Loves

So. Tagged again by DD. This time it’s love; something I’ve been told lately that I know very little about. And to avoid the usual barrage of “how come I’m not mentioned” and “who’s that one about” that these things usually spark, I’ll avoid the whole whole thing and treat you to some of my favourite quotations on love, by people who can write way better than me.

Though it be broken–
broken again — still it is there:
the moon on the water.
– Choshu

“True love is boring,” Roland repeated. “As boring as any other strong and addictive drug. And as with any other strong drug…”
– Stephen King. Wizard and Glass

Yet each man kills the thing he loves,
By each let that be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
– Oscar Wilde. The Ballad of Reading Gaol

…She turned to me and said, “Philsan, I will spend two days with you and you will not have to pay me. I will love you for two days and then I will not love you.”
– Philip Caputo. A Rumor of War

“Do you know that until I met thee I have never asked for anything? Nor wanted anything? Nor thought of anything except the moment and the winning of this war? Truly I have been very pure in my ambitions. I have worked much and now I love thee and,” he said it now in a complete embracing of all that would not be, “I love thee as I love all that we have fought for. I love thee as I love liberty and dignity and the rights of all men to work and not be hungry. I love thee as I love Madrid that we have defended and as I love all my comrades that have died. Many. Many. Thou canst not think how many. But I love thee as I love what I love most in the world and I love thee more. I love thee very much, rabbit. More than I can tell thee. But I say this now to tell thee a little…”
– Ernest Hemmingway. For Whom the Bell Tolls

Don’t tell me it’s not worth dying for
I can’t help it, there’s nothing I want more.
– From the Bryan Adams song Everything I do I do it for You

The heart is an organ of fire.
– Michael Ondaatje. The English Patient

It is better to love many things a little than one thing too much.
– Daniel Carney. The Whispering Death

I vow to thee, my country — all earthly things above
Entire and whole and perfect, the service of my love…
– Sir Cecil Spring-Rice. I Vow to Thee My Country

She smiled and closed her eyes again. “Bird and bear and hare and fish…”
Smiling, Roland finished, “Give my love her fondest wish.”
Her eyes opened. She smiled. “You,” she said again, and kissed him. “Still you, Roland. Still you, my love.”
– Stephen King. Wizard and Glass

And my all-time favourite:

“My life is very monotonous,” he said. “I hunt chickens; men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all others. Other steps send me scurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wind in the wheat.”
– Antoine de Saint-Exupery. The Little Prince

The Transformer

Spotted this sexbomb at the Colombo Car Show last weekend — and no, I don’t mean one of the show girls, though they weren’t too bad either. The Cobra caught my eye almost immediately, hidden away behind the usual junk of pimped up Subarus and Mazdas, its cockpit shrouded against the light drizzle outside the BMICH. It was obviously a Cobra, but a peek under the rain covers revealed a BMW logo embossed in the centre of the steering wheel. Clearly, this had been restored with some variations, or actually built from scratch.

The rain eventually eased and the covers came off, unveiling a tan interior. Out of the bonnet popped a Chevrolet V8 small-block engine. A Brit turned up a few minutes later and and told me it was in fact a RVD-283 Python, a replica of the legendary AC Cobra Mk II, the only one in Sri Lanka. His name was Vince Wright, and the Cobra had been built by his company, RV Dynamics, right here in Sri Lanka.

Wright switched on the V8, apologising for a noisy fan belt, and the deep bass growl rumbled through the twin side pipes. The Python rocked on its brakes like a leashed animal, straining to escape.

Vince Wright’s Python had begun life, once upon a time, as a ‘57 Chevrolet Bel Air. Having once belonged to the US ambassador to Sri Lanka, it had eventually been abandoned, rusting and rotting away in the Mt Lavinia sea breeze for about five years. Wright salvaged and entirely rebuilt the Bel Air’s V8 and 2-speed auto box, and restored the chassis, which is all that remains of the original Chevy. Everything else was either scratch built or borrowed.

Out in the Wilderness — Dayan Jayatilleka on Pleading the 13th, Being a Hippy, and Getting Sacked by Boggles

Sri Lanka’s soon-to-be-ex-Permanent Representative to the United Nations in Geneva took time off from his busy schedule of sipping martinis, getting up the Americans’ noses, and fighting on the Western Front, to have a little chat with us. This is his first interview since the Foreign Ministry announced that he has been recalled from Geneva, effective August 20th.

