The president's colourless hue

Maithripala Sirisena knows timing. He knows when and where to declare and defend position. He knows how to mince words. How to keep to the point. That doesn't make him a statesman however. That makes him a politician. A clever and crafty one.

At present though, he's facing a problem. A big one. He isn't leading a party anymore. Doesn't appear to be. He's leading a "headless cadaver".

Gunadasa Amarasekara used that term to describe what and where the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) is now. He is correct. The party is led by a man who's shown himself to be absolutely incapable of defending it.

To be fair, Sirisena has shown again and again that he can come out if pressured. That's what he did last Tuesday. To be sure, what he said about his decision to nominate his predecessor didn't sound too good. It ruffled feathers on one side and left many of his critics in the dark. As of now, however, one shouldn't worry about his stance on Mahinda Rajapaksa. There are other things. Other matters.

There's his choice of words for instance. It wasn't long ago that he made accused people of wanting to go back to slavery (under the Rajapaksas). What jarred was the accusation. It indicated bias against those who support the former president, not just the politicians but those among the 5.8 million pro-Rajapaksa voters who still rally around him.

If he accuses them of wanting to revert to the Dark Ages that's his problem. But Sirisena is not president of 6.2 million people only. He's president of the country. That includes the 5.8 million who didn't vote for him and those who supported other candidates. That also includes those who can't vote due to disability and disqualification.

Those who see green in everything seem to think he has a moral debt to pay. In certain respects, they are right. He couldn't have won without them. That this should mean unconditional obeisance to the UNP is ridiculous however. Sirisena is no puppet. He owes neither the UNP nor the SLFP, technically speaking. Favouring those who voted for him and lashing at those who didn't isn't statesmanship. That's what the Rajapaksas were once known for.

His statement on Tuesday echoed all this. Sadly. Sure, he defended the nomination of Rajapaksa by saying "for party unity". 99% (the proportion of his party he claims were with his predecessor) indicates a majority. Not to have heeded their call would have indicated anti-democratic tendencies on his part. What's interesting however is his justification for dissolving parliament. He claims it was to stop the pro-Rajapaksa motion against the Prime Minister, alleging there was a conspiracy to install his predecessor as Prime Minister through the National List.

First of all, a conspiracy is a conspiracy. Unproved and unsubstantiated. It can be alleged and targeted at someone to suit political preferences. The decision to dissolve the parliament was made on the day the COPE Report was to be released. It was also around the time the motion was to be presented. The Mahinda Faction can insinuate the former as reason for dissolution. Those who oppose them can quote the latter. Either way, the president did himself no favours by dissolving parliament after making a pledge that he'd see through the 20th Amendment. That's a blemish. On him.

Secondly, the decision to nominate the former president was taken for the sake of party unity. Laudable, but it contradicts his neutral stance. If at all, his decisions within the past six months have favoured one side over the other, "the other" being his own party! In this regard both his neutrality and his self-righteous claims about upholding party unity look like eyewash. So does his claim that he told the Prime Minister to ask Arjuna Mahendran to resign.

Sirisena is an Executive President. He calls the shots. He was quick to obtain a restraining order to stop his party convening on Wednesday night, we note. He could have acted faster with the Bond issue. He didn't. Excuses are weak, therefore. Worth a dime a dozen.

If Sirisena was so concerned about party unity and the need to maintain good governance, he should have rejected Rajapaksa and pressured the Central Bank Governor to resign. He showed himself incapable of doing both. With most of his faction in the UNP, his stance must be made clearer. Is he with the Blues, the Greens, or the front for good governance (stripped of party-colour)?

Would he really claim his government is pitch-perfect? That the Prime Minister's conduct during the past six months is accolade-worthy? That his refusal to nominate Rajapaksa as the PM candidate indicates party unity when there hasn't been any other candidate named? Besides, if he's really that neutral, why is he still the Chairman of the SLFP? Doesn't that indicate "conflict of interest"?

