First, Second, and Third Worlds Are Changing Places!

We have all grown up being presented with certain sociocultural perceptions as if they were unassailable facts. For example, the idea of ‘First World’ nations, and ‘Third World’ nations, is a global classification which is supposedly based on economics and facts and figures. But recent events and political developments are showing a radically different picture which challenges these beliefs.

First World nations comprise the European settler/colonising nations, who, empowered by self-justifying beliefs of white supremacy, expanded their reach from the boundaries of their own relatively small countries to conquer other nations which were rich in resources. Portugal, Holland, Spain, France, Belgium, and England all used weaponry to enforce their status and assert their rights of exploitation over many countries and continents.

Their wealth today had its foundation on the labour of enslaved peoples and on mineral and agricultural resources which were taken over from the people of the colonised countries by violence, force and rapacious greed. The so called Great Exhibitions of the 19th century were giant displays of wonders from this pillaging. The movements towards Independence, and the Great Famines and Great Wars of the 20th century resulted in the displacement of millions of people as economic refugees.

Immigration has resulted in a forcible challenging of the concepts of First and Third Worlds. What we see now in the rise of what is euphemistically called Populism in countries like the U.K., the U.S.A and Australia, particularly focusing on calls for a limiting of what is termed mass migration and the fear of being overwhelmed by refugees, is a direct consequence of the historical injustices of the past. Multiculturalism threatens the idea that it is possible to retain control of the colour of a society: not only the skin colour of its citizens, but their political stripes, their religious beliefs, their dominant language, and their core values.

Colonisation was a form of vicious control of others who were different from its perpetrators, and monoculturalism in the name of social harmony is another form of retaining that control. Sri Lanka in this regard is actually shining bright in comparison with far larger and more self important nations. Despite three ingresses of colonisation, courtesy of the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British, and the colourism and class hierarchies and political tensions that have accompanied these invasions, there is a cohesion and a tolerance and a generosity between communities in this small island that makes it vibrant in its diversity.

Viharas, temples, mosques and churches co-exist, and despite the regular playing of the majoritarian politics during election cycles of the predictable short term profits that arise from polarizing the minorities, people have lived respecting each other and each other’s beliefs. Peace and reconciliation workers in particular have done a great deal to raise awareness of the need for empathy, for dignity, for valuing of the differences in others. And the younger generation are showing themselves to be more educated and literate about other cultures, and more open to the customs and social traditions of those other than the ones they have experienced in their homes and communities.

We see this in the number of religious festivals the country celebrates each year, and the generosity of people in diverse neighbourhoods inviting those of other faiths to their feasts and celebrations, as welcome guests. The ‘ghetto mentality’ that people decry in other nations is not seen so much in this country, today. The currency has been repeatedly devalued, and the emigration of professionals from the country in response to the recent economic crisis has been disheartening.

But when one looks at the quality of life and real sense of community in Sri Lanka, it seems to be far better than what people are enduring in Britain or the USA. People in the so-called Third World have witnessed the erosion of capitalism, the class division, the rise of brazen elitism, and the socio-economic distress starting to be felt by the voting majority in the First World. Vulnerable classes of people are visibly suffering in countries which call themselves the beacon of democracy.

True sense of community comes from genuine co-existence and co-operation, which requires compassion and humility. Greed and individualism does not activate social harmony.

We in Sri Lanka, due to the multiple crises we have experienced, are less polarised, less reactive, more resilient and more focused than many countries. And we are starting to see that there is a vast and growing shift of global power as a result of decolonization. The very vociferous nature of anti-immigration rhetoric and its rise in the West shows the perceived success of so many people who have been able to find and create opportunity amidst dire circumstances and challenging conditions.

But it must be opportunity and access for all. Recently, one of the country’s most renowned schools sought to ban the wearing of head coverings for women, preventing mothers collecting their sons from school or participating in parent/teacher meetings. This has led to complaints being made, of discrimination against the Muslim community. After the Easter Attacks in 2019, the rise in anti-Muslim feeling was noticeable, and it was met with campaigns against hate speech in social media, and concerted efforts by activists and community leaders.

https://themorningtelegraph.com/45171/

South Asians as a whole focus on education, and many do their utmost to ensure that they and their families have access to opportunities for not only employment but self growth: prosperity in every sense. Entitlement and grievance make a noise, but are often all hot air, talk and no action; and quality and calibre will always show themselves in contrast to be valuable cultural assets. Living at a lesser standard in a so called First World country, enduring racist attitudes, distrust, suspicion and micro-aggressions, is often eclipsed completely today by the prospects offered by one’s country of birth.

We can retain the positive aspects of our culture - the warmth, the humanity, the love of social life - in a way that a wholesale pursuit of economic growth has not achieved in the West, where social isolation and loneliness are on the increase.

The classism in this country is in many ways a consequence of colonial imposition, but also based on culturally learned bias against race and religion. A truly multicultural society with a majority ethnic group dominating the positions of power will not allocate second tier status to any minority citizen. Through recognition of equal rights and individual merit, through commitment to inclusive policies and active participation, through open mindedness and setting aside of attitudes of inherited entitlement, the society can progress and thrive.

The long illustrated and collectively disheartening experience of citizens - that prominent, corrupt and connected individuals are somehow not accountable in the same way that other citizens are - is now being challenged. Everyday administrative processes such as utilities payments and support for households are actually improving, despite the orchestrated comments from paid nay sayers on social media.

Sri Lanka can, by developing its human resources, making its administrative infrastructures more efficient, developing English as a link language which will act as a bridge to international employment opportunities which can be accessed without leaving the country, making itself a magnet to investors, and expanding its support systems to encourage its citizens, really become resplendent again. I see with joy the national pride expressed whenever talented local athletes, scientists, writers and scholars, beauty queens and artists achieve international recognition. Sri Lankans have great creativity and talent in a number of fields of excellence. Until recently, the fracturing effects of civil war and conflict and the debilitating impact of corruption and abuse of the vulnerable have been endured as if there was no solution or remedy that could be sought.

Social media has shown its ugly side in this country in outbursts of hate speech and splintering discourse over the years. But it can also be a powerful instrument of positivity, if used consciously to illuminate the best of which we are capable. Is there a ‘Second World’? A world which is not colonising and exploitative, and also not embattled and exploited? Not a predator, and not prey? But an empowered global participant? Can we create and inhabit that world? It can be the best of both worlds, and of all possible worlds.

We have been described by spokespeople from the ‘First World’ over the years as underdeveloped and developing, but we can all see as their empires have been dismantled and their populations divided that their experiments have not worked out well for them. I suggest that a society which seeks to develop itself wholistically will always succeed. It will take time, but every step will be taken in the direction of prosperity and happiness.

Special Treatment

I write this in a period when the country and the world is in transition. The late renowned journalist John Pilger created a documentary film called ‘The New Rulers Of The World’, about 20 years ago. My students and I studied it together in Globalisation courses. As the title of his documentary film suggests, he theorises that the old feudal societal system of the Middle Ages, which had been softening into what we called Democracy, was now being broken down into a new elitism, dominated by increasingly conscienceless and violently money hungry individuals.

Social inequality was entrenched, notions of social justice and equity were broken down, and brutal demarcations of power and powerlessness were now becoming the new norm. Underclasses were now being created to be exploited, and human worth was no longer seen as intrinsic, but was now comparatively assessed. Some humans were deemed more valuable than others.

People started talking openly about privilege and entitlement, and being humbled and feeling grateful for the same, about ten years ago. Noticeably, those blessed with most of these endowments, including inherited property and recently created offshore bank accounts, were the most quiet about them, and the most egalitarian in their politics, the most publicly cultivated in their tastes, and the most philanthropic in their assiduous virtue signalling.

Amidst this new socio economic calibration rose a repellant and very recogniseable category of people: those adjacent to powerbrokers, those who opportunistically court and fawn on the old feudal aristocrats and the new money makers. Parasites, fattening themselves via contacts and connections and whatever crumbs they could collect from the tables of their big name buddies. The rent-a-crowdsters, the seat fillers. Those attracted by terms like ‘high end’ and ‘high worth’ and ‘high value’.

By their name dropping you will know them: because, coming from relatively unmonied backgrounds, they thirst and hunger to create the impression of what they imagine privilege to look like. Brand names are brazenly displayed, bling is prominent, they are desperate to be seen in the society pages. Their resumes and CVs are short on substance, and in many cases concocted or faked. Because they cannot bear feeling inadequate, they openly say that formal qualifications do not amount to very much. The name of the institution of education is just a brand stamp to them. They assume everyone really feels the way they do. That no one truly has real inherent worth, and life is just a hall of mirrors.

