By Vishwamithra –

“So long as the human spirit thrives on this planet, music in some living form will accompany and sustain it and give it expressive meaning.” ~ Aaron Copland

Today the country resembles a vast moving carpet of water. Cyclone Ditwah was a tropical cyclone that formed in the Bay of Bengal and brought heavy rains and strong winds to Sri Lanka and southern India, particularly Tamil Nadu. It’s ferocious and destructive powers consumed Sri Lanka, almost every district, as never before. From Dondra Point to Point Pedro, the destruction it caused was unprecedented; its beginning could be forecast, yet there was no forewarning. Maybe at a very cursory level the people may have exchanged elementary information amongst themselves about the cyclone and its potential, but in a very scientific sense, no information was disseminated by the government machinery as to the precautions one should take, what shelters are available at what point or what village and at what temple or school or community center, etc.

In the total absence of such treasured and valuable information, when the mighty waters crash on your threshold, what can one do, other than collect whatever nearby, gather the family and run? But the question remains whether they had any time left, even to run. The official numbers released by the Disaster Management officials are close to five hundred (500) presumed to be dead and many hundreds still missing, categorized under ‘uncounted’. The very images seen on television have elicited many a teardrop; but those who were so resilient to survive and extend a helping hand to his or her neighbor were many and a heartwarming communication to all of us indeed.   

Human spirit has survived thousands years and its unceasing cascade through millions of men, women and children would continue to course through their veins and bring forth the very essence of the human family and its invulnerable existence through untimely crashes and devastation. They can be bent but never broken. Men and women were clad in whatever they were wearing at the time of the unkind waters making an unwelcome visit to their dwellings; and making their belongings disappear in seconds was another sad episode of the drama that was being played in front of Smartphone cameras; the social media transmitted these pictures depicting courage on the one side and despondence on the other; portraying the validity of both survival and death of their own brothers and sisters to the millions of Facebook, Instagram, Ticktock and Whatsapp recipients is no waste of time and energy; the moving drama of human tragedy played its most vital role on the vanishing banks of the mighty Mahaweli, Kalu, Kelani, Walawe and all other major and minor gangas (rivers) in Sri Lanka.

Waters that fed the earth and nurtured that soil with richness without any prejudice and discrimination as to who and which colored-Lankan that shaped and cultivated the land, were in a ferocious mood and its course was not controlled or governed in terms of any preselected fashion or configuration. The contours were not crafted by irrigation engineering specialists. Water finds its own level, as the cliche goes. Those who never suspected that their fate was foretold by their beloved fortune-tellers years earlier had to disown their own superstitious ways of living and their unsubtle ways of religious beliefs.

None of the politicos were adversely affected. None of the Colombo-dwelling millionaires and billionaires had to suffer the obscenities of having to abandon their household belongings and run away in search of higher plains. The most vulnerable segments of society, the poorest of the poor and the middleclass have come together to form a platoon of those who had to remake their lives altogether in the most tragic and unfortunate circumstances.

A young couple, husband clad in a sarong and holding its bottom up and the wife in her homegrown jacket and skirt was carrying a basin on their shoulders. Their profiles were a picture of desolate audacity; a Picasso-painted masterpiece exhibiting what devotion to parental duty and stoicism beyond measure is; carrying in the basin was their only baby-child, secured and held high above the gushing waters, this couple displayed to the onlookers what ‘grace under pressure’ is. So was the most heart-wrenching scene of a small herd of elephants, raising their trunks ever so proudly, attempting to keep abreast of the flow with the angry and all consuming waters of the floods.

The ‘spirit of man’ never diminishes in the face of calamity, whether man-made or natural. A solitary man having climbed to the top of a coconut tree, waiting for more than six hours to be rescued by an Air force helicopter, more than seventy neighbors surviving on top of a roof until they were spotted and extricated by our law enforcement men, a poignant episode of men, women and children in the savagely violent waters that were once their roadways and green land, could be viewed on every television screen; their forceful lingering and undefeated posture were a marvelous preface to the next chapter that is waiting to be written by our historians in time yet to dawn.

Now the waters are receding; its potential reascendance will be unwelcome and its possibility is  sparse. It’s time to rebuild and recapture the same dedication and boldness shown during the testing and trying times to the present and near future. Resilience is a sublime human quality that has never abandoned man since the beginning of times. Never failing to answer the call, man, on the beaten track of civilization and with each uncounted millions and billions of small steps, has arrived at the modern station of astonishing and glorious inventions such the Smartphone and Artificial Intelligence.

The courageous drama of man would not allow him to rest and be apathetic; it would not let him wonder in a barren land of hopelessness and despair; he shall pick up each and every piece that has fallen while he was being smashed by the extravagant yet ugly visits of natural disasters. He needs help; the government’s pledges, whatever they are, must be followed to the end, until the last penny is settled as they promised.

The burden on President AKD and his men is enormous; they too cannot be resting and meandering along inhospitable paths of delusion and political hallucinations. What is confronting them is not a mere economic bankruptcy; it is not within the boundaries of human endurance. What awaits them has gone beyond bankruptcies and ordinary suffering of man. Uplifting of a nation from the dredges of deep catastrophe  and awakening it to a fresh tapestry of vistas and possibilities is well within the reach of man and that maxim has been proven beyond all shades of doubt by Japan and her people after the Second World War. Destroyed by an experiment advanced and propounded by Albert Einstein about two decades prior to its successful fruition, the world entered the dreaded ‘Nuclear Era’. Today Japan stands tall with other nations in the world as a smart and resilient member of the human family.

If Japan could do it, so can Sri Lanka. But she needs help, not only from her own men and women, but more from her international partners. Aid would begin to pour in. And unlike the notorious ‘Helping Hambantota’ project that made the Rajapaksas rich and the countrymen poor, helping Lanka should be a genuine and sincere commitment to the next step she could take towards normalcy. Let the ‘Real Sri Lankan’ come out now. Not the profit-thirsty, shortsighted and dishonest and corrupt one. But the real one whose ideals are more mingled with the sublime teachings of Siddhartha Gautama the Buddha.

While attending to the urgent and immediate needs of the South, equal or even more focused attention needs to be paid to the Northern and Eastern Tamils and Muslims. The hill-country Tamil population must have been devastated beyond help. No citizen must be ignored nor spared. Disbursement of relief funds, temporary assistance to schoolchildren, timely repairs to the broken culverts and disturbed field channels on the paddy fields, speedy repairs to submerged industry workshops are all but a very few of the thousands of tasks ahead for the country, its leaders and her population.

It’s time the real Sri Lankan came out!

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