Sunday Times 2
Disturbing trends in Serendip
‘I am just an ordinary man’ sang Prof. Higgins in My Fair Lady. In a different way, I too am just an ordinary woman. I want what most people want: a chance to live in relative comfort in an ordered and secure environment, to be able to pay my bills and have something left over for any unforeseen contingencies, to keep my family safe and (hopefully) happy. This, I feel, is not too much to ask, especially in the post-war context when I can negotiate the streets of Colombo without fear of a bomb being detonated under my vehicle.
The rich-poor gap is widening
So what is keeping me from realising my paradise right here in Serendip? I acknowledge the fact that Serendipity is a state of mind rather than a place and that there are those who could be happy in the midst of chaos and those who will find things to criticise even in Eden. But like most others, I cannot divorce myself entirely from the things that are happening around me to enter a pseudo-Nirvanic state; nor do I make myself miserable over the fact that the world around me is not perfect. I merely want to get on with life but am brought up short by the disturbing trends I perceive in the culture and society of Sri Lanka.
Take the traffic on the roads, for instance. It has become exponentially worse in recent years. Everyone complains but nothing is done about it. The police give us regular updates on the number of accidents that have taken place during the preceding quarter and the increasing number of deaths that have occurred on our roads. Occasionally I see an increased police presence on the roads, by which I deduce that either a ministerial big-wig is expected to pass by, or that they are out to nab you for a minor traffic offence.
At other times I see them unnecessarily propping up lampposts while speeding buses over take other vehicles on pedestrian crossings, narrowly missing pedestrians who are forced to run across the road as if all the fiends in hell were after them. The trishaws remind me of those magical buses in the Harry Potter movies, which are able to contract themselves to fit into the narrowest of spaces. To drive safely in Colombo, one must have as many heads as Medusa to keep an eye on the vehicles that head towards one in typical Kamikaze fashion, hell-bent either on self-destruction or murder.
Apparently, we have now been re-classified as a middle-income nation, rather than as a developing one. This re-classification is probably better for our pride than for our pockets, for I have it on good authority that the percentage of foreign aid we receive now is directed, less towards development efforts and more towards other unspecified areas.
I am no economist and hence will accept what our experts tell us about the improved performance of our economy. When I look around, I see a confirmation of this assessment in the increased number of sleek and expensive vehicles driving at breakneck speed whenever the congestion eases up somewhat on our newly carpeted roads. The highways are a sight for sore eyes and I can well believe that I am travelling on the highways of a developed nation, but for the fact that ours are more beautiful, with lagoons and rubber plantations on either side creating a panorama that is quite stunning. The downside of this is that one cannot relax and enjoy the view as, in the guise of a modern-day Houdini, we must look over a shoulder even as we gaze ahead to keep an eye open for those errant un-policed drivers who break speed limits and crash into other vehicles or road dividers.
Apart from undisciplined drivers and a police that hear, see and speak no evil except when it suits them or their masters, what have I to complain of when I drive along roads which are kept beautifully clean and free of potholes? Is there not, obvious and visual evidence that the country has progressed economically? As mentioned before, I am no economist. My truth is garnered from the evidence of my eyes and ears.
And I am disturbed when I see old people begging on the streets, looking for scraps tossed carelessly from within those monstrous vehicles; I am disturbed when I see a frail man raise his axe to hew a fallen log, his feeble blows making small headway on the hard and seasoned wood; and again when I pass by the same man many hours later struggling to hoist the bundle of firewood he has hewn onto his head; I am disturbed when a woman who works as a domestic tells me that despite earning a decent wage, the cost of living being what it is, she finds it difficult to provide three meals a day for her children; I am disturbed when another woman tells me that they eat two meals a day because they cannot afford three and that she pacifies her young children with tea which helps to curb their appetites.
Yes we have better roads, bigger vehicles and a sudden increase in the number of self-made billionaires. But when I balance these against the silent majority whose plight seems hopeless, I wonder whether, economic markers aside, we have really progressed? That the health of a nation is determined by the size of its middle class is a truism because the middle classes are just what their name implies — they are in the middle. A large middle class implies that wealth has been distributed fairly evenly; that such yawn-inducing and boring values as decency and honesty, the education of children to become upright and law-abiding citizens, brought up in accordance with religious values, dealing with fellow men and women with kindness and forbearance, will prevail by and large.
Middle class values have their limitations. They do not leave room for brilliance, artistic excellence or rugged individualism. But individualism and brilliance will prevail in any climate; while the rest of us who are merely ordinary, can get on with life in a society governed by the laws of decency and tolerance for one another.
This brings me to another disturbing trend that has overtaken the nation in recent times, and that is the spectre of religious bigotry and intolerance, which is adding further strands to the warp and the woof of ethnic divisions in the country.
The nation is still reeling in the wake of a thirty years war with the Tigers in the North. Issues regarding post-war reconciliation have not yet been resolved to the satisfaction of people within and without the country. All of us, whether we live in the North or the South of the country, have been affected one way or another by this conflict and carry the scars of this conflict, visible or invisible, on our collective selves. Perhaps it is our very woundedness and fear which has led to the rise of religious extremism. Just as animals will move closer to their own kind to gain strength in numbers, so too people seek other like-minded people to feel safe in a threatening environment. Hence to compound the ethnic divisions in the country, we now have Muslim extremism, Christian extremism and, in its most recent manifestation, Buddhist extremism.
Like the brew concocted by the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth we now have ‘double, double toil and trouble’. I watch with dismay and disbelief as hate speeches are made on public platforms with nary a move by the authorities to curb them. Some of the speeches made by such religious bigots are chillingly reminiscent of speeches made by the Nazis against the Jews. The Holocaust happened not because the Germans by and large are vicious and cruel, but because they chose to listen to the rhetoric of hate without doing anything to curb the rise of evil. It is our turn now to make a choice. What will it be?