Scammers and teledrama queens. Victim mentality giving way like sink holes under their facial reconstruction procedures.

This is the ‘Fake It Till You Make It’ brigade. They would not know what to do without their little band of followers, who are required to regularly bolster their fragile self image. They boast about knowing important people, who do favours for them. Like puffer fish, amplifying their actual size, in a hostile world.

But ironically, as the world is changing, such antics are becoming increasingly ridiculous. People who take short cuts are now being seen not as cool or clever but lazy and greedy, and when they boast about disrespecting the systems and being above the laws of the land, their gross sense of narcissistic exceptionalism shows not the superiority they imagine, but reeks of actual inferiority.

Their jobs are sinecures, gained through personally knowing so and so, and coming from such and such a family, and so whatever profession required sincere effort or actual exertion was too much work for them. So they never knew the transformative experience of having a true vocation, or of working towards anything other than self enrichment. They are colossally little, in the end, and their legacy is a reverberating reel of repetitive selfies.

These kinds of people are super fatted in every sense. They mimic and they mime. They are like the smooth surface sheen on the top of a cyst. All the inflammation is pooled up and toxic inside. And when their masks fall, at points of tension or micro aggression, you see how atrophied they have become. No accountability and a delusional sense of immunity has eroded their empathy. Like acid, it has eaten away their residual humanity. They are disconnected from the hoi polloi, and they prefer it that way.

These are the people who boast of using contacts and connections to get certified vaccine certificates during the Covid pandemic, so they had the certificate to show without having had to take the vaccine. No protection needed, they thought, because they felt themselves to be extra special, and superhuman - and immune to the normal ailments that affected lesser people.

Death, the great leveller, is something they like to defy. It makes them feel outrageous, larger than life, to live while others die, to travel in comfort while others cannot, to jump queues while others faint from exhaustion. They see themselves as born exceptional: and if only everyone could recognise that, the world would match the ideal realm in their heads. All the grievances they carry come from this sense of the failure of others to recognise their superiority.

Their ideal realm is a world with plush red carpets rolled out, people ushering them through iterated archways with smooth surfaces and embossed augmentations. They worship notions of exceptionalism. It’s their religion. It’s Stone Age principles, wrapped in high end gloss. Remember that, when you see their big lippy mouths open in those carnivalesque smiles in the glossy magazines.

The norms they live by - ‘if no one can prove it, I did no wrong, you’d have to be stupid or naive not to work the system, people who play by the rules are fools’ - have become an ecosystem. Only very toxic plants thrive in it. Venus flytraps, and the like.

They divide the world into winners and losers, and everything is commodified: every relationship is transactional, to them. Enmeshed in a world of surfaces, simultaneously stagnant and superficial. If it was not for their pathological need to be admired, they would be invisible, if not quite immortal.

ColourBlind Casting

Over the past 25 years, we have seen many adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, and the adaptations have in several cases been visually very confronting and challenging, for some viewers. I believe this trend started with the Miramax adaptation of Mansfield Park, released in 1999.

While this production did not cast people of colour in the main roles, or even in minor roles, it is the first production ever to have vividly illuminated the cruelty, objectification and exploitation of slavery, as part of colonialism and enrichment, as practised by Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of Mansfield Park, in a way which shocks the heroine, Fanny, who is the moral centre of the story.

The revelation of the sources of his wealth and status show the questionable ethical conduct of the patriarch of this family, and provide a context for the subsequent moral disintegration of his children, who all fall prey to forms of temptation and depravity, even Edmund, who is intimately redeemed only by his affection for Fanny.

In more recent years, we have seen the quasi Regency Shondaland confection, Bridgerton, on our screens, openly using the slightest of speculations regarding the genetic ancestry of an English queen as a framing portal to usher in women and men of African and Indian heritage into the story landscape, each with their colourful back stories.

This inclusiveness and diversification trend has extended into the 19thC production ‘The Gilded Age’, in which wealthy African American families are brought into connection by the story writers with the Anglo-European families of New York.

In Bridgerton, the scenes where the elder sister of the Sharma family, in Season Two, participates with her younger sister and mother in the saffron/ turmeric paste beautifying rituals traditionally used by Indian brides before the impending wedding ceremony are beautiful to see. The love story between Miss Sharma and the eldest son of the Bridgerton family is based on an ‘enemies to friends’ arc which is very believable, and in which contrasting skin colour is no barrier to the recognition of beauty and desirable character qualities.

This preference to bring characters together across social barriers was foreshadowed in Season One when the eldest Bridgerton daughter falls in love with the dark and handsome Duke, and their magnetic attraction to each other is intensely illustrated in their words and actions, inter alia as a celebration of their equality or at least equivalence of social status.

In Jane Austen’s adaptations, we have not seen any casting director go beyond the pale, and venture into colourblind casting. Elizabeth Bennet may be accused by the jealous Miss Bingley of having ‘brown’ skin, but (fortunately for all of us clutching our pearls) it is only ‘tanned’, which is ‘no great wonder, in the summer’.

Shakespeare’s work, in contrast, has been often performed with people of all hues and from all ethnic backgrounds in the principal roles, and recent performances of Harry Potter on the stage actually cast a black Hermione Granger. The author herself, in her description of the characters, never specified Hermione’s ethnic heritage, only stating that she had bushy hair, and it is clear that the prettiest girls in Hogwarts School were the Indian Patel twins, and the Chinese Cho Chang.

Bridgerton aside, this embracing of diversity in the film and stage productions of beloved books which are regarded as central to the English literary canon is a trend about which I have mixed feelings. The realities of colonisation and the assertions of white supremacists created a conceptual underclass, in which people of colour lived their lives as minor characters and in service to the central characters. And therefore, in the cultural products of those eras, artworks were created in which people of colour were erased, or invisible.

The comments sections of Jane Austen online groups is an interesting snapshot of our times.

‘Mansfield Park has, to my mind, the best TV Austen adaptation of all time: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04vfvpn via @bbciplayer

Impeccable costuming, wonderful casting, fidelity to the novel, understanding of the period, and no painful, anachronistic, ignorantly woke attempts to force every third character to be black or trans.’

Shoehorning people of colour into European landscapes is problematic. But what seems to really offend some people is the high status which these people of colour are afforded, in these fictional narratives. It is ‘anachronistic and painful’, because it clearly offends supremacist beliefs that people of colour could be so well established, so dignified, and elegantly costumed, and coiffured, and move as equals through gilded drawing rooms, and be centered in narratives instead of sidelined.

One of the worst and laziest equations ever made is the lumping together of minorities as second class citizens, seen as having lesser value: women, disabled people, trans people, people of colour and people exhibiting other forms of divergence from a standard of normativeness which is male, heterosexual and with skin containing less melanin, into the messy category of ‘different’, which to the minds of many is a euphemism for ‘deviant’. Women are not even a minority, statistically.

In Georgette Heyer’s novel, These Old Shades, the Duke of Avon’s sister has a black servant boy, called Pompey. The social mobility we are being shown in what I term Regency concoctions is wish fulfillment on the part of those who prefer a more colourful and equitable world, and have chosen to create it themselves, in fictional storytelling, reality falling far short of the way they clearly wish the world to be.

Colourblind casting on the one hand asserts the primacy of human personality, of intelligence and soul and emotion, as being more significant than external identifiers of race, colouring, facial features, hair type, physiognomy and body shape. In these contemporary performances, it is visually suggested that calibre, and content of character, is more important than the colour of a person’s skin. We relate to the characters on our screens as human beings, and we become interested and involved in their challenges and experiences as if they were real, and relatable.

However, in our identity obsessed world, it is also a form of false equivalence, and erasure of difference. We are not all human flat packs, culturally constructed the same. Our unique social and anthropological characteristics, and the cultural traditions in which we have evolved, are part of us.

The genders are different, and more diversely and subtly formulated these days. The actor who played the eldest Bridgerton son could not be more than a good friend to the lovely Miss Sharma, in real life.

This celebration of difference is at the heart of any union of human beings, whether personal in marriage, or political, in the form of nations. Tolerance is not a grudging recognition of someone else’s equivalent centre of self, but ideally, in a less threatened and defensive society, a more positive delight in multifoliate hues and difference.

