MR. UNCLEAN

Chandra Jayaratne the former head of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce has taken to being a full-time, all-cylinders-firing critic, and it may be because he does not have a day job these days as a Chamber head. This writer does not know – but when he writes long screeds about Colombo being prettified on borrowed money, he is not even funny!

How many leagues behind reality is this man? Can he find anybody in Colombo or the rest of the country, who is against the recent projects at the former Dutch Hospital or the Racecourse premises, for instance?

Harpo Gunaratne the head of Harpo’s Pizza is not your typical Colomban. He does not have the rogue genes of the Colombo-wallah who complains at the drop of a hat, just because the regime is not made in their own image.

Sleepless nights

True that this regime and its chief apparatchiks may not possess a nuanced knowledge of British history, or the times King Charles held sway over all of England, the way Chandra Jayaratne’s favourite leader for this country has -- but as Harpo Gunaratne said recently in a public forum in a dialogue with this writer, we can complain until the cows come home, but by any yardstick the progress made in terms of making Colombo a tourist magnet by first getting its civic act together and making the city livable, is laudable.

Harpo says that regional standards cannot be achieved in one day. But, this is a brilliant start - - and that is the sum of this gentleman’s verdict, and he should know, with Harpo’s pizza having fanned out to the Maldives at one time to boot.

Chandra Jayaratne dumps all of his grievances about governance issues together with his particularly ghoulish cavil about the prettification of Colombo. Now, even if he may have some concerns about governance that can arguably be of some marginal value, even, when he dumps these concerns together with his peeve about the prettification -- gentrification if you will of Colombo and its environs -- his real motive begins to show.

It is not as if this former Chamber head loses sleepless nights over the fact that he perceives that there are troubling governance problems. He loses sleep on the contrary because the kind of sleepy regime that he wants headed by somebody who has an idiot savant’s knowledge of British history, is not occupying the seats of power.

He says that Colombo is being prettified on borrowed money, and he seems to be saying this because as a lot of the recent hotel investments etc., around the city have been made through recourse to generous loans etc.,

But what does this have to do with the fact that the city is being independent of this investment drive, made to look more presentable, at some cost to the exchequer?

A government can be faulted for taking untoward risks and inventing pie in the sky schemes, but does the effort to improve Colombo in the looks department, feel like an ostentatious project that falls into the general category, shooting for the moon?

For one this facelift, is an insurance against any failure in tourism. In the main, this is not a good year for tourism due to a sluggish economy in most parts of the developed world. But in the absence of the expected tourist influx due to reasons beyond our control, we have a steady stream of locals using the newly laid out promenades of Colombo, and checking out the lay of the land.

Expatriate community

In the process, they spend good money which is why new restaurants are opening up almost by the minute and are thriving. Anybody who has his pulse on this pulsating new reality, will know by instinct that there is something very good happening here – and it is repeated, it needs a special kind of ghoul to pick a bone with Colombo’s prettification drive that has drawn plaudits from the worst curmudgeons in the darkest ranks of Tuscany …

Besides, the trend is catching on in other cities. Galle is coming alive, and there are a different set of reasons perhaps, but Galle is coming alive nevertheless, even if a relatively high spending expatriate community has something to do with it.

Appearances can have a contagious uplifting effect.

There is a strong desire for the high-flyers, the Governors and Mayors of other regions and cities, to mimic Colombo’s facelift, even before the government gets into the act in these parts of the country.

But the former Chamber head is not happy. He wants to Colombo to go back to the days of garbage strewn chaos, and posters pock-marking every parapet wall and back of a bus. He wants it to be an eyesore, because he says the country does not have the money for better things.

Cleanliness is next to godliness. It may be cliche, but Colombo’s prettification will create its own momentum for change. People will be motivated enough to work, and they will leave the incurable cynics such as Jayaratne wallowing in the dust heap that permeates a lingering stink from yesteryear…