David Blacker: First off, there seem too be two opinions on your sacking. One, that you were too pushy about the 13th Amendment. Two, that you pissed off the Israelis. Which is it?

Dayan Jayatilleka: It could be either, both or neither. The editorials in The Island and the Daily Mirror on July 20th, indicate that it could have a personal aspect. Let’s unpack the other opinions. If I were ‘pushy’ about the 13th amendment I was only pushing a line that was the official stance of the government of Sri Lanka as contained in two post-war joint statements, of May 21st and 23rd. I was doing so in the English language, trying to convince the international community and the Tamil Diaspora of the sincerity of the Government’s commitment to devolution and a political solution, in a context where there was and is a powerful campaign calling for international intervention of one or other sort on the grounds that the Government will not implement such reforms. I was also waging an ideological struggle against those hard-line fringe elements who were opposed to the 13th amendment and playing into the hands of Sri Lanka’s enemies. I was not instructed to do otherwise.

As for the charge that I should not write to the papers or express my views in the media, I have always done so with the disclaimer that these are strictly my personal views. There are other diplomats who have done the same. The controversial articles in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, by Dimitri Rogozin, Russia’s serving ambassador to NATO in Brussels, and a political appointee, not a professional diplomat. The respected diplomat, Kishore Mahbubani of Singapore was a star speaker in New York’s seminar circuit where he would preface his remarks by saying ‘these are not the views of the permanent representative of Singapore but simply of Mahbubani’. In our own diplomatic history, there is the example of Ambassador Ernest Corea, the former editor of the Daily News who was posted by President Jayawardene to Washington DC, precisely so he could use his journalistic skills.

The Israeli story is old hat. That issue came and went, and I was sent a letter signed by the Secretary to the Foreign Ministry which said that H.E. the President wished me to stay on in my post until May 31st 2010. Furthermore, after I received instructions, I have stayed off the Israeli issue. Therefore, that is probably just an excuse.

DB: For months, there have been ominous warnings of your head being on the block — particularly over the Israeli issue, but these seemed to come to nothing, and you say you were personally assured of your position by The Man himself. So is this sacking in deed a personal vendetta by the Foreign Minister? The Island suggests he feels upstaged by you. What do you have to say about that?

Dayan Jayatilleka: What I have is a letter dated March 26th, signed by the Secretary to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which says that H.E. the President has decided that I should stay on until May 2010. This was after the initial controversy involving Israel. Even if some one had a personal vendetta against me, I am not naive enough to think that this sort of decision, in the wake of an earlier unsuccessful effort to remove me and in the aftermath of the successful Special Session of the Human Rights Council, would have been implemented without some semblance of a green light, however fleeting and flickering, from the top political leadership. So it was probably a confluence of factors.

DB: Many people feel you’d make a better Foreign Minister than Rohitha Bogollagama, and he knows it. Do you agree?

Dayan Jayatilleka: Is that meant to be some kind of a compliment?

Reading with Both Eyes

The Juggler by Spock84/DeviantArt

I keep thinking about balance a lot these days. Not just physical balance, obviously, though I think about that too on some nights, especially when I’m walking out of a bar. I’m thinking more about a mental attitude. About keeping everything in the air, and not dropping any of the balls. I think it requires a sort of 360-degree peripheral vision that allows you to plot the locations of everything without focusing on anything. It’s something I feel I’ve always wanted, but never managed to achieve. I just finished reading Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, and there’s a bit in it that touches on this. In it, the protagonist is attempting to decipher books from the planet Tralfamadore:

Billy couldn’t read Tralfamadorian, of course, but he could at least see how the books were laid out — in brief clumps of symbols separated by stars. Billy commented that the clumps might be telegrams.

“Exactly,” said the voice.

“They are telegrams?”

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message — describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

Years ago, a friend of my father’s told me how he was learning to speed read, and it involved using his peripheral vision to scan down both sides of the column of text, the left eye down the left side and the right eye down the right. The downside of this technique was that while you registered the pertinent details quickly, you didn’t really absorb the sentences. So it was great for reading a newspaper, but not so much when it came to a novel. But it’s still all about balance, of not really focusing on any one thing.