In our excitable contemporary world, in which people find it difficult to do anything other than compete for territory and contest the most desirable sociocultural space to occupy, and the most compelling platforms on which to speak their truths, it is the reinterpretations of classic stories which portray to us the evolution of our species. Both in the bold steps forward, with the diversification of what we are now being shown as admirable and worthy, and the hue and cry (often muted, in genteel literary groups) that inevitably follows.

End Gaming

I have some advice to give: Make the most of what days are left to you. Find the work you most like to do, give away or sell what you no longer need, downsize and minimise your possessions - and expand your personal aspirations. No, this is not a late New Year post. It’s a suggestion, to detach yourself from everything that distracts you from happiness, or tries to substitute for it.

Tune down the noise and mute the most annoying of the people clamouring for your precious attention, be they influencers or even friends and associates. You will wake from a trance, induced by a surfeit of social media. Have you noticed how fashions rise and fade, but how certain preferences are consistently endorsed and normalized, in modern conduct books. Viral this and viral that. Beliefs originating from elsewhere, and seeded and dispersed like actual viruses, amongst us.

People using the same words, and threadbare phrases, and a dolorous sameness permeating the global discourse. We are being herded, everyone. Like the hapless wildebeest in The Lion King, with tech bro billionaires snapping at our heels to make us run. Echo chambers and digitized infomercials and product placement and saturation of our senses - and the manipulation of our consensus.

So we may not be living in an actual war zone, but it’s pretty clear that we - our minds, our beliefs and our perceptions - are under siege. Think back to about 15 years ago, and then 30 years ago, before the advent of social media. The first smartphone was released in the year 2000. Facebook was unrolled in 2004. Instagram in 2010. TikTok in 2016. We were told they were designed to build community. It’s now very obvious that these sites have been created to track us, and play us. And to corral us into voting blocs, being told what to think, how to interpret what is happening in the world around us, and that we need to ‘keep up’ with the updates, to stay alerted and notified. We actually do not. We are being gamed, and we are being played. We can step back, and step out and off the field. We can choose not to receive, and disconnect, and leave.

I ask: Is what we are digesting through words and images and audio material empowering us or disempowering us? Do we feel more confident and calm, or more anxious and troubled, by what we are being told and shown? What values are being endorsed? What images and conduct are being rewarded, on the flickering screens in front of us? Are we not being baited, driven and triggered? And kept in a constant state of volatile restlessness, boredom and dull acquiescence?

Do we understand how the world works? Do we accept that, not being physically present when various incidents occur, what we are being presented with is hearsay? Do we perceive the framing techniques that are used to convey narratives in a certain way, to ensure that the key points land on us with maximum impact? Whether it’s shock jocks on radio or controversial ‘journalists’ platforming misogyny, racism, anti-wokery and slavish worship of capitalism, on Sky News, X, etc., we are being served a stream of truisms, clichés, anxiety-fuelling material: provocations and prompts that are calculated to stir up emotive response and bypass our thinking process.

Critical thinking and lateral thinking are needed to remedy this learned passivity which makes us willingly receive - and even welcome - what actually harms us: all these programmes are the products of the same mentality. Ambush, hijack, assault people’s peace of mind, wear them down until they surrender, follow orders and do what they are told.

We do not see what people really are, only what they appear to be. Machiavelli said that, in one of the most famous books on power ever written. Now, with the immersive onslaught and saturation of AI, bots, deep fakes, and human impersonators of all kinds, we are being sold facsimiles of human feeling and experience. Do we know that a specific person actually said a certain thing? Or is it a replica? Is it an approximation? An attribution?

So much is derivative, and disconnected from a pulsing life force. The only energy being produced is the stimulus of fear and horror. How can we not respond with despair when presented with images of the results of human cruelty? But are they real? Is ‘the enemy’ really the enemy? Or the ‘ally’ truly an ally? Or is our adrenochrome being drained while we are still alive? We are like animals in a maze, being cynically trained to respond to fake stimuli! Our energy - our attention - our focus - our vitality - our commitment - our humanity - are being harvested. And we are being trained to actually participate in our own diminishment.

The democratization of media has flooded us with thoughts from people attempting to gain followings and subscribers. Algorithms and trends dictate what we are shown, like meals on airport trays, curated by an array of limited choices. For many months now, I have subscribed to various channels on multiple platforms to see what is happening in the world. Through an onslaught of pop ups and pornographic lures, it’s still pretty easy to see that there is nothing new going on.
And we are being desensitised, through systematic overloading of our capacities to process incoming data. Just jerking in response to stimuli, predictably and on cue. This is not being alive, or sentient. Have you noticed how short our attention spans are becoming? And how we feel a possibly intense response to a new situation briefly, and then it peaks and fades and we forget about it? Substituted by the next event? Are our responses even distinguishable from each other anymore? Can we even recall why we felt the way we did, at the time?

The most disturbing outcome is that everything starts to feel random, and arbitrary - as if it doesn’t matter whether we feel positive or negative about a person or an event. We could take either side, and it would not make any difference to any real world outcome. What we firmly believe to be true can be overthrown in a short period of time, when the facts we were relying on are proved to have been false - augmented or modified or otherwise faked. Being gaslit and told that something which horrifies us is fake news erodes our faith in our ability to discern true from false and friend from faux.

Remedy? Not tuning out, but tuning in - to a cleaner and higher frequency. We can do this. I suggest exiting the pernicious platforms. Those strident voices will go quiet. No FOMO will be felt. The great juggernauts will crash somewhere other than the peaceful place where you find yourself.

Friend Or Faux?

When we realise we need to simplify, clarify, downsize and declutter our lives, we naturally start with our material possessions. We sort everything into what needs to be repaired, or repurposed or gifted, or kept. And in the end, after a lot of dust, frustration, decision-making and stress, our lives become more enjoyable. The biggest single factor that interferes with this clarifying process is not laziness or inertia, but sentimental attachment. We hold onto things because they represent a certain time of our lives, and experiences which we want to remember. We may never look at these old trinkets or letters or souvenirs or floppy discs or whatever, but they are part of our life, even if they are just taking up space, and adding no value.

And we do the same to friendships.

However, with friendships, it is even more important to apply the golden rule of decluttering: ‘Have you interacted positively and meaningfully with this artefact/entity in the last year? If not, let it go.’ Because relationships that stagnate sometimes decompose, break down and become toxic. After all, they are organic and they are perishable: formed of energy that passes between two living beings. And if the interpersonal communication becomes shallow, one-sided, transactional or under-nourished, the bonds become false, and in fact untrustworthy, in a way our material possessions do not.

It’s a suspension bridge. And a weak connection means what is being conveyed from one side to the other is in danger of falling through the gaps. While often we overlook relationship red flags, and try to give people the benefit of the doubt, and tell ourselves that we are imagining things when the energy feels problematic or off, here is a helpful list of several clear signs that a friend has become faux:

1. They are constantly late, or frequently cancel or shift times when you arrange to meet. There’s always a reason for it, but it is chaotic, and disrespectful, and you are expected to understand that things are ‘just always really hard for them’. This indemnifies them from ongoing accountability. Why are they so reluctant to meet? What’s getting in the way of their timeliness?

2. They overshare their financial or accommodation troubles with you, and you increasingly feel compelled to try and help them in practical ways. This is a clue that they have identified you as a designated resource person.

3. They are competitive with you, often in petty and trifling ways. They don’t like it when they don’t do as well as you do in any amount of instances, whether major or trivial. Why did you get a good result in an online game, or a bargain at the sale, when they did not? They do not like it when your merit or authority is publicly recognised, even by a bot! They are very silent when you share any good news.

4. They do not really enjoy being present at any event where you or your work are being celebrated, recognised or praised. They might go to the extent of coming late to such an event, to avoid the speeches and just come to access the celebratory food, for example.

5. They echo you and affirm what you say, so you do not truly know what they really think. This chameleon behaviour is something to be noted. It’s a way of adapting to their environment, withholding their true character and opinions, and mirroring you, in a show of apparent compatibility. It’s a survival mechanism.

6. They are hyper-critical of you. They will read an article you have written, and their eye will immediately be drawn to the one typo in it, which they seem to enjoy pointing out to you. They note every crease in a tablecloth or scratch on a table. They are fundamentally ungenerous, and looking for flaws in everything you do.

7. They are ungrateful when accepting gifts from you. Somehow, whatever you have chosen for them will not be quite what they want, or will have something wrong with it, and they are not too polite to hurt your feelings by saying so. It’s not the thought that counts! This is a form of devaluation and disrespect.

