It is ok if you have not heard of Nilame Wanigasekera
Akira Kurosawa made many films. I’ve seen.
There are Kurosava ‘moments’ that are etched in my mind, as there are in
the case of other film makers of course. Many, in fact. This Tuesday
morning in July, though, I see only one. It is an image and a statement
‘Dreams’ is a 1990 Kurosawa film belonging to the ‘magical realism’
genre and based, we are told, on dreams that the film-maker had seen. So
it is not a film but a collection of ‘filmlets’. I am thinking of
‘Crows’. It is about an art student who goes looking for and ends up
inhabiting Vincent Van Gogh’s painting.
There is an incredible moment when the student meets the maestro in a
wheat field and Vincent, close to suicide-moment, dismisses him: ‘there
is so much more to do and so little time’. He then leaves the perplexed
artist and walks away and into the wheat field and into his own painting
of that landscape.
‘There is so much more to do and so little time’ reminds me of Keats’
close-to-death poem, ‘When I have fears’:
‘When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain,
Before high-piled books, in charactery,
Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain...’
I am thinking of a man called Nilame Wanigasekera. I doubt if anyone
reading this would have heard that name. He was known, though. Known and
loved by close to a million people in this country. He was not a
politician, nor a film star. He was no ‘public figure’ to the extent
that he was never featured in a newspaper article. He was not considered
‘news’ or ‘newsworthy’. No, not in life and now, not in death.
Nilame Maama died. Last night. I heard this morning. No, he wasn’t
close, not at all. It’s been mostly smile plus a few words a couple of
times a year or even less for the past 10 years. We never planned to
meet for we didn’t know each other, belonged to different generations
and didn’t have reason to strike up a conversation. He was quiet.
Courteous. Effective in what he did.
Nilame Maama was one of the pioneers of the process through which the
thrift and credit cooperative movement in Sri Lanka, better known by its
Sinhala acronym, ‘SANASA’, was revitalized under the leadership of P A
Kiriwandeniya. The leaders of that move were not your typical ‘NGO
kaarayas’ as such you will find ‘officed’ in and around Colombo 7 (yes,
the addresses of big name INGOs and the headquarters of high-profile
NGOs tells quite a story of elitism and top-down comfy-activism). They
were the equivalent of the barefoot doctors in the vast terrain called
microfinance, long before that became another buzz word that the World
Bank appropriated and long before the world heard about the Grameen
Bank.
Nilame Maama almost single-handedly built a strong regional base for
the SANASA Movement in the Kurunegala District. When the Movement
spawned a Development Bank in 1998, he helped collect millions of rupees
worth of deposits and shares from this district. He helped build an
asset base for the Primary Societies in this region far exceeding those
of branches of well known commercial banks. He was at one time the
Chairman of the SANASA Federation and of the SANASA Development Bank
too, if I am not mistaken.
What is it that separates this unassuming, quiet, hard-working person
from Kuliyapitiya from the thousands of other do-gooders running around,
well, doing good? Nilame Maama, with total fidelity to the cooperative
principles on which SANASA is built, always thought ‘collective’.
He did not see ‘self’ much. A man who spent his life uplifting
thousands of people, turning dreams into reality, giving hope and
dignity, Nilama Maama took the blows that life inevitably sends the way
of such people with equanimity, without complaint. He paid a heavy price
for his selflessness. So too his family.
He died last night of a heart attack. He built lives but was not able
to finish building his own house. He helped rural people all over this
country to do things that enabled them to give their children a decent
education and secure remunerative forms of employment. His two children
are still not out of school.
He was blamed by his near and dear for neglecting self,
‘self-interest’ and immediate family. His self-interest, it seems now,
was the collective interest and the national interest. He neglected
family. He might have thought ‘so many things to do, so little time’. I
don’t know. I just saw him from a distance.
All I know is that when I was told that he had died and when I
learned about his conditions of being, I remembered Kurosawa’s ‘Dreams’,
I remembered ‘Crows’ and I remembered the words of Vincent Van Gogh.
There are two thoughts, at first glance in opposition to one another,
but I feel in the ultimate sense saying the same thing: ‘there is so
much to do and so little time,’ and ‘there is nothing to do and so much
time too’.
There’s ripened grain in a granary somewhere. Somewhere, some child
is not hungry. Somewhere, some girl is getting ready to go to
University. Somewhere a family has a house, a roof over their heads. A
lot of people will not know how it all happened. They will not remember
Nilame Wanigasekera. He won’t know either. It will not matter. Not to
them, not to him. Some people live their lives that way. That’s all.
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