Wedding rings to political science: a treatise
Advertisements galore, peddling the power and potency of mass communications. You may have not missed the particularly gauzy one, in which a bridegroom realises that he has lost the wedding-ring when he is about to walk the isle. He entrusts the best-man to find a ring before the ceremonies start, and the man calls his uncle in London who sends some Sterling pounds pronto - - and the couple we surmise, have lived happily ever after.

There are other commercials which talk of holidays in Rome, some of them cheesy-bizarre, but all faithfully selling the concept of the global village where connectability is measured in seconds.

Then take this scenario: A Tsunami hit the Southern coast of Thailand, almost one and a half hours before it hit Eastern Sri Lanka. Tsunamis travel in concentric circular motion from the point of origin. There was every chance that this tsunami was going to hit Sri Lanka. In Diego Garcia, they say the Americans evacuated troops -- but the Pentagon establishment is in absolute denial.

The tsunami hit Indonesia before it hit us - - it sneaked up on Malaysia before it slammed us, and it hit the Andamans before it hit us - - and the Andaman's are part of the Indian union.

Then it hit Eastern Sri Lanka before it hit the Southern and Western coast of our country. Journalists were despatching copy about the giant waves hitting the Eastern coast, quite ignorant of the fact that the Tsunami was now on its way to do a similar job on the Western coast, sneaking up from under their Blue-Tooth enabled laptops.

Why wasn't there a single call from Thailand, or from the East coast of Sri Lanka to the West coast? Some say that the people had no time to call -- because they were running in a mad scramble to save their lives. But everyone knows it's only the coastline that was damaged. The telephone systems in adjacent towns were all up and running.

But nobody placed that call, no radio stations picked it up. Sachinder Bindra, a CNN correspondent said one day in his despatch from Colombo that "Indian troops are here in Sri Lanka, ignoring fact that Sri Lankans never warned them of the oncoming tsunami because it hit Sri Lanka before it hit the Indian Southern coast.''

Bindra should be given the Instant Egglayer Award in television punditocracy. He might as well asked why a part of India, the Andamans, did not alert the other part, because whatever he may say, not every telephone in the Andamans or the Nicobar or Car Nicobar islets were damaged.

The moral of the story is that you might get that wedding ring and save your marriage, and your best-man may rejoice and do cartwheels, but out of a 100,000 human beings, not even one can be relied on to place a proper call -- perhaps to a radio station - - to save over 15,000 human lives. A note about those figures: 100,000 is a conservative estimate of the people in adjacent towns in Thailand and the Eastern parts of Sri Lanka, who could have alerted the about 20,000 or 15,000 people who died in the South-Western coast of this country.

That's not apportioning blame. Repeat: It's not a blame-game. The story's sub-text is that human nature is much more bizarre and complex than we can imagine with our collectively limited cognitive capabilities.

In other words, human kind can be collectively negligent --collectively unawares, and collectively caught with their pants down. A man may chastise his wife for not being able to save their dog from a road accident -- but he wouldn't chastise himself for not being able to place a call that may have saved thousands of lives.

One aspect of it is perhaps that even a killer Tsunami is something that happens to others - - but that's only one angle. Human beings are in a persistent endeavour to give meaning to their lives, which is in most part why they have invented the philosophies, the sciences - - and the host of other disciplines that range the gamut from anthropology to political-science.

But for the most part, these are puny human endeavours to give people the illusion that they are in control of their destinies.But the unpleasant truth is that though most people are capable of having a reasonable degree of control over their individual destinies, they are either singly or collectively incapable of changing the destiny of the polity, or the community at large.

When we translate that to the larger picture, it inevitably means that though political scientists may argue and analyze until the cows come home (to watch cable TV…), they are more often than not talking about everything else but the reality. Political scientists do their number, to massage their egos and to smother their existential angst.

They have all the right to do it -- but life is what happens while they are making other plans. Even in simpler terms, what it means is that it's often the smaller, unexpected, irrelevant and often totally ignored details that will determine the next course of events in a country or a society.

Its another reason that political scientists who are gung-ho about dismissing the effect of Prabhakaran's personal psychological make-up on the rest of the country's destinies, should brush up on their Jung and their Freud and their Buddha, and maybe take a refresher in psychology instead of pulling an all-nigther on the latest micro-theory on conflict resolution by an obscure Professor who rides a bicycle to work in Upsala.

But yet political scientists often make a mistake of presenting us their craft as a hard-science. Their fans, and generally the excitably dumb chattering-classes, then call them the hard-core in social analysis and conflict resolution punditry.But the reality is that all of them are fraternities. One group of political scientists provides the oxygen for political groupies who entertain the notion that Prabhkaran is Hitler reincarnate, and that the only way to solve this problem is to give Velupillai a hard kick in his private areas that will hopefully send him into a terminal coma.

The other set of groupies rely on their political punditry to say something like the opposite - - which is roughly, that the Sri Lankan government is the root of all evil, and that there can be no resolution to this conflict unless the Sri Lankan government's actions were as sombre and profound as some of the favourite catch-phrase jargons of this punditry.

(Examples: "categories, non-territorial Federalism, BATNAs and subterranean and other immersed elements.'')But human beings need to be groupies, be they political groupies, diaspora groupies, or plain old Michael Jackson teeny-bopper groupies with tattoos right about two centimetres over their butts. One set of groupies pretend to know that they know the final solution, the other set of groupies say there is no solution in anything - - so they sniff a line of dope, or pass out on Ecstasy. That's the only difference.

But in the end its the same thing - - a human endeavour to make meaning out of things that are vague, meaningless, not determinable in any shape or form that makes sense to human beings.

But that's why the wise man Kautilya said (not to be mistaken with the latter day sage by the name of M. de Silva) "view all things with reference to all their bearings and ramifications.''This is not to advocate a cop-out which says throw all political-science overboard, but to say that the latest turn in the Sri Lankan saga depends on a certain combination of factors which shall certainly not discount the following, which on the face of it, any political scientist worth his grant money will dismiss out of hand: (a) what Prabhakaran's son tells his father about tsunami victims (b) Whether the JVP can get out of its sub-conscious Anura & Chandrika Bandaranaike worship trance (c) whether there will emerge one pro-active man or woman in the Sri Lankan South who can pre-empt the Tigers and the Americans, either in the army, in civil society or in the political laboratories (d) whether the American marines can make a Thailand style cat-house enclave off the shores of Hambanthota, maybe.

That last consideration is of greatest import in deciding the destinies of this 2000 year old nation. Caution: This is not satire. It is life, in its palpable glory, in a way in which a political scientist will dare not tell you even in the dust jacket of his thesis presentation.

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