Like walking, riding a bicycle, or flying helicopters.

It makes me sometimes wonder what balance really is. An awareness; a compromise? Or is balance in fact the opposite of focus, of quality — of good, even? But Robert Pirsig often talks of quality as almost situational awareness; an overall grasp of the big picture. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he makes it sound like balance:

If you want to build a factory or fix a motorcycle, or set a nation right without getting stuck, then classical, structured dualistic subject-object knowledge, although necessary, isn’t enough. You have to have some feeling for the quality of the work. You have to have a sense of what’s good. That is what carries you forward. This sense isn’t just something you’re born with, although you are born with it. It’s also something you can develop. It’s just not “intuition”, not just unexplained “skill” or “talent”. It’s the direct result of contact with basic reality, Quality, which dualistic reason has in the past tended to conceal.

A juggler needs balance to keep all those objects in the air, but he still doesn’t lose touch with them. He touches them all, moves them around, controls them. Maybe that’s it.

Into the Top Ten?

An SL Army soldier moves in on Palampeddi village, in north western Mannar, soon after its capture in July 2008. -- Image by © Stringer/Reuters/Corbis

I had mixed feelings when I read the following statistics. It was like walking into a Lambo showroom and asking for the specs of a Murcielago, knowing what my annual salary is. The SL Army’s current strength is around 200,000. That’s almost double the size of the British Army (109,000), and larger than most western European armies. Gen Sarath Fonseka says he wants to increase the troop strength to 300,000. That’ll make the SL Army the tenth largest in the world! It’ll be a quarter the size of the Indian Army (approximately 1.2 million). India has a population of roughly 1.2 billion, while ours is just under 20 million. The next largest armies from ours will be Russia and Iran, with only 20,000 soldiers more than us. This will be the Top Ten:

1. China – 1,700,000
2. India – 1,200,000
3. North Korea – 900,000
4. South Korea – 560,000
5. Pakistan – 520,000
6. United States – 475,000
7. Myanmar – 325,000
8. Russia – 320,000
9. Iran – 320,000
10. Sri Lanka – 300,000

The combined armies of SL, Pakistan, and Bangladesh will equal the strength of the Indian Army. The Indian nuclear power stations at Kalpakkam, south of Chennai, are two hours flying time by SLAF MiG-27s based at Anuradhapura. The two new stations being built at Kudankulam, west of Nagarcoil, can be reached in less than an hour.

It is credible that with the proposed expansion of Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone, the SL Navy will have to be beefed up, as will the SLAF. An overall Armed Forces strength of at least 500,000 is quite possible. 2.5% of Sri Lanka’s population will be under arms.

I know it’s nuts. I know it’s impractical. I know we can’t really afford it. But, dammit, doesn’t it look good?

Peace in Five

Was tagged by the End on this Five Words About the SL Situ that RD started. I can’t really put my thoughts into five words. It’s a bit too complex for that. At least for me. So instead, I’ll give you five pictures. You can attach whatever words you think suit them.

And to keep it rolling, I tag Indi,
Electra,
Ravana,
Nayagan,
and DBSJ.

Nineteen ’til I Die

Last night it rained. And I stood under my parents’ porch and smoked. The deluge of water on the tin sheeting drowned out everything — traffic, the neighbours, the sound of the TV. Just me and the rain and the dark, like it had been on that first night in December 1990. I stepped out from the porch, and the rain put out my cigarette in an instant. I spat away the shreds of tobacco and let the rain soak me. Remembering them, as I have done a hundred thousand times in the last eighteen years.

I can remember the ridged steel flooring of the Y-8’s cargo bay like it was yesterday, digging into my arse as I sit packed in with my platoon, flying to Palay.

I remember the smell of wet sandbags on that first night on the FDL at Elephant Pass. Looking out into the black ink beyond the perimeter. Here be Tigers.

And the ten-man patrols through knee-deep water, trying to be quiet. “Kata vahapang, huththo,“

The hot, dusty days and wet, rainy nights. Mosquitoes. And being tired. So tired. Every day. All the time.

Sharing cigarettes and melted Edna chocolate on Christmas Day. Tang instant orange mixed with warm, brackish Jaffna Peninsula water.

