This Pretentious Plenitude

(loketa parakase, gedarata maragate )

“On 3 June, 1400, the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus entered Paris. By the showy standards of contemporary state visits, Manuel cut a sory figure. Accompanied by fewer than sixty of his own attendants, speaking nothing but Greek, mounted on a borrowed white charger and dependent for his travelling expenses on his hosts, he had come to beg for money and troops in the hope of preserving his shrunken domains from the Ottoman Turks.”

– Cursed Kings, The Hundred Years War IV, 2015)

By Usvatte-aratchi

A few days ago, I went to Panadura to see my brother, 95 years old. We parked the car to go to the Arpico Supercentre at the southwestern corner of Galle Road and Nirmala Mawatha. From the park, I did not go into the store; I sat in the car. There were about 20 cars parked and people went into the store and drove away after making their purchases. There were more women shoppers than men. The women were distinctly well-clothed and appeared well-fed. They all wore slacks or skirts and upper garments, all in good taste with no garish hues. None wore a sari. All men wore slacks and shirts and none a kapati suit or sarong. All the cars glistened in the morning sun; none had scratches or worse damage. One car had a number plate BK; all the others had number plates with three letters. There was plenitude; where is the austerity the country is published to undergo? Or is austerity the burden borne by only one category of citizens? A few days later, as I entered through the gates to a hospital compound, I noticed that the man who issued tokens from a little cubicle in the heat and humidity wore a necktie. Public servants assembled before ministers invariably wearing a suit. The rooms are airconditioned to accommodate them. Doesn’t it make more sense to wear simple shirts in rooms cooled to a higher temperature to save fuel? Why this pretence of plenitude in this land of austerity? It is so poor that it bears the odium of having defaulted on its sovereign debt.

What are the rules of etiquette that require us to wear evening dress, no matter who the dignitary that one has to meet? Well, of course, anyone is entitled to wear funny clothes, even silken wigs in this high temperature and high humidity in torrid tropical weather. But in this impoverished hungry land, where children who attend school faint from starvation? There are reports of stunted and underweight children. I expect to read infant and maternal mortality rates for 2021, 2022 and 2023 higher than the excellent levels that our health services had ensured for us. The age cohorts born in 2020-2024 will bear the scars of this scourge throughout their lives.

Sometime in the mid-1980s, a friend of mine was the Indian Ambassador to Vietnam. She was very keen to learn Vietnamese. After a few weeks in the country, she hired someone to teach her Vietnamese. Although now written in Latin script, there is a range of diacritical marks to help one to speak a word with the proper tones -more complex than in Mandarin or Thai. (The Latin script was introduced in the 17th century by Portuguese Jesuit priests.) In the second week of lessons, the tutor took the liberty of raising a question with the Ambassador, one evening after the lesson. ‘Madam, with the flaps of the dress you wear, I can make a pretty blouse’. Isn’t it a pity that so much cloth must is wasted’? (Vietnamese are still small-made, perhaps genetically and the result of centuries of malnutrition.) The ambassador who was very sympathetic to what Vietnam was trying to achieve, was shocked by how right the tutor was. She took her lesson seriously. I was a student in Britain in the 1960s and stayed in my lodgings all summer, except to go to the theatre in London. One summer, I was invited to tea in the garden with the queen. Many students from Commonwealth countries were so invited. I had no suit to wear for the occasion nor did I consider it wise to invest in one, just to attend a tea party. (Mad Hatter might have considered it otherwise.) We are still a poor country and anyone who yearns for the use of expensive clothing must seek a fitting clime. Some of you must have observed the army-style warm collarless cardigan that President Volodymyr Zelensky wore when he addressed the US Congress, a rare honour bestowed on men from outside the US. Does a caparisoned elephant look more dignified than the real thing in the wild? Do murderers, plunderers, women abusers and forgers gain dignity when they wear kapati suits buttoned up to the chin? If clothes make for dignity, mannequins in shop windows must present the most dignified postures in the world.

