Thoughts from London

Athens Games: And so I told the President
Your Excellency,
A thousand pardons for writing to you like this. Not that I do not trust the postal services. It is that even if this letter was delivered to the presidential doorstep it might still not reach Your Excellency. I mean there are scores of persons of varying sizes, shapes and dispositions who stand between the president and her public.

Even if this eventually gets to the presidential in-box it might not be before the next Olympics four years from now. That would be a national disaster.

Since it is a matter of utmost urgency and public interest, I thought this open letter could be read by all and no president's counsel - they do tend to proliferate don't they - could say later there was no such letter.
What is more, this way is cheaper, too. I don't have to post copies to what they call "interested parties".

When I used to work in Hong Kong which had a millionaire every square yard, a constant refrain of the Chinese was "time is money."
Now you and I know Your Excellency that time is not everything. In fact, most often it is nothing and a waste of time worrying over it.
And as for money, why should you bother about it really.
Still, even at the expense of being accused of undue haste and a thousand sundry offences, I must say my piece to save our beloved nation from insults abroad and sarcastic barbs at home from your political and other foes.

I would not have put pen to paper, so to say, had I not seen in a Sunday newspaper a photograph of our contingent to the Olympic Games in that glorious ancient Greek city of Athens.
There they were, all dressed in maroon or blue jackets looking like your Alliance flag. All except, that is, for your Sports Minister who chose a lily-white national dress.

I have no objection to Minister Jeewan Kumaratunga stamping his own sartorial style on the contingent. But I fear that were he to turn up in Athens at the head of the Sri Lankan delegation dressed all in white, the Athenians who fought the disastrous Peloponnesian war and fought Sparta too, might well consider this a sign of surrender even before the Games had begun. That would be terrible.

What is even worse and a real scandal is the composition of our delegation. Our eight-member contingent is accompanied by 16 officials to the Olympic Games.
How could anybody have allowed such injustice, such an obvious imbalance.

Would future generations ever forgive such an elementary exercise in arithmetic? This simple ratio of just two officials to every single participant is the kind of mathematics to be expected from a callow student not a nation of established ganankarayas.

How could those guilty of this selection have forgotten that the Olympic venue is Athens which, in ancient times, not only produced some crazy philosophers like that fellow who went round the market place in broad daylight carrying a lantern, but also great mathematicians who could put two and two together and get 22.

I am sure that in your student days at St. Bridget's Convent, Your Excellency had heard about that chap called Pythagoras who made great advances in mathematics and geometry, though some of his other advances were apparently rejected. But that's another story.
Anyway this Pythagoras said something about the square of the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle being equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides or some such thing. After all these years I still haven't been able to unravel that drivel.

Anyway I heard the other day that your Deputy Sports Minister Sripathi Sooriyaarachchi was in London. All this time I thought he was going to Athens. Some decades ago when the then Education Minister I. M. R. A. Iriyagolle's journey to Bangkok took him via London and Washington they used to say "Iriyagolle Bangkok giya wage" - an improvement on how the Portuguese went to Kotte. Perhaps Mr. Sooriyaarachchi's knowledge of geography is somewhat rusty or he took the wrong flight.

Or, perhaps, he is an admirer of Pythagoras and wants to check two sides of a triangle before trying the hypotenuse for size.
All this might sound like some Socratic conundrum but the real worry remains our inability to get the participants-to-officials ratio correct.
If Sri Lanka turns out to be the laughing stock of the Athens' Olympics for sending 16 officials to look after eight participants, you must get hold of those was responsible for mess and banish them to Jaffna for a course in pure mathematics.

This nation would have been spared such humiliation had you taken complete control of selecting the officials, instead of sending just one person from the presidential secretariat to watch people running round in circles, though he might well learn something from that.
That is why I urge you now to have a provision in the new constitution you hope to draft clearly stating that official delegations to all sporting events abroad will be selected by the head of state/ government and their ratio to participants shall be at least 10 to 1.

Your Excellency will notice how vital such a clause could be. I understand, for instance, that Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapakse is going to the Olympic Games to meet world leaders with whom he will have bilateral discussions. Poor chap deserves it after going through the first four months of your government not knowing exactly where he would be in the fifth month.

Now in the fifth month he knows exactly where he is -- the great city that gave democracy to the world. Now between watching the women's high jump event and the marathon he could try to push through a few deals for us.

I hope you will inform your prime minister immediately to discuss how Sri Lanka could assist in carrying forward the message of the Olympics and whether some of our national sports could not be included at the next Games in Beijing.

Why, for instance, have so many people from different nations to run all over the world carrying the Olympic torch?
As you know Your Excellency we have enough pandan karayas in our country to take over the task starting immediately, without foreign amateurs. Our chaps have been at the job for decades and need no training.

Why should not one of our ancient sports like climbing the greasy pole be an Olympic event? Since we are particularly adept at greasing especially to lubricate palms, we would surely collect a couple of medals.

The added advantage if Your Excellency does all the selections, is this. With all these efforts at peace and reconciliation you could ask Velupillai P to send a couple of participants, too. But please do urge him not to send those fellows with things tied to their waist that go bang. No doubt they will win their particular event. But how are they going to collect their gold medals? I don't think they allow posthumous awards at the Olympics, but Mahinda could ask, of course.

There is a lot more to say about what cabinet ministers, the Bar Council and NGOs could learn from Greek history and Athens. But there is time for that. After all the Olympics have only just started.

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