lonely, sick, mostly unhappy auctorial also-ran of unpleasant character as someone admirable, worthy of a biography. But that doesn’t really make me want to read any more about Sebastian Knight, and besides, I object to authors who entertain themselves at my expense unless they are able to entertain me at the same time.

All the other ‘postmodernist’ (really?) tricks – the way the plot of the novel takes on aspects of the plots of Sebastian’s handful of novels, so that fiction holds a mirror up to fiction, and the frequent chess references whose point, I am sorry to say, entirely escapes me – did not add interest or charm to a novel I found significantly lacking in both qualities.

And then, that famous Nabokovian prose... Apparently this was the first novel he wrote in English, so one shouldn’t be too harsh. But Nabokov was always an extreme stylist, one who liked to stretch an image or metaphor till it was on the verge of overbalancing and falling flat. Most of the time he got away with it – this was a man who could describe horse-dung in the act of production in breathtakingly beautiful prose – but for some reason his writing in this book strikes me as often no better than clumsily arch. Perhaps this was his way of portraying the untutored style of his narrator, V. The effect, sadly, is not always that of a bad writer rising above himself; too often it is that of a good writer – indeed, a great writer – missing the mark.

Which, I think, just about sums up this unfortunate novel.

Thank you, Mr. Hitchens

Letters to a Young Contrarian

Though no longer young, I remain at heart a contrarian, someone who is driven to question conventional wisdom and popular attitudes. Indeed, I feel this is something of a duty – one in which I am far more lax than I have any excuse to be, and clearly far more lax than Mr. Hitchens is. Living as I do in a country that has fallen victim to creeping ethno-religious totalitarianism, my conscience was not simply pricked, but speared, when I read this:

The two worst things, as one can work out without leaving home, are racism and religion. When allied, these two approximate to what I imagine fascism must have felt like.

As we Sri Lankans know all too well, he is right. As we also know, fascism is hard to stand against. Amazingly, Hitchens offers a recommendation for living conscientiously with all kinds of oppression, one he calls living ‘as if’ – living as if one were a citizen of a free society, truly able to exercise all one’s rights and duties, so that one’s way of life becomes itself a form of protest.

In order to survive those years of stalemate and realpolitik... a number of important dissidents evolved a strategy for survival. In a phrase, they decided to live ‘as if’... Vaclav Havel, then working as a marginal playwright and poet in a society and state that truly merited the title of Absurd... proposed living ‘as if’ he were a citizen of a free society, ‘as if’ lying and cowardice were not mandatory patriotic duties, ‘as if’ his government had actually signed... the various treaties and agreements that enshrine universal human rights. He called this tactic 'The Power of the Powerless’ because, even when disagreement can be almost forbidden, a state that insists on actually compelling assent can be relatively easily made to look stupid.

I found this book put heart into me, reinforcing my belief that disagreement and argument are vital to the pursuit of happiness. I am no political activist, but I believe in certain values and know certain things to be true, and I try to live by these truths and values. The struggle is hard and often seems futile, especially when one’s friends and colleagues turn away to embrace the lie. At times like this, it is good to learn that the effort is not necessarily wasted. It is rarely one feels grateful to an author for writing a book. Thank you, Mr. Hitchens.

Blotched

A review of the inaugural issue of Ink magazine.

Some people think you have to know a lot about culture and the arts to write about them in a magazine. Not true. I wrote ignorantly about art and culture for years and nobody ever called my bluff. The real qualification for writing about culture and the arts in magazines is being able to write a good magazine article.

What makes a magazine article good? I reckon if it makes people want to read it, and they’re satisfied after they’ve finished it, that’s a good magazine article. Very simple.

Or maybe it isn’t so simple. I’ve just seen the inaugural issue of Ink, which somebody left behind at my house the other day, and it’s pretty bad. It calls itself the March-April issue, though it only came out on 5 May, and at Rs. 200 per glossy copy and very few ads inside, it probably cost more to publish than it will ever make at the newsstands. You can download the whole thing free from their web site, too. Makes you wonder whether they’re really in it for the long haul.

