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TIMES POSTCARD
A Sri Lankan calendar year is not shorter - just different
By Rajpal Abeynayake
This New Year marks the halfway point of the first decade of the 21st century. Pessimists say that the last year was all awry. There was garbage all over the place especially in Dehiwela Mount Lavinia, judges got shot, the ceasefire almost got shot down and so on and so forth.

My friends say “neva gilunath ban choon”. But last year many nevas did gileanavafy - a lot of ships did sink or run aground due to the tsunami, literally.

The tsunami was in 2004 of course, but since it was at the tail end of that year that catastrophe was heaped onto last year's compendium of events.
By Boxing Day this year, the tsunami was boxed into a compartment. We had bigger things to worry about such as a war for example.

The only people who took real advantage of the tsunami were, somebody said, the NGO folks, and Prabhakaran's folks. Prabhakaran sees every disaster as an opportunity. On the Sri Lankan side, the Sri Lankan state sees every opportunity as a disaster.

Prabhakaran exploited the tsunami by getting new boats and painting the LTTE as the forgotten party in tsunami relief. Some pundits on the Sri Lankan side said initially that Prabhakaran had perished in the tsunami.

Prabhakaran showed that he had risen like a phoenix from the ashes, and that he will even exploit ashes — other peoples —to his advantage. Apparently Prabhakaran was to launch his current bout of hostilities last year, but the tsunami upstaged him.

Now, he is eking out his revenge. He seems determined to create more dead bodies and more grief that the tsunami did within the year. I saw a photograph of him paying his respects to a dead body, one which appeared prominently on an internet website a couple of weeks ago. Hmm, I wonder what he is thinking. Tamils Eelam's most prolific assembly line product — Japanese produces cars, we produce bodies? That's even if it is considered that the man being respected in the picture was perhaps not killed by the LTTE, to bestow the benefit of the doubt on him there.

On Christmas day, a great friend — a bon vivant — invited me for lunch, and there were some Sri Lankans abroad from holiday having a whale of a time and a whale of a debate.

One Sri Lankan from London said “mehe thiyana joliya kohevath ne hallo.” ('Sri Lankan jollies are not to be matched in any other part of the world.')
He is got to be right -- because they looked down from the heavens at Sri Lanka, found that these people are having too much of a good time and decided to send down Prabhakaran.

They have sent him down, but that hasn't worked either -- so mark my words, if this thing doesn't work and Sri Lankans act as if they don't care who created tsunamis, they are going to send the devil himself to this country by the end of next year. Not that it's going to make much of a difference, you might say. I will entitle you to your own opinions.

The man who said "mehe thiyena joliya kohevath ne'' was contested vehemently by another Sri Lankan who sees no difference, I gathered, between Prabhakaran and George W. Bush. This guy lives in America.

This is when I figured that Sri Lanka is not the issue — the issue is Sri Lankans. Whenever Sri Lankans gather, as the Londoner says, there is more mirth in the occasion that one could eke out of a Richard Prior stand up comedy skit. (And may his soul rest in peace.)

Why? There is still somebody who wants to vote for George. W. Bush in that country, and he was born Sri Lankan. In the final analysis it's not the man that counts, but where he comes from.

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