8. They do not check in on you or reach out to you to see how you are, and the relationship feels very one-sided. Because it is. You are the giver. They say things like: ‘I’m not ignoring you.’ Or ‘I am going to go quiet for a while’. Like a bear hibernating for the winter. Because they have got enough supply for the moment. You’ll see them again when they are hungry.

9. Their habitual mode is passive aggressive. They efface themselves in the relationship, and then lash out when their frustration builds up. No healthy open discussion. Their ‘relational style’ is to not engage in the effort of honest dialogue. It’s lazy, and it’s avoidant. A lot of time is wasted in listening to their self-justifying caterwauling.

Basically, the higher any individual scores on the above checklist, the more likely they are to be opportunistic and possibly predatory. At the very least, the relationship with them is not equitable and balanced: there is a disparity, and it should not be glossed over. Don’t try to exercise tolerance or compassion towards such individuals. Cut them off.

Many people come from very difficult backgrounds, and have learned to relate to others in abusive or damaged familial contexts. It is important to extend grace and compassion to each other, and to help where we can. But discernment should be exercised, when the victim card is being continually played. Such people are sycophants, flatterers, fawners and parasites.

This is a challenging era in which we live, and we need to ensure that our immediate contexts, both physically and emotionally, are as clean and clear as possible. Time to conserve our resources, everyone! Match your energy, observe the way people conduct themselves, and align with people who can give as well as take.

What People Don’t Realise About Weight Loss

Now there are weight loss drugs available, in various forms, and a person can lose 30 kilos of body weight or more in only a few months. When we consider that the celebrities we see on red carpets or catwalks are about 50 kilos in weight, we can understand the significance of this change. This ‘supermodel’ body is only inhabited or owned or maintained by a small percentage of the female population.

If we focus only on appearance and status and admiration (‘Your friends will be amazed at the difference in you!’), it’s a straightforward success story. But if we are above 70 kilograms or 80 kilograms in weight, or 90, or 100, and we are medically described as morbidly obese, and we find it difficult to fit into our clothes, or even move around easily, let alone run or even walk, we need to understand that we are dealing with psychology as well as biology.

A rapid weight loss does not give us much time to address the psychological reasons behind the weight gain in the first place, which at these levels has taken time, and involved habits and choices which have been made by us over many months and years.

Weight is a shield, and a protection. Many women feel exposed to the gaze and intrusive observations and assessments of others, and carrying extra weight deflects this. We live in a society which crudely rates people out of 10, and excess weight immediately drops our visual desirability. To some people, this feels like peace.

Weight blurs our features, and makes us less identifiable and distinctive. In the era of digital photography, if a person loses substantial weight between having their passport photographs taken, the camera does not recognise them as the same person.

Weight protects us to some extent from being manhandled and physically lifted and hurled against walls by abusive partners. No one who is over 80 kilograms in weight can easily be thrown around like a rag doll. To some people, being a woman of substance feels like safety.

Excessive weight is called ‘morbid’ because it puts layers of fat around our internal organs, making it more difficult for our digestive systems and our hearts to work properly. This has long term negative effects that can be difficult to reverse. It also affects our hormonal regulation, so we do not feel so sexually motivated. Our libido level is diminished. This in many ways simplifies our lives. It relieves us of those hot whips of adrenaline that accompany attraction.

What we need to understand is that when we lose a large amount of weight, and get close to the essential bone structures of our bodies, we inevitably attract more people’s interest, and are thus unconsciously signalling our desirability and availability to others. Our weight acted as a physical parenthesis around us, signalling our unavailability. But it also put us at a disadvantage, in terms of putting off people who might otherwise have been attracted to us. It is a shield, a cloak, and a filter.

We had got used to a more muted life, and the physical boundaries and defences we had built should dissolve more slowly, in order for our sense of self and sovereignty to adjust to the changed conditions. The positive attention directed at someone who has lost weight is overwhelming. You are seen, admired, recognised, approved of, desired, sought after. It can be like a powerful incoming force like a king tide which makes it difficult to keep your bearings.

Your relationships completely change. You have far more choice and opportunity. You can move more freely through the world, moving through not only dress sizes but through style and fashion eras, and into spheres in which you had not felt comfortable, before. You may have thought only clunky jewellery suited you. You could be wrong: delicate jewellery can now be seen to advantage on your more streamlined face and body. Your senses get sharpened, and you respond more intensely to sensory experiences of all kinds. You are waking up after being half asleep for years. You feel fully alive.

But without sustained nutritional support and strength building during the entire process, your complexion will not brighten, and soften and your hair will not thicken and become shinier. The fact is, if you have carried extra weight for a while, your body has adjusted to your previous weight and mode, and it naturally takes time for your entire system to recalibrate itself. You must positively support yourself through good diet and exercise routines. You should keep aware of what makes you uncomfortable, and when you feel unsafe.

You ‘suddenly’ become visible, and gorgeous, and people say you look like a model or ask if you are in an advertisement. It can go to your head. As a young girl, being told you are pretty is a wonderful thing. But as a woman, depending on your life experiences, and how much your identity is determined by the way people look at you and the admiration or respect they accord you, your presentation is something that can be seen by you as something you have greater control over. If you want to be respected for your character, and your brains, and your articulacy, don’t overshadow these aspects or displace them. Present yourself always fully, as a whole person. You can modify how you want to appear, according to the event you are attending. You do not have to display your breasts or your legs or your hips and buttocks or draw attention to your ‘attributes’ and ‘endowments’, if you do not want to elicit the attention of every drooling member of the citizenry. You are not just a thirst trap or a cynosure.

You can live your life, more freely and naturally. But do so with awareness of the way human beings of all genders and cultures respond to each other’s changing energy. By shifting shape, and consciously choosing to do so, you are radically upgrading your life experience. You are opening doors to worlds that you may or may not like or feel safe in. You become an object of beauty, and people’s gaze lingers on you. You are now in the Pretty Privilege enclave, roped off and insulated from the ‘hot struggles of the poor’, to quote F. Scott Fitzgerald. Only in this world, we are talking about poverty defined as being genetically unblessed.The air is rarefied, the language is aerated (everyone talks of ‘elevating’, and ‘curating’ and ‘augmenting’ and ‘positioning’ and ‘aligning values’) and there is a lot of conspicuous consumption - of everything but food. Kate Moss highlighted this by saying that ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.’ Do not simplistically substitute drugs or cigarettes or other stimulants or sedatives for food. Our bodies need nutrition, not just distraction.

Overall, by losing excess weight, turning potential or stored energy into active kinetic energy, you activate your life: your sexual drive, your intellectual vibrancy, your psychological capacity, your openness to relationships, and your sense of self worth. This is such a comprehensive and monumental shift that it is best undertaken as mindfully as possible. You might wish to pace yourself.

Soft Politics And Shadowplays

Recently, a senior academic at Peradeniya University was removed from his position after being found guilty of sexual abuse of a junior colleague. The Supreme Court intervened to ensure that the sexual harassment in this instance was met with legal consequences in the face of the initial failure of the university to act to uphold the rights of the targeted woman.

What is significant about this case was that predatory behaviour in the professional environment, which usually takes place in private settings and which, due to the embarrassment and shame surrounding any victim who complains, is usually never brought into the open, was in this instance named and investigated and that the perpetrator was prosecuted and suffered real consequences for his conduct.

This landmark judgment offers dignity to an individual who has been wronged and also requires that the institutions and organizations in which the perpetrator operates step up into accountability even at the cost of initial public embarrassment. Shame must now start to change sides. For too long in this country the victims of abuse and unprofessional misconduct have been shamed instead of the perpetrators facing consequences for their actions.

To understand that men and women in Sri Lanka live in different worlds in the same country, one only needs to interview several women in different spheres – business, government, academe, literature and media – about their experiences of harassment in their professional lives.

We can see then how misogyny and classism intersect in various spheres of society: in media, corporations, academia, the law and the professions, in government offices and in the private sector, including the worlds of politics, journalism and literature.

This disproportional experience of harassment and abuse is of course not unique to Sri Lanka but when people say that Sri Lanka is a country like no other, endemic misogyny can be seen as the context in which Sri Lanka has not had a Time’s Up or Me Too movement. Sri Lanka has its Weinsteins and its Epsteins but they are not operating on such a high profile level. All sexual abuse and gender based harassment cases have certain features in common: in every case, major power imbalances exist between the perpetrator and his target and a form of bartering transaction takes place between a less experienced person, usually a girl or young woman, and a more experienced person who in most cases is male, mega rich, in the public eye and socially powerful.