He needs to come out. He needs to resign from his party. And remain colourless.

Uditha Devapriya is a freelance writer who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com

Touching heart and eye

Kumar de Silva is a busy man. He's hard to catch, naturally enough. One wonders how he found the time to organise an exhibition, especially an exhibition as carefully planned and structured as this. "Nostalgie05", a virtual trip around daily and routine-filled Paris, opened on Friday the 10th. It closed on the 12th. I went on both nights. It caught heart. And eye. Like all photographers who privilege the "how" of what's being taken, his work bore witness to sensitivity to mood, fidelity to life, and economy of style. Impressive.

I ask what moved him. He explains. There was life and he felt the urge to record it. That sensitivity to mood isn't coincidental, after all. There was planning involved. Meticulous planning. Framing, angles, curves, even silhouettes: these come together so seamlessly.

But it rarely shows. For all his planning, everything he takes and exhibits seems effortless.

Each photo tells more than just a story. It opens an entire world, free of frill and as honest as it can be. Even more impressive considering what Kumar used for his snaps: a palm-sized camera a bystander (not exhibitor) would use. I ask him whether he uses any manipulation techniques even those with professional equipment tend to exploit to the hilt, and he denies it at once. I'd usually be sceptic at this point. But then I remember that art without artifice requires or rather depends on simplicity. That's what his work touches on. Simplicity.

And in the end, this works. None of his photos is complicated in any way. They reveal life in Paris for what it is. There are people eating at restaurants and poring over newspapers. There are organists playing nonchalantly. There's even a woman seated on a bench, right after a drizzle, an exceptionally bright sun casting a shadow in a way photo-editing techniques can't emulate. No artifice here. Thankfully.

Perhaps it's all to do with Kumar. He mentions "Bonsoir". Of course. He wasn't only a presenter in that show. He handled the camera. As he admits, that acquainted him not just with the Paris he grew up with but with a city seen through lens after lens. All that experience and thirst shows. Remarkably. That's what whets our appetite, our longing to go into what is exhibited. Yes, imagination works in different ways. Nostalgie's lesson may well be that.

There's another reason why it touches heart. All proceeds obtained from "Nostalgie05" will go to a fund. That fund is dedicated to two kids, their father being Rukshan Abeywansha of The Nation. The exhibition last year was dedicated to him. In a way, the message it embodied continues even now. Explains Kumar's enthusiasm as he tells me how he plans to sell his work, with nothing for him in return. Explains how readily he gives credit to those who've helped him along the way.

What of the photos themselves? "I didn't want to bring out a foreground and leave it at that," he tells me, pointing at a photo with two pigeons caught mid-frame and a chair and table at the top. That speaks volumes about the sort of photography he treasures. The foreground isn't privileged: those little details surrounding it have a story to tell too. Maybe that's why and of course how he's more a painter than photographer.

"Nostalgie05" didn't jar. It didn't disappoint. There's a reason I went back to it. The first night wasn't for photo-viewing. It was for hobnobbing. For chatter. And gossip. The last night was more open. There was space for scrutiny. Close scrutiny. Relishing photo after photo, savouring the play of shadow and light in simple yet diverse ways: all this added to my enjoyment. An amateur myself, still being tutored in the finer aspects of "taking snaps", this artist's simplicity moved me.

Kumar's work didn't merely embrace eye. It also touched heart. Pretty rare, you must admit.

Written for: The Nation INSIGHT, July 18 2015

From Bela to Martin

Review of AnandaDrama's "Dracula!", directed by Thushara Hettihamu, written by Nishantha de Silva, Rajitha Hettiarachchi, and Ishtartha Wellaboda, scored by Ranil Gunawardena, and staged from July 10 to 12 at Lionel Wendt Theatre.

