Pradeep and I have cooked for each other several times over the last few weeks. He lives in the neighbourhood. I have been over about three times now and I have each time been hugely impressed by his expertise as a self-taught gourmet chef. If you check out his blog, you’ll know why.

The part I find most interesting, however, is the conversation afterwards. On two occasions now, Indi also has been present, along with a few of the usual suspects. I generally tend to throw them an incomplete idea that I have been thinking about and let the pride tear at it, ripping it apart. There’s no snarling, although, at times, it does get passionate. It’s a great forum for debate, because Pradeep is an encylopedia - his arguments are meaty - and he tackles it with a razor-sharp mind and serves it lightly with humour. And the great thing about having Indi sparring alongside, is that when it comes to argument, Indi is a different animal. His views are principle-centred, he is irreverently hilarious in expressing them, and he will not let go until he is completely satiated.

There are some issues that I still have not worked out in my head. Not that it matters to anyone else - heck, I’ll never be able to run for public office with the things I have said on this blog - but I like to have a clear position on things. To work out issues, having other people from opposing points of view debate it in front of you is great. It’s even better when you can interject and steer.

Anyway, all this is a preamble. What I really want to share with you on this post is this article that Pradeep wrote in his defence a few months ago. I really liked it and I read it again today. I agree with its point of view on the international community, it is a point of view that I have found impossible to express as well as Pradeep has in this article, without sounding like a paranoid NGO-basher. God knows, I am not one of those, but I think our history being the way it is, we have every reason to be skeptical of too much international interference, and a general attitude of mild suspicion of foreign intervention will be to our long-term advantage. Remember the Kandyan Treaty of 1638? I can’t express myself as well as the article does, so, I might as well reproduce it.

http://www.island.lk/2008/02/22/features4.html

ICES and ‘I’: the Struggle for a Critical Social Science

Dr. Pradeep Jeganathan,
Senior Research Fellow,
ICES, Colombo.

A mass protest against government attack on job security for young workers in France: ‘I then told him that I was, in turn, worried about the situation in France’.

The “I” in ICES:

September 2006 found me having dinner with a French Anthropologist, at the Delhi University international guest house. I had a month long visiting Fellowship in the famed Department of Sociology there, where I count many friends and colleagues, Jean Pierre was there for the launch of a co-edited volume on Bourdieu, the French Anthropologist who was deft enough to write a classic account of Algerian culture without mentioning violence once, while doing fieldwork in a time of revolt and revolution.

Jean Pierre (not his real name) told me he was very worried about Sri Lanka — the conflict, the violence, the Sinhalese and Tamils. I shared many of his concerns, and when I found his knowledge of Sri Lankan things was superficial, I tried to deepen his understanding, here and there. I then told him that I was, in turn, worried about the situation in France. He expressed surprise. When I said repression of youth protests, widespread racism directed against immigrants, when seen in the context of French intolerance of forms of female dress such as a headscarfs and veils, was very worrying to me, he stopped eating. “You worried!?” He said with amazement, pointing his fork at me. It obviously wasn’t a two-way street when it came to worry. He was worried about Sri Lanka, but was amazed when he heard I was worried about racism in France. When I went on to argue, that French racism was the basis of Franz Fanon’s celebrated analysis of the subject in Black Skin, White Mask — which I had used as the center piece of a global history class, when I was a professor in the US, he left the table, wandering off into the men’s room, not to return for some time. He didn’t even want to discuss it, well certainly not with me.

I first heard of Fanon, when I was an undergraduate intern at ICES. We didn’t really have a library in those days, but Regi Siriwardena had a copy and he lent it to me. It deepened my understanding of “whiteness” as well as “blackness.” Each time I asked my predominantly white, Lutheran students at the University of Minnesota to comment on his most famous line: “the Negro is not. Any more than the White Man,” I too read the line afresh, and understood a new, some thing about the world. When I joined ICES, the “I” in the International stood for that kind of vision. We were looking at the world, from its underbelly, from the point of view of those who had been colonized.

The “I” in ICG:

The I in ICG, the International Crisis Group, is not the I, in the ICES. It does not provide a located, anti-imperial view of the world, rather it provides us with a God’s eye view of “crisis;” not all over the world, but in carefully chosen trouble spots. If you scroll through the country selector on its website, you won’t even find India and China, or the United States or France mentioned; how these ‘crisis’ get selected, should be the subject of a research paper. In fact, North America doesn’t even appear as an area, and its European section doesn’t have regular reports on the Western part of the continent. It is a curious collection of small countries, that are positioned on a NATO or Western European centered political map, with ‘crisis’ that need what ICG calls ‘recommendations.’ North America is just a great blind spot that can never be commented on, but what’s most fascinating is the imputed audience for each set of recommendations. For example, a report on Thailand, has recommendations for the Thai government, a rare report on France, for which no country tab exists as pointed out above, has recommendations for the French government and activists, and a report on Sri Lanka, has three sets of recommendations, for the government. the LTTE and INGOs and foreign governments.