And contact. Finally. What we’d lived for, longed for, suffered for. What we’d watched in movies and read about in books. Contact. Sex for virgins. With red tracers. And the elephant sitting on my back, squeezing the breath out of my lungs as I tried to hold my rifle steady. The hammer roar of 7.62-mm fire, gunflashes blurring the distant, running figures.

None of us were over twenty, most eighteen or nineteen. Ariyaratne, the section commander, and Dias, the machine-gunner; our parents, old men of twenty-four. Combat veterans of the Sinha Rifles. The hard core.

And the killing. I remember every single one. The blood, the eyes. The smell. I remember Rohantha getting hit by the .50. I remember the sixteen-year-old bayoneted girl with the long plaited hair come loose. I remember kneeling at a tube well and washing the crusted blood out from under my finger nails.

Down time. Sitting in abandoned tin buildings in the Saltern Siding. We’d strip down to OG shorts and slippers and our Death By Bullets T-shirts. We never talked about victory, about killing Prabha, or defeating the Tigers. Our personal goals were to survive, to do well, to not let each other or our regiment down. Sura talking about the XT-250 he wanted to buy. Husni and Sanjeeva talking about girls. Dias and I cleaning guns and talking about optics.

I thought I knew them all very well, but now I realize I didn’t really. And now, sadly, I can’t recall their faces in detail. And sometimes I have to think hard to remember all nine names.

Well, it looks like it’s over now. And I wish those guys were here to see it. I wish we could all go out for a drink and talk about EPS and catch up on our lives. But it’s too late for all that. It all took too long. I wish they were all in their thirties, like me. Maybe they’d have wives, and children, or not. I wish they could walk down the road and be offered kiri bath by the trishaw drivers. I wish they were alive.

For Section 2, Recce Group Charlie, 6th Sinha Rifles.
KIA, July 1991, Elephant Pass.

Drop in the Price of Chillies in 2009

I was hoping for a fairly uncontroversial ad awards this year, following on the heels of 2008’s scam issues; however that doesn’t look likely. Everything seemed very low key at first. There were no embarrassing judges telling us our work was shit in the forums. There weren’t any catfights between CEOs and C-oh-ohs over whose ads were scam. Everybody was ready to toe the line, divide up the Chillies, and go on home in the same sedate rowboat. Sound almost Slimmish, no?

And Slimmish it was. This year’s panel of local and international judges decided wholesale was the way to give out Chillies, doling out a record nine (count ‘em, nine) Golds, a Grand Prix, and a Best of Show. That’s more Golds than has been awarded in all three previous years put together. And don’t even get me started on the dozens of Silvers, sackloads of Bronzes, and what looked like millions of those silly Finalists that were handed out. Couple this with a new scoring system that moved away from the so-called Olympic system to a point-based system, and you have a Chillies show that was fundamentally different from the previous years.

Now I have many questions for the Chillies organizers, but it all boils down to just one really: WTF?

Let me explain.

I’ll start with the two scoring systems that have been tried for the Chillies — Olympic, and point-based. With the Olympic system that was in place over the last three years, metal value won — a Gold beat a Silver beat a Bronze, etc. Pretty simple. A Grand Prix or Best of Show trumped everything and the agency that got that baby scored the night. Now, there was a bit of a fuckup last year. Leo Burnett won a bunch of silvers (relatively a lot by the Chillies standards of the time), and looked to be 2008’s most consistently creative agency. But not quite. You see, Triad (which had won next to nothing all night) suddenly pulled a Gold out of the hat and had the last laugh. So this time, the Chillies decided “that’s not fair” (and to be fair, it really wasn’t very fair), and decided to move the goal posts. Onto the cricket pitch. They also forgot to tell Triad, apparently (though more of that, later). This time there would be a point-based or tally system. It didn’t really matter whether you won one Gold or three Bronzes, because each award was apportioned a point value, and at the end of the night, you totted up the score, and the agency with the most points won. To make matters worse, a fourth place slot was created so that if your work was too crap to win a Bronze, you’d still get a point for it. Then, to add an element of farce to the night (and no, I don’t mean the drag show), the Chillies decided there would be a Grand Prix and a Best of Show! Now, ladies and gents of the Chillies, I hope you’ve noticed that Grand Prix means “great prize” in French — in other words, yup, the best of show. So while international ad shows have one or the other, we have both.