"AnandaDrama" has come a long way since 2013. That's what I could gather at Lionel Wendt last Sunday. Thushara Hettihamu's Dracula! opened for the third and final night. Let me come out with it. I loved it. I saw energy, enthusiasm, and spontaneity: qualities that rarely get together. That's why I didn't just laugh. Why I felt what I was laughing at. Vague, yes. Still.

On the cast I'll write shortly. Meanwhile, here are some reflections. For a source text that has been adapted, distorted, reconfigured, and in other ways modified, Hettihamu's Dracula! was a breath of fresh air. I can't describe it without assessing how its organisers structured the play. But let me make one point clear. In this version there was a subtle intermingling of horror and comedy maintained throughout. That wasn't its greatest strength. But it helped.

The program notes try to justify the play's four-Act structure. It needn't. That structure was kept for a purpose: to pay "homage to the novel's epistolary style." Coupled with the quirks of characters and the way the actors transited into multiple roles, it also made something clear: the play's biggest strength. More on that a little later.

Dracula! doesn't rely on a unity of milieu or time. There is no compression. Only variety. In such a context it would have been a miracle if the cast didn't err. Well, miracles happen. Hettihamu's cast did his script proud. They stuck to two things that vindicated them in the end. One was a swiftness of movement. The other was humour, sustained throughout but not to the point of overkill.

Playing two roles is a challenge. Playing five or more is worse. You've got to associate yourself with every character and that in a medium which demands perfection and nothing but. Well, seeing the cast at work with a multiplicity of roles, I was taken aback. A case-by-case assessment would be difficult at this point. But with a limited cast, that would also be appropriate.

Dinoo Wickramage as Mina Murray acted her part with enough sensitivity to make us ease into her other roles. Eraj Gunewardena as Jonathan (Renfield) Harker hovered between his Jekyll-and-Hyde halves well. He changed accents. And moods. That helped.

Charith Dissanayake's dimwitted Dr John Seward couldn't connect the dots in front of him so much that it became a running gag. I haven't seen Charith's other performances. This was his first I saw. He enthralled me. Maybe it was Seward's clumsiness. Maybe it was his rendition of Abraham Lincoln (of all people!). I'm not sure. Either way, he kept us on tenterhooks. And made us laugh.

I haven't seen Vishan Gunawardena's other performances either, but his Van Helsing played Hardy to Charith's Laurel brilliantly. I'm not bluffing. His other roles helped him here. As both William and Molly, the caretaker and nurse at Seward's asylum, his constant Cockney-accented exclamation "The Ship of the Dead!" tickled rib.

Two sequences come to my mind. In the first of them, Van Helsing repeats the "Ship of the Dead!" line, giving away the "Vishan" in both Helsing and William and deliberately opening the audience to the artifice beneath the art. In the other, like Inspector Clouseau from A Shot in the Dark, he uses his deductive powers to come to an incredible conclusion: that Lucy bit the necks of certain dead children. I didn't just see humour here though. I saw spontaneity. Rapid and sustained. Rare.

I'm not so sure about Nandun Dissanayake. For a play called Dracula! he was featured for a matter of minutes. Even the Count laments this, breaking the fourth wall as he does so. He was comic, to say the least. He did not appear strained. I didn't see Nandun there, moreover. I saw a blood-sucking Count transposed from Transylvania into Lionel Wendt. This isn't flattery. This is what I noticed. His Dracula was essentially a self-parody, but not to a point where he made us aware of it. He kept a fine balance between the Dracula of Bela Lugosi and that of Leslie Nielson.

Let me be honest. I didn't see Bela Lugosi's Dracula in him. I saw Martin Landau's Bela Lugosi.

And in a way, that summed up the show for me. Dracula! wasn't just parody. It shouldn't have been. Like all well-written plays it was subtle. There was humour and there were laughs. But that wasn't parody. Wasn't farce. That was something indefinable, which went beyond the comedy-horror dichotomy it played and (in the end) broke the rift between audience and stage with. The best way I can describe it (if I may take the liberty to do so) is by comparing Hettihamu's Dracula! to (who else?) Landau's Lugosi.

