Gratitude: An Interesting Concept
By Emil van der Poorten –April 17, 2016
Emil van der Poorten
What follows is not an attempt at some intellectual exercise but some random thoughts that have arisen thanks to public perceptions and applications of the term gratitude and, on a more personal level, the practice of “gratitude,” in a variety of ways without any reference to what the sum total of cause and effect amounts to in the matter.
It has now become, thanks to a shallow and irresponsible media, graven into the granite of Sri Lankan history that the Rajapaksas, particularly Mahinda and his ultra-militaristic younger sibling whose arrogance appears to know no limit, were responsible for “saving the Sinhala Buddhists” from total decimation by the Dravidians (now followed by those practicing Islam) both of whom and even collectively happen to belong to minorities which would be considered small by any standards.
This “saving” has achieved mythic proportions ranging from Dutgemunu, in the prime of life, slaying the Dravidian devil incarnate, Elara, when the latter was something like 80 years old, to the butchery of Nanthikadal, the likes of which has never been recorded in the history of Sri Lanka.
Out of the “saving” which, given all the evidence should point to, at least, dilution of that grandiose term, what it has spawned, in the Mahavamsa tradition, is a grandiose history which seeks to diminish the reality of people other than the small chauvinistic rump that dictates public policy in this country. When they are not loudly espousing the cause of this religiosity, as do outfits such as the Bodu Bala Sena, they claim custodianship of even the Buddhist clergy whose “independence” they proclaim it is their bounden duty to “protect.” That Buddhism and its Buddhist clergy have survived more than a millennium of persecution and marginalization without the endeavours of those such as Minister Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe seems to escape these defenders of all things they designate to be of any cultural/religious significance. Incidentally, the two terms I have just used have become interchangeable because those wielding the authority to make it so have chosen precisely that route.
The condemnation I make is not directed only at the Mahinda Rajapaksa dispensation (MR1) but at the Maithri/Ranil (MR2) horde as well. What these people have chosen to do is to distort Sri Lanka social and political history in such a manner that future generations of every ethnicity in this country are, at best, going to be seen as a bunch of Idi Amin acolytes or, at worst, the South Asian equivalent of ISIS.