Take the case of cars. In this small island with a short mileage of expressways and a speed limit of 100km per hour, where do people go in a Mercedes 350 or BMW 740 ? Those gas guzzlers, V8 vehicles which even Bhikkhu covet, are symbols of pretentious plenitude. I recall some MPs explaining in parliament that they needed expensive vehicles because they had to travel in their electorates on uneven roads. When NIssanka Wijewardene was the government agent in Badulla in the early 1960s, he toured the district on horseback and Uva is still not an area roads in good condition in that part of the country. Leonard Woolf, 123 years ago, toured the Hambantota district on horseback. Riding a horse on rough tracks and rural roads is no fun. I cannot see why MPs cannot travel about in cheaper cars which are less expensive to buy and also consume much less gas. All this plenitude is at the expense of rich and poor taxpayers. The frequent use of helicopters by the president and ministers is something we cannot afford. Once a relative of a president flew in a helicopter from Ratmalana to Maharagama, at government expense. A president travelled by helicopter several times to ‘inspect’ construction work on the Moragahakanda dam. I wondered how much engineering the man had in him to waste so many resources for so flimsy a reason. When a dam was built across Gal Oya at Inginiyagala in 1950-52 with two months to spare before the end of the contracted date, there was nobody flying around in helicopters. The Ampara-Siyambalanduwa road was a decade away and one had to drive to Chenkaladi to get to Inginiyagala, a tiring journey for a young man even in 1968-69. When a poor population struggles to climb higher in the income ladder, it does not help to grease it with opulent lifestyles by its leaders. That grease pulls down people back into poverty.

Our religious leaders do not help. The Durutu perahera was held a few weeks back. Navam perahera is on a grand scale. Then comes Avurudu when the whole country takes a holiday and eats and drinks as if there were no tomorrow. May is for vesak. June, and people sojourn in Anuradhapura. July is for many festivals in devale in the south. August puts up the spectacle in Mahanuvara. September opens a period of quietude in pansal only to begin again in November. Who objects to religiosity among believers but please undertake them without denying the rest of this economy resources. It is more important that a child goes to school regularly than that votive candles are lit on an altar.

Some places of religious importance in this country are mighty rich. Their daily income probably is in the millions. What is the educational institution or hospital that they financed to build and run? Even the Vidyodaya pirivena receives, to date a subvention out of taxpayers’ money. Why isn’t it maintained with the collections in the shrine with a Bo-tree in Kalutara? The collections are administered by the Public Trustee but why not give a sense of ownership to those that collect the money? The Venkateshwar kovil in Andhra Pradesh runs a fine university with a part of the huge income it earns. Superstitious politicians from our country contribute to that income. Satya Sai Baba organization in Bengaluru runs schools and provides pipe-borne water to villagers close to their offices. The Rama Krishna Mission in India has a brilliant record of having established and run many schools and colleges in India. Tatas have established research institutes that put out high-quality work. In the 13th and fourteenth centuries when England was probably poorer than Sri Lanka then and certainly poorer than even impoverished Sri Lanka today (2023), colleges that now comprise Oxford and Cambridge universities, were built and run by Roman Catholic churches, monasteries and rich individuals. Many Bishops established colleges in Oxford and Cambridge. Walter de Merton started Merton College in Oxford; Peterhouse in Cambridge had similar beginnings. They had to wait for Edward III and Henry VI to meet Royal benefactors of colleges. In the first settlements in Boston Bay, the immigrants established Harvard College (now Harvard University) in 1635 well before a systematic government came into being there. Someone needs to inquire why well-endowed religious establishments in this country, do not find it fitting that they establish educational facilities for bright students. They would rather gild with 13.5 kg of gold, a fence around a venerated tree.

Why do we so often mistake appearances for substance? More than 120 years ago, Thorstein Veblen coined the term ‘conspicuous consumption’ to identify behaviour patterns of people in opulent societies. What does one call this pretentious plenitude in a land where hunger haunts almost every household day after day?