There's a sequence in Tim Burton's Ed Wood which might make this a little easier. Wood (Johnny Depp) is walking along. He's dejected. Doesn't know what to do. He comes across a coffin-shop. Goes in. Sees Bela Lugosi (Landau), once a star but now down on both luck and money. Bela's in a coffin, like Dracula, and seems tantalisingly like his (virtual) namesake. The music builds to a crescendo. He wakes up. Music stops. "This is the most uncomfortable coffin I've ever been in. Your selection is quite shoddy. You are wasting my time!" he exclaims.

I don't know how to define this. Where does it fit in? Self-parody? Pathos? In the end I suppose it doesn't really matter. That's pretty much what I can say of Thushara Hettihamu's Dracula! There's comedy. There are laughs. Suspense too. To define them all with one word would be beside the point though. And at the end of the day, that's what good theatre is or rather should be.

That was this play's greatest strength.

Sure, there were weaknesses. Two of them in fact. A friend of mine found the story a little confusing. I didn't, but I saw his point: with 100 minutes and a near-chaotic plot-line, you need to pay attention. The slightest distraction and you'll miss it.

The other weakness was the portrayal of Ranjit the Sikh servant. That was unneeded. Frilled. It reinforced a stereotype (the red turban and his name make it obvious where he was ripped off from) which jarred. Other than that, the play moved along just fine.

My only regret was my choice of ticket. I was seated at the back. There were other people. Naturally enough, there was conversation. I couldn't hear what was going on in the story at times. Trivialities to be sure, but in the end that took away what I could readily have taken in had I sat at the front. My mistake.

To sum up, Dracula! wasn't just good theatre on a human level. In its use of props (the choice of using boys who snarl like wolves to rearrange them was ingenious) and its film-like silhouetted images (providing another laugh, with the image of the towering Count "emptying" the London-bound ship), I was truly mesmerised. I don't usually say this about plays, but if Dracula! were shown 10 times, I'd see them all.

I stand by what I said before, hence. "AnandaDrama" has progressed. Admirably.

Photos courtesy of Rajitha Hettiarachchi

Written for: The Nation INSIGHT, July 18 2015

This spooner's not for turning!

Sometimes I wonder why I am who I am now. No, I don't wish that I were born different. It's just that through time I have changed. As has my family. We've gone down a bit. For a spooner, that's intolerable. After all, the vilest disgrace we can get is getting our names dirtied. And what worse way for that to happen than by falling down, financially speaking?

All this we were taught, by the way. No, our teachers didn't conduct classes on "spoonerism", but any form of abuse we put on our not-so-affluent "friends" (note the asterisks, please) was wilfully ignored by them. They sanctioned it. By silence. They sanctioned other things as well. We were taught not to shake hands, for instance, unless the guy offering to shake ours was "worthy" enough in our estimation. That's class, we were taught. We believed it. Still do. That's why we laugh whenever kids from down under offer to shake everyone's hands. They think it’s polite. What rot!

See, it's not just about who we are. It's what we do. That counts. Big time. You don't see us going on buses. You don't see us taking trains. You see us wake up late (because we live right next to those schools every kid in the country dies to get into). You see us take our very own cars (reserved for us by our fathers, bless them). You see us in the backseat. We aren't driven by our mothers. There are people who come and drive. We are dropped off at whatever school we go to and taken back at whatever time it's over. Simple as that.

And we love it. We love to abuse our drivers. We love to throw off our anger at them. We love to compare where we are schooled with where their kids go to, knowing how superior we are and being happy therefore. We make no bones about it. Nor do we apologise for it. That's just the way we were born. And bred. We can't help it.

There's more I can write. I'll leave those for later.