The ‘International Community’

The I in International Community, as used by the ICG, is quite the same as the I in ICG, and isn’t all that very far from the I in Imperial. This is in fact, the “I” that allowed my French colleague Jean Pierre to ‘worry’ over violence in Sri Lanka, but be amazed that I would worry over French racism and repression. When it comes to France, ICG has no recommendations for non—French institutions or organizations. Why, it is an internal matter, no doubt, none of any one else’s business! But when it comes to Sri Lanka, of course they have recommendations for the EU or INGOs.

The “I” in ICISS.

This is where the knowledge produced by ICG is crucial to what is now called, the “responsibility to protect” or R2P. It is in those crisis areas or trouble spots where, recommendations for outside actors and interests have been legitimized. And it is the need to underline this legitimacy, and foreclose criticism of it, that has made necessary, the labored, yet superficial claim that R2P, as a conceptual turn, is vastly innovative — and therefore a enormous advance towards global peace. This is just not true; and is based on a weak argument. The claim to a great advance, comes on several fronts — the first being that there is a rethinking and then a redefinition of State Sovereignty, in the conceptual casting of R2P. This supposedly, is all worked out in the Report of the International Commission on Intervention of State Sovereignty (ICISS). Note the I again! It isn’t really worked out there at all. As should be well known to serious political theorists, State Sovereignty, in pre-modern times was configured in two parts, and is embodied in the King and the King’s body, the subject people. Again, as is well known, the locus classicus of this argument is Kantorowicz’s account, and the literature that follows, whether it be Balibar or Lefort will tell you that in modern societies, it is the ‘people’ constituted as a community of equals, who represents themselves in a state which is an expression of their Sovereignty. The ICISS report does not address the basics of political theory, rather it asserts that if a state is unable or unwilling to protect its population, then its Sovereignty can be challenged to that extent. Well of course, that’s central to the charter of the United Nations, with the provision that a resolution of the Security Council or two thirds of the General Assembly meeting in Emergency Session supports this claim. And as such, intervention under UN authority is allowed under the charter. Does the ICISS claim to challenge this? Yes, most certainly! That’s the big innovation; according to the report, and this is tucked 57 pages in, a regional body (read NATO in Kosovo) or even another state, can intervene unilaterally in another, if it feels that there is a “responsibility to protect.”

So can we, at ICES, begin to study, with a view to intervening at once, racism in France or for that matter the US prison system, where inmates, who are a large proportion of the general population and belong to a minority group i.e., African-Americans, who are, as it is well known, subject to widespread and continuous rape and battery? No of course not, there is no “I”CG report on US prisons or the US for that matter. Sorry, you can’t feel responsible; the ICG doesn’t think it’s a crisis in the first place. The penny drops; this is why Gareth Evens has to be the head of ICG and the ICISS and now the new, Global Center for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P).

ICG decides for GCR2P what the cases are; and in those cases, a sub set of which are earmarked for third party ‘recommendations,’ it is asserted that state sovereignty has now been eroded. Sri Lanka is such a case, Burma is another. Thailand or India is not, because I very much suspect, that in those countries –one a long standing democracy, the other having struggled with this form of government for some time– such recommendations wouldn’t be tolerated by the state. Claims of Sovereignty and democracy are certainly not incompatible, it would seem.

And there is of course another criteria which comes in: when a country is ripe for third part recommendations to be made about it. Yes, you guessed it, it is also a failed or faling state, in the eyes of the International Community. That’s why it isn’t enough to address the state, or political groups within the country; oh no, they’ve failed, so we must look to the Internationals (that “I” again), who of course, never fail.

R2P & the UN

To counter mounting criticism in Sri Lanka over this idea of R2P, Rama Mani, in an interview, and Radhika Coomaraswamy in a widely publicized email letter claimed, the Sri Lanka state is a signatory to the 2005 World Summit declaration on R2P and thus, this concept has somehow been “bought” on our behalf, by the government. That’s just not true. The World Summit declaration, which has hundreds of paragraphs, mentions R2P in two, 138 and 139. But it only supports intervention under the charter of the UN — that is after Security Council resolutions and/or General Assembly sessions. Euro—American commentators, like Walter Hodge of the New York Times, have begun to refer to states having “buyers remorse” after signing on to R2P. Well that’s a misstatement, since they’ve never bought it in the first place; they couldn’t surely — a UN summit can not agree to overrule itself! GCR2P, an INGO, funded by multiple government sources and private sources, now established in a University in New York, is not, by any stretch of the imagination, an organ of the UN. But Coomaraswamy who serves on its advisory boards, acts like it is — telling us she is there on the express request of the Secretary General. Well, that’s nice, but it does not make it a UN body, does it? Rama Mani in an interview with Lakbima News makes a specious analogy with UN peace keeping forces in Haiti, which have a Sri Lankan contingent. Sri Lanka has participated in R2P operations, she cries out – so what’s wrong with it. That’s based on typically weak logic; UN peacekeepers, in Haiti or elsewhere, operate under the authority of the UN charter, under security council resolutions, not on a privately commissioned study, authorized by ICG and then regurgitated by the private GCR2P. The situations don’t compare, since what is at stake in the Sri Lankan debate right now, is the direct affiliation of ICES to GCR2P as an associated center.

