The Sri Lankan Obsession With Superlatives & Superiority

By Emil van der Poorten –October 25, 2015

Emil van der Poorten

It is said that first impressions are the most vivid and I can, certainly, recall the tone and content of my early contact with the language that was spoken on radio or tv or appeared in print for either the purpose of selling some product or in the dissemination of information when I returned to Sri Lanka about a decade ago.

Having found the North American, particularly the USA, claims that the product being spoken of was top-notch in every way and having reached the point when such rhetoric made one want to puke, there was an expectation that laid-back Sri Lanka would be haven from such basic boastfulness.

Did I have a surprise coming!

It seemed like anything and everything we, in Sri Lanka, said or did was “the greatest.” The boxer who gave that particular word credibility and new meaning was that black fighter from Louisville, Kentucky who, during his transition from Cassius Clay to Muhammed Ali, applied that sobriquet to himself and repeated it, seemingly, ad nauseam. At first, it was taken as simply promotional hype and, given the often-bizarre conduct of the man who kept repeating it, was simply taken as an eccentricity and did, at worst, prove the time-worn contention that there is no such thing as bad publicity. However, the difference was that Ali did prove that he could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee,” backing his boast every foot of the way with his balletic foot movements and lightning fast fists.

I sometimes wonder whether modern Sri Lanka’s predilection for repeating the mantram of “we are the greatest” harks back to its taking of the World Championship of Cricket in 1996. The fact that the competition had, overshadowing it, the spectre of terrorist violence which led to some of the premier competing countries refusing to compete on Sri Lankan soil out of fear for their lives, appears to have deliberately been downplayed and when, referred to at all, has been preceded or followed by the accusation of lily-livered cowardice on the part of the opposition, that accusation being picked up by more than the usual proportion of the international media as a result of it being uttered by no less a person than the country’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. The dapper and debonair Lakshman Kadirgamar whose public persona, as projected to the western media in particular, was, if not the epitome of all that was bright and sophisticated, certainly was more worldly and intelligent than many who preceded him and certainly streets ahead of those who followed him in that ministry!

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