For now, here's what's important. When you're a spooner, you remain a spooner. You may be anywhere in the world. You may do whatever you want. You may even fall down in life. Once a spooner, however, always a spooner. We don't turn. Not that easily. If we see our drivers' kids or their equals get into our schools and clubs, we take umbrage at it. If we see our betters there, we salivate and try to be their equals. Yes, we're kids. No, we shouldn't do all these. But that's what we've been instructed.

I've fallen too. But I remain a spooner. At heart. I may not have servants to serve me at my beck and call or their kids to tease and in other ways embarrass. I may be in a school which teaches this ridiculous thing called "equality". Heck, I may not even have my own driver to pout at and put to shame every time he tries to befriend me.

These are trivialities, though. Whether we like it or not, we have a reputation to keep. This reputation is what sustains us. It's what empowers. What motivates. Sure, we may not be able to stand our inferiors having better brains than us and scoring better marks at tests. Sure, we may resent our neighbours for having come from beyond "spooner-land" (the Big City, that is) and settled down with their horrible, horrible kids who can't put two words together. Sure, for putting up with all this I ought to be given an award or a token of appreciation by my fellow spooners.

In the end though, it's the little things that matter. Like who I am at heart. A silver spooner.

Let me make this clear, hence. This spooner's not for turning.

Written for: The Nation FREE, July 11 2015

On Sparrows and Pallbearers

History is version. So is truth. That was what a Prime Minister (here) observed when he wrote that truth was relative, and that yesterday’s truth might become tomorrow’s fiction or vice-versa. Naturally enough, opinion gets scripted into incident, which is why it becomes difficult to reconcile differing versions of the same event.

The Jaffna Public Library burning is one example. It’s been more than three decades. We still don’t know what happened. We still don't know who did it. Not by a long shot.

Yes, there have been eyewitness accounts. Yes, there have been allegations, accusations, and countless other insinuations that have subsided through time. But what really happened? The "whodunit" part to it has been hotly debated, with politicians from both sides blaming each other. Edward Gunawardena’s book Memorable Tidbits Including the Jaffna Library Fire tried to resolve this by pointing fingers at the LTTE.

The book was acclaimed. It moved an academic to apologise and withdraw an accusation he himself had believed in. Professor Carlo Fonseka, who throughout the 1994 Presidential Election maintained that Gamini Dissanayake had sanctioned the burning, recanted. We are forced to question that recantation, however. We are forced to ask: how? And more importantly: why?

To resolve that, we need to look at another version. Another book.

Thangarajah Mukunthan was not at the site when the Library was burnt. He has written a book, however. To say it offers a counterpoint to Gunawardena’s book is an understatement. “The Jaffna Public Library: 34 Years Since the Burning” is a compilation of events as they happened. Its author lays the blame on not just the Army but members of the ruling party as well, in the run-up to the District Development Council (DDC) Election.

Here’s what happened. On May 31, 1981, a meeting attended by more than 2,000 people and overseen by four police officers (including one Sinhalese and one Tamil sergeant) at Nachchimar Kovilady was disturbed violently by unidentified terrorists. In the ensuing carnage, Sergeant Punchi Banda was killed, his Tamil counterpart shot thrice.

This later became (part of) the basis for the Library fire. At around the same time, police officers baton-charged people and reduced to ashes several public places throughout the city. No site was spared. Not even the Kovil. By the following day, schools and bus services were shut down. Curfew would be declared the day after. In the meantime, chaos reigned.

From here onward, unfortunately, history becomes version.

About a week later (June 9), after the Library had been razed to the ground, the then Opposition Leader Appapillai Amirthalingam accused the police of complicity. A heated exchange between him and members of the United National Party (UNP) followed. That didn’t tone down allegation, however. It merely sustained it.

Amirthalingam didn’t name names. It took another nine years and a split in the UNP for someone to do that. And when Ranasinghe Premadasa accused Gamini Dissanayake of having a hand in the Library fire upon the latter’s defection (with Lalith Athulathmudali) from the party, the cat was out of the bag. This was because (as Mukunthan infers) Premadasa couldn’t have known of Dissanayake’s (alleged) complicity without his being privy to it in the first place.

