Eyes wide shut

By The Scribe

We had just heard about the bomb down Green Path; an attempted assassination of the Pakistani Ambassador in Sri Lanka. The media had rushed to the site. After the initial phase of everyone making frantic phone calls to their families and friends to see if anyone had been affected, we all crowded around the TV to see what had really happened and get the ‘inside story’ as it were.

About half an hour later and none the wiser, I decided to take a stroll down Green Path in the pouring rain. Why? I don't really know. The closest I can come to explaining myself is that I wanted to (quite literally) get ‘hit’ by reality! I wanted to feel something for once… I just needed to feel something, anything, it didn't matter what it was, I was desperate to share in the pain, the suffering and the tears of my country…

In the aftermath of this bomb, and as the general trend of sporadic bombings in and around Colombo started to die down, life (as always) went back to normal. People (although quite reluctantly) started getting used to the countless checkpoints, the parking restrictions, making way for every VIP's convoy as they wizzed past at break neck speed, the numerous Army, Air Force and Police personnel standing all over the place looking suspiciously all around, we became accustomed to it all. So much so that it started to become very much a part of everyday life. We are a resilient race after all. (By this I mean the human race.)

So, hours stretched into days, days into weeks and weeks into months and we the city dwellers carried on blissfully or maybe purposefully oblivious to the world around us.

We must survive after all. No point in wallowing in self pity or misery. However, identifying the fine line between survival and a lack of concern has proven itself to be the most challenging feat of all; a challenge each of us have to battle with every day.

How have we fared so far? Now there’s a question worth answering. Drawing from my own experience once again, after seeing some real life ‘battle,’ footage on the news for the first time in my life, it really hit me that we were well and truly at war! For a whole minute or two I found myself just gaping open mouthed at the TV screen in sheer disbelief, bewildered by what I was seeing. It was not essentially just the images (which, to be very honest, resembled one of those typical war movies, where the sky is ablaze with fireworks), it was the actual realisation that this was not just some random footage of some country in conflict, but rather that this was in fact what was happening a couple of hundred kilometres away from us, in the very same country! I mean, how much more ‘in your face’ can it really get? It left me thinking.

See, according to my calculations, in general there are three types of us, those who care, those who don't care and those who actually do something. The foremost lot of us are those who frequently chat about the current status of the country, the futility of the ongoing conflict, the immense waste of human life as a result of it and the dreariness of the whole situation, in general.

The second category pretty much speaks for itself, expect that this group could also include those who have become embittered as a result of the war and its numerous repercussions, and so therefore choose not to care.

Finally, the third and smallest group are the ‘movers and shakers’ who refuse to rest until peace has been restored.

Every day, those of us that live in relative peace, wake up, eat, go to work, carry out our usual chores, return home, eat, sleep and do the whole thing over again the next day.

ot too far away, people just like us, are living from moment to moment in fear of their lives, not quite knowing if they'd make it through the night alive! It's almost as if we are living in two completely parallel universes within the same country. Can any one of us living like this actually look at our fellow countrymen in the eye and honestly talk of unity?