The Saadhu Blog

the cow in the cybercafe

daya dissanayake (2004)

‘If I stay here for one more day, I’ll have to kill myself’ said the girl in khaki shorts and white t-shirt.

‘Why?’ asked the girl in the flowered cotton frock, without taking her eyes off the book she was reading.

‘Because I don’t want to end up in a loony house’

Micky, the girl in khaki shorts, was walking up and down on the grass lawn. Ruvanthi was seated on a wooden bench under an avocado tree. Ruwanthi continued reading. Micky walked non stop, a dozen steps to the edge of the lawn, then back to where Ruwanthi was seated. Every few minutes she looked at her wrist-watch. Then she would look up at the sky through the thick foliage and heave a sigh.

Sometimes she unclipped her mobile phone from her waist. She would hold it up, stare at it for a while, walk around holding the phone up to the sky, and then close the flap in disgust.

‘Why couldn’t you build your house where you could get a good phone signal?’ she would ask her friend, not expecting an answer.

When she got tired of walking, Micky came and sat beside Ruwanthi.

‘I have to find a cyber café’ she said after a while.

Ruwanthi did not take her eyes off her book.

‘I thought you were my best friend’ Mickey said after another long silence.

Ruwanthi took Micky’s hand and squeezed it, without a word. She closed her book. The continuous chatter of the squirrels and the birds was occasionally interrupted by the mooing of a cow grazing in the grassland below the house.

‘Try this’ Ruwanthi’s younger brother ran up to them, offering a ripe guava to Micky.

‘No. Thanks’ Micky said.

‘Take a bite first, then throw it away, if you don’t like it’ Ravi appealed. Reluctantly Micky accepted the fruit. Ruwanthi grabbed the other one.

‘Have you washed it?’ Micky asked.

‘Why should i?’ Ravi asked. ‘We are not offering it to the Buddha’ he added.

‘It is direct from the tree. It has been washed by the rain’ Ruwanthi told her friend.

‘But still’ Micky hesitated.

‘It is cleaner than all the junk you get in the city’ Ruwanthi assured her, taking a big bite off her fruit. Micky began to nibble at the fruit slowly, but once she got the taste of it, she smiled her thanks to Ravi.

‘Malli, do you know any house in this village, which has a telephone’ Micky asked.

‘The only telephone is at the post office’

‘Can you show me the place?’

‘Sure. But I don’t know if the phone is working’

‘Let’s go’ she jumped out of the bench, dragging Ruwanthi along with her.

As they walked down the gravel road Ruwanthi noticed that all eyes were on Micky. She noticed the look of disapproval on the faces of the elderly women, and the smiles on the faces of the young men, as Micky passed them in her tight fitting shorts. Ruwanthi tried to avoid their eyes. She knew the women would comment about it to her mother.

When she saw the small red sign board of the sub-post office, Micky looked around and had to ask Ruwanthi where the post office was. Ruwanthi pointed at the open window to one side of the entrance to the small house. They looked into the room through the window. Micky saw the table and two chairs and an old fashioned telephone on the table. There was no one inside.

‘Are they closed?’ she asked Ruwanthi.

‘No. They close it only if the whole family has to leave the house for anything. I will call her’ Ruwanthi said and walked into the house. Micky watched her friend walking straight in and go towards the kitchen calling someone by name. A young woman came out, wiping her hands on the cloth she had wrapped around her waist, over her frock.

‘We want to make a phone call’ Ruwanthi told the woman.

The woman noticed Micky, when she came out of the house, and she invited them to come in and be seated. Micky was too impatient.

‘I just want to make a phone call’ she said.

‘I don’t know if it’s working today’ the woman said, leaning against the door-post. Micky looked at Ruwanthi, in desperation.

‘She has to make an urgent call. Shall we try if it is working’ Ruwanthi appealed. The woman went in to the post office room to check the phone. They followed her in to the room. She was rattling the cradle.

‘It’s dead’

‘When will they repair it?’ Micky asked.

‘I don’t know. It works on and off. May be if we try in another hour, it would be working, or it may not work for another week’

‘Then how do you communicate with the outside world’

‘Why, the postman comes every day. He brings the letters and any telegrams or messages from the Main Post Office’

‘How can you wait for several days to get a reply for any message?’ Micky wanted to know.

‘If it is urgent we can send a telegram’ the woman said.

‘How can you send a telegram if your phone is not working?’