The first thing that jumps out at you from the cover of Ink is a big yellow belly. Was the symbolism intended? I’m pretty sure they didn’t intend for the belly to upstage the magazine’s own masthead, but that’s what it does. Not what I’d want for the first issue of my magazine – but Ink seems to be run by unusually shy and retiring people. They won’t even tell us what their magazine is about. I searched the cover in vain for some paraphrase of the words ‘the hot new arts and culture mag.’ None to be seen. Nothing on the editorial page, either. Why the big mystery? Don’t they want people to buy their magazine?

It gets worse inside. The table of contents is a guessing game: what do you think ‘Beating War with Drums’ is about? Or ‘Dubbed Out Concert Footage?’ Don’t look for explanatory subtitles; you won’t find any. Worse, the table of contents is laid out in some bizarre arrangement comprehensible only to the person who designed it, with some articles left out altogether. Why?

It’s the same precious, sloppy, amateurish story all the way through. This is a glossy magazine, often with several pictures on a single page. The pictures are interesting, yet not one of them – not one – has a caption. Three members of the group of artists known as Theertha are pictured separately in an article on the group, yet none of the photos tells you which man is which! Even reading the article won’t tell you, unless you happen to know – as I do, because I know the man himself – that the founder of Theertha, Jagath Weerasinghe, is not pictured in the article at all. Why was that?

There really is no excuse for this kind of incompetence. It’s not just lousy journalism, it’s commercial suicide. An important reader segment for this sort of publication is made up of the friends and relations of people featured in them. By treating their feature subjects so shabbily, the editors of Ink are deliberately turning away paying customers.

This peculiar reticence also extends to the articles themselves. There are no author bios, no introductory blurbs to tell us what the articles are about. There’s a feature on the filmmaker Vimukthi Jayasundara, with a big photo of him and all, but his name only appears in the body copy of the article – and you have to read up to the fourth paragraph before you even find that. Unforgivable.

As for the articles themselves – the meat of the magazine, the thing you pay your two hundred bucks for – they range from high-school-essay bad to absolutely unreadable. There are three exceptions. Two are by Pradeep Jeganathan: a restaurant review and an article about sushi which seems to be the first in a series entitled Pradeep Jeganathan’s Tastefusion. I say ‘seems to be’ because the magazine designer has got the type sizes and weights wrong again: the series title, which should appear as a header bar, has become the headline, and the headline looks like a subhead. Despite this, the article itself is great. I hope we’ll see a lot more in this line from Dr. Jeganathan: he writes about food elegantly and mouthwateringly and he seems to know his stuff in the kitchen. Best of all, he knows how to write a magazine article. His restaurant review, too, was first class. Absolutely no quibbles with either of these.

The third exception was a review of Blue, a bad and silly book. This was by A.S.H. Smythe, an Irishman (which seems to make nonsense of the editor’s claim that Ink is ‘entirely a Sri Lankan enterprise’, not that it matters). Mr. Smythe’s review is an amusingly-written hatchet job, one that Blue richly deserves, but it is much too long. A piece of fluff like Blue doesn’t deserve more than a paragraph or two – to give it two whole pages is to dignify it above its station. Here again, it is the editor, not the author, who is to blame. The Blue review should have been given some blue pencil.

As regards the other articles, the less said about them the better. Though I’d like to know why some unknown graphic-design student gets a such big feature. Maybe her daddy owns the magazine. Apart from this piece of nepotistic tripe, the other articles are just plain amateurish – written by people who know (or think they know) a little bit about art and culture, but who can’t write a magazine article for toffee.

The above is supposed to be salutary, meaning (as perhaps only Mr. Smythe will understand) that it is intended to cure and preserve. If only for its audacity, Ink deserves to survive. It would be nice to have a real Sri Lankan arts magazine succeed. The chances are slim, though. Our arts and culture scene is tiny, and most of it is not very good. How do you write about dull, unoriginal or ugly art in a way that holds readers’ interest? You can be honest and put everybody down, but how long can that last before people get sick of your ranting? Or you can try to be kind to the undeserving, and end up sounding like one of those magazines which are given away free to anyone passing by, the ones in which all the articles are thinly disguised advertorials singing the praises of the restaurants and other firms that place ads in the magazine. Either way, the reader feels cheated, and won’t come back for a second helping.