This is not a matter of opposing the regime in power or not, as Paikiasothy Saravanamutthu and his colleagues have cast this. It’s a much larger issue; the decisions and directives of the GCR2P might well be violations of international law; catalyzing the movement of R2P from principle to practice may well be illegal. If the regime in power in Sri Lanka or elsewhere is committing atrocities against its population, the forum for expressing grave concern and demanding out side intervention, is the UN and its organs; to set up well funded and well heeled private organizations to be such fora might well be constituted as neo-imperial, giving the “I” in ICG, yet another meaning.

It is therefore really quite condescending for Romesh Thakur, to suddenly descend from on high and tell us, that questions of imperialism has long been settled, and in any event, is addressed in the ICISS report, of which he is a co—author. No, it is only an assertion, in this report — there is no argument as such, despite pages and pages of humming and hawing. In his recent opinion piece that was carried in the Hindu and also the Daily Mirror, Thakur cites straw men in an imagined Sri Lankan debate on the matter. He misses, perhaps through bad research or deliberate myopia, G.L Pieris’ reasoned arguments with Gareth Evens’ Tiruchelvam lecture, and again, his comments on Jayantha Dhanapala’s UNDP lecture, to which Tissa Jayathilaka replied. And I hope he will not miss this argument; if he, as an undoubted stand in-for my friend and colleague, Radhika Coomaraswamy, wants to continue with the debate.

While Thakur gets the contours of the Sri Lankan debate quite wrong, the real point is one that Evans labored over, as well. Neelan Thiruchelvam was a cosmopolitan, Evens said, and as such, would never have called R2P imperial. Cosmopolitans are those, in this argument, who’ve somehow got beyond imperialism, and are of course, comfortable with that wonderfully ill defined ‘international community’ of which of course the Canadian High Commissioner Angela Bogdan must be a member. By this argument neither G. L. Pieris nor Rajiva Wijesinha nor I am cosmopolitan; we are somehow parochial because we want to follow the logic of political theory (Pieris makes an important argument about the rule of states with recourse to social contract theory), or international law? Surely, this notion is extremely thin and not really worth further comment, except to note its function in the larger rubric. It is these cosmopolitans who liaise between the third party Internationals, the High level High Commissioners, and their friends, the parochial locals who aren’t really educated and refined — this is the thin upper crust in the society of any failed state, and it’s the kind of interlocutor Grath Evens likes.

Imperial or International?

The “I” matters after all. It matter who speaks and from what position. And it matters if the “I” stands for Imperial or International, and then in turn, what kind of International. ICC, would a good, final example. Once the Imperial Cricket Council, it then metamorphosed into the International Cricket Council, which is when Umpire Hair “called” Muralidharan in the famous Boxing Day test in Australia. The I in International was pretty close to Imperial, in 1995. It took a massive struggle over knowledge, who knows what and how, to establish that elbow flexing was pretty universal among bowlers. And then it took the leaking of an ICC report that Bret Lee flexes more that Murali to finally put the matter to rest. Alternative knowledge matters, and articulating it critically matters as much. That was central to the ICES I joined in 1987, as an undergraduate intern, and it was central to its projects for decades after. It gives me a sad, empty feeling to realize that arguments made on crucial matters by authoritative ICES voices, like those of Radhika Coomaraswamy and Rama Mani are based on bad fact and argument, and more, that we’ve lost the ability to think for ourselves.

Take for example, the simple fact that even though there has been widespread tub thumping about R2P, none of the associated books or journal articles are available in ICES, Colombo’s library — I had to find all the source materials used in this argument myself, an area of research which is far removed from my speciality. We’ve never had a serious in-house discussion of these issues based on a close reading of the documents, and there isn’t one serious article written by any one on the staff, that thinks through these issues. ICES is nowhere where it used to be.

In the old days, when the I in ICES, actually stood for some thing, the ICES, I joined, believed in, and returned from a coveted job in the US to work for, would have been at the forefront of whatever debate that we chose to enter, not from up high, as Internationals who are better than locals, but as internationals who are also local, located, recovering from colonialism and the ongoing brutalities of violence, to contribute, despite and through that experience, not only to the tradition of critical social science in this country, or the region, but beyond, in the world at large.

Navin: mara drama

From the children’s section of today’s The Island.

Dude. I thought I had heard everything when The Island published the words “pubic nuisance” instead of “public nuisance” a few months ago. Clearly, I was unhappily mistaken. In a bid to outdo themselves, perhaps in an attempt to set a Guinness World Record, The Island newspaper continues to astound. These poems appeared in the children’s supplement, The Happy Island, today. On the cover, we find a serene looking boy of about six years old dressed in white looking over a little golden child monk’s statue. It is a picture of serenity, in keeping with the beauty, religious piety and moral superiority we have come to expect from this peaceful island, reflected of course in the values of the newspaper in question. Love for his fellow men veritably drips from the pen of the editor.

And on the inside, page 2, in fact, we find this. Above. I am not kidding. Yes, that’s right. Children’s section. If nothing else, this justifies what Tracy Holsinger was talking about on her daytripper blog a few weeks ago. Don’t Sri Lankan editors check this stuff? I mean, someone should get fired for this, if not the newspaper being shut down. How many kids are going to read this and ask their mums, “Ammi, what’s a quick-fire dick?”. How many will insist on playing with the paedophile uncles with their teddy bears?

