By Vishwamithra –

“I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will.” ~ Antonio Gramsci

One is not born with wisdom. He or she might be born with talent that needs to be sharpened and refined. One could be born with uncommon personality and charisma; yet personality and charisma need to be developed and shaped in accordance with identified qualities and nuanced aspects of other characteristics. Skill is a totally different story altogether. Skills have to be learnt and acquired. These qualities with which almost each and every human is associated with the ‘growing’ process and developmental evolution, have been enunciated in varied text books; they have been promoted as uncommon and rare qualities each person needs to develop within oneself and gradually grow into near-perfection. But wisdom is altogether a distinct and distinguishable  facet of human development, the possessor of which, more often than not, stands alone in the presence of ordinary men and women. Wisdom dawns at the cessation of foolishness and apathy; it is acquired through a rigorous and painstaking voyage of discovery and rediscovery of elemental values that differentiate man from  the animal.

We as ordinary men and women yearn for those fundamental skills; talents, we assume would help us achieve our goals and targets we set for our lives; for such attainment we would be better prepared and ready, for instance, for obtaining better results at our job interviews so that we could secure employment defeating our closest competitors. Such material and mundane pursuits are indeed necessary; they serve an unequivocal role in our lives. Yet, when confronted by an unknown phenomenon, either natural or man-made, we pause and hesitate to deviate from our conventional path. Taking a fresh path, opting to tread along a new road might be more tempting because everything else has taken us to unfriendly and unnerving  ends.

Today, Sri Lanka has arrived at such an unenviable juncture. We do realize the futility of our previous efforts. All our endeavours in the past have led to this undignified end. An end that does look, sound and manifest itself like a perfect goal; but when those who arrived at this end look deep inside the end, when we examine the core of the end after stripping the outer layers, we behold the same old rotting middle; a nauseatingly abysmal nucleus that has been alluring our shortsighted journeys and travels is still attracting us. It is indeed a tragic end of a journey. Surely, we do not want to venture into such an empty and hollow odyssey?

The political domain since our ‘Independence’ in 1948 has been dominated by two families and their related cohorts. It is so sad and lamentable to admit that neither of those families have produced a wise man or woman to govern us. We have had leaders of conventionally distinguishable men and women. They are D S Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake, Sir John Kotelawala, SWRD Bandaranaike, W Dahanayake, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, JR Jayewardene, R Premadasa, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Ranil Wickremesinghe. The only exception to the accepted elite of the country is R Premadasa and he ruled only for four years. He was assassinated by the ‘Tigers’.

From amongst those above, seven (7) were educated at either St Thomas’ College or Royal College, Colombo. Both women heads, mother and daughter were educated at St’ Bridgette’s College Colombo. Of the other three, the Rajapaksa brothers were educated at Richmond College, Galle, Nalanda College and Ananda College, Colombo and the lone outsider R Premadasa too was educated at St. Lawrence School, Maradana, one of the main inner cities in Colombo.

Sixty eight years have passed since the Swabhasha policy of the Bandaranaike-transformation; we are yet to produce either a President or a Prime Minister who was educated at one of the rural schools in the heartland of the country. Whose fault and whose fortune or misfortune it is due to, I do not want speculate now. But a major portion of the blame rests fairly and squarely, in addition to the failure of successive governments to establish rural schools that had sufficient numbers of English teachers, with those who cast their votes at the polling booth at each of the elections held up to the present day. People get the government they deserve, period.

Our people, willy nilly, meandered with the same flow of rotting and murky events. When clear water was visible and ready to be drunk, they chose to indulge in their rush to consume the debris and trash.

There is nothing wrong or untoward with the so-called elite schools in Colombo. Royal, St Tomas’, Ananda and Nalanda are great educational institutions. But one simply cannot understate the the cultural and socioeconomic elitism associated with any so-called ‘big’ school situated in the Colombo-based big cities. The facilities available in these big schools were an enviable factor for those who did not have the same wherewithal in their rural schools. Thanks mainly to the establishment of Central School system by CWW Kannangara in the late nineteen forties, we saw some great schools springing up such as Poramadulla, Tholangamuwa, Maliyadeva, Ibbagamuwa and Galahitiyawa Central Schools.

