CULTURE, POLITICS AND ZOOS REFLECTED IN TSUNAMI
There is lot of talk on rebuilding the nation by the government as well as the opposition. Many NGOs have joined the bandwagon forgetting that for some time they had been echoing their masters and mistresses in the west to the effect that they had to build the nation. Thus when they talk of rebuilding the nation one does not know whether to believe what they are saying now with, as some of them call it, post tsunami wisdom or what they said earlier. It is in the Sinhala NGO press that the words post tsunami (pushchath sunami) are used, and not in the national press. However, I heard one pundit in the national television interviewing a minister referring to "pushchath sunami" effects.
Many politicians express the view that all have to be united to rebuild the nation. This implies that all the political parties should shed their differences and join hands at this hour of need. However going by the culture of the people as well as that of the behaviour patterns of the political parties, it is very unlikely that the political parties would close ranks. There is, as usual, not only no unity among the political parties but thee is intra party rivalries that have come to the surface in the aftermath of Tsunami. The president who came back only after a several days has now taken control of the "relief" measures and had asked all the Sri Lankan embassies to send money to a fund for which she is not responsible to anybody. She has appointed two of her favourites as heads of two task forces, thus limiting the powers of the Commissioner in charge of the essential services. The government machinery is very inefficient as we noted last week, and the so called task forces are not doing much to help the victims of tsunami. They like many others bask in the glory of the work done by the people voluntarily not through any centralised system.
Those who have been appointed to lead the task forces do not know much about the culture of the people though they have been praised by some "intellectuals" who are equally at sea when it comes to tsunami as well as the culture of the people. What has to be done is to establish some kind of coordination among the groups engaged in relief measures, rather than the task forces trying to direct the work associated with relief and rehabilitation. Very soon the question of constructing houses to the displaced people would have to be addressed. There are groups who would volunteer to construct these houses and what the task force has to do is to provide these groups with the know how of building houses according to the climate of the country at a low cost. There are institutes and people with this type of knowledge who would use mostly material found in the country instead of the imported varieties. However, if the task forces without any respect to the culture undertake by itself to construct the houses with foreign aid and foreign expertise, at the end of the exercise we would not have built the necessary houses. While reconstructing the school buildings, railways and the highways should be directed by the respective ministries and the departments the other construction work should be left mainly in the hands of the volunteer organisations. One would even go to the extent of handing over the construction of some school buildings to volunteer organisations.
It is true that various individuals, organisations, political parties would try to score a few points over the relief and rehabilitation work. Whether we like it or not it is part of the Sinhala Buddhist culture that the other communities may also have absorbed during the last two or three centuries. The claiming of credit has increased during the last few decades as we could see from the banners that come up after any event from a funeral of an individual to a tsunami. However, one should not think that this is a particular character only of the culture of the Sinhala people. Those with a knowledge of the history of western science and mathematics would know that the so-called scientists not only fought to gain recognition and thus credit but worked to deprive others of such honour. The family of Bernoullis fought among themselves in this game of gaining recognition and depriving others of due credit. Fathers fought with sons uncles with nephews and the brothers themselves fought with each other. The fight between Newton and Leibnitz over the so-called discovery of calculus is well known, though both of them may have got the original ideas from India. Newton worked hard to deprive Hook of any honour on the "discovery" of the law of gravitation.
As long as the groups and the individuals do something worthwhile for the displaced people there is no harm if they display a banner to tell the world what they have been doing. All the media that collected items for the tsunami victims in a way advertised themselves. The present plane loads of aid that we receive from the west do not come and go away unnoticed. Those who deal with "aid" tell us how much they have already contributed and how much further we could expect from them. It is not only the Sinhala people who "advertise" their "gifts" to the victims but the westerners themselves. In fact the latter category get a wider publicity as the local media as well as international media give publicity to all these "donations". We know how much of dollars, pounds, euros and yens we get from various countries, though they are only pledged. We do not know how much we would get finally in "real terms" as most of them would go back to the country of origin in the form of salaries of various officials and even soldiers, and equipment bought from those countries. It is also known that some of the countries do not contribute as much as they pledge.
With these pledges we have been bombarded with officials and Sri Lanka has become a sea (tsunami) of activities by foreigners. Waves of tusanimis come to our shores one after another and one has to be careful of the bona fides of all these ladies and gentlemen. Before we deal with them one word on the activities of the political parties and others who preach unity. It is very unlikely that those who preach unity believe in their own words. They preach knowing very well that no unity would be achieved through relief and rehabilitation work. The Sinhala people are very independent and the Sinhala society is a fairly homogeneous society. Though there may be disparities income wise as a result of an imposed capitalism and western Christian modernism from outside, the society is still very homogeneous with respect to talents, leadership etc. We have not produced genii though some people think that they belong to that category. On the other hand we do not find among ourselves people who are ignorant of what is happening outside. The average man on the street is very knowledgable though he could not predict the tsunami. Then our scientists did not do much better though the animals who do not have any of the equipments managed to run away from the "tsunami rella".
