Let our dreams come true

New Year - some random thoughts

It is high time our historians and sociologists both academic and otherwise start re-writing the history and sociology of our country emphasising more on the commonness between the two major communities- the Sinhalese and the Tamils.

When I say Sinhalese I mean the majority of them, the Sinhala Buddhists and when I say Tamils, I mean the majority of them, the Tamil Hindus.

These two peoples converge at so many points and that too at almost all levels - metaphysical, religious, cultural and social that one wonders why all these idiotic things happen around us.

One almost begins to suspect whether some unseen Satan is at work.

Are these two groups or communities so exclusive of each other as the western academic establishment tries to make out? We know that the western academic establishment, particularly in the so called Area Studies has functioned as the handmaid of political expansion and domination.

Be that as it may, the indigenous system of medicine and Jyotisa are two areas in which the Sinhalese and Tamils converge at a deep psychic level. They share both.

It is a tragedy that precisely these are the two areas, the ruling elite since independence - rootless, alienated and widely degenerate-have been least concerned with. At times, they have used Ayurveda politically, vulgarising it in the process - as they are doing with Buddhism!

Jyotisa is a shastra concerned with Time in relation to the real or apparent movement of heavenly bodies. It is not surprising that the Sinhalese and Tamils, in the context of shared religious values and forms observe the New Year on the same day–in mid April.

There is much in common in the manner they celebrate it. The New Year, the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, with its overtones of gaiety and joy, the kiribath, the sweets and sharing with neighbours, is a day with great potential for reintegrating our peoples.

In Jaffna, in the early years of this century when we were young, the New Year season was one of renewal, auspicious expectations, joy and glory. The bath at dawn - the bath then was no more body care as it is now, it was a ritualistic renewal of life - the visit to the local temple, the pongal at home, the sweets, sharing them with neighbours, relatives, friends and the poor, the cart-race, the swings and all and more made up the celebrations.

The New Year heralds the beginning of wasanta kalam - a period when people enjoy the sweet blessings, including sex, of life given by God in plenty to all without discrimination.

All these have now become a lost dream. Even in the remotest villages, January 1, has become New Year's day. This could be because of more than a century of English domination, colonial education; may be an idiotic interpretation of secularism; may be the renewed assault of western neo-colonialism masquerading as globalization, free trade and humanism.

I have said a lost dream. Dreams sometimes recur, even become real.

-Yagnavalkya

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