“They obviously were all party to it, the President downwards.”

So where does Gunawardena’s version diverge from Mukunthan’s? In Gunawardena’s book, the fire was started by the LTTE to blackguard the Army and Government. Plausible? Mukunthan doesn’t think so. An opponent of the LTTE himself, Mukunthan believes that it couldn’t have had a motive for burning something valued by the Tamil people. In this he was echoing Tassie Seneviratne, whose article on the fire (where he critiqued Memorable Tidbits) ends with the following words:

“Furthermore, will the Tigers, given that they were the most inhuman murderers of all communities including Tamils, fighting for Tamil Eelam, destroy the strongest and most precious cultural possession of the Tamil people — the records of the very cultural claims they were making? Inconceivable by any stretch of imagination!”

Inconceivable, certainly. And implausible.

Gunawardena reasoned that the LTTE consisted mainly of low caste Tamils oppressed by the Vellala aristocracy. This (he argued) was the motive for burning the Library, in his words the “repository of classical Hindu treatises and the pedigrees of Hindu Vellala aristocracy” (page 349). Certainly, opposition to a rigid caste structure accounted somewhat for the LTTE’s rise to power. But to extrapolate and suggest that this alone explains the burning of a site treasured by Tamils would be akin to saying that the Colombo Library (hypothetically) was ransacked by a bunch of radicals for housing bourgeois literature!

By reducing the desecration of a cultural site to a caste-rift, Mukunthan suggests the writer was trying to put off the blame from where it really belonged. “There were rumours that Gamini Dissanayake and his henchmen were in Jaffna on June 1,” he tells me (while the other version states that Dissanayake arrived two days later). The ruling party had a motive, furthermore. “The UNP knew the TULF had a presence in in the district. Its members wanted to create unrest. That is why they wanted to destroy the Library.”

This isn’t the only point at which Mukunthan begs to differ from Gunawardena’s version of events. According to the latter, the incineration was a strategised move by the theoretician of the LTTE, Anton Balasingham, whose ploy involved moving Tamils into the capitals of Europe, Canada, and Australia to perpetuate the belief (or myth?) that they were an oppressed race in Sri Lanka.

This and the author’s account of arsonists on the loose throughout the city, which involved the looting of petrol sheds, contrasts with Tassie Seneviratne’s assertion that a police sergeant attached to the Jaffna Police Station had told him that he “poured petrol from a barrel and ignited the fire with a matchstick at the Jaffna Public Library.”

Mukunthan agrees. “There were no arsonists. Everything was calculated, to the dot. Stalwarts from the ruling party and their goons strategised every step, of this I am convinced!”

Still. Gunawardena’s belief that the LTTE was strengthening itself even before 1981 stands to reason. The bombing of an Avro aircraft in 1978 and the political assassinations which followed proved that. The PLO’s involvement (along with India’s) in training its cadres has also been proved. It was all meticulously planned, yes. But the insinuation that the LTTE burnt the Library doesn’t hold water, certainly not with people I've talked to (it must be mentioned here that these people were for the most part Sinhalese).

Seneviratne alludes to the first few lines of a nursery rhyme in his article:

Who killed Cock Robin?

I, said the Sparrow,

with my bow and arrow,

I killed Cock Robin.

The rhyme ("Who Killed Cock Robin?") begins with grief and ends with resolution. But there's a problem here. If the Sparrow did indeed kill Cock Robin (and it affirms that at once), where are the Robin's pallbearers? Years and decades after the burning of the Jaffna Library, one looks in vain for a Beetle to prepare the shroud, an Owl to dig the grave, a Rook to act as Parson, a Wren to bear the pall, and a Bull to toll the bell for arguably the most horrific act of cultural desecration in our time.

Let me be clear. The perpetrator(s) must be found. So must the pallbearers. Purely and simply.

Written for: The Nation INSIGHT, July 11 2015