This phenomenon was not limited to the South of Ceylon. Even in the North, schools such as St John’s, Jaffna Central, St Patrick’s and Heartly were considered elitist as compared to schools located in non-Jaffna proper, Thelippalai, Velanai and other rural regions in the peninsula. In the same vane, education received at the rural school is no exclusive qualification to be ruled as a President or Prime Minister of the country. But one cannot disregard the rural and rustic context within which a student is growing up while attending such a school and the enormous relevance of that context when pressed with other geopolitical and domestic pressures one has to withstand and endure when governing a nation in crisis times.

A value system one grows up with and the significance of that value system in rural Ceylon as contrasted with the pukka sahib-values one naturally acquires and becomes comfortable with when growing up in big cities do matter; availability of material conditions, wherewithal that one could use when confronted with unusual situations could be of decisive measure. A rustic base cannot be just ignored because such a rustic-based person cannot communicate well in English.

Eventually what does matter is the totality of the education one has been accustomed to; not only the number of basic degrees and Masters and doctorates one has received, but the readiness and suppleness of his mind and his willingness to discard what is unnecessary and embrace what is new in the current sociopolitical marketplace shall play a vital part in the complex process of decision-making. Above all, empathy and authenticity of the character cannot be taught in school. Such substantial qualities are invariably associated with the homely upbringing which could be directly attributed to a rural upbringing solely due to the fact that parental attention is more keenly practiced in the rural social atmosphere; that instills a genuine and sincere authenticity that is not uncommon in such environments.

Wisdom, the poverty or abundance of which, is our central theme. From the experience we have had up to now does not speak well for its abundance. For that matter, its total absence has been, is and will be the main obstacle we have to overcome as a single collective nation. The national dialogue has deviated from this central theme and in fact, taken for granted that all our leaders are wiser than the rest. On the contrary, it’s the opposite that is true and prevalent. When faced with each and every crisis situation, our leaders have responded with a stark absence of wisdom and intelligence. One is not expecting our leaders to be even remotely close to such savants as Buddha, Swami Vivekananda or Gandhi. Such greatness is limited to super-mundane minds. Yet an expectation of a modicum of commonsense and elementary rationality should not be much to ask for.       

Anura Kumara Dissanayake has shown some remarkable oratorical skills; his empathetic delivery and the vernacular so sharp and rustic pronunciation, his criticisms of his adversaries so disciplined and sustained cannot be ignored. We did have such sharp mob orators in the past. R Premadasa and Rohana Wijeweera are two examples who could mesmerize an audience on any given day, before any setting. But the people have been awakened to a new reality. That awakening has been enriched and made more imminent by the Aragalaya-22. A near total collapse of the economy accompanied by the intolerance of the past seventy six years, unity amongst all ethnic groups without a hint of narrow racial chauvinism, especially our youth succeeded in convincing their older generation that there could be another way out.

That way might not have been seen yet; that new way, new path and new horizon may not have presented itself yet. But that fact alone, the very freshness of the new, the very fact that it is totally a new experience and new and untested and untraveled road is certainly more alluring and inviting in its enigmatic appeal.      

AKD did not attend a Colombo-based or any other known big school; he had his secondary education at Thambuthegama Central School. His beginnings have been very humble and not so appealing to the pukka sahibs of Colombo or any other big cities in the country. His childhood has seen the aridity of the dry zone and its main staple contribution to the country-rice. He does not need to be ashamed of that beginning. He does not have recreate his own humble history and recreate an ornamental veneer. His village upbringing is his strength; not his weakness. Men and women who attend his rallies could not care whether he attended Thambuthegama Central or Kekirawa Central. They recognize his as one of ‘them’ not the ‘other’. There is unique and unparalleled advantage in that very distinction. He must put it to good use.

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