‘I can send it through our postman, he will be here sometime today’

‘This is the 21^st century’

‘So what?’ Ruwanthi asked.

‘There is some ripe jack fruit, would you like to have some?’ the woman asked, ‘we plucked a really sweet fruit today’

Ruwanthi looked at Micky. She shook her head.

‘We are going to the tank for a bath’ Ruwanthi told the woman.

‘Then you shouldn’t eat jak fruit right now’ the woman said, walking up to the road with them.

‘I’ll send a message if the phone starts working’

‘Are we going for a bath?’ Ravi asked.

‘I just told her that, to avoid having the jack fruit. Micky didn’t want to stay’

‘But shall we go to the tank?’ Ravi asked again. Ruwanthi once again looked at Micky.

‘I didn’t bring my bathing suit’

‘You don’t need it, I’ll give you a cloth. Come on, enjoy your visit to our village, don’t look so glum’ Ruwanthi pulled her friend towards home. Ravi was already running towards the village tank.

Micky did not want to wear a cloth and she refused to wear a sarong either.

‘That’s what we all wear, when we bath in the tank or at the well’ Ruwanthi told her.

‘Can I get into the water like this, in my t-shirt?’ Micky asked.

‘Yes, if you want to. This is not a hotel pool, there is no one to ban t-shirts’

The tank was not far away, the gravel road lined on either side by neem and tamarind trees, led to the tank bund.

In ancient times it would have been a huge tank, but due to poor maintenance more than half of the tank was now a grassland, and there were even a few trees growing in the old tank bed. Micky was amazed at the beauty of the distant hills and the glistening water beckoning them to come in.

‘Are you sure this water is clean?’ Micky asked.

‘We have been bathing in this from the time I can remember, so I don’t know why you should worry’

‘But people wash clothes, they bathe their cattle and all those germs would be in the water’

‘I have never thought about it, but there must be some kind of natural disinfection. We don’t have to Chlorinate this water’

Micky hesitated for a long time before she got into the water.

‘Eeek. Something bit me’ Micky almost jumped out of the water. Ravi began to laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘They won’t bite you, they are harmless fish’ Ruwanthi said with a smile. ‘don’t worry about them’

Micky had watched in amazement the ease with which her friend wrapped the cloth around above her breasts her and got out of her clothes.

‘What if the cloth gets untied?’ she had asked Ruwanthi.

‘It won’t’

Then Micky noticed that elderly ladies wrapped their clothes around their waist leaving the upper body bare as they bathed.

Ruwanthi was glad that Micky could forget her electronic world and enjoy the luxuries offered to her in the little village. Micky was swimming about, playing with the young boy. She tried to pluck a water lily and got entangled in them. She had got used to the mud and silt by then.

Micky wanted to go back home to change into dry clothes and threw the towel across her shoulders covering her wet shirt. As she picked up her mobile her face darkened again. She asked Ravi if he could go to the post office again to find out if the phone was working again. Ravi could not understand why this girl was so obsessed with the telephone, but he took off at a run, still in his wet clothes.

‘Don’t you feel more refreshed than if you had been in a hotel pool?’ Ruwanthi asked.

‘I don’t know. My whole body smells of mud, tell me how I can get connected’ Micky said in the same breath.

‘I told you before we left the city, that we are going to a remote village, which is not a part of your global village. I told you not to expect all the things you enjoy in the city’

‘Yeah, but how would I know that my mobile would not work here. When you told me you didn’t have a telephone at home, I was not worried because I expected to connect through EDGE from my phone. As long as I had my notebook and phone I hoped to be connected to all my friends and Sundeep Dougal and all the music and all the news of the outside world’

‘Who is Sundeep Dougal?’ Ruwanthi wanted to know.

‘If I can get connected, I will show you’ said Micky in exasperation. ‘Please Ruwi, tell me where I can find a phone that works or a place where I could receive mobile signals’

‘I don’t know. There is no one in our village who would know where a phone would work’

At lunch, Ruwanthi watched as her mother kept on filling her friend’s plate. It seemed that the tasty delicacies on her plate had momentarily pushed aside her e-world. Micky kept on asking about each dish. She could not identify most of them.

‘They are all either from our own garden or plucked from the fields’ Ruwanthi’s mother told their visitor.

‘You will never get cancer by eating this, like from the food you have to eat in the city’ Ruwanthi added.

‘Why?’

