Plus

Plus

TIMES POSTCARD
If Nirupama doesn't tell her story, who will?
By Rajpal Abeynayake
Today's Postcard carries a book review:
Nirupama Subramanium in her book "Sri Lanka - voices from a war zone" writes that Velupillai Prabhakaran the Tiger leader "is in a cage of his own making."
Some cage I thought. He has made all of us Sri Lankans prisoners of sorts -- prisoners of his more than 20-year-old campaign for a separate state. Where was a single day in my professional career, for instance, that was devoid of Prabhakaran and his long shadow's impact?

Nirupama Subramanium offers vignettes in her book about life in the Prabhakaran-impacted Sri Lanka. These vignettes seem to be from what she remembers best as a journalist who covered the country's war and peace.
Necessarily, they are of a somewhat depressing quality, and she quotes an Indian friend to say: "It's (the war is…) like poverty in India. Unless you have to deal with it directly you stop noticing it after a while.''

For Sri Lankans, this is almost not a nice book, as it paints too many home truths as they are -- but doesn't do justice to the one other home truth, which is that a lot of people lead lives of extraordinarily good quality (at least relatively speaking…) in this island, despite all of the tribulations described in the book.

But also, Nirupama doesn't tell any untruths -- she talks of Sri Lankan women who "power'' the war, by going abroad to strange places such as Cyprus after learning rudimentary English while also learning to handle household appliances in a Colombo madrasa - my description not hers! -- for migrant workers.
All of which is material that necessarily needs to be treated in her roving journalistic way -- as not enough has been written about the war in terms of vignettes, since it began. There are tomes of course of papers dissertations and theses about conflict resolution, but for a taste of the conflict itself, a book such as this is rather apt.

From saying that Prabhakaran "in his outdated chic looked like a small town businessman in India" to her assertion that she was "blown away'' when President Chandrika Kumaratunga gave two Mercedes Benz cars to the heads of the Asgiriya and Malwatte chapters, Nirupama Subramanium provides her opinions liberally, in order to draw a virile picture from out of Sri Lanka's conflicted predicament. That's not an offence, and she does a greater job of storytelling than many of the journalists and raconteurs who have gone down that route before her.

It's a journalist's book however and some admiration should be reserved for the fact that she did not try to pseudo-academize it in the fashion of so many others who take to similar tasks.

Nirupama Subramanium gives credit to a whole heap of like-minded characters for helping her with the book's work and research - and this is where at least for some people, the rub would begin to chafe. Does she get her gaze on Sri Lanka from one particular vista -- which is the one that is occupied by sundry foreigners, NGO operatives and international sharpers?

She is especially beholden, for instance, to a former Reuter's correspondent in Colombo, whom she says gave her a fresh perspective on Sri Lankan affairs. Which perspective is that? She doesn't tell us unfortunately, but maybe we could guess.

But, no book is supposed to come out as our book -- your book or my book -- and this one is Nirupama Subramanium's book. It's her way of seeing things in Sri Lanka -- and a lot of the time she sees them without jaundiced eyes, even though some of the time she may not be so clinically un-blinkered. But, no matter anyhow, I'd say.

Back to Plus