The Season To Be Merry!

By Emil van der Poorten –December 27, 2015 

Emil van der Poorten

I have to admit the provocation for the (corny) title of this piece is the time of year and the need to take yet another look at the year just drawing to a close behind us.

By the time you read this, Santa would or would not have descended down your (metaphorical) chimney and placed gifts in abundance or the proverbial piece of coal (in our case an anguru kaella probably) at the foot of a metaphorical tree.

But what of the time between such an event last year and the one this year?

Let’s try to do a little summing up.

We went through the last days of 2014 with excitement in the air at the prospect of a very real chance to be rid of the first real dictator we had encountered in our modern history. We began the New Year by dumping the head of the most violent and corrupt government we had ever experienced.

However, the flurry of excitement that followed the January 8th overthrow of the Rajapaksa Regime has steadily evaporated with many indications that its replacement was seeking to live up to the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna’s pithy condemnation of the parties to the “right” of it – Unuth Ekai, Munuth ekai,” six of one, half a dozen of another.

If one were to understand the local (English-language) media, Sri Lanka had become one big barbecue: all kinds of prominent members of the recently-dissolved royal court were being “grilled” here, there and everywhere particularly by a newly-established tribunal established under the aegis of the Police department. One was entertained – if that is the word – by veritable legions of the “important” of yesterday being escorted into these places in which justice was allegedly to be dispensed. What distinguished these from the “common or garden” variety of (alleged) criminal was the fact that the latter invariably sought to avoid being recognized by the video or still camera and, therefore, the wider public, by covering their faces with whatever was most easily and quickly available: a hand, an arm or a handkerchief.                 Read More