A call to the he managing director of The Island resulted in the knowledge that they have been getting calls all day long and that they claim that ’someone hacked into the computer system and replaced the copy’. Bullshit. He’s still accountable. This is the second absurd gaff in the space of a few months. Someone needs to get fired.

The poster says, ‘The story of the Ramayana will be revealed through a new perspective, that of Ravana, who up to now has been portrayed as the “Demon King of Sri Lanka.”‘ I’m definitely going to try and see this ( above). It sounds as if they are finally listening to my side of it.

The last Ramayana play I went to see a few months ago, was put on by the Elizabeth Moir School. I enjoyed it. It was definitely of a school standard, and the acting, in general, was not exceptional, but it was a decent production, which had a number of points to recommend it. Lucky Attygalle, the director/teacher-in-charge, I discovered later, had written the script herself, which impressed me. It was a good choice of school play and there were some interesting facets of it, like the choreagraphy of the monkey scenes, and the fact that all the monkeys were played by younger students of the school, resulting in the monkeys actually being diminutive in size, when compared with the humans. The costumes were beautiful and made up for the relatively sparse stage.

Unfortunately though, they didn’t get the story right. They did make an effort to show the human side of Ravana, but this is not really what I want. I am quite comfortable with the demon persona. After all, it gives me the opportunity to repeat the words of Al Pacino in The Devil’s Advocate and actually mean them. (”Well, on a scale of one to ten… ten being the most depraved act of sexual theatre know to man… one being your average Friday night run-through at the household… I’d say, not to be immodest, your wife and I got it on at about… eleven.”) The Sita-throwing-herself-at-me-and-being-secretly-in-love-with-me bit is the part that they got wrong, but then again it IS a school production, and I guess there’s only so much you can be expected to swallow. That’s not what she said though.

However, one thing I did like was Rama and the Ayodhya crowd depicted as a bunch of traditionalist fogies, while Lanka was like the happening place. The costumes especially, brought this out. Ravana was like the most fashionably dressed. Very cool. Lets see if I can try and find some photos.

Hmmmm. Here goes:

That’s Ravana and his brother in Lanka. See what I mean about the funky clothes? I think we should all be wearing this kind of stuff. All the time.

That’s Rama standing up (above), talking to the beautiful Sita, and looking on in the background is Kaikeyi, who was a proper little (albeit underage) minx. Those are the monkeys below.

So, I’ll let you know how I liked this next production after I see it.

I remembered on Saturday, forgot on Sunday, and upto now, still haven’t called. By some strange coincidence, however, I inadvertently wrote this, below, at the writers’ group meeting last evening. My mind must surely work in strange ways, if I can put something like this down on paper, and not realise what I had specifically decided to make a point to remember only the day before.

“Her night time ritual was always accompanied by her telephone, and the thoughts of her son who she missed very much. She wondered, as she scuttled around her little bedroom attending to the Ponds Face Cream bottle instructions, where he was, what he was doing, and whether he would come and see her this weekend. As she brushed her salt’n'pepper hair exactly one hundred times, she thought of the things that she would say to him if he would call: about old Sopi and her daughter’s truant husband, the lemon butter rulang cake that she had baked this afternoon (just like the old days when her son was little), and the leaking roof on the veranda that the baas had promised to fix two months ago, but which was still neglected, and still dripping.

She wondered if her son was awake. She had a momentary pang - a fleeting urge to dial his number - but she discarded this thought as she dropped the cotton buds into her bedside wastepaper basket. She had not seen him in months - the third of January, to be exact - and she had scarcely been able to chat to him on that occasion because he was in a hurry - an important meeting. Her son worked hard, she knew, even on Sundays, and even though this usually prevented her from spending more time with him, she forced herself to take comfort in the fact that she had raised such a diligently useful pillar of society.”

Strange, huh? I better go make a few calls now.

There is a lot of B.S. about patriotism these days. I don’t mean that patriotism itself as a concept is bullshit. Neither, do I imply that we Sri Lankans should not be patriotic about our country. What I deride, however, is the sense of pride, identity and loyalty that many of our countrymen display exclusively towards their own ethnic or religious group. Again, these feelings on their own are hardly harmful, but when they masquerade as patriotism for country, it becomes downright destructive, not to mention a tad irritating (but then, I do tend to have little patience with the retarded).

Patriotism is not the same as the love of, and pride in, religion. It is certainly arguable that it can sometimes be interchanged with love of nation (nationalism), where a nation is a group of people with a defined cultural and social community, but this is not an understanding of patriotism that I like. Nevertheless, even if we do use this definition, to view current Sri Lanka in these terms would be to realise that an intense feeling of nationalism in the majority Sinhala Buddhist population is ridiculously counterproductive to its own political and military aim of keeping the country together. If you want an undivided country, you need nation-building, true. But you need to build an idea of nation that keeps all important groups defined within it, not locked out of it. Building an idea of nation in Sri Lanka that is exclusively Sinhala Buddhist is what the terrorists want. That’s why they are also called separatists. (It’s quite simple really, I don’t know why some people don’t get it. Oh yeah, of course, the retards - I keep forgetting).

The bird brain’s view of patriotism.

