Those who identify with issues that deal with country or gender, identify with these matters as an end in themselves. That was not supposed to be how it was. Why does identification become an end in itself for so many people?
Some of these identities are innocuous enough. They have been borrowed from experience, or have something to do with nostalgia.
People identify with the groups they grew up in. It could be as simple as the group that met in the corner, on fifth avenue, near the grocery store. It can be that precise.
It is in this context that this writer hopes to base this article on nostalgia for the past. People do say much about how and where they grew up, and some periods are special it seems on a global scale.
There are enough websites dedicated to 60s memorabilia for instance. They say that the 60s was a period in which everyone lost their innocence. That may have been true in London or Tokyo. But in Sri Lanka in the 60s, people’s innocence was still intact.
The rulers were essentially aimless in the 60s in this country, and so were the people. Different classes of people may have had their own approach to life, though. There was much more chronic poverty in the country than there is now.
But all this is glossed over by those who remember the 60s as the era of innocence. The 70s are remembered as a time when this innocence was lost somewhat. But even that sort of transition was not traumatic. It’s as if uncle Dudley was replaced by Aunty Sirima and Uncle Colvin, and the tea party was still in progress in earnest.
People had that opportunity in Sri Lanka those days to be avuncular about their leadership. What would a teenager of say the 2020s say to a youth of the 1970s if they met in a parallel universe where time was warped and everyone remained the same age?
PERISHED
The 20s youth would say that his father is baying for the blood of the leadership. The chap from the 70s would probably go, “but that’s very rude.” He would say they were clamouring for a physical altercation with Uncle Dudley too, if only to lock up his camera because he looked far too much of a tourist going around examining fields of potatoes with a Hasselblador Nikon slung around his shoulder.
The 20s boy would look perplexed. As far as he knows, these decisions about appearance of politicos are taken by the handlers. But for Dudley it had nothing to do with appearance. He was in love with his camera and thought nothing of indulging in his hobby of taking photographs while he did his job as Prime Minister.
The boy from the 70s would say that as things went on, in the 70s they began becoming very angry about their politicians too. Say for instance, there was this driven person by the name of Felix Dias Bandaranaike who was someone like the priest who committed murder, Matthew Peiris, except that Felix didn’t murder anyone. It was just that they were both as mad as hatters but in their different ways.
That guy Felix turned politics into a wallauwa-illauwa type of pursuit. For those who do not know the argot, wallauwa-illauwa can be roughly translated as the eccentricity of the manor. To which today’s teenager from the 2020s would probably retort by asking what they did to him, this Felix character? Did they try to tear him limb to limb?
SUPPLIED
Imagine his surprise when he is told that the most they did about Felix was to make a movie about him. That was the most they did to politicians they disliked those days. They pilloried them in a flick and had a good laugh, and then they came up with all types of extraordinary names for leftist politicians who didn’t leave them enough material with which they could even make so much as a movie, or even a stage drama.
Those politicians took things so personally that most of them died — of their own accord as it were — soon after losing elections. A whole string of Cabinet Ministers from the 70s perished in the months or couple of years after they had been thrown out of the political arena completely by voters who made them lose their seats under the first past the post system.
Now it would be the turn of the 20s kid to say “that’s rude.” As far as he’s concerned he only knows politicians who keep coming back even after they have lost all credibility. They are perpetually in parliament. It’s strange he says out loud, that nobody is arguing for the restoration of first past the post. Imagine all politicians in retirement soon after an election?
But what could people do those days? They couldn’t rant against politicians regularly retiring to five star hotels because the only hotels in which people could indulge in some excess those days were the Fountain Café and the Taprobane. Those two were also essentially hole in the wall operations except that they were a little bit more up market than the Chinese joints that did so much brisk business in the past as they do now. (That being the only thing that was constant that straddled different eras.)
Even the song lyricists didn’t become overtly philosophical those days and were content with stringing together some words about ladies who are nice in Bombay and matters of that sort which may have been as far as they went to make any allusions to geopolitical reality those days. This is in contrast to the guy from today who has to put up with rap that is so political, and politics that is so mushy.
The 2020s kid knows everything is franchised in his time. Even the maalupaangs are sold at franchised operations which insist on calling these comestibles fish buns. In the 70s maalupaangs were sold along with schoolbooks and other nick-knacks by the mom and pop shop operators who ran formidable businesses from their smallish premises, which if they were run today would be called boutique boutiques. That’s because everything is called boutique these days if they want to jack up the price, and so you have boutique hotels and boutique lodges, which means that they would have called mom and popoperations boutique boutiques if they had half a chance.
IDENTIFY
Everything is franchised to such an extent these days, that if they want to run anything the mom and pop partners of today would have to think about something original such as cryogenically preserving corpses, or some venture even Elon Musk wouldn’t touch.
Now we know why people who identify with their pasts even if they were originally from the 70s way back, do it as an end in itself. Why should they have any agendas when in their pasts nobody including the politicians had any agendas?
Imagine when all the politicians wanted to do was to get by and maybe take some pictures of potatoes? It was impossible for politicians to do anything wrong those days because they didn’t do anything, either good or bad in the first place.
Others got by too. No one in particular was angling for anything. The mom and pop shop supplied most people’s needs, and if people wanted to splurge they went to a place with a name as simple as Fountain Café.
It was not so much that there was a show to run those days. People who identify with their pasts as if they have perpetual nostalgia overload, do so because they yearn for a time when the show ran itself. Nobody thought of running it. That would have been somewhat like attempting to take over the work of the universe, and keeping the world turning. We don’t have to create night and day, it happens by itself. That was how it was in the pasts that people remember. The show ran. It ran itself. Everybody had day passes to it.
Rajpal Abeynayake