I’ve been fortunate these past three years in meeting young men and women who have shared their perspectives with me. Some of those perspectives, I find hard to agree with; others, I find hard to disagree with; and still others, I am not sure whether I should agree or disagree with at all. These young, wild teenagers – many of them behaving beyond their years – are the obverse of the children of our movies: they are idealists but they are not stupid, whereas their counterparts in our contemporary movies are so stupid that they can only broadcast those idealisms through the loudspeaker. Their love for photography, for the guitar, for the sheer, sensual pleasure of taking a microphone and singing in front of an audience composed of members of the opposite sex for the most, stems from this strange dualism: they are children, yet they think beyond their years in a way their age can’t do justice to.
The elders of this country are nervous about those who will take after them because of this self-contradictory position that the young are in: they are groomed to be the elders they are not at an early age, yet they are treated and indulged as the youngsters that they consciously try not to be. This is certainly one of the most discernibly peculiarities of modern sensibility, and for me it explains, at least to an extent, why our teenagers become adults long before they hit 17 and why so many of them (from the many I’ve met thus far) are so suave and smug and self-confident that they don’t feel the need to be aware or respectful of the adults in front of them. At one level that can be taken as a sign of their arrogance and complacency. At another, it’s something else.
In America, the youngest of all democracies, the young were a little like this after the Second World War; they rebelled against authority even when that authority yielded to them and indulged them. If James Dean, from Rebel Without a Cause, appears so shockingly outdated and even out of place today, it’s because America has gone beyond that kind of youthful angst which the fifties epitomised and because a country like Sri Lanka is yet to produce that kind of angst. Dean has nothing really to complain about, if we are to apply the standards that we, here, apply when it comes to the upbringing of our children, to him, and yet we do see a mild trace of his rebelliousness in the young of today. There’s a difference between this rebellious streak which is opening up in the country and the streak that characterised them two or three decades ago, because then the young ones wanted to please their elders and the society they were born to. Simply put, that rebellion converted them into doers, the generation of Clarence Wijewardena and Rookantha Goonetilake.
The young of those early days wanted to show off because they had what it took to translate what they had into something fulfilling. The young of the recent past were unable to make this leap (was it because, by then, a gap had materialised between the high culture and the popular culture, with the young taking to the latter even though the elders were adamant that they stick to the former?), owing to which they could only imitate any new artiste who came up. Our popular culture never went beyond Bathiya and Santhush and Iraj for quite some time, and later, when Batti and Paba and Muthu Kirilli came, they couldn’t go beyond the mega-series on television either. Look at those latter three TV serials today, the veteran cast members they had (can you imagine someone of the calibre of Irangani Serasinghe or the late H. A. Perera in a mega-drama revolving around a love story today?), and compare them to the shoddiness of what television puts out for mass audiences now.
The new modern culture is different in many ways, I believe. Thumudu Dodantanne, the star of Koombiyo and Sahodarayo (the former more popular and enjoyable than the latter, for me that is), is the newest face to adorn our silver screen, and he does a pretty good job at being that new face in a way that puts to shame even (from the cinema) Uddika Premaratne and Hemal Ranasinghe. For those who want a story instead of an overdrawn, overdue love story, for those who want a plot that parses, that keeps you expecting the next episode without making you feel cheated, Koombiyo is the ultimate television product. It relates to the contemporary society and culture we inhabit – people are turning the conversations in it into memes on Facebook – in ways that no other mega-series can or will, in the near future. (That’s why my excitement over it is tempered by my disappointment at the fact that it took years for the producers to get it approved by the top board at ITN.)
Apart from Koombiyo and Sahodarayo, what are the other symbols of this modern culture? To mention a few: Sanuka Wickramasinghe, Tehan Perera, Ho Gana Pokuna, Adareyi Mang. (We don’t have an equivalent for these in literature, for some reason.) What brings them together is their disregard for the rules that have been set for their respective mediums by other, more established players in the industry: neither Ho Gana Pokuna nor Adareyi Mang, for instance, yields to the commercialism or the profundities that the mainstream and the art house movie sector operate on. They promote rebellion but not at the cost of an absolute annihilation of the values which are being rebelled against. When people listen to Sanuka, they aren’t listening to songs about lovers being denied their romances by the world; they’re listening to songs about lovers being denied their romances from within. It’s the same story with Koombiyo: the urban angst that the serial purveys has been portrayed by so many directors in the medium, but no one has captured our attention in quite the same way the characters in that particular serial have. It’s not a rejection of the old, it’s a reworked, better version of the old.
The schoolboys of today are growing up on this kind of culture, and I for one am happy. When I was schooling I had to put up with either the insufferable yet strangely intriguing mega-drama or the shallowly profound mini-series about contemporary angst (sincerely awful, awfully sincere), and this was true even of the other arts: the only serious movies I had which I could watch came in the form of Aksharaya, long before Indika Ferdinando broke my prejudice against Sinhala films by giving us a film that soothed our sorrows and emboldened our joys without leaving me with the impression that what I was watching was a facilely serious production about a serious idea. The young of today, in other words, are inheritors of a serious culture, but without the overly serious overtones. It’s a new kind of youngsters that is being nurtured by the contemporary sensibility. When they take to photography, when they decide to croon Sanuka’s Saragaye, and when they try to entrance the opposite sex, they aren’t being shallow like their descendants from my generation were. They are truly, madly, sincerely serious about what they’re doing. They have the facilities. They have the confidence. And more than anything else, they have themselves. Isn’t that enough for now? I think so.
Written for: Ceylon Today ECHO, February 18 2018
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