So, the billboards referring to Mahinda Rajapaksa as the next Dutugemunu did not help. Neither, did the independence day pennants along the roads which read (exlusively in Sinhalese) “Shakthimath nayakayek, shakthimath jathiyak, shakthimath ratak”, which translated means “A strong leader, a strong nation / ethnicity, a strong country.” I had an awkward time explaining this to a fellow Sri Lankan who happened to be Tamil. The word jathiya can be technically interpreted as nation or ethnicity, but if you ask a Sinhala man on the street what his jathiya is, he is likely to cite his ethnicity. This type of government communication is utterly counterproductive to building a common Sri Lankan identity, and it also follows that it is counterproductive to the purported political and military ideology of this government: that Sri Lanka is one nation, one country, and should not be divided.

Fortunately, however, love of a particular government is only required to be a patriot if the elected government is actually representing the best interests of the people it claims to represent. There are certain times at which goverments are tempted to tramp all over the interests of the people. And, really, you can argue about what constitutes country, but surely The People must be a large part of it? Much more so than the government? At least? Another thing that constitutes country, far more so in my opnion than a particular government controversially elected by a whisker, is the constitution. That is perhaps why it’s called the constitution. (Take note, retards).

And, sometimes, governments in their enthusiasm to keep the country together, or in their enthusiasm for for easy solutions, or their enthusiasm for utterly retarded courses of action, decide to act against the constitution. Most often these instances probably go unnoticed. However, when these instances are open for everyone to see, there is a burden on every citizen to stand against such violations, because the constitution must, at the very least, seem to be obeyed. Upholding the chief instrument that defines one’s country - the constitution - is required of every true patriot. If a part of the constitution becomes outdated or irrelevant, it can be changed, constitutionally.

However, not everyone in our country agreed with this when, last year, the government tried to evict over three hundred Sri Lankans from Colombo and send them away forcibly back to their “homes”. It was huge blunder on the part of the government, apart from being legally and morally reprehensible. Yet, a few seemingly intelligent beings capable of putting pen to paper, not to mention fingertip to typepad, appeared utterly distraught at the outcry of civil society. And the worst part of it was that they claimed to be patriots.

Hogwash. They wouldn’t know true love of country if it rogered them up the ass.

P.S. By the way, the Supreme Court gave it’s ruling a few hours ago that the evictions last year were against many articles of the constitution. You can read CPA’s press release below. My congratulations to them, the true patriots, in this instance.

http://www.cpalanka.org/Statements/CPA_welcomes_Supreme_Court_order_on_evictions.pdf

This is a poem Vivi sent me some weeks ago. It was written in 1985 by an Indian feminist economist named Bina Agarwal.

Sita Speak

Sita, speak your side of the story,
We know the other too well.
Your father married you to a prince,
Told you to be pliable as the bow
In your husband’s hand.
Didn’t you note Ram broke the magic bow?
They say you-the ideal daughter –
Bowed your head in obedience
As you were sent away

With your husband you chose exile
Suffered privation, abduction
And then the rejection –
The chastity test on the scorching flames The victim twice victimised.
Could those flames turn to flowers without Searing the soul?

They say you were the ideal wife
You questioned him not
And let him have his way
The poets who wrote your story
Said: a woman is not worthy of hearing the Ramayana; like a beast she is fit only For being beaten Could such poetry ever bring you glory?
Yet, they spoke their verses without challenge and With such falsehoods got away.

Sita Speak

You who could lift the magic bow and play With one hand Who could command the earth with a wordHow did they silence you?

(Bina Agarwal 1985)

I came to you to hurt someone.

I came to you because I was pissed off.

I needed something to comfort me, someone to hold.

I needed someone to make her as mad

As she had made me.

I was angry.

I knew the way she felt about you.

She had never liked your kind,

Always insisting that we never

Shared your company,

To the point that she could hardly bear

To share drawing room or restaurant

With the allure of your wafting charm.

What better way to get to her,

Make her ill with worry,

Than to be seen holding you.

Like I said,

I needed to be comforted

and calmed,

And although I had never

Succumbed to your spell,

I saw your hex on lesser men:

an impulsive rush

a frozen calm

a withdrawing tease

and long degradation.

But, like I said, I was pissed off.

I cared less about the ever after.

I came to hurt someone

that night

at a student bar

at a university not far from Coventry

at the age of twenty one.

I’ve been smoking ever since.

I just discovered today that the image I’ve been using of Ravana on the blog for two years is actually from a movie that has just been shown at the Tribeca Film Festival. It seems to be historical in more ways than one. Here’s wired.com’s piece on it:

One-Woman Pixar’s Animated Film Premieres at Tribeca

Sita Sings the Blues weaves together Flash animation, original watercolor paintings and rotoscoping techniques in this colorful, modern-day take on an ancient Indian epic.
Courtesy Nina Paley

NEW YORK — Amid the documentaries and live-action features at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival is a first for the event — a feature-length, computer-generated animated film rendered entirely by a single animator, working out of a home office.

Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, which makes its North American premiere Friday at the festival, tells two parallel stories: the ancient Hindu epic the Ramayana and the breakup of Paley’s 21st-century marriage. It does so through four distinct styles of animation, a “greek chorus” of Indonesian shadow puppets and wildly imaginative musical interludes that use authentic 1920s blues recordings to link narratives 3,000 years apart.

