A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Monday, August 7, 2017
Kathmandu revisited
by Sanjana Hattotuwa-August 5, 2017, 12:00 pm
In
Kathmandu this week after over ten years, I was struck by how much
worse the city looks and feels from what I recall when I visited last.
Google Maps is deceiving. The mushrooming of cafes with interesting
names, pubs, restaurants and gastro-bars in various districts along with
a wide-range of hotels suggests, on the face of it, a bustling,
well-planned and cosmopolitan metropolis. The number of apartments alone
suggests a much higher density of population in the city than when I
was here last, along with the vertical additions to older structures
making some of the buildings bizarre Lego creations – with the rather
beautiful red brick and clay forming the foundation of what are
comparably grotesque mortar and steel additions on top, finished off
with an assorted array of water tanks, of varying colour and size.
The roads of Google Maps snake their way in intricate patterns across
the city. The citizen-generated OpenStreetMap platform is even more
detailed, offering a bird’s eye view of a city, its myriad of alleys and
a valley writ large that offers a lesson in the complexity of urban
planning, or the telling lack thereof. At street level, in a vehicle or
on foot, the cartographic appeal of urban complexity on a map soon
becomes life threatening. Many routes through Yala in a 4WD would be, by
order of magnitude and without exaggeration, smoother and better than
navigating some of the main roads in Kathmandu – all of which seem dug
up at almost every junction and turn, only to be summarily abandoned.
There is a fine dust which permeates and covers everything – a mixture
of earth, sand and cement.
After occasional or overnight rain and the resulting mud baked in the
hot sun, the dust becomes worse. All this makes for a beautiful,
Promethean haze at sunset, especially when framed with the old temples
and courtyards of comparable hue, but is in fact about as unhealthy as
it gets. I couldn’t quite figure out if the fresh meat on sale in
road-side abattoirs were better off and preserved for a fine coating of
dust, or whether one somehow and over time developed a natural immunity
for the level of pollution here, in all that is consumed, touched,
breathed in, or drunk. A veritable spaghetti of power, cable TV and
telecommunications lines weigh down poles that hold up all three, like
black and grey octopi shadowing every junction and street. To see the
Himalayas in the distance at sunrise, after an overnight shower and
before the pollution wakes up, is still quite magical.
Kathmandu as a city though, for the most part, is hell.
It wasn’t like this when I came in April 2003 for the first time, before
full-blown democracy and during monarchy. I came before there was a
single traffic light in the city, when man, machine, monk and every
sacred bovine meandering and interaction took place around its own
logic, and often sedate pace. There were no ATMs. No place took credit
cards. The best place to exchange currency was at the airport. Dial-up
internet was slow at best. There was no roaming available, even if you
could afford at the time the astronomical rates for SMS and calls. The
airport looked like a large red-bricked house retrofitted with a hastily
constructed control tower, and a long stretch of unused road
re-commissioned as a runway. You walked quite a distance from the plane
to the terminal. Incredibly, all this remains relatively unchanged even
today. The myriad of places I stayed in and walked around on the many
occasions I came to Nepal during Sri Lanka’s ceasefire agreement, in the
early years of this century, the earthquake in 2015 has wiped out. I
felt tempted to go to these areas and see what they looked like now, but
opted to instead go through my old photos – why replace or risk what is
fondly recalled to what I may recoil from or react badly to today.
I came to interact with Nepali journalists and civil society on the role
and relevance of media in a ceasefire process. Sri Lanka’s great lesson
to the world at the time was around how a ceasefire could be a
foundation for a just, positive peace, which was more than the absence
of armed conflict. This was before smart phones and social media had
been invented. The workshops we had in Nepal were under the banner of
‘conflict conscious news management techniques’, focussing on framing,
intent and what in later years was embraced in the practice of data
journalism – anchoring stories to verified information and visualising
trends over time, instead of being first to report unverified rumour and
always focussing on events. My presentations and discussion points from
14 years ago flag a serious conflict of interest – with Norway as
mediator and as also head of the monitoring mission – and what even then
were clear signs of deep structural flaws in the ceasefire process,
including the intransigence of the LTTE and a growing disconnect between
the mood of the people and a technocratic government, which risked the
entire structural reform agenda.
The affable spokesperson of the Sri Lanka Monitoring Mission (SLMM) at
the time accompanied us, as a counterpoint to this critique. A
comprehensive knowledge of spoken Hindi at the time allowed me direct
interactions with some leading figures from the Maoist movement we met
in closed door meetings held in secret, and also many journalists from
outside Kathmandu. We flew around in Buddha Air flights, which true to
their name, offered hair-raising, stomach churning journeys that were
never more than a few seconds away from the possibility of rebirth on
mountainside. Social polling on the lines of what had been conducted in
Sri Lanka was unheard of in the country at the time, and so much of the
interest was also around how civil society and media could embrace data
around public mood and sentiment in their work.
So much of this is relevant even today, and ironically, for both
countries. In Nepal, political stasis and large-scale corruption is
clearly reflected in the state of urban decay alone – unfinished
infrastructure, a lack of standards in construction, unplanned
buildings, a lack of regulatory oversight leading to physical and
digital congestion. In Sri Lanka, we have today the same Prime Minister
as I talked about in the context of the ceasefire agreement fourteen
years ago. The tendency of the present government, as it was during the
CFA, is to largely ignore public sentiment once in power. Social media
and smart phones are framing inconvenient narratives the governments of
Nepal and Sri Lanka cannot wish away. Spoilers and extremists are using
these new vectors to reach and influence younger voters. Back then as
well as today, economic considerations trump interest in political
reform – hunger and hopelessness fuel a growing discontent that
manifests itself through apathy and violence, ripe for opportunists to
exploit.
Back then, the verdant hills of Godavari, a short distance from but a
world apart from Kathmandu provided the frame for our first discussions
with civil society and journalists in Nepal. We came to this country to
share lessons of a high-level political and military project we weren’t
the architects of, had little meaningful access or insight into and were
fearful would come undone – which it did. I came to Kathmandu this week
with humbling lessons of how much we had gone and done wrong. The last
King of Nepal once tried to isolate the country, by shutting off the
Internet, literally. He’s gone. The country endures. We thought the
awful Rajapaksa regime wouldn’t end. We were wrong. A healthy defiance
and resilience binds the people of Nepal and Sri Lanka, and why for me,
coming here will always be so interesting.