If Ink is to survive, it has to go beyond all that crap and become what it really wants to be, and what we all want to see: a really good Sri Lankan arts and culture magazine. To achieve that, it will need a professional editor, a professional designer and some grown-up writers to write for it. It will also need a professional advertising and marketing person with enough power to make the editorial team face a few bald commercial facts. With a makeover like that, Ink may actually have a life beyond its second or third issue. I hope it does, but you won’t find me putting any money on it. Not yet.

Keep the Little Monsters at Home

This will be short and sour.

The BBC News Magazine web site has posted an article on the vexed question of toddlers in restaurants. While admitting (as who cannot) that they are a menace, the article goes on to offer an excuse or two for parents who insist on bringing the little beasts along, one of these being the desire to ‘get them used to restaurants’.

Well, I‘ve heard some sorry excuses for self-indulgent doting in my time, but that one takes, if you'll pardon the expression, the cake. Get them used to restaurants? Why, in heaven’s name? So that they can beggar their parents with expensive dining-out bills in early adolescence? Out-gourmet the Guide Michelin before they’re out of secondary school? Or just learn to draw increasingly bitter comparisons between Mum’s cooking and the canard aux herbes Sri lankaise they were served at the Lemon last night?

Do these fond parents really imagine they’re somehow socializing their kids by inflicting them on cringing strangers? What idiots. Toddlers cannot be socialized. They are monsters of id. They aren’t even properly human yet – to all intents and purposes, they’re still little animals, and half-formed ones at that. Besides, research has shown that parents don’t socialize kids; peer groups do. All Mummy and Daddy’s patient training in manners and decorum, all the coaxing and encouragement, all the gatings and punishments, even the beatings used by some parents as teaching aids, count for very little; it’s peer pressure and, a little later, a desire to impress the opposite sex that turns juvenile delinquents (that is, all kids) into socially viable individuals. And even the small contribution parents make in this area cannot begin until a child actually has some consciousness of others’ rights and feelings – a sensibility that does not develop, except possibly with respect to close blood relations, until the kid is well past the upchucking-in-public stage of life. And yes, I know some people never get past it, but that simply means they’re still toddlers in spite of the breasts and facial hair. This is true even if the breasts and facial hair are both on the same person.

Anyway, we all know this twaddle about getting children used to restaurants is just a lame excuse. People bring their toddlers to restaurants for one of two reasons: (1) they are so besotted by the issue of their loins that they cannot bear to be away from them for ten seconds or (2) they have run out of volunteers – even paid ones – for the job of babysitter. In the first of these cases we are clearly dealing with some sort of compulsive pseudonarcissistic disorder, requiring – oh, I don’t know, electroshock therapy and institutionalization, with the kids being taken into care, preferably at some remote, Spartan orphanage. In the second, you and I will be dining next to the quelled and demoralized parents of one or more pint-sized psychopaths, and we might not leave the restaurant alive.

There is absolutely no excuse for bringing children under the age of, say, five, to restaurants. Restaurants are adult places. Adult things are done in them – business, mutual social grooming, status competition and, above all, sex. Restaurants are vital, indeed sacred, to the central ritual of human mating – the gifts of food with which males of our species and its forebears have courted females for at least five million years. No-one, not even the broodiest biological-clock-obsessed thirtysomething woman, wants to be reminded of the consequences of courting and mating while engaged in the actual activity. The presence of children at such occasions is a turn-off comparable with a skip-load of offal being overturned next to one’s table. Indeed, the effect (and the smell) are often identical.