Best known in the 1990s for her comic strip Nina’s Adventures, Paley turned to animation in 1998, mostly using Flash, and produced the illusion-rich Fetch and the award-winning series of shorts The Stork (which portrayed each “bundle of joy” delivered by the stork as a population bomb).

Over an Indian lunch in the Curry Hill section of Manhattan, Paley talked about tech, heartbreak, rotoscoping and her new film.

Nina Paley mixes the Ramayana, blues songs and her personal tale of heartbreak in Sita Sings the Blues.
Courtesy Nina Paley

Wired: What is your movie about?

Nina Paley: Sita Sings the Blues is a musical, animated personal interpretation of the Indian epic the Ramayana. The aspect of the story that I focus on is the relationship between Sita and Rama, who are gods incarnated as human beings, and even they can’t make their marriage work [laughs].

Wired: And that ties in with the film’s second narrative.

Paley: Right, and then there’s my story. I’m just an ordinary human, who also can’t make her marriage work. And the way that it fails is uncannily similar to the way Rama and Sita’s [relationship fails]. Inexplicable yet so familiar. And the question that I asked and the question people still ask is, “Why”? Why did Rama reject Sita? Why did my husband reject me? We don’t know why, and we didn’t know 3,000 years ago. I like that there’s really no way to answer the question, that you have to accept that this is something that happens to a lot of humans.

Wired: And this whole movie was rendered on a laptop?

Paley: I started on a G4 titanium laptop in 2002. I moved to a dual 1.8-GHz tower in 2005, moved again to a 2-by-3-GHz Intel tower December 2007, with which I did the final 1920 x 1080 rendering.

Wired: What software did you use?

Paley: It was animated primarily in Flash. I made some original watercolor paintings by hand, which I scanned and animated in After Effects. I can’t believe I’m such a tech booster now, ’cause I used to be a Luddite!

Wired: Mostly in Flash? How many .fla files, for the Flash geeks out there?

Paley: Let’s see; say six shots per minute, 80-odd minutes, so it’s close to 500 individual scene files.

Wired: I thought I saw some rotoscoping in Sita.

Paley: You did. That was Reena Shah dancing. She did the speaking voice of Sita and she also danced. I videotaped her and traced elements of the dance in Flash. That wasn’t an automatic program, it was all by hand.

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/hollywood/news/2008/04/sita

It’s 4:30am and I can’t sleep. I did the usual things: got wiped out at an online poker game, tried installing Hellgate London, and checked my mail. There was one particular mail from a friend that came with just one line that read “This is cruel, but funny”, and a link. It was a link to a website called www.mingers.com.

A minger, in British slang, is someone who mings: an ugly person. When I clicked on the link and went to the website it was full of real life pictures of ugly people. There was a minging couples section, a readers’ contributions section, and even a minger of the week. This, incidently, is this week’s minger of the week:

My initial reaction was one of disdain at the cruel mind that had not only concocted this idea, but had gone to the trouble of executing it. This feeling quickly eroded when - trolling through the photographs - I started laughing at how fugly some of them were. I guess that’s one of the basest forms of humour. It possibly had something to do with a feeling of gratitude to god or nature or karma or my ancestors that I wasn’t this fucking ugly. My chances of passing on my genes (if you wish to look at it this way) were so much better than these poor non-threatening mingers with their fugly genes. The extent to which it was so, was ridiculous, even laughable. I felt better about myself, and I had the urge to mail the link to a friend of mine who worries about her weight, to make her feel better.

Through all this, I experienced a feeling of sympathy in the background.

And then a little later, the feeling changed again. When I was checking out the couples section, I felt something else. The thing is, all the couples looked happy. And not just camera happy. Like really happy. I’m not talking about posed smiley shots - everybody looks happy in those - but these minging couples looked unusually happy to me. Like they were meant to be together or something. Maybe, it was my sympathy kicking in, latching on to the dying remnants of a belief that the world is fair and that everything balances out in the end. Or, maybe, it’s easy to let your imagination take control when it’s 5:17am in the morning, there’s an April cuckoo threatening to start cooing outside, and you’ve had absolutely no sleep.

So, check it out and let me know whether I’m imagining this.

Also, before you go, let me leave you with another thought. Below is a picture I came across years ago. I want to know: why on earth would anyone want to do this to themselves?

I thought about this for awhile. And I think, someone would do this to themselves either because they became compulsively addicted to being pierced, or (and here’s the exciting bit) they felt they were ugly in the first place, and they wanted to be sure, and excel at it. You know when you think you have a talent in something and you hone your skill at it? Something like that. Maybe, being ugly was the only thing that set this guy apart from the herd. He felt he was ugly. And, he just wanted to be really sure. He wanted to be better at being ugly than anyone else.

Or, maybe, he wanted to find true love.

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P.S. I’m going to go and try to sleep now. I feel kinda ugly for writing this. Goodnight.

He is one of the most famous singers in the country, but he says he does not have a good voice. For the last three decades, he has been one of our most recognizable citizens, but he says he is not good looking. So, what is it then that has made this man and his band so infectiously popular across all age groups, language barriers and income classes? It is his humour. “When you write something about your life, that relates to a lot of people”, he says. “People are fed up with this serious stuff.” Perhaps it was also his sense of humour that helped him woo a bombshell fourteen years his younger, who he married when he was thirty. Now, he is the father of two beautiful daughters and two talented sons who have their own band with their own recent hit single.

