Necessary meditations on carelessness and callousness
I
haven’t seen Regi Siriwardena’s play The Blinding, directed by Haig
Karunaratne. I was not at the preview at the ICES and not at the British
Council more recently. I haven’t read the play either. Someone else was
at both performances, Comrade Aunty Nimal Breckenridge. And, as she
sometimes does when something irks her, she shared a story.
‘Last evening I was at a play pre-viewed before a group of us. It was
‘experimental theatre’: a hard hitting commentary on how we ‘ordinary’
people lived our ordinary lives while corpses were floating down rivers
and petrol soaked tyres hung round young men’s necks incinerated them.
When the show ended the director/producer (a friend of thaatha’s)
started a discussion. I made the first comment.
Then a mobile blared; and as the owner scrambled in her bag and
started a conversation. I asked,”Could the public’s carelessness and
callousness be displayed better?” And walked out.’ And this, Comrade
Aunty Nimal says, after Haig had specifically requested that mobile
phones be turned off.
She added a disclaimer, the gist of which I reproduce here: ‘I am
told that I should guard against expressing such comments. My reactions
are always spontaneous and polite; never pre-schemed.’
Systemic terrorism
There is something about that time, the bheeshanaya or ‘Period of
Terror’ in the Sinhala short-hand that few Sinhala-speaking Sri Lankans
would be ignorant of. It was deliberate and systemic terrorism on the
part of the JVP and on the part of the UNP government of the time. Some
60,000 people were killed over two years or so. The body count at the
height of violence was around 50 per day. Very few, if at all, were
killed in gun battles.
In stark contrast, when the LTTE was decisively crushed in May 2009,
there was no lack of chest-beating, tear-shedding crusaders begging and
even demanding that the terrorists be let off the hook. And now that
preferred outcome did not materialize, there is no lack of the same
kinds of crusaders wanting to down those who rid the country of the
terrorist menace. Back then, in the late eighties, it was all ‘fair
game’.
Respectful silence
Was it that in the late eighties the ‘right kind of people’ were
getting slaughtered, i.e. those who were better dead? Was it that the
world didn’t have the eyes it claims to have now? I don’t know. What is
indisputable was that back then there was a kind of callousness and
silence that was apparent among certain sections of the population.
The transgressions, let me repeat, were not alleged to have taken
place. They happened. Well documented. Facts, not allegations.
A death is a death and each dead is consigned the same state of
being, in a physical sense (the jury is out on other senses): they are
out of the scene and the equation. The manner of dying however and the
circumstances too can provoke different kinds of reactions and so too
the identity of the dead, apparently, where circumstance and manner are
roughly similar.
I am not talking of course of those rare beings who have cultivated
the ability to exercise equanimity when encountering the vicissitudes of
life.
The lady in question obviously did not belong that that category.
Callousness and carelessness cannot be stopped by way of legislation. It
is human thing; ‘inhuman’ some might correct me. Perhaps the performance
was weak, I don’t know. Perhaps it was seen as some kind of ‘that’ which
was different from the ‘this’ of being obnoxious. These all include
value-judgments at one level or another, yes. Still.
It seems that some deaths and killings are not newsworthy, some not
worthy of respectful silence, some deserving cheering and some so
irrelevant that keeping-in-touch via mobile phone is a far more
important matter than being civil and civilized. These things cannot be
demanded, Comrade Aunty Nimal would not disagree, I believe.
Self-interrogation
It is easy, someone might say, to pass judgment. Someone else might
observe that it easier and indeed too convenient not to. It is easy to
pick and choose when to engage and when to look askance.
Why bother to attend this kind of theatre, if one was adamant not to
engage, not to reflect and open oneself to self-interrogation, and to
change ways if way-changing made sense, all things considered?
Comrade Aunty Nimal, as I said, was present at the British Council
when The Blinding was performed there. She had a comment that might shed
some light.
‘The discussion at the end highlighted, as the play did, the enigma
of the human condition. Who were ‘ordinary people’? My first thought was
(a question): were we, in that room, ordinary people? (This was) sharply
followed by the thought ‘why not? How many of us when we left, had had
our brains ‘re-wired’ .........?’
She concluded ‘I think I will stop there for now.’
I will too. And I will proceed to reflect on these not-easy questions
the inimitable Comrade Aunty Nimal raised.
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