To encourage the restaurateurs of the world to come to their senses and impose a blanket ban on customers under the age of five, I propose that sane adults – which is to say, those unencumbered with children – take certain steps. These will include refusing to sit near family parties with small children, or better still, insisting that they be seated somewhere the sight, sound and smell of the little brutes will not offend other diners’ sensibilities. A quiet back-alley location, behind the restaurant among the garbage cans, would probably be best; as a second option, the manager’s office will do nicely. One might also refuse to pay one’s addition on the grounds that one’s health and appetite have been impaired by the stress of having to eat in public among small children, and furthermore forward any medical or psychiatric bills incurred over the following days to the restaurant management; but best of all, I think, will be to form a lobby group and organize restaurant boycotts. I shall shortly commence a canvass of friends, relatives, correspondents and Facebook hangers-on with this end in view.

As for the offending parents, they will just have to be sent to Coventry, won’t they? There or Siberia.

Down the Drain with Wikileaks

Whistleblowing is good when actual wrong has been done, but governments and businesses cannot function without privacy any more than individuals or families can. When people don't feel comfortable talking off the record, or when they fear they might be endangered by it, they stop talking, and mutual misunderstanding and suspicion ensue.

Take the revelation that Hillary Clinton had inquired of her aides whether Christina Fernandez was on medication and if so, how the meds affected her decision-making. It's a perfectly legitimate question for a secretary of state to ask before meeting the president of a foreign country. Yet Ms. Fernandez is hardly likely to be pleased to learn that it was asked, and this makes relations between Argentina and the US ever so slightly more difficult. Much worse would be the consequences of harsh words used by US diplomats (in a confidential discussion) about the chief Chinese representative at the Six-Party Talks over North Korea, and the revelation that some American diplomats think an important Turkish minister is a bit of a closet Islamic extremist. Publicizing such matters makes the going along the rough edges of international relations just that much rougher--and makes the world a slightly more dangerous place.

Back on the home front, what good purpose is served by making public the knowledge that some American diplomats in Colombo, at least, believe that President Rajapakse and his military commanders are guilty of war crimes? It is not as if the news is going to change the views people already hold. It may briefly put fresh heart into human-rights campaigners and civil-society activists, but its practical consequences are all negative: they consist mainly of increased friction, distrust and resentment between Sri Lanka and the US, and between Sri Lanka and the west in general. It will make working towards final reconciliation and accountability harder than ever. That benefits nobody.

'Freedom of information' also means freedom for information to flow. By turning itself into an obstacle to its free passage in this way, Wikileaks has made the world a shadier, more secretive place. This is nothing less than a terrorist attack on civilization. It will have a far greater impact, in the long term, than 9/11 ever did or could. And it is not just the West that is the victim here. It is everybody.

Breeding Stupidity

What is the average Sri Lankan IQ? Two recent global studies of the relationship between IQ and other important national statistics (popular religiosity and national disease burden) both include Sri Lanka among the countries studied. Naturally, both studies give a figure for mean national IQ. I confess I don’t know how far we should trust these figures, but I don’t see any reason for discounting them altogether.

IQ is, I know, a controversial statistic. There is massive disagreement about whether it is a fair measure of intelligence or whether, indeed, it measures anything at all. Its origin in eugenics makes it suspect – and scandalously, black people tend to do worse on IQ tests than whites. Less scandalously (since they didn’t invent the tests), East Asians do better than either. All this is worth remembering, yet there is no other measure of general intelligence that works as well as IQ, and it correlates to other measures of intelligence too. Perhaps intelligence cannot be measured at all; yet IQ tests certainly measure something like intelligence.

With all these caveats in hand, then, what do the statistics tell us? The IQ-vs.-religiosity study uses data from a famous and controversial book, IQ and the Wealth of Nations, and it puts the average Sri Lankan IQ at 81.

This is pretty shocking. However, it’s probably an extension of the figure for India, which is the kind of thing the authors of that book did quite a bit of. The more recent Economist study gives figures of 82 for India and – more shockingly yet – 79 for Sri Lanka. This puts Sri Lanka on par with Nepal as the lowest-IQ countries in the non-black world.

Sadly, this doesn’t surprise me. The Sri Lankan environment actively selects for - that is to say, breeds - stupidity. Here's how.