He is the epitome of a kana bona Moratuwa miniha - a man with an extra large appetite for all that life offers. Some may call him a libertine, but he is clearly a man who loves his country, albeit one who is disillusioned with what he sees as the hypocrisy of its people. This is a theme that reflects strongly in his band’s last album, which was strongly satirical about Sri Lankan society. His songs have have always been simple and catchy. The country has danced to them at parties and weddings, sung them on trips, and watched the music videos on television.

However, his success has not been without controversy. His sound has been hijacked to communicate political propaganda against his will, and he had a much publicized skirmish with one prominent son of a politician. His popularity and influence would make him an ideal political candidate, and he has been approached by political parties. However, this is something he clearly finds distasteful. “To me the political situation in Sri Lanka is like a toilet”, he says. “When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go. But, nobody likes to live in there. It’s in such a pathetic situation.”

The man himself interviewing Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga, Mahinda Rajapaksa, Anura Bandaranaike, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, a UNP-er, and some JVP comrade with a very large plug.

The first interview I ever did was with Sunil Perera in 2005. It appeared in two parts in The LT magazines of July and August of that year, and later Serendipity magazine ran an edited version of it in January 2006. Timothy Senaviratne took the photographs and Deshan Tennekoon did the design and layout. The man was so open and displayed so much of his, er, personality that I couldn’t publish everything that happened at the interview.

Here are the PDF files of the two parts of the interview as they appeared in the LT magazine. I am warning you: it’s not short. (If you want to go straight to the sex, it’s at the start of the second part).

interview-with-sunil-perera-for-LT-part-1

interview-with-sunil-perera-for-LT-part-2

Shorter version of interview with Sunil Perera for Serendipity

“Sri Lanka is not a design country”, Lars Wallentin, a packaging design guru said at a workshop I attended in 2003. I think he mentioned Norway and Sweden as examples of countries with good design. I don’t know how accurate that is. He’s mainly a packaging designer, so wha’d he know anyway, right?

Nokia, granted, is extraordinarily designed, but my first choice would be Japan. That’s because of the way the Japanese have a long history of incorporating great design into nearly every practical area of their lives, often elevating the mundane into superlative forms of art and technology at the same time. Take their rock gardens, for instance. Or, their samurai swords. Or, the way they present their food. Or, the way they drink their tea. Or, their hairstyles. Or, their kimonos. Or, their martial arts. Or, their animation. Or, even Shibari, their bondage style. Yes, that’s right - they’ve even got a form of art for tying people up.

I guess, it’s just because humans like things that look cool, and these things just look so fucking cool. The architect Pugin who worked on the British Houses of Parliament said, “It is alright to decorate a construction, but never (to) construct a decoration.” Good design is not merely creating design for design’s sake, its taking a practical activity and making it better. Good design should be a part of our culture.

Certainly, Sri Lanka does not have great design in packaging, neither do we choreograph our drinking, nor do we have a traditional art of tying up our significant others, which is understandable (coconut husk rope being so itchy). However, we do have some cool architecture, probably some of the best in the world for the tropics.

Geoffrey Bawa has a lot to do with this. I love his stuff, because it is simple, practical, relaxed, and it blends into the natural surroundings. It is open and light and cool - the way things should be in the tropics.

So, I was happy today when a friend sent me the following presentation on nine Sri Lankan architects shortlisted for the Geoffrey Bawa Award for Architecture. Have a look.

Geoffrey Bawa Award for Architecture

This is from an article I wrote for TimeOut Delhi which appears in their latest issue. The photograph was taken by Deshan Tennekoon. Since leaving the cushy corporate job last month to pursue things like writing, advertising, and teaching economics, which interest me more, I have been pleased with the number of assignments I have been getting. I realise that going free lance is no easy task, but the initial signs are encouraging.

Prasanna Vithanage is one of the most controversial and outspoken film directors in Sri Lanka today. His subject matter usually succeeds in irritating the sensibilities of the prudish Sri Lankan establishment by exploring facets of society that are traditionally kept locked in the almirah.

Vithanage has rare credentials: he is one of few Sri Lankan artistes, if not the only one, to successfully battle a minister and the National Film Corporation and win his right to freedom of expression. In 2001 (?) he managed to convince the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka to overturn a ministerial ban on his Purahanda Kaluwara (Darkness on a Full Moon Day, 1997). However, in spite of his boldness, he has achieved recognition for the sensitive and introspective quality of his films by winning awards on the international film festival circuit in Amiens, Singapore, Fribourg, Las Palmas and Makati.

Pavuru Walalu (1990 / 105mins), or Walls Within as it is referred to in English, will be featured at the Sri Lankan Film Festival – Commemorating 60 Years of Indo-Sri Lankan Diplomatic Relations at the end of March. It is a tale which portrays extramarital love, infidelity and abortion - taboo subjects in a country still failing to agree on its post colonial moral identity. Two lovers, separated by World War II, meet twenty years later. The conflict between personal and familial ties results in upheaval, guilt, and loss in a forceful and stark depiction of social reality.

