One more leader for the assassination nation
Teresita Schaffer the former US ambassador in Sri Lanka who is now heading a Washington based think-tank issued a statement worthy of her tank, when she said "Sri Lanka is gradually becoming leaderless.'' She was commenting on the recent assassination of the foreign minister and the string of LTTE killings before that, making Sri Lanka a nation that was left bereft of good leaders. Staying alive became the best -- most coveted -- qualification for statesmanship.

But, to look on the bright side -- and however ghoulish it may sound -- the political killings have kept the Sri Lankan leadership stakes hot, or at least forever simmering.

The LTTE didn't quite intend it that way, but its actions have meant that we have not been laden with the same old same old for years at an end. The old order changeth and yieldeth place to the new. But in Sri Lanka the old order has changed at such an accelerated pace, resultant of which god (….and by that I don't mean the sun god…) fulfilled himself in many ways in the past years. The almighty has replaced even some potential dictators who may have still been around had they not been taken by an assassin's bullet. Premadasa, his detractors may say, was planning to change the constitution to be president for life, and Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake for instance had presidential ambitions that could have sometimes made Premadasa look like a convent girl.

Consider president Kumaratunga. The assassin's bullet -- or the bombers shrapnel -- could not take her, and having got that reprieve, look what she almost did. She almost stayed on for another term - - (and another and another?) - - except for the fact that she could not elect the Speaker she wanted, to push through a constituent assembly to overhaul the constitution.

She was a victim of circumstances that were to say the least, fortuitous. The constitution did her in, as did an elections commissioner and an impish successor by the name of Mahinda Rajapakse. So, she becomes the one that got away without dying, plus the one that the people got rid of before she came to stay for life.

Now leaders such as Rajapske and Wickremasinghe, folks who would have not just been underdogs but ciphers and chit-carriers if Athulathmudali Gamini Dissnayake or Premadasa were around, are threatening to lead a nation with presidential powers that are normally meant for more monumentally ambitious people.

Take Wickremesinghe for instance. The man is still in the land of bliss, hoping that the presidency will fall on his lap. With the Jana Bala Meheyuma, he psychologically closed his presidential campaign, and put up the shutters. The rationale?

That he had already won the race having caught the physiological moment, mustering millions on the road when the other party was struggling to name its own man for the job. But, weeks later, the SLFP managed to name its nominee, and tweedledee was presented his tweedldum.

Both candidates are now in the processes of being painted and tasseled by their PR juggernauts with personality attributes that they do not possess. In place of a personality, Mahinda Rajapakse has a red colour shawl, and Ranil Wickremsinghe has a designer jacket and tie.

Both men's chief planks are curious. They are self-castrating types, who want to emasculate themselves and present themselves to the electorate as lesser men, because that's what they think the electorate wants.

Wickremesinghe thinks that if he sells half his manhood to the LTTE it would somehow go with the fact that he doesn't have much of an orator's voice. Its like wearing matching socks - - he wants an image in which he is the slave of the dominatrix LTTE, which is an image that goes with his unfortunate vocal chords.

Rajapakse has also sacrificed his manhood at the altar of indecision, and may have become all things to all men by taking no decisions at all -- and exposing himself in the process as less of a man himself. He is like the court eunuch who squirreled away his manhood for the greater good of the king country and harem.

But looking on the bright side is an imperative in a nation that decides its leadership stakes by regular murder. So what's sanguine about Ranil and Mahinda’s candidatures?

Look at it this way. Both have more potential for being led, at least by events, to some sort of tryst with destiny. Not being set in their ways, they can make things happen almost by sheer incompetence. Ranil Wickremesnihge signed a ceasefire agreement that placed the Sri Lankan government at a hopeless disadvantage, but it changed the political landscape even though Wickremesinghe himself did not notice the disadvantages.

A leader with a stiffer backbone may have noticed the disadvantages, and would have therefore waged neither war nor peace. With Mahinda and Ranil, we have leaders who if they cannot lead, can at least be led by the nose. It's not an altogether uplifting proposition, but for a country named serendipity we have to learn to take it in our stride…

End-piece:
I called an ex-ed ‘charitable’ recently for calling Sivaram charismatic. It has caught him on the chin, and the man has quixotically titled an end-piece a footnote (!) to say that he, when he was still not an ex, had stopped Sivaram's articles when the latter turned too Tigerish.

Fine then! We take it, by the levels of his inimitable logic, that Sivaram ceased to be charismatic the day this ex stopped carrying his articles. All I said after all, was that this nationalist called Sivaram ‘cahrismatic.’
Now, to think that we understood charismatic to be a quality that stays for life -- and has nothing to do with the quality of a man's prose?

Like the regular curmudgeon who cannot understand friendship, the ex natters-on about apostles. We can understand that some people never have the sensitivity to differentiate between friendships and PR, but what an apostate this guy, to grudge the defense of a friend by a friend of the (charismatic!) deceased.

We have no such obfuscations or confusions -- a friend is a friend is a friend. We suppose its in that spirit that the family of the deceased wanted this friend to deliver an eulogy at the dead man's memorial where, incidentally, the said ex was present, unable to decide whether he is here or there, a friend, foe, apostle, apostate or something in-between?

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