• Because life here is nearly unbearable for an intelligent person, and prospects are so poor, the brightest Sri Lankans of every generation emigrate, taking their genes (IQ, like intelligence itself, is strongly heritable) out of the pool. This has been happening without pause since a few years before Independence – a matter of three generations now.

• The society they leave behind is one that has evolved to nurture and celebrate stupidity, while intelligence and originality are penalized at every turn. Tradition, religion and caste all load the dice against independent thinking and creativity; you can’t even record a new version of the National Anthem without being accused of disrespect to the nation. So intelligent people prosper less than stupid conformists, have fewer children and perpetuate their genes less.
  

• Arranged marriage, which works against the natural tendency of intelligent people to marry one another and produce intelligent offspring, is widely practised.

In fairness, it must be said that other South Asian countries are not a great deal better than Sri Lanka when it comes to average national IQ. This does not surprise me: the same driving-away of the most intelligent in every generation, the same coddling of stupidity through religion, caste and ‘the way we do things here’, is as evident in these countries as in Sri Lanka. India, of course, is changing fast. But will Sri Lanka? From a Ceylonese perspective, the prospect doesn’t look good.

Map source

Early Aviation Images

My friend Longoff has put together a wonderfully nostalgic collection of early Ceylonese aviation photographs and trivia on Picasa, which you can look at by clicking on the picture below. They include such gems as a Chance-Vought Corsair fighter-bomber being towed to its hardstanding by an elephant, pictures of old Air Ceylon timetables and in-flight menus and some fantastic images of the RAF base at China Bay, later inherited by the Sri Lanka Air Force, where the rotting carcass of a Fairey Fulmar used to greet Air Ceylon internal flights from Colombo at the end of the runway back in the 1960s.

Early aviation in Sri Lanka

The photo of a gang of indentured native labourers building the runway at Katukurunda aerodrome tells a less agreeable tale of Ceylon, but one that was always an inseparable part of the experience. Lest anyone think Sri Lanka superior to the land of my birth in even this sorry respect, let's not forget that, right now, gangs of Chinese convicts under the supervision of Chinese warders are hard at work in the South, building the government's vanity projects for it. Meanwhile, some surveys of youth unemployment in Sri Lanka put the figure as high as fifty percent. Yes, you read that right.

Call Someplace Paradise, Kiss it Goodbye

Once upon a time, there was a country called Ceylon. It was a quiet, rather sleepy place that did not covet greatness: a former British colony, a little backward in some ways, perhaps, but civilized and decent. Its climate was felicitous, its scenery of legendary beauty, its people known for their simplicity and friendliness to strangers.

The cultures and customs of Ceylon were fascinatingly polymorphous and its faiths multifarious, ecumencial and syncretistic, for many different races called the country home. Walking through the streets and bazaars of its capital, you might hear a half-dozen different languages spoken in the space of ten minutes, and see twice as many different styles of costume on the backs of passers-by. This multiplicity of races and faiths did not always live in amity, but life was largely peaceful for all that. Garden walls were low, gates were left open and front doors ajar. The children of all races played together in the streets.

Ceylon ceased to exist in 1972. It was superseded by a new country, Sri Lanka. Unlike Ceylon, Sri Lanka has not been mostly peaceful: it has been at war against sections of its own populace for nearly all its history. That history is a sorry account of expropriation, ethnic oppression and cleansing-by-stealth, war, revolt and separatism; its successive governments have been noted mainly for their violence, corruption, incompetence and malfeasance, their gradual erosion of the rights and opportunities of those whose lives were in their trust, and their reluctance to leave office when their time was up.

Like every other Ceylonese, I became a citizen of Sri Lanka on 22 May 1972. I am, I believe, a reasonably good citizen. I pay my taxes, obey the laws and do my civic duty as I see it. I am no revolutionary, neither do I think it possible to resurrect the past.

Yet I am not - and will never be - Sri Lankan in my heart. I am a Ceylonese for ever. The tourist brochures call Sri Lanka Paradise, but the real paradise was always Ceylon. The fate of my motherland bears out the the lesson the singer sang, long before he sang it:

Call someplace Paradise, kiss it goodbye.