Lies and a Tiger — How a Diaspora is Killing its Own

Pro-LTTE demonstrations in Sydney (tamilsydneydotcom31/flickr)

As the war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam grinds inexorably towards certain defeat for the self-proclaimed representatives of the Tamil nation, there seems to be no great fanfare, no glorious last stands. This revolution dies not with a bang, but with whimpers and cowardice. And lies.

For a year the Tamil diaspora, spread from Tamil Nadu to Toronto, watched open-mouthed with disbelief as the iron fist of the Sri Lankan infantry divisions cut the Tiger formations to pieces, hammering them back into a tiny pocket close to Mullaitivu on the island’s northeastern coast. Now, as the world watches, a mortally wounded Tiger cowers behind the very people it claims to defend, mauling them as it dies.

As the pace of the offensive slows down in the heavily populated Mullaitivu District, the Tamil diaspora has finally found its voice, and a cause worthy of its outrage – the Tamil population of the Wanni, trapped in the fighting and suffering horribly. They lack everything human beings have a right to expect – food, shelter, clothing, security, life itself. If anything in the northeast is worthy of our attention, it is these people, held hostage by their proclaimed protectors, forced to face the guns and tanks of the SL Army in the cynical hope that if enough of them are killed or maimed, the world might step in and save the LTTE.

Tamil family sit by a trench in the LTTE-occupied No Fire Zone (Human Rights Watch)

The diaspora, organized and spurred by LTTE front organizations, chants its mantra of concentration camps and Sri Lankan government genocide of the Tamils, ignoring the fact that it is the LTTE, and not the government, that is holding the Wanni Tamils in these inhuman conditions. And like all human catastrophies, this one too, has spawned its celebrity hangers-on. First, Sri Lankan-born British rapper MIA, and now at the eleventh hour, Booker Prize-winning Indian author Arundhati Roy. These two individuals more or less represent the two strongest tones of voice we hear calling for a cessation of the Sri Lankan military offensive against the Tigers.

For This All that Blood was Shed

SL Army infantry in the Wanni (Defence.lk)

In the closing days of March and the first week of this month, April, the SL Army outflanked, cut off, and destroyed the Charles Anthony Regiment of the LTTE, in one of the most decisive battles of the war. For almost a year, the SL Army, sweeping across the Wanni from west to east, had attempted to pin down the LTTE and cause it significantly large casualties. However, the ever elusive Tigers have always prefered to slip away when outflanked, rarely allowing themselves to be trapped in large numbers, sacrificing rearguard units so that the larger forces could escape. While the casualties came in trickles, the jugular sought by the military high command was not forthcoming. Thus, the encirclement and destruction of the Charles Anthony at Aanandapuram, east of Puthukkudiyiruppu, could be celebrated as a memorable victory for the SL Army.

However, what makes this defeat a catastrophic one for the LTTE is the
fact that along with the Charles Anthony went almost every remaining unit commander of the LTTE, and many of their deputies as well. In a stroke, the Tigers have been virtually emasculated. The fact that the GoSL has now declared a 48-hour ceasefire over the Buddhist and Hindu New Year, is indicative of the SL Army’s confidence in defeating the LTTE in a matter of weeks rather than months.

On March 30th, elements of the SL Army’s 53rd and 58th divisions and Task Force 8 advanced out of Puthukkudiyiruppu in a pincer movement intended to outflank the Charles Anthony Regiment which held the eastward-running Puthukkudiyiruppu-Iranappaalai-Puthumaathalan road. A brigade of the 58th Division swung east and then south, while another from the 53rd, along with TF8, commanded by Col GV Ravipriya, attacked east and then north; both pincers meeting at Pachaipullumottai junction in the rear of the Charles Anthony. The Tigers fought fiercely to prevent the encirclement, but were overwhelmed. Lt Col Gopith, CO of the Charles Anthony and his 2/ic Amuthab were killed on the 31st, and demoralised and leaderless, the Tiger troops were encircled. Outnumbered nearly ten to one, over a thousand Tigers faced almost 10,000 troops of the 4th, 6th, 8th, 12th, 14th and 20th Gajabas, the 11th and 20th Light Infantry, the 5th Vijayabahu Infantry, and the 9th Gemunu Watch. Also in action was the SL Army’s elite special operations forces — elements of the 2nd Commandos and the 1st Special Forces.