In every instance, the perpetrator exhibits a sense of false but socially endorsed entitlement, dehumanizes the person they target and objectifies and exploits the person whom they are subjecting to mistreatment as if the people they harass are all generic and interchangeable and not individual human beings. These predators have developed a pattern of identifying the vulnerable and treating them like trophies and toys, devalued and discarded after use and abuse.

The ignorance and lack of sex education and rights and consent in which young women are still being raised in Sri Lanka leave them vulnerable to exploitation and coercion. In their lack of access to direct paths of advancement based on their merit and their social precariousness, they are part of an underclass defined by their gender status as weaker. Many do not even realize that what happens to them qualifies as abuse or is illegal. In the transactional environments of corporations and commerce, they are treated as commodities and expected to barter their beauty and desirability for promotion and advancement in their careers. Their economic vulnerability compounds their victim status. And this gives the perpetrators leverage over them.

There is a long tradition of infantilizing, marginalizing and ornamentalizing women. Women exist, in the minds of misogynistic people, merely to serve men, not as intellectual companions to discuss ideas with or to listen to or learn from. An interesting article arising from the Epstein investigation highlighted the way this belief operates to invalidate women.

Interestingly, what seems like alpha masculinity is performed by perpetrators who actually despise and dislike women as a gender, believing them to be an underclass, not seen as equals. The people they praise and venerate are usually only men. From the most trivial exclusionary memes they share, extolling only the great men of history to the all-male boards and panels and steering committees in corporate and governance culture, women are relegated to non-educative and non-executive roles.

The platforming of predators

Many of the worst offenders exhibit grandiose narcissism and seek public recognition and fame, so they operate in what we may see as a split screen mode: perceived as respectable and renowned in public and acclaimed and platformed unknowingly by institutions operating in a whole social context that is created to empower them.

Their predatory personal conduct occurs in a hidden realm and the public only sees these brash young men – articulate, often charming, and often described as a powerhouse or controversial or unapologetic. The worst behavior usually occurs in their late teens, twenties and thirties. Their talent and loquaciousness enable them to ingratiate themselves with useful seniors in the institutions to which they attach themselves. Their directors and superiors have no idea of the conduct that is going on in the lower tiers of their research centres, foundations and corporations. By the time the perpetrators are in their forties and fifties, they have outlived the excuse of youthful brazenness but they have by then left those hunting grounds behind them.

All of them have preyed on women, professionally and sexually. And all of them have systematically interfered with women’s professional progress and reputation in their fields. They have flourished in a culture of impunity. This culture is still entrenched but it is now being exposed.

Given their track records, there is no reason to think that they change their beliefs and personal standards of conduct as they mature, although they age out of bad boy status over the years and many have sought positions of authority in academe. Several continue to ingratiate themselves with recognized people of good character as a form of camouflage. Meanwhile, the women whose career paths they have disrupted and derailed have to overcome the trauma they have experienced in order to progress in their lives.

The old guard are innocents who believe in ethics and moral codes, especially senior leaders and people of the older generation who live by codes of honour and integrity, and have been unknowingly platforming and promoting these questionable characters

This insidious moral corruption has infiltrated every institution in the country.

Based on the extensive anecdotal evidence so far, it is clear that this gross conduct occurs in a sort of parallel shadow realm, away from the blaze of the public eye in which these predators like to strut and preen. Interfering with women is a sort of pastime for them, a leisure activity, which soothes their bristling egos and brings them temporary relief. The women involved are seen as a renewable resource.

They have thought until now that no one would ever call them out or remember how they have treated all the junior females they treated as prey. The harassment only ceased when the predators moved on in search of fresh supply.

The revelatory antics of Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, not to mention the fictional Charlie of Charlie’s Angels and actors and movie stars and beauty pageant hosts, have taught us that any man who encircles himself with women and surrounds himself with a harem of girlfriends and who is seen pictured with a bevy of young girls catering to him is viewed as powerful in a primate culture. James Bond is admired as a ladies’ man but the Bond Girls are almost indistinguishable from the cars and the other expensive luxury toys in his garage and from each other.

Many men identify with these “winning” stereotypes of success and seek to emulate them.

Whisper campaigns and shadow sovereignty

Because Sri Lanka is so small and the spheres in which high flying aspirants operate is likewise relatively restricted, several names have come up several times in relation to sexually predatory and coercive conduct, bullying, disrespect and harassment. Several of these men have visibly engaged in clean-up activities to burnish their good name in recent years, including participating in community enterprises, archiving offensive blogs which made them controversial and on which they built their own visibility and performing pro-feminist virtue signalling of various kinds.

The Supreme Court in the case of the Peradeniya academic ruled that the members of all the departments at the university had to attend mandatory harassment awareness training. But the perpetrators in the wider community clearly believe they have managed to get away with it, keeping it undercover and refraining from perpetrating harassment against anyone but the most powerless and making it a point to befriend public feminists, presenting themselves as allies to the extent of even to this day giving presentations at public festivals on subject areas in which they have supposedly made themselves recognised experts. Certainly, perpetrating abuse makes a person an expert on it but so does being targeted by it.

Swasthika Arulingam on her FB Page recently stated, “When we speak up, we don’t always get justice. Today morning I saw the face of a sexual predator being paraded as a ‘literary expert’ in an upcoming literary event. That is life.” She does not name the specific individual she has in mind, but there are at least three men who would fit her description.

This should not be what defines life for a Sri Lankan woman.

Men who have built fortunes on catering to the preferences of misogynistic viewers and consumers are now having to pivot. Elon Musk is having to reconsider the use of his X platforms to promote deepfake images.

Opportunistic fempowerment is being engaged in by men like this and it does not seem like atonement but appeasement. These femphobic men in their daily conduct in their workplaces have short fuses, are irritable and often contemptuous of women they consider beneath them in the work hierarchy and dismissive and hostile to their juniors, especially if they feel their own authority or pre-eminence is not being respected.

They have caused real damage to the women concerned, and to the country by extension, discouraging people of genuine talent from engaging in their work with full strength and vigor. The homegrown misogyny of our country intersects with the rise of global masculinist incel culture and its inbuilt resentment of the progress women have made in professional spheres.

Like all narcissists, the men who perpetrate harassment in the professional sphere behind closed office doors are very good at presenting an affable public profile and cultivating key people to create a cover of social respectability for themselves. It is a form of strategic camouflage that signals the opportunistic predator.

They do not usually change their conduct without intervention. And their fuelling compulsion is power hunger, not necessarily lust. In fact, misogyny operates to devalue women. One well known perpetrator tried to actively sabotage a young researcher and journalist just a year and a half ago. She was subjected to verbal and tactile workplace harassment, phone harassment via menacing voice calls that were so sudden and so short that she could not record them, whisper campaigns and defamation of her in the wider community to try to prevent and hobble her – eventually successful – crowdfunding campaign when she was accepted to study at an overseas university.

A known perpetrator of domestic violence has been invited to speak about cyber violence and another expresses outrage at the terrible violation of a schoolgirl but shares photos of the victim’s face at the death scene on his public blog. Is it to show what violent rape looks like or to further exploit the body and dignity of this young woman to self-servingly amplify his own readership? The pressure of the never ending need to create content tends to encourage this kind of desensitization.

There are institutions in Sri Lanka that are known as terrible places to work, for women. There are men who young women are specifically warned to avoid. Some offices of various newspaper publications are still known to be spheres where certain journalists considered their offices a hunting ground and the young female journalists as prey. One young journalist said a senior journalist who had positioned himself as a mentor to her had sent her a picture of himself shirtless to her phone. When she did not reply he texted “sent in error” and deleted the picture. But of course she still had the photo at her end and showed it to her friends and her fiancé.

In the literary sphere with the advent of the internet many articulate young people built reputations as opinion writers and bloggers. Some have made it a successful basis for their careers as influencers or travel writers. But in the literary world, we found young men about 10 to 15 years ago often publicly attacking women writers, not only those who were their peers, but older and more established writers who were already occupying cultural space they wanted to enter that they had earned themselves and who had started to win the very few literary prizes available at that time to writers when the men tried year after year and kept failing.

There seemed, under the protection of free speech and public opinion, to be a group of individuals behaving like wild animals in the literary sphere in the 2010s. They even used the term attack worthy to describe their targets. When asked if they felt any sense of responsibility to uphold standards of ethics and objectivity, at a public forum in 2015, especially in reviewing people’s work, they said that people were taking their humorous and light-hearted statements too seriously.

