By Vishwamithra –

“What will your last words be?” ~ Karl Marx’s famous last words 

In 2022, January 1^st dawned as just another day in Sri Lanka. It was a Saturday; gloom of the skies signalled of things to come. Crowded cities aside, the rural environs were pregnant with rainy clouds waiting to unleash their anger and grief with unappeasable tears. While the weeping clouds may have wet the parched soil in the arid zones, the same would not be eagerly cheered on by the inhabitants in the hill country, for such hard rain clearly indicated landslides and clogged waterways blocking the regular radiant of the earth’s slope. That eager wait is no longer a wait; the calendar has already forgotten the days of January, February and March of 2022. Less than two weeks are left for the story of the year 2022 to be told.   

In the quiet, rustic belt of the country, a singing breeze is caressing the landscape to a lull and tending to put an apathetic generation to sleep, sleep that arrives quickly for a weary traveler. To turn back and labor to be introspective, one needs the discipline and training of the mind both of which come after a dedicated yet at least a rudimentary education. Rarely does it come to an uneducated and unsophisticated mind, yet it may still embrace a formally uneducated but intrinsically keen and alert one whose life-goals have been set from a very tender age, shaped and defined by the sophistication of sheer will and the character and spirit of the circumstances.

Those who believe in the nonsensical superstitions of fate, destiny and previous-birth karma have virtually given up on the niceties and inevitability of true living. True living entails all shades and nuances of mind and matter- breathing, birth, death, sickness, growing old, wealth, poverty, love, hate, quarrels, war, tears and joy and the whole enterprise of life and living. One has to deal with all the drama of life when one comes of age, whether man, woman or child. But he must remember that all these elements, banal or extraordinary, of life and living are man-made and there is no argument or debate about it. Those who relegate it to unseen gods and other inscrutabilities have mortgaged their lives to others for they are too weak to carry the vast and heavy burden of life by themselves.

When poverty or injustice or lawlessness confronts him, man has to fight it without hesitancy, without procrastination and without mercy. No god, no messiah or no sage would come to his rescue unless he is prepared to face it head on, that is the unfinished and unending story of mankind. As Gandhi said, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

Now we come to the real question: Are we ready to change ourselves if we really want to change what is around us? That change may well be your family environment, your community, your ethnic group, your Temple, your Church or Kovil or Mosque or it may even be your government, your governance system or your leaders. 

Yet we must remember that if we can’t change the course of the wind, we have to change the course of our boat, if we still need to keep sailing.

Sri Lanka, our Motherland has reached that impasse today. Everyone is searching high and dry for a way out; man has started a fresh sailing, not a voyage, but a sailing because the voyage was started, at least the current lap of it, soon after obtaining Independence from the British colonial powers. Handing over the country to the upper-class Pukka Sahibs of the twentieth century was considered Independence. Leaving the underprivileged, poverty-stricken and under-educated behind, these Pukka Sahibs began their own joyful ride, from the Senanayakes to the Kotelawalas. Then came SWRD Bandaranaike, not that he loved his countrymen less but he loved his ego and ambition more. In order to win votes amongst the Sinhalese Buddhists and the so-called downtrodden, he unleashed the Buddhist Monks with a beguiling political message but an empty desire to fulfil the pledge hidden behind the message. The followers voted and went back to their measly dwellings in the far and out countryside while the leaders came from measly beginnings to arrive at the voluptuous top. The nation’s fate was once again sealed within the Colombo residences and the walls of Parliament, the so-called Temple of Democracy. No words could describe the degradation and adulteration of people’s power.

Somewhere in the late sixties, Rohana Wijeweera articulated this alternate power-holding dynamic, from the Senanayakes to the Bandaranaikes, in the most apt and powerful fashion. But Wijeweera’s efforts, firstly in 1971 and later in 1987, too were way to shortsighted and egocentric. Power, when it gets ahold of those who are corrupt and avaricious, is more corrupting than the seeker or holder of such power. That is the internal impulse of power.

It is against such a forgettable backdrop that the year 2022 dawned. Mahinda Rajapaksa, the political hero of the 21^st century, was ousted by Maithripala Sirisena, not because there was any political capital and resultant worth ascribed to Sirisena but because the Rajapaksa-led government was so unpopular and corrupt to the teeth and toes. From the time Sirisena-Ranil combo took over the reins, instead of righting the wrongs and diluting the state machinery so saturated with corruption and inefficiency, the people realized that there is no difference between these two forces, the UNP-led power center and the SLFP-led power center.

A new group of cheats took advantage of the stagnating governance and economic structures and projected a guy called Gotabaya, Mahinda’s younger brother. The group called itself the ‘Viyathmaga’ (Learned Group). The usual suspects supported them and Gotabaya had an easy passage to the throne. Gotabaya taught his elder brother Mahinda how to corrupt a nation in such a short time. But during his tenure, until he ran away from power, thanks solely to the people’s power shown via the Aragalaya, the corruption-ailment took so deep a root in our society, it had gone underground so that no seeing person could identify it until it hit the main trunk and branches of the marketplace-tree with such venom and ferocity, lines for petrol, diesel, kerosene and cooking gas began to crowd the streets; inflation gripped the consumers so hard, overnight, the scarcities and prices of available items skyrocketed to unbelievable heights.

That was this year in the months of February, March and April. The memories that are dancing in our sleep are most regrettable. In the meantime those remembrances that pertain to the early days after our Independence are mostly forgotten; those who could remember are not among the living; even personalities such as Gamini Dissanayake, Lalith Athulathmudali and Chandrika Kumaratunga are fading away to distant environs. That is why it is of paramount significance to chronicle some events and functions that did take place during this passing year, 2022.

The year 2022 is one of the most eventful and politically vibrant years. What was packed into the months of March to the present day should not be allowed to depart from us any soon. What was most promising at the beginning of the Aragalaya has fizzled out abruptly. The departure of one scoundrel, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, has resulted in the sudden arrival of another persona non grata, Ranil Wickremasinghe. The tears of joy at the parting with Gotabaya have turned into a grieving howl with the advent of Ranil Wickremesinghe. A memory on the one side is sheer joy and the other, utter grief. That is the scourge of these last two weeks of December, parting passages of 2022.

A promising coming-together of all ethnic groups at the height of the Aragalaya are being torn apart again; both in the main media outlets and the social media, flames are being fanned and a hungry people are being fed with the same fear of minorities portrayed as Gullivers waiting to swallow the Sinhalese Buddhist Lilliputians. The leaders of the Aragalaya have been jailed; their voices silenced and action thwarted. Action of great magnitude and even greater character is being depicted as traitorous and unpatriotic. When those who wield power tell a story through their own media, what can the spectators do? Is political power running through the barrel-fulls of money and muscle?

The sweet memories of the Aragalaya and their fragrance should not be allowed to evaporate into thin air. Those memories may fade into blurred mist one day but that day should not be tomorrow or the day after. The not-so-sweet and bitter memories might linger on as they always do; yet it is incumbent on all of us who were dreaming about a better world with deeper understanding of our values to make our younger generations remember the hard as well as the pleasant memories alive, for without those memories, we are left with nothing. 

A system change may not happen tomorrow, it may not come about even in five to ten years; but one day it will come and it is most crucial in the context of our unbroken history as a nation to keep alive the good as well as the bad parts of our national voyage. Without which we are merely a collection of  two-legged animals that follow a tribal leader whose only qualification happens to be that he is able to kill better than the rest.             

*The writer can be contacted at vishwamithra1984@gmail.com