As the saying goes we do not want to be second to another person, though we do not wish to go against authority in general. This has some connection with the homogeneity of the society as expressed by the statement "like the police constable who is retired" (pansion giya policekaraya vagey). When in office the police constable gets the "recognition and respect" but once he is retired he becomes just another living soul among others. We resent authority imposed by the British but we do not do much against it individually. At the same time we do not have much faith in the talents of the leaders. The Sinhala people can be united but it can be done only by an extra ordinary person. The present leaders are mere substitutes for leaders and they being not above the people whom they are supposed to lead cannot unite the masses. The unity talks by the present day politicians will not work as the people do not see a genuine leader among the former.
In spite of having no unity we should be able to pull through the crisis. However, if there was a genuine leader who could command the respect of the nation to a man we could have worked wonders. In the history of the Sinhala people one could easily find the periods during which they had the genuine leaders. At present we do not have such leaders, and what we have to do is to see that at least we retain the semblance of a sovereignty that the country possesses. There are some people who think that if not for aid from the western countries and so-called globalisation we would not be able to recover. For one thing if not for western Christian modernity we would not be having the present day life styles that contributed immensely to the havoc caused by the tsunami. If tsunami has proved anything it is the danger of depending on one system knowledge neglecting all the other systems. The western system of knowledge failed miserably though many of the so-called educated people who have a smattering knowledge of what their masters and mistresses in the west have created, may not admit. The animals who did not give up their systems were able to survive. Only those animals who are in captivation in zoos established by the west would have suffered. If the Dehivala zoo was closer to the sea some poor animals would have died as a result of tsunami. We who live in "human zoos" created by the west suffered and not the animals.
Instead of attempting to get away from the "human zoo", we under aid volunteer to be trapped more and more inside of it. If we have to get aid, then use it the way we want and not the way the so-called donors "advice". However, if most of the local experts know only a fraction of the knowledge the foreign experts have created then there is nothing much we could do about it, rather than following the "advice". On top of that there would be the usual "commissions" that the top in the "aid business" get and as they are the people who dictate terms, even those locals who want to contribute something on their own would not be permitted to do so. Invariably those at the top would know nothing about other systems of knowledge and they would depend very much on the "advice" of the foreigners. We have lost our sovereignty as far as knowledge is concerned. What about the political sovereignty of the country?
No aid is without strings or as they say there is no free lunch. It is not the intention of this column to see the back of the "donors" and the"experts". What is advocated here is a tight control of their activities. There will be more "aid" to the LTTE following the Italian example and it is not only the Tamil diaspora that would come to help in rebuilding the LTTE. We do not know whether the fascist murderer Prabhakaran is dead or alive. In any event it is not only a section of the Tamils who want to see the LTTE resurrected. What we have to understand is that so-called humanitarian activities are not entirely devoid of political agenda. The western systems have a habit of claiming that certain parts of knowledge are independent of other parts, especially after Descartes. For example the westerners would proclaim that the state is independent of religion. This is furthest from truth as no state is independent of culture which in most cases is based on a religion. Though the so-called educated people in the country, who live in human zoos called universities, research establishments and other such places, continue to ignore, as it does not come from the west, the different parts of a culture, including knowledge are bound by a "chinthanaya". (More than thirteen years ago a vice chancellor of a university told me that I have a captive audience attending the lectures and that it is wrong to teach my views to the students. He had no objection to the NGO pundits teaching the students the gospel truth according to western political science and other disciplines. Only after the tsunami I began to understand the meaning of the term captive audience in a university lecture theater. The universities are nothing but human zoos where the young "animals" captivated are trained to live according to the western gospel truth, and be useless to the country, with or without sophisticated equipments). The humanitarianism of the presidents and ex presidents of the USA who all of a sudden found the address not only to the Sri Lankan embassy but to the temples in Washington where they and their wives shook hands with the Bhikkus (Cannot these Bhikkus tell even the Sakraya that it is not their custom to shake hands?) cannot be entirely devoid of politics.
Are we in a position to retain even the semblance of a sovereignty that we have? Do we have the necessary manpower (womanpower) in the so-called task forces? Powells, Annans and other may come and go. The fact that these visits do not merely arise of humanitarianism was revealed in the interest shown by some Tamil racist organisations as well as UN officials to send the secretary general to the north and the east. Why were the UN officials so bothered to send him to the north? Have they sent him to meet leaders of IRA and other terrorist movements? They would naturally say that they wanted him to visit the camps and not the leaders. However, we all know that having gone there he would not have been able to come back after visiting only the camps and the devastated areas. The fact that a representative of TRO met him in Colombo before he left the country speaks volumes for the planned visit to the north and east. Unless we make a hard cold calculation of their visits and take the necessary cautionary steps we would become more and more captivated inside the zoos that have been erected for us.
Professor Nalin de Silva
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