Their justification for writing attack pieces was that so many reviewers are too afraid and timid to be critical and tended to write friendly reviews to appease their friends. But attacking a writer and critiquing their work are very different activities, with very different intentions. One of these men tried via a vilification campaign to have a senior writer’s work removed from the local English syllabus so that younger local authors (presumably like himself and his cohort) could occupy that territory. A woman who had authority, comprised of seniority and comparative high socio-economic status and literary skill, especially as this woman was English-educated and came from a foreign country, was a many-layered threat to a mindset like this. Taking her down seemed like a duty to the downtrodden. The editors at his newspaper were threatened with legal action by the writer and they scrambled to try and placate the lady. The rule with defamation matters is that an apology should be offered in the same forum in which the injury has taken place. A woman’s professional reputation is her sovereign territory and having earned it, she has every right to defend it in any public forum against such devaluation.

The internet and the obsession it generates with gaining followings and increasing likes and clicks and views perfectly meshed with the ambitions of self-aggrandizing perpetrators. Controversy sells. Aiming for the lowest common denominator yielded short term rewards. They bought in big and tried with varying success to cash out before the market fell.

They seemed ignorant and uncaring of the reputational damage they were causing. In fact, they seemed to derive satisfaction from it. One of these individuals took the slander and libel that had become normalized in the digital culture in this period to an extreme when he attacked a female writer on his public Facebook platform. The post and the comments thread in that instance were photographed and handed to the police. The perpetrator was formally summoned by the police and asked why he had attacked this woman in such a public way. He had mistakenly thought that by removing the post 24 hours after he had posted it he could not be held accountable.

He tried to justify his actions by claiming that she had written an article attacking him. Asked to produce the article he had cited, which was read in front of him by the police officers who were interviewing him, he was asked why he held this belief since no actual name of any individual was in the published article and it was a general article that did not identify him in any way. He had to admit this as a fact. He was charged with malicious harassment and threatened with having his social media accounts deactivated if he offended again.

The underlying grievance held by this individual was that he had wanted to be reviewed in the most widely circulated print newspaper in the country. Desiring social credibility, he had approached this woman writer to review his 80,000 word book so he could gain the more public recognition he craved at that time. Her refusal to do the review was made on professional grounds that she was in the midst of her own professional schedule. But it triggered narcissistic rage in him. In his view, women existed to service him, to succor his need for praise and to advance his career.

Disrespect for a woman’s professional career, her life and her schedule is part and parcel of misogyny. And many men see a woman’s commitment to her unfolding career, her professional development and her prioritizing of her professional challenges, duties and responsibilities as personal rejection. We see the cycle of love bombing, grievance, devaluation and discard operating in every harassment case. The perpetrator’s frustrations do not need to be sexual. In fact, sex in professional spheres is about power and validation, not desire; power imbalances excite predators. The desire to dominate and control what threatens us and to assert ourselves at the expense of others is a tale as old as time.

The traditional beliefs of our parents were that people’s professional and personal lives should be kept separate and judged separately. But when a person uses their professional workplace for personal gratification, these demarcations come down and the boundaries get blurred.

Our online culture today also escalates this blurring of boundaries. Sri Lankan men in their twenties, thirties and forties, and now even younger and older, are increasingly avid consumers of pornographic content. Women are being trafficked, their images deep-faked and distributed for money and they are being coerced into creating content to cater to the rising demand for them to be reduced to images of their sexualized and objectified bodies. Women in the workplace conducting their professional lives are interacting every day with men whose perspectives are now saturated with provocative and enticing images and ideas of women online, women who are offered up to men visually like items on a smorgasbord or a room service menu, on demand.

Old boys’ clubs and isolated young women

Sri Lankan society as a whole has upheld the old beliefs of droit du seigneur and classified the male gender as the elites in a social hierarchy that made men of all ages consider themselves entitled to the servitude, the support, the admiration, the appreciation and the submission and self-effacement of girls and women.

The old boys’ club activities of drinking, sports, warriorship, swearing, dancing and acting inappropriately to women seems to be the contemporary equivalent of the hunting and shooting activities of the privileged people in the old days. Playboys are often predators. And they are now being threatened by exposure, extinction and erasure.

The women were trophies or toys (women in Hugh Hefner’s Playboy world are termed playmates or bunnies) in this arrangement. Translated to the corporate or governance sphere, we see internalized misogyny operating to further entrap and isolate young women who are being subjected to abuse. Colleagues look the other way or are deaf to grievances and complaints and human resources executives violate their codes of conduct and become public relations agents for their bosses. Like any systemic corruption, the enablers and facilitators act as a supportive infrastructure – those who profit from it will not speak against it or call it out. The intersection of sex and commerce and predatory misogyny can be seen very clearly today.

The younger generation has an opportunity to overturn this extractive capitalist conduct. Recently passed legislation recognises the conduct of preying on the vulnerable as criminal behavior and enables it to be prosecuted as such.

Like any observable criminal conduct, there are red flags that can be lined up to make a red carpet stretching straight to jail. There is an unofficial predators’ playbook and there are signature moves tabled there that constitute a recognizable pattern.

The task now is to progress from identifying this behavior to criminalizing it.

The new Anti-Corruption Act No. 9 of 2023 has a dedicated sexual bribery statute. Another important change in the law is that, unlike previously when only a favor, money or gratification given to a public sector officer was considered as a bribe, now even private sector bribery is a criminal offence. Coercion is being outed.

So if someone in a private company like a mid-level manager asks a junior employee for money, then it is a bribe and a criminal offence. Similarly, if any sexual favors are solicited, then it constitutes a bribe and is punishable as a criminal offence. The victim can complain to the Bribery Commission. Here, the transactional attitude that governs this conduct can be used to prosecute the perpetrators.

The Short March and The Long Conflict

A few days ago, Black July was commemorated by people in Sri Lanka. It was the day that the 26 year civil war began.

To find the roots of this conflict, we go back most often to the Sinhala Only legislation that was made into law in 1956. The Sinhala Only Act empowered Sinhala Buddhist nationalism and attempted to decolonise the country from England by making Sinhala the national language and decentring the other two recognised languages, English and Tamil. The debasement of English has had long lasting detrimental effects, in cutting off the country from the wider world, but the marginalization of Tamil has created longstanding conflict within the country, and lost some of its greatest citizens, who were forced to leave the country to seek survival and safety overseas.

S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike has always been blamed for being the prime minister whose SLFP party passed this legislation. He was accused of opportunism and racism and capitalising on ethnic chauvinism to shore up electoral support for his political career. During the recent aragalaya, the huge statue of him was not toppled over by the protesting crowds, but was blindfolded, to signify that he had not foreseen the long term consequences of his actions that took place now 70 years ago.

Mr. Bandaranaike himself was assassinated just a year after the legislation was passed. The legislation could have been fully amended by successive governments at any time during the last 70 years. That it was not, was a disservice to subsequent generations.

What many people today do not know is that he tried to recognise the Tamil people in the years building up to this Act but was vociferously shouted down by members not only of the Opposition, but of his own party.

https://www.tamilguardian.com/content/sinhala-only-bill-was-means-giving-back-sri-lankan-identity-cbk

July 26 is the anniversary of the signing of the historical agreement called the Bandaranaike-Chelvanayakam Pact, which in 1956 was created to recognise and protect the rights of the Tamil people within the state, offering regional autonomy to Tamil people, by recognising Tamil as the official administrative language in the North. Bandaranaike co-created this pact, and although the agreement lasted only nine months, it deserves to be more recognised.

The UNP had had a bi-lingual position until they realised that they needed to amplify Sinhala chauvinism. In 1957, J.R. Jayewardene strategically stirred up Sinhala nationalist sentiment, only nine years after the country had achieved independence from the British, by organising a public rally and march protesting the pact and what it represented. The march on October 4, 1957 was highly theatrical and triumphalist, and was planned to proceed with great publicity and fanfare from Grandpass in Colombo to the sacred Buddhist city of Kandy, home of the icons of Buddhism.

Mr. Jayewardene and Mr. Dudley Senanayake headlined the march, stating that the pact would divide the nation. The performative weaponisation of Buddhist cultural tradition, first begun a decade previously, then commenced. The intervention of Buddhist monks into political life, and their presence at ceremonial events, became normalised. The great religion of Buddhism taught peace and compassion as its central concepts, but those who weaponised it repurposed it to fit their own political agenda.

