OUR WAY

Yesterday was supposed to have been Fathers' Day or so we were told. The commercial hype that's attached to these generically dedicated 'days' -- Mothers' Day Fathers' Day etc., has assured us that though we are culturally as far apart from these ideas as the North Pole is from the South, we have to tolerate being told that one day in the calendar is 'Fathers' Day.'

The good thing is that in our indigenous culture, though, every day is 'Fathers' Day'. The fact that in the commercialized West a special day needs to be dedicated to the patriarch of the family is a measure of the low esteem in which fathers' are held in these parts -- rather than the other way around!

There are days dedicated to causes - - the National Blood Donation day for instance. On those days the commercial behemoth and the advertising juggernauts that are machined by this behemoth, is silenced. That's because there is obviously not much money they can earned from National Blood Donation Day. Nobody is going to send cards wishing his friends and near and dear 'a happy National Blood Donation Day,' for instance.

However, it is not as if the commercial behemoth has in many ways not corrupted our society, and made it subservient to the culture of mammon. This is why there is a great deal of truth when the Defence Secretary says that there is much more to national security that just the aspect of defence. We need to be economically secure and we need more than just our troops -- we need to be cyber-secure and in many other ways secure as well, and secure in terms of geopolitically being unthreatened and independent.

However, it appears that in terms of inimical market forces for instance, we have as a nation managed to be free from the influence of the forces of multi-national commerce, more than our giant neighbor India for instance. India cannot contemplate a change of government without wondering what that would do to the vast links that the Indian engines of business have formed, sometimes to their own detriment, with Western driven market forces.

In Sri Lanka, we have a nationalist regime that while tying us to the forces of foreign capital and investment for commercial benefit, has eschewed and resisted the wholesale takeover of culture, national super-structure and ethos, by alien market driven forces.

In many ways this has left us confident enough to be self sufficient in our material and other human needs such as security and health -- for instance.

In the area of security, there is a totally new approach, and the Defence Secretary no doubt with the inspirational input from his Commander-in-Chief, has to be given the credit for creating this new outlook towards how we prepare to defend ourselves.

For instance, the President recently said that we need to manufacture what we need in terms of weaponry and equipment to the greatest possible extent -- and this for instance was not something on the future-vision radar of any previous Commander-in-Chief.

The world's arms dealers needless to say thrive on conflict and unrest in nations far away from their own -- and through the agency of their own proxies sometimes they have been able to cynically foment the right amount of conflict that they need in order to sell their weapons. Weapons self-sufficiency is one way in which to be inured from their machinations while preserving our sovereignty and our territoriality, despite the various threats and impositions that come our way courtesy vested foreign interests.

One such imposition was the Indo-Lanka accord even though its antecedents may have not been linked to arms dealers. It is not an issue that we have the luxury of ignoring however, and our opinion makers say it has cause more problems than it has solved, and the more we think about recent history, it appears that homegrown is always best -- and home-made saves us tons of money while securing our national self respect integrity and the ability to withstand external influences.