Travelogue: Far from home, one step is enough for me?

In a way a rarified community, sort-of on display, a little alienated from contemporary society but cannot quite migrate to Australia either. ( Lonely Planet says you got to meet the Coorg's when you are in Bangalore. Though the Kandyans have not achieved this degree of exotic status, they are getting there.) 

Increasingly, some Kandyans are seen to whisper that it's a shame that the Sinhalese were clamouring for Lohan Ratwatte's arrest, when in the final analysis, he was involved in a Sinhala-Muslim altercation. It is an affront to Kandyanism, they say, that the Sinhalese were calling for Lohan's capture and imprisonment.

In this way, the best political study of this country's upheavals its rifts and its current political direction can be achieved via that rather belittled form of writing called the travel piece. "Of all the pursuits in which the wise excel — the chief among them is writing well.'' Or so goes the well worn piece of old world wisdom.

But, those who want to write the political treatise from what has been picked up at last week's seminar in Colombo, will definitely pickup the jargon ( social capital, peace dividend, ceasefire interregnum etc.,) as opposed to the trends and ideas that define the political tide in Sri Lanka today. 

In Colombo there is a profound hope that social activism will redefine people's lives. Colombo dreams on, in very prosaic fashion, that all of life can be managed and manipulated from the seminar rooms in the capital city.

Woody Allen is supposed to have said once that "life is what happens when people are making other plans''. In Hikkaduwa, there is a lot that happens while Colombo ruminates. Somewhat a little North of Hikkaduwa, a General Manager of a seaside hotel let all his married employees stay on the job — and laid off (downsized) the bachelors soon after the airport attack. Most of the singers in the Calypso band that plays at the Hotel are unemployed arts graduates. 

They say it is better to sing for their supper, rather than opt for the fast unto death. A "satyagraha for jobs'' has been undertaken by some of their other unemployed graduate comrades in Colombo. 

In Hikkaduwa, I get holed up on the balcony with a friend who is teaching economic anthropology in the United States. From Arizona to Hikkaduwa is almost a dream come true, he proclaims. The sea is a little angry that night — but nothing can intimidate a discussion about our economic times, with friends kindred spirits and swaying king coconut palms keeping sentinel.

The friend has just returned from Australia where he met a whole lot of Sri Lankan émigrés. They plied him with liquor, and eventually arrived at the truth. Most are unhappy to live there — and some call my friend aside and tell him "look, we all did good jobs in Sri Lanka.'' Some are working in factories, or doing low grade professional jobs to get by. 

My friend pipes in and says "there is no harm doing a factory job, there is dignity of labour in these parts.'' That's a bit too much for these Sydney-siders. They say "Man, you got to be from the JVP?" It is a no win situation for him, with these men who went down under……

In bad economic times, banks close, hoteliers go home, but thinkers' intellectuals and economists not only have a field day, they are the mirrors that society seem to be unable to do without. These days, they seem to get paid better too; my friend churns out papers almost four to a week, between flights from Arizona to Australia. 

Eventually, he hopes to settle down where it all happens. Sri Lanka, economic anthropologists paradise.

Writing is near synonymous with social activism in this country. It is becoming so, with free press advocates all but donning political colours. But, if the seminar circuits didn't decide the course of the economy and the political culture, neither do the newspapers define what people think about the ceasefire.

Colombo's unblushing bourgeoisie is keen to set themselves apart from the hoi polloi and their fondest and most ubiquitous symbol: the three wheeler driver. The great reference point for good journalism used to be the Lanka Guardian – and its Editor Mervyn de Silva was always fond of quoting his three wheeler karaya. 

He used to quote him almost as often as his son the political scientist quotes from Gramsci. 

There is a Thursday "banda - gedera'' on one of the Nawala Road byways. Somebody says "all the three wheeler drivers are saying this government is going to get cheated one more time.'' Peace disillusionment is ultimately a three wheeler driver's thing, unless, it is said, you work for the Sihala Urumaya. It is a stratified society no doubt, and political orientation is ultimately a matter of exactly where you are placed in the social spectrum. 

There are some who straddle two worlds, such as a friend from Kandy, who sees the world from Arthur's Seat — a Kandy vista from which all the world is an Oyster for the settled un-perturbable mind. 

But you come back to Colombo, and the seminar circuit will buzz into your ear that calamity is probably around the corner. "No worries'' as they say in Sydney side. They have been saying so for the last 25 years.