‘Here we don’t use any food poisons on what we grow, like chemical fertilizer and pesticides’

‘You mean we eat only poisonous food in the city?’

‘Yes. That’s why I come home whenever I can, to breath fresh air, eat fresh healthy food and relax’

‘But I can’t relax. I feel suffocated, when I cam cut off from the rest of the world’

‘Forget the rest of the world and enjoy your stay’ Ruwanthi’s father told her.

‘I can’t. There must be several hundred messages piled up on my e-mail server’ said Micky.

‘Most of it would be junk mail, why should you worry about junk’

‘That’s what is worrying me. When my mail quota gets filled up, I will miss all my important mail’

‘It depends on what you mean by important’ Ruwanthi said.

‘Importance is a very relative term’ Ruwanthi’s father added, but Miky ignored him, probably thinking what would this old village farmer know about what was happening out side his village.

After lunch Ruwanthi wanted to go back to her book. Micky came to sit beside her, with her notebook. She started writing. Ruwanthi glanced at the screen, to see that Micky was composing e-messages. It would keep her quite for sometime, thought Ruwanthi going back to her book.

Mickys fingers flew over the key board. Ruwanthi’s eyes skimmed over the pages of the novel. A lone squirrell chirped nibbling at a guava. A few cows grazed lazily under coconut trees below the garden.

The quiet tranquility did not last very long.

Micky closed the notebook with a snap.

‘Because you told me you did not have electricity in your village I came prepared with two extra batteries for my notebook and one for the phone’ Mickey said in an accusing tone.

Ruwanthi went on reading.

‘Why didn’t you tell me mobile signals did not cover this village?’ Micky asked again

‘I didn’t know’ Ruwanthi said, without taking her eyes off the page.

‘How can you say that? You live in the city with me, you use a mobile phone and use the internet and e-mail just as much as I do’

‘I have never used my mobile here, so I did not know it wouldn’t work. I can wait till we go back to the city, to get into the internet’

‘May be you can. But I can’t’

‘Try reading a book’

‘I don’t read books. Who reads books anyway?’

Micky walked up to the window.

‘You don’t have a TV. You don’t have DVD to watch a good movie. You don’t even have a good music set up’

‘Listen to the birds, it is much more relaxing than the wild noises you call music’

‘But your bird song is often supported by farting cows’

‘Don’t be so vulgar’

‘I don’t know why I ever thought you were my best friend’ Micky stormed out of the room. She went in search of Ravi.

‘Ravi, have you ever climbed that hill?’ she asked, pointing at the range of hills on one edge of the village.

‘Many times. Would you like to go? The view is wonderful from the top’

‘Is it difficult?’

‘There is only a foot path, but it is not very difficult’

Micky went back into the house. She wanted Ruwanthi to go with her. Ruwanthi was reluctant to leave her book, but Micky was her guest. She tried to tell Micky that climbing the hill was not easy, but Micky insisted.

‘Let’s take the camera, we can get a few good shots from the summit’ Ruwanthi said.

‘I have my phone camera’ Micky patted her belt.

Ruwanthi persuaded Micky to change into her long denims, warning her about thorny shrubs on the path they had to climb. She was more concerned about the disapproving looks of the women they would pass on the way.

They climbed over fallen trees, crept under creepers, and paused for breath whenever they reached a flat stretch of the foot path. Ruwanthi tried to point out to the city girl various plants, flowers and the birds. Micky looked dutifully at what ever was shown to her, but her eyes came back to the screen of her mobile phone. She had it switched from the moment they began their climb.

Suddenly she would stop, turn around in a circle, holding the phone high, walk back a few steps, and then forward. Ravi watched in amusement, and Ruwanthi sighed. Micky would give up in disgust and continue the climb. The stop once more, the moment she saw even a faint trace of a signal.

They reached the summit. Ruwanthi spread her hands to show the breathtaking beauty of the valley beyond.

‘It’s working’ Micky jumped up in delight. Ravi had to hold her by the shoulder to pull her away from the edge of the rock.

Micky sat down to play with the keypad on the phone. She did not see the slowly flowing river across the valley, or the mountain range on the other side. She did not see the towering cones of the giant cane clinging on to the trees. She did not see the temple, in the middle of the vast green rice fields. She did not feel the cool breeze soothing her tired limbs.

Her eyes were on the screen, reading and then replying to all the messages she had received. Ruwanthi and Ravi sat on the rock, enjoying the beauty spread below them. They knew every hill top, all the big trees and every rice field, below them. Yet they would never get tired of this view. It was worth the climb.