This anti-pact protest march in fact was a short one and not the epic unfolding that had been promised and envisioned. Ironically, its outcome resulted in exactly what the organisers of the march were claiming to be protesting against: a binary split and a fracture in the country which polarised the majority and the minority communities.

The 72 mile march was planned by Mr. Jayewardene, the leader of the opposition party, the UNP. Wider claims of love of the motherland aside, it was an attempt to shore up support for his party in the minds of the emotive populace after their crushing defeat in the 1956 elections. The marchers never reached Kandy, being assaulted by stones thrown by pro-government supporters. They had intended to ask the gods to bless the country, in that most sacred of sites, they said, to keep it unified and not divided.

After this, fierce rallies were staged in Colombo by Mr. Jayawardene and Mr. Senanayake, including a massive gathering at Mr. Bandaranaike’s private residence in Rosmead Place with the grounds and garden of the house called Tintagel filled with angry crowds who had been stirred up by the opportunistic opposition MPs, led by Buddhist monks.

The pressure became so extreme over the next several months that Mr. Bandaranaike abrogated the pact in 1958. Within his own party, pressure was also being directed at him, notably by the Mahajana Eksath Peramuna (MEP) coalition and the Viplavakari Lanka Sama Samaja (VLSSP) Party ministers Phillip Gunawardena and William de Silva - no doubt, with threats and menaces. Mr. Bandaranaike was murdered by a man a year later, an individual dressed in the robes of a Buddhist monk, who was angry that various lucrative trade contracts were not being directed towards himself and his allies.

The tensions behind Mr. Bandaranaike’s actions at that time were illustrated in a famous political cartoon by Aubrey Collette titled ‘Cat’s Out Of The Bag’. In the centre of a large room, the caricatured figure of Mr. Bandaranaike is seen opening a large string bag, out of which comes a roaring Sinhala lion with a banner proclaiming Sinhalese Only. Confronted by this ferocity is a horrified Tamil lady in a saree, protecting her small son. In the doorway and in the shadows, clearly overseeing the proceedings with malice and gleefulness but not directly connected to the bag or the lion, are shadowed politicians in their national dress. The placement of the figures by the artist strongly suggests that Mr. Bandaranaike was sent out as a scapegoat by those who later profited for decades on the Sinhala Buddhist nationalism that the Sinhala Only Act engendered.

Instead of focusing on Mr. Bandaranaike as the signer of the act into law, subsequent generations would do well to examine who actually profited in the long term from the division of the country after his assassination two years after the act was passed. It is clear that Mr. Senanayake and Mr. Jayewardene were indeed the two who did so, continually furthering their political power and consolidating their status. The continual and repetitive devaluation of the minorities added fuel to their numbers. Sinhala Buddhist chauvinism really benefitted them.

If we look at the image of the Sinhala lion and what it signifies, including its representation on the national flag holding a sword in its paw, we can contrast two central concepts of power. The lion is the universal king of beasts, an emblem of power and might. Yet power centred on physical domination is a primitive form of power, and exercises itself through the fear it causes in its citizens. A better model, especially for a democratic socialist republic, would be of protective rather than aggressive power where all peoples were guaranteed safety and the right to live and work in peace and without harassment.

Members of any ruling party who cease to care about the rights and dignity of all a country’s citizens, are insensitive to the citizens’ differing situations and with the goal of ensuring peace and co-existence not in their sights, inevitably begin to pursue vainglorious domination instead of justice, ultimately destroy the safety and welfare of the very citizens who have voted them into power. It’s a numbers game in politics, and this is why Facebook, X and other digital platforms are so useful in generating voting blocs and echo chambers with people being rage-baited to comment and identify with issues and vote with their ideals and emotions and perpetrate cancel culture, joining personality cults and critiquing designated targets in hordes like bots.

Indeed, the subsequent seven decades from 1958 to date have seen a fractured society and a vulnerable and volatile citizenry. Every election cycle to this day sees the emergence of racist and derogatory rhetoric and ethnic tensions, cynically stoked by majoritarian parties with vested interests in leveraging ethnic division. The use of social media and digital technology amplify the reach of racist propaganda in an extreme way. Recent laughing emojis posted under people’s names after NewsWire posted a story about the excavation of mass graves in Chemmani, evidence of the systematic slaughter that occurred in J were sickening visual evidence of the callousness of the Facebook users who posted them.

In 1948, D.S. Senanayake had passed The Citizenship Act that disenfranchised three quarters of a million Tamil plantation workers to give their land to landless Sinhalese. The Gal Oya Scheme consolidated this internal colonisation of the country. His son Dudley Senanayake seems to have extended this physical territory domination that secured a voting base among the Sinhalese majority by strategically invoking a romanticisation of the Mahavamsa narrative. In the 1960s, he structured the post-colonial state as a custodian of Buddhist culture. This immediately marginalised the minority Tamils, Muslims and Christians. By doing so he sacrificed national unity to shore up support for his coalition. The aggressive nationalist vision promoted the majority Sinhala Buddhists over all other groups, inciting disrespect for the differing religious and cultural traditions of the minorities.

Mr. Jayewardene then utilised nationalist rhetoric for two decades to build a victory that finally came to him in 1977. This personal achievement was 20 years in the making. In the two decades from 1956 to 1978, attempts were made to amend the demarcations of the Sinhala Only legislation. In 1965, ten years after that incendiary Act was signed, the Dudley Senanayake-Chelvanayakam Pact was signed, and the District Councils Bill was gazetted in 1968. This provided that steps would be taken under the Tamil Special Provisions Act to make Tamil the language of administration and record in the Northern and Eastern Provinces, for Tamil people to conduct their business in Tamil across the whole island, and to enable legal proceedings to be conducted in Tamil in the Northern and Eastern Provinces. These were essentially the terms of the original Pact that SWRD had drawn up with Chelvanayakam, and now a decade later his own SLFP party and the LSSP and CP, protested it to the point where it was abandoned.

https://tamilnation.org/indictment/indict004

Unsurprisingly, successive governments failed to implement the laws, enacted by Parliament, with regard to the use of the Tamil language, creating ongoing discouragement and resentment. Politicians tend to cater to the wishes and interests of the majority, particularly majorities which they have to a great extent not only catered to but shaped, over years of expedient and opportunistic strategy. They then act as if the minority do not exist, as they do not need their support in order to maintain their own political position. In 1978, J.R. Jayawardene made himself Executive President with enhanced powers and a new Constitution, and a multi-member proportional system for parliamentary elections.

He attempted at that time to put on a conciliatory display towards the minority Tamils. Under the new Constitution, Tamil was granted official language status as a national language, although Sinhala was enshrined as the official language of the country. However, the true attitudes towards the minority community held by the new Executive President and his party were on full display only three years later.

In 1981, Mr. Jayewardene was the president of the country, head of the UNP, with Ranasinghe Premadasa as prime minister. On May 31, 1981 the country saw the atrocity of the burning of the Jaffna Public Library. Watching from the Jaffna Rest House as the library burned were Cyril Mathew Minister of Industries and Scientific Affairs and Gamini Dissanayake Minister for Lands, Land Development and Mahaweli Development, who later claimed it was the work of a few drunk policemen. The attack on the library was never properly investigated, and the perpetrators were never held to account, adding another episode of impunity in the country.

In Colombo in 1983, eyewitness testimony reports that the Jayewardene administration and the police and armed forces did nothing to stop the looting and burning and terror that was unleashed on the Tamil citizens. The addresses of families and shop owners and business owners of Tamil origin were accurately identified from what could only be government records. And thus the riots began, which killed many thousands of people and destabilised the country for nearly 30 years.

President’s Counsel and Former President of the BASL Mr. Saliya Pieris, today recalls the violent outbreak of the civil war:

‘Despite declarations of curfew, it was clear that the all-powerful Executive President and his government with a five-sixths majority had lost control.

Was it that they had lost control or that they did not want to control, until it was too late? We will never know. For three days, J.R. Jayawardene was off air. I remember my parents’ anger and disgust at his failure to address the nation. He had won the Presidential Election just eight months before.

When he eventually did come on national TV about three days later it was not to express remorse or anger at the violence but to condemn separatism and to announce the 6th Amendment to the Constitution, banning separatism. He lacked empathy to understand the anguish and suffering of the people who had been torn from their homes and whose loved ones had been killed. The 6th Amendment was another counterproductive amendment brought as a knee-jerk reaction which resulted in the ouster of the moderate TULF MPs from Parliament, thus strengthening the LTTE.’