Time Out met Prasanna Vithanage in Colombo one evening last week to ask him about his work, the industry and its struggles. He was punctual, wearing a polo shirt and looking a tad tired, but enthusiastic, after a long day of editing his next film, Akasa Kusum. He asked us to call him by his first name.

TO: Critics have identified “reflectivity” as the primary virtue of your work. What do they mean?

PV: All my films have been an inside-outside process. I have tried to capture what is happening inside the character, unlike say, in action films. They are personal films, when a filmmaker tries to capture human life and society through himself: through his contradictions, memories, and opinions. I have used my films as a kind of self expression.

TO: You are also a theatre director. What was your first love?

PV: Film making was my first love, although I love to work with good actors and theatre has given me a base to find and work with them. I love working with actors, blocking and understanding the character, even in film, but it is different. In theatre you get that live experience.

TO: Why do you think that theatre actors are better than film actors?

PV: In this country, either we have theatre actors or teledrama actors. Our teledramas lack subtext, whereas in a play the most important thing is the subtext. You feel it when good actors and actresses are acting what is going on inside them, but in teledramas always they are talking about the issue and about the emotion. Teledramas have become a launching pad for bad actors.

TO: In your opinion what is the biggest challenge that Sri Lankan directors face?

PV: The biggest challenge to any artist, especially in a polarized country, is to capture the lie. I feel we are losing the middle ground, even the slightest thing like, lets say, depicting a soldier visiting a brothel. The film maker may be interested in the soldier’s loneliness, but the present ethnic war will have a big share in the way the situation is interpreted. The various groups who are thriving on polarization will come against the film maker on their grounds, because they wish to see the soldier as something else, and the war as something else.

Maybe the filmmaker’s intention was to capture the war, or how the present situation has affected our human relationships. It has changed us over the past twenty-five years, but if I show it in a film, maybe the state and its apertures will not like it. So that is the biggest challenge: to be truthful to what you see, and to reach the public in a society where the people are in a kind of fear psychosis.

TO: What is the present state of censorship in Sri Lanka?

PV: The state does not like filmmakers portraying the war in a negative light. The present situation has given a red light to the artist that you have to talk according to the government line, the government values. They have not proclaimed these values, but they mean the old values, our traditional cultural values. Because of the war and the resulting polarization of society along ethnic and religious lines in our country, and the effect of globalization, nationalist feelings have erupted. And, the censor board is a symbol of this.

TO: Leaving the content of their propaganda aside, do you have any admiration for the way the government is using the media to control the population?

PV: [indignantly] No, I don’t have any admiration. I think an artist creates something because he disagrees with the norms or the society or the establishment. And if he becomes a part of the establishment, I think he ceases to become an artist.

TO: Will Sri Lankan directors let their content be influenced by this situation we are in?

PV: I think for me, all the restrictions, in one way will make the expression of the artist more subtle and the work better and when a film becomes more subtle it will make audiences more intelligent.

END

So that’s the TimeOut article. Incidentally, Prasanna is currently finishing up a production with the producer of The Full Monty, called Machang, about a bogus Sri Lankan handball team that goes missing in London. It is written by Ruwanthie De Chickera and stars her brother and my friend, Gihan De Chickera. Prasanna is also working on Akasa Kusum, about a faded movie star coming to grips with a new world and her own demons, starring Malani Fonseka.

After talking to Prasanna, I feel very interested in his work. I am going to buy his box set from Torana.

Kids will absolutely love watching Geoffrey Case’s Samurai. It is colourful, lighthearted, and full of movement. Case wrote it with a young audience in mind. The play has themes that are relevant to what is happening in Sri Lanka, and it is hoped that this will get young people thinking.

At work today, I came across this conversation between twofriends. You may know them, but not as Anusha and Buvaneka.  Buvaneka’s interest is aroused when he spots Anusha’s status message: Anusha is surrounded by characters from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Buvaneka: Ah, I see it is a normal day at work, then?

Dude.

That cake was f—ing awesome man,

Like really awesome.

Awesome, awesome, awesome.

So, a friend sent me this today. It turns out, the angels and demons of Elizabeth Moir School are going to trod the boards with their version of the Ramayana.

I sent my friend my version of the story with a note saying that I hope they get it right. My friend replied and said that they are going to depict the conflict between Rama and myself as a divide between the old and the modern. I have to say, I am pleased to be thought of as modern, but I guess it’s understandable that they think Ram is old fashioned. He doesn’t have a blog. And, he’d never say something like, “I am going to see the play fo sho“.

I really do hope they get the story right though. Some of the gossip I have overheard about me is just plain ludicrous. According to some, I forcibly kidnapped Sita and kept her captive in a cave. In a cave. That makes me sound like bloody Hannibal Lecter. If this play starts to go along those lines, I think I might just lose my cool enough to get up in the audience and set the story straight.

But then again, I gave up defending myself after the 20th Century. (That is B.C., by the way). I gave up because, the story just ain’t that easy to explain. You have to explain the whole background and stuff, and set up the characters, and then the backstory. Sometimes, you have to even introduce new concepts and words.

You try explaining to a bunch of school kids that the reason that they found her tied up was because she liked it better that way. The last time I tried to explain that, they thought she just liked munching M&Ms. Sigh…