After replying all the messages, Micky began to talk on the phone. The other two walked away a little distance, to give her a little more privacy.

‘My battery went dead. I forgot to put the spare battery in my pocket, when I changed into slacks.’

‘We can come again tomorrow, if you like’ Ravi said.

‘Yes. I have to. I’ll bring my notebook so I could check my mail too’ Micky said.

20.25, 02-20-2004

Corruption breeds corruption

Today the United Nations is “celebrating” corruption.

A few decades ago, corruption was not a word heard often, bribery was a word which was never used openly. Bribery then would mean palming a one rupee coin to the gate keeper at the hospital to get in to the hospital outside visiting ours, to a hospital attendant to jump the OPD queue or to look after a patient. It was a pot of curd or a bunch of plantains taken to the residence of an official for some service. Or it was a bottle of arrack offered to a clerk in a government department. A very popular film was produced about a doctor who accepted a bribe of a few rupees to attend to a patient.

Looking back, it is very difficult to believe that we are living in the same country. Today bribes are offered and accepted openly. Even the highest authority in the country states that they have been offered bribes, and accuses other high officials of accepting bribes. There seems to be total immunity for everyone in the country for such a dastardly crime. The public has got in to the habit of forgiving and then forgetting. What they do not realize is that corruption is worse than a cancer, that it keeps on growing, that corruption always breeds further corruption. It also becomes a chain reaction, spreading from one level to another. It is also like a narcotic drug, as you get used to it, you have to keep increasing the dosage.

Such corruption means that money which should have been used for the benefit of the country ends up in some ones pocket, or bank account. With high level corruption the money even goes out of the country. Where funds come in to build a 100 houses only 50 houses would be built and a palace somewhere else. Where funds come for 100 km of highways only 50 km would be built. This corruption trickles down. When a poor family is allocated Rs 100, they receive only Rs. 50. Corruption also affects productivity, because all work get delayed till palms are well oiled. Till then every thing is at a standstill.

Bribery has become a part of routine business today and if bribery was to stop immediately by some miracle, there would be an immediate collapse of the private sector business and all public services. It would take a while for business to recover from such a collapse.

‘Give me liberty or give me the freedom to bribe’ wrote Pierre Lemieux, in www.mises.org. Today we do not have any freedom, even though we celebrate the winning of such freedom, and we boast that we are a free country. We are not free. We are the slaves under a totally corrupt system. Nothing works without the proper oiling. The politician or official who tries to be honest, who would refuse a bribe, would not be able to survive in today’s urban jungle. One good apple would not be able to survive amidst a heap of rotten apples, however much chemical treatment has been done.

The term Public Servant is not applicable anymore. The new term for public officials should be ‘Public Masters’. They are the masters and we the public are the slaves. We are worse than slaves because we have to serve them and pay them too. Even a Minister who accepts a bribe should be considered as a prostitute. People in such high positions would be selling not only their body and soul, but sometimes the entire country, our future generations. When a powerful official in a powerful country accepts a bribe it could sometimes affect the entire world.

Bribery is a form of prostitution. Payment for services rendered. Then anyone who accepts a bribe can be considered as a prostitute. A whore. Harlot. What ever name is to be used. But this is worse than prostitution because all men do not need services of prostitutes and all women are not prostitutes. Prostitutes are also used as bribes sometimes, in which case it would be a prostitute using the services of a prostitute! We have to coin a new word for this.

Bribery works in a vicious circle. And very often it is justified by those who give and accept bribes. It has become standard practice in some trades, like motor spare parts, when a new purchasing officer comes to purchase spares for his organization, be it public or private, the salesman at the counter would ask him the price that should be shown on the invoice. The man would try to refuse it the first time, but within a few days he would be roped in. It is in the interest of the salesman too, because the bribe offered would tie his customer to them. The salesman or his company would not be loosing any money, because the bribe would be added to the selling price. This cannot be stopped, because there would not be a fixed or standard price for most motor spares. There is heavy competition.

