Eat Lard

Today if you went out to the street, you wouldn’t be able to find someone who voted for Mahinda Rajapakse and co. You’d sooner find out who shot Roger Rabbit. I would like to know the tuktuk driver numbers in Sri Lanka, because there’s a demographic who’ve withdrawn their once vocal support.

Trishaw drivers are small-businessmen and are exposed to the the Sri Lankan economy and their withdrawal of support is linked to commercial reasons. Colombo has less purchasing power, and is less secure than before. Less people travel at night, and those who do travel with taxis for safety. The exchange rate of the ruppee has reduced the government’s ability to subsidise fuel. Their half-thought out supportive slogans are replaced with sullenness.

I’m tired of small time thinking. Sri Lanka’s failures aren’t about the triumph of evil or even about great crimes. Our failure is thinking too small. We will not be the first country to lobotomise politics or set ourselves incredibly low intellectual standards but we are the worst country to do so. We’re not the comfortable middle class American living in a country with strong institutions, wealth and economic power. This is Sri Lanka, with it’s the scarcity of resources, dreadful alternatives.

Ours is huge number of serious problems that need debate and discourse. Opportunity, employability, economy, identity, governance,equality and the lack thereof should keep a young nation like ours up though the night. We need new solutions, we need to look at older ones too to see what to do and what not.

Instead, reaching for the easy opportunity, we have marginalised these issues to a point where an entire electorate discusses the price of bread, forced conversions and and how the masculinity of a candidate is eclipsed by the luxuriant growth on the other’s upper lip.

What is worth fighting for is certainly worth thinking for. Passive resistance in the Indian struggle for independence was less of a philosophy; more a gambit that as part of the wider strategy, outmanoeuvred the British. Britain, having cloaked their blatant commercial interest in India as welfare and civilisation, woke up to find themselves shooting unarmed protesters. Unable to sell this any more to their voters or to international onlookers, they were forced to leave. And it wasn’t passive resistance all the way: Critics of Gandhi have argued that some of his non-violent protests were also allowed to end in bloodshed. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/peace/articles/gandhi/index.html

The lesson: It wasn’t a triumph of non-violence; it was a win for the smarter player. Successes don’t come from simple doctrines, they are engineered. We should devise the steps leading to the outcomes we seek, not throw adolescent tantrums against what we see as unfairness.

I think we need to think out our plans if we are really going to live in Sri Lanka in the future. I don’t know about you, but I have no exit strategy. My only alternative is to work to make this a country I can and want to live in. I don’t expect it to be easy, and certainly don’t expect it to be quick, but i rather not leave the most important questions of the day to be addressed as they are now.

I’m going to pick questions I see as important and ruthlessly classify some as unworthy of activating my neurons. Debate is invited. I don’t expect to be right even most of the time and certainly will be arse deep in subjects that are outside my comfort zones and asking the stupidest questions. This activity stems from an idea that the answers we seek should be simple, clear and be derived from rational thinking and debate rather than the from the opaque advice of a professional elite.

More to follow.