So today let us remember the day that Mr. Bandaranaike and Mr. Chelvanayakam tried to make a pact, 70 years ago, to respect the Tamil people, which was made into law and which then lasted for nine months. It is easy to forget the attitude of inclusiveness and respect that motivated that, in the majoritarian mayhem that followed. All the braying and brutishness that accompanies the nationalisation of religion should not fracture or erase that brief but significant moment of higher aspiration.

Let Your Arrow Fly

When my brother and I were little, our Mother read us stories. The ones we most loved were myths and legends, and the ones I remember most clearly were the stories from The Mahabharata. We were thrilled by the stories of exile, of treachery and betrayal, of Queen Draupadi’s invocation of the never-ending saree bestowed by Sri Krishna to protect her dignity, and of the house which was treacherously saturated in oil by their enemies, to end the lives of the brothers, but from which they escaped at night, in the dark, together and alive.

Which of the brothers was my favourite? I know everyone loves Arjuna. But I secretly liked Karna. However, the story of how Arjuna won the archery competition remains my favourite. He was the most outstanding young warrior being taught by the revered military teacher, Drona, who favoured Arjuna over his own son.

In my mind’s eye, outlined in the beloved voice of our Mother, I saw the palace and its grounds, filled with hopeful warriors from all over the known world, the sun glittering on their bright armour and weapons. It’s always morning, in my imagination.

Drona outlines the rules of the archery tournament to all in the vast courtyard. He indicates a tree, at the centre of the building. On a high branch of the tree, he indicates a bird, made of a shiny metal. The warriors are instructed to aim for the bird, and bring it down.

Everyone assumes this is a test of strength, of capability, of skill in wielding a heavy bow. But one by one, as the warriors are called up and take their stance and prepare to string their bow, some of which are legendary weapons of generational renown in their clans, Drona asks them each a question, which cannot be heard by anyone standing more than a metre away. One by one, after they respond, the young men are declared disqualified by Drona, and required to sit down.

Some, who have never experienced rejection in their lives, storm off with their retinues in attendance. But the majority stay, out of genuine curiosity, until the final warrior is called. Drona’s son too had been disqualified by his father. All eyes were on Arjuna, as he respectfully approached his teacher. This time, as he was the last, the question and answer was asked aloud, so all could hear them.

As Arjuna strung his bow, and declared himself ready, Drona asked him: ‘What do you see?’

All the others had said: ‘I see this palace courtyard, I see my fellow warriors, I see the people watching, I se the blue sky, and the radiant sun, I see the tree, and the bird in the tree.’

Arjuna said: ‘I see the bird.’

And his teacher said: ‘What part of the bird do you see?’

And Arjuna said, ‘I see only its head. And on its head, only its eye.’’

And Drona in delight said: ‘Let your arrow fly!’



In the complete silence that ensued, all heard the twang of the bow, and the whirring of the arrow, and the sound of the metal bird as it fell to the ground underneath the tree.

Drona explained: ‘This was not a test of skill or even accuracy, the ability to measure distances with the eye. This was a test of focus.’

Arjuna won because he was not distracted by the colour and the chaos and the emotional energy all around him, or by his own excitement and anxiety and anticipation. He cleared away all concerns but the one that was right in front of him.

Over the past several years, with the hullabaloo or Covid and the violent consequences of natural disasters and shortages of essential fuel and goods and services, and the imminence of the end of the world, I have often thought of this epic courtyard tournament. While waiting in queues, at airports, at passport offices, at taxi ranks, at cinemas, and while being besieged by incoming emails and messages on my smartphone. I think: ‘What do I see?

What is most important? And of this, which is the most important part?’

I think of myself, an ordinary girl, with no supernatural or legendary powers, in my daily body armour, preparing for everyday skirmishes and battles, trying to focus on what matters most, in each moment, so I am not bewildered by the noise and the confusion of mixed messages and concurrent incidents and deadlines pressing on my mind.

I try to sort everything out in my environment before I start any venture, so my mind is clear, and I know where everything is. I am a veteran of grief, having lost all my family members in the space of four years, the last of them being my Mother, who first read those stories to us.

These are lifelines, and harnessing them is how we deal with deadlines.

Perhaps it is our very mortality that prompts us to try and clear everything up as much as we can, the knowledge that if we do not make the effort now, to streamline, to downsize, to minimize and to distill our possessions and our accoutrements, the materials available to us, never fully utilized, will be left in a jumble for less mindful individuals to sort through.

Before seizing the day, or any day, we must first set our gaze and align it with our will and our strength. Many people are not used to this sort of hard mirror being held up to them, and it’s a shock, but really it is a necessary calibration at the start of each day.

It is the same principle as taking time to sharpen your blade before cutting a tree or cutting vegetables for cooking. The refining and preparation process takes time, but it greatly increases the effectiveness of the action that results.

Passive Aggression and Activism: Sisterhood Is Not Always A Safe Space

A Report From The Field:

1. Many activists are genuinely motivated by the fierce and pure desire to change society.

2. Many are also very damaged people.

3. Especially in the areas of sexual violence and harassment, people drawn to bring public awareness to the gross inequalities suffered by women, girls and children have often been personally impacted themselves by distressing forms of traumatic conduct, including rape, assault, victimization, and humiliation.

4. They are still carrying that trauma within them, and it is triggered in situations which affect them, even decades after they are free of that specific situation in which they were harmed. But they have not been able to directly face this. And society will not let them express their anger and frustration in open ways. So they do it obliquely and in a passive aggressive way. Peace and reconciliation is a battlefield.

5. Ongoing unaddressed damage creates toxic thinking and relational patterns. Therapy is expensive. People impacted by harm are often in precarious employment situations, and this is also partly due to the condition of their unregulated emotions. Discussions with colleagues can turn hostile very quickly, and professional encounters can become personalised. This damages their professional reputation.

6. Social and status differences - and needling underlying resentments created by these differences between people who actually share a common cause - can come up in the form of insults, mockery, incomprehensible volatility, defensiveness, projection, assumptions and offensive stereotypes.

7. Class disparity trumps gender solidarity every time, especially in a tightening economy. And the differences erode the common ground. One woman will say to another ‘A person of a certain status and background will not understand why a woman will be silent in situations of harassment; or just not leave when she is subjected to domestic violence.’ In other words, you are protected and immune from harm, and I am not. You do not understand my suffering, and your work to assist really troubled people is just a hobby or a pastime. Your contribution and your service are invalidated. Sisterhood of political affiliation is subject to issues of sibling rivalry, just as blood bonds are.

8. Boundaries are necessary between people who are from differing class backgrounds, especially in countries where those differences shape people’s self esteem, perceived societal value, job prospects and capacity to contribute.

9. Even people with legal training and knowledge of professional conduct violate these standards with petty and unhinged behaviour when they are triggered or threatened or riled.

10. Justice is their mantra; but there are blind spots in the way every activist categorizes others. Grievances (often going back to their childhood or young adulthood) are activated when they feel powerless or dismissed, as an adult. They turn the person they are speaking to into an enemy in their minds. They mock from inflamed ego, from a sense of personal deprivation, from a sense of being denied what the other has, and the sense that nothing will ever change that rigid structural systemic difference, now. Democracy has died in darkness, at least in urbanized capitalist societies.

11. All social categories of activist are often narcissistic, ego-driven, and performative, and are compensating for a sense of not being attended to or heard when they were young. Hence their vocalization about issues of powerlessness, and abuse - and their sense of victimhood; and their presumptive assumptions that they are speaking for others in a cause. Virtue signalling rounds out their public persona.

12. Struggle street is their address. If poor, they are survivalist. If wealthy, they seek to connect with causes to bring meaning to their daily routine. Struggle makes them feel alive, and justifies their own conduct to them. Struggle to shift the needle, challenge the autocrat, demolish the dictator, speak out and bring what is silenced out of the shadow. It is genuinely exhausting. Yet many of them, whether rich or poor, only peripherally understand, identify or even confront their own pain. Burdened beyond their endurance, they lash out at their own colleagues. Sisterhood can evaporate under the cumulative weight of itty bitty irritants, innuendos, sarcasm and snide remarks.

Because you have to be in a safe place, to heal. And activists - by definition - do not feel safe in the world as it is.

By all means, work with them. But be safe out there. Be aware that - apart from their cliques and bestie groups - sisters today are often doing it for themselves.