The person in charge of purchasing or imports in this shop would be aware of this practice, which he himself would put to good use when he makes the purchases. The foreign supplier would look after this person. At the other end, the sales staff of the organization where they all know how their purchasing officers are making money would in turn be using this policy for what they sell. And even for a customer who does not want to accept such a bribe, still the salesman could claim it from his employer. There would be no way to check if such a commission is paid in full to the buyer or if it is pocketed by the salesman. Such sales commissions are justified, sometimes even by the management, as long as it improves the sales. After a while the salesman would have made enough money on the side, that he will open a business of his own. He would tap all his old clients, offer a bigger bribe and beat his previous employer. Someday it would happen to him too.

When the management insists that at least three quotations should be called for and product or service, when it is manipulated, one party submits all three quotations, giving them enough room to share substantial profits with those involved in the purchase.

When it comes to public institutions where products and services are purchased by tender, bribery and corruption has spread from top to bottom. Gone are the days when public tenders were handled by honest officials, who handled the tender and the evaluation to ensure that the country obtained the best products and services at the best price. Today the corruption begins before the preparation of the tender documents, where specifications could be ‘locked’, to ensure that a particular supplier or brand or model could only fit the tender specifications. Then it would be smooth sailing, the bidder could give his own price adding his profit margins, big enough to be shared with the people handling the tender. Often these people manipulate innocent technical officers to achieve their ends. There are also other ways of ensuring that their party gets the tender. The tender can be announced giving very little time for bidders to prepare and submit their offers. They could introduce impractical condition to qualify for the tender. After the tender is opened, offers, specifications, supporting documents could be introduced, documents from competitors could go missing. The members of the evaluation committee could be influenced, blackmailed or replaced with their own people. When samples are required, they are obtained from the institution from their present stocks, in cases where packing and labels are not required, to ensure that the samples never fail. Samples of other competitors could be tampered with.

Children learn from their parents how to give and accept bribes. A child’s first exposure to bribery is at the time of school admission. Officials who issue the documents needed for the admission, and sometimes teachers and the school principal has to be bribed. In some schools this would continue, till the child completes his education, to win special favours in school activities, to be selected for sports teams, to be made a prefect or school captain. The child would also be aware when his parents accept bribes, would know how the parents are able to offer them all the luxuries. Even after the child has grown and matured enough to know what is right and wrong, he would enjoy the ill gotten gains of his parents. Not many would rebel against such actions, when the parents solicit more and more bribes to send the child overseas, to USA, UK, Australia or Japan for higher studies. The country has to pay for the education of these spoilt brats. The real Free Education in this country is really enjoyed by the children of some politicians and state officials only. By this time, corruption would be in the child’s blood, never to leave, and he will continue the tradition and pass on to his own children.

Everyone in the country is aware of these practices. When a politician or a ‘public master’ sends his children overseas for studies, unless he has his own private income from business or professional services, we all know that he would not be able to afford such expenses on his salary. Unless it was on a scholarship the child would need expenses for academic fees and for food and lodging. In most instances such needs of the officials are provided for by businessmen. The official is under obligation for these businessmen, for several years, till as long as their children remain overseas.

Multi-National Companies, who state publicly that they do not resort to any unethical practices, still continue to bribe their way into big business in our part of the world. To them bribing our officials is not an issue, because they consider people in our countries are already corrupt totally and every one has a price, which they can easily meet. Then they will only add all this cost to their price. When any businessman pays a bribe to get some business, in the end it is the consumer who pays it. We have to pay not only the money for the cost of production and profits, but also for the payments made to officials who approve the import of such products.

Sri Lanka has joined the Anti-Corruption Initiative for Asia-Pacific, under the ADB/OECD. Thus our country is now committed to fight against corruption. The question is who will lead this fight? Who can cast the first stone? One year ago Sri Lanka received US$ 125,000 (Rs. 12.5 million) from the UNDP, “to begin a project aimed at preventing and rooting out corruption, by promoting transparency and accountability in the public and the private sector”. It would be interesting reading material if the Commission to Investigate Allegations of bribery or Corruption (CIABOC) could publish the progress they have made with this project, or for that matter what the CIABOC has achieved over the past 12 years!

Bribery was made an offence in 1883, during the British rule. Then over the years new Acts were brought in. Declaration of Assets was made compulsory in 1975. CIABOC was formed in 1994 when all the other Acts and rules and regulations had failed. In one of their reports CIABOC mentions a “case of a Senior Security Manager of the National Housing Development Authority who was successfully prosecuted for seeking sexual gratification from a female security guard on the promise of getting a transfer to a more congenial station and a house to live in”. What an achievement!

Citizen Perera will have to go on bribing his way through, from birth to death, and even after death.

daya@saadhu.com

vaccines and “swine” flu

The whole world has panicked with the spread of the new strain of influenza A, named H1N1. The original misnomer ’swine flu’ made some of our officials consider banning the import of pork! Two years ago it was the ‘Bird flu’, with some people giving up on eating chicken!

When there is an epidemic, we should be careful, but without going into panic mode.

There is a saying, “treat a cold and it will be cured in seven days, don’t take any any medicine and it will last for one week”. This should apply for the new flu, too except for a few among us who do need prompt treatment, like infants, expectant mothers and the feeble elderly.

The International Drug Mafia has still not been able to come out with a drug to fight A H1N1. All they can offer, and for WHO to recommend, are two anti-viral drugs developed against “Bird flu” and later on used even against common influenza. The exact wording is, “Since these antivirals have been effective in treating seasonal influenza, they are also expected to be effective for pandemic (H1N1) 2009 infections.”  WHO advices not to use these drugs without   using Oseltamivir could result in the development of resistance to anti-viral drugs and also the development of drug resistant strains. This drug was developed for the “bird flu”. Since the “bird flu” has not appeared again the manufactures had to find a new market, and A H1N1 became God’s gift to the drug barons.

Today the drug mafia is able to earn billions of dollars by selling their vaccines.

Normally a vaccine would take at least five years to be introduced into the market. It needs long research, then development, indoor testing and trials and the clinical trials. (which is the mafia term for conducting experiments with new drugs and vaccines using human guinea pigs).

The new flu strain appeared just one year ago. Already there is mass vaccination, without any studies on the effectiveness of the vaccine, its short term and long term side effects and the WHO is giving its full support. What are the risks involved, when we use such an untested unproven vaccine on our children? Day by day the number of vaccines given to our children is increasing. We do not have any idea of the cumulative effect of all these vaccines. We do not know what the long term effects could be. This is at a time when there is a major controversy in the United States that childhood autism is a result of this excessive vaccination.

It is time to decide on the priorities in immunization. Polio and Japanese Encephalitis vaccines are becoming essential because there is no cure for the diseases.  Rubella vaccine for girls about to get married could be a must. But is it essential for our teenage school girls, at the risk of death, to habe rubella vaccine, just because it is the practice in the western countries? It is an insult to our young girls, if our health authorities expect them to become teenage mothers while still preparing for their O. levels.

Sri Lanka has always followed a very sensible path when it comes to new drugs and vaccines. They have always been careful to await clinical trial reports and then do a controlled clinical trial in our own country to ensure that the vaccine is safe for our people, because they know that the same vaccine could have different effects on people of different countries due to genetic and biological variations. That is why it is difficult to understand this almost obscene haste to expose our children to this new vaccine.

There are reports of new forms of influenza strains appearing, around the world. There were also reports that this new A H1N1 virus spread from a laboratory of a multinational drug baron, even accusations that it was intentionally released.

Those who are in such a hurry to introduce this vaccine for A H1N1,  do they have an answer if a new strain, perhaps deadlier than this, appears by next winter? Even if a new strain does not appear, how long does the immunity last from this vaccine, do we have to vaccinate our children every year, like they do with the common flu vaccine in other countries? Only the drug mafia would benefit.

Could it not be better to be careful? take precautions against the spread of the flu. Educate our people to stay at home and stay isolated even at home, to avoid the spread of the illness. We used to have such good habits in our villages, when there was an infection of a contagious illness. People would have a sign on their door or gate giving notice to other people in the village that they had an infected patient at home.

WHO drew up a major campaign HFA/2000, Health for All by 2000. We are nearing the end of 2009, but HFA is nowhere in sight and in fact it is almost becoming Ill-Health For All or IHFA for ever.

Arogya Siddhi. Let good health prevail.

R.A.S. & the RAMAYANA

The Hindustan Times has reported today that our Royal Asiatic Society has claimed “The Tourist Board has been over the last couple of years marketing Sri Lanka to India as the abode of Ravana of the Hindu mythological epic the Ramayana. This is a total travesty and a future danger for the territorial integrity of Sri Lanka as there is no historical evidence whatsoever about Rama and Ravana… I urge you to immediately cancel this foolish and anti national project’’
http://www.hindustantimes.com/Second-Ramayana-battle-being-waged-in-Lanka/H1-Article1-480886.aspx#hide

According to the RAS website, “The Society provides a forum for those who are interested in the history, languages, cultures and religions of Asia to meet and exchange ideas. It offers lectures and seminars and it provides facilities for research and publishing.”

The problem is probably that the current president of the RAS Sri Lanka is obsessed with “scientific” issues only. He rejects the Ramayana, Rama and Ravana as “Mythology” and does not allow any discussions on such issues.

If he rejects the Ramayana as mythology, and the Ramayana sites in Sri Lanka, then the question arises about his stand on the Mahavamsa, about Vijaya, about Pandukabhaya, about the Buddha’s visits to Sri Lanka and about Sri Pada. How do we separate history and literature?

Does he reject the Buddha, just because there is no “scientific” evidence about the Buddha, except for what is found in the Asoka edicts which were inscribed after about two centuries from the time of Buddha. Does he reject the images of the Buddha? Does he reject the Tripitaka because it was written down after many generations had passed it down orally?

If some ancient Indian king had inscribed on a stone pillar marking a place where Rama was born, where they found Sita, where they went into exile, then do we accept such claims as scientific, as we have accepted Asoka’s editc abotu the birth place of the Buddha?

Why pick on the Ramayana?  Can he prove that Ravana is a mythical figure? How can he deny that Ravana was one of the greatest physicians our country has produced?

It is difficult to understand how the ‘Ramayana Trail’ organized by the Tourist board could be called an ‘anti-national project’. If the SLRAS president considers it as a scientific body, how could they talk about anything as ‘anti-national’?

The Ramayana as a threat to the ‘Territorial integrity’ of Sri Lanka, needs further explanation from the SLRAS, do they believe that Rama will invade Sri Lanka again?

Instead of a closed door session, why doesn’t the RAS Sri Lanka have an open discussion, and also invite a few Ramayana scholars from around the world?

In the Supina Sutta of the Anguttara Nikaya, we hear of the four different coloured birds who alight at the feet of the Buddha and all of them turn white.

Today the many coloured birds who alight at the feet of the statue of the Buddha, not only remain in their original colours, but they also form into groups by their colour

Transformation of Buddhism

In Sri Lanka, the Dhamma preached by the Buddha has gone through many transformations.

First we had the Hinduization, bringing in Hindu deities into our temples, sometimes converting them to ‘Buddhism’.

Next came the Christianization, which led to the coining of the term ‘Protestant Buddhism’. This was influenced more by Christians who turned to Buddhism, than from a direct influence of the Christian church. We saw this with the start of ‘Sunday Schools’ instead of teaching the Buddha Dhamma to the children on poya days. We saw the Bhakti Gee, Wesak Cards, Schools on the lines of the Missionary schools, and even performing marriages in temples, officiated by Buddhist monks, even though there was no legal status in the ‘temple marriage’.

Now we are seeing the Islamization of Buddhism. It too had begun gradually, almost unobtrusively, like the proverbial camel getting into the tent.  Some of the first changes happened in ‘Buddhist schools’, where mothers of students were compelled to wear a sari, when they came to the school. Why the Sari, is it because the school authorities believed that the mothers could corrupt the young girls and boys if they came in trousers, or skirts or cloth and jacket? Couldn’t a woman wrap a saree around her, but appear more naked than if she was unclothed? Couldn’t a woman wear a shirt and trouser and be the most decently dressed, if by the standards laid down by these schools, ‘decent’ meant not flaunting the women’s assets?

Now we have Buddhist monks, threatening to issue a fatwa against a political opponent. This threa was called a ‘Sangha Angawa’, what ever it could mean. If a Buddhist monk, or should we call him a ‘Mufti’ or a ‘Mullah’, issues a Fatwa against a person, then could a Buddhist kill this person and attain Nirvana?

Even if consider the ‘Sangha Angawa’ as a form of ex-communion, it would be interesting to see how a follower of the Buddha Dhamma could be excommunicated. A true Buddhist does not belong a to church and he can be a Buddhist, all by himself.

The early part of the Mahawamsa dealing with the origin of the Sinhala race is probably a bag of bullshit. Vijaya, if he ever arrived in Lanka, with half shaven head, bansihed from hi sown country, is considered to be in the 6th cent. B.C.

the latest archeological excavations have unearthed a settlement with a house with a floor paved with stones, and with a canoe burial cemetry of their own. this shows is was an advanced civilization, around 1350 B.C. that is 700 years before vijaya.

these people are our ancestors, not the thug born out of an incestuous marriage