Movie Review - Madras Café

This isn't going to be a comprehensive review, just a few "sound-bites" of my impressions.

We've seen lots of war movies from Hollywood. I've grown up with movies about the Second World War ("The Bridge Over The River Kwai", "The Guns of Navarone", "The Battle Of The Bulge") and in my youth we saw movies about the Vietnam War ("Apocalypse Now", "Coming Home", "Platoon") and lately, we've begun to see movies about the two Gulf Wars ("Courage under Fire", "The Kingdom", "The Hurt Locker"). 

What's common to all of them is that they are all narrated from the Western point of view, and they concern wars that have touched Western folk. The impact to the West is what makes these wars important, even if their impact on other people is far higher. And of course, wars that don't involve the West at all are never discussed, even if their impact to other people is enormous. Case in point: the Iran-Iraq war. As in all things, the Western view of the world dominates the media, crowding out other voices and other viewpoints. [There are exceptions. Sometimes, stories of human poignancy trump Western parochialism and break through the media silence, e.g., "Hotel Rwanda", "The Kite Runner". But these are only exceptions. As a rule, Western characters need to be impacted for a story to be considered worth telling.]

Measured as a cultural force, Bollywood and Al Jazeera are probably the only non-Western voices that command a significant worldwide audience. Bollywood is no stranger to war movies, since India has been shaped in a significant way by its partition and the wars with Pakistan. [My favourite story, a coming-of-age tale set against the backdrop of the Kargil war, is "Lakshya". A more comprehensive, if somewhat rambling, movie on the Kargil war is "LoC Kargil".] But in spite of some excellent storytelling, no one outside the subcontinent ever seems to be interested.

The East Bengal genocide that culminated in the liberation of Bangladesh is the single biggest South Asian tragedy since partition, with anywhere from a million to 3 million civilians killed. That story has been told on screen many times, but it has never had a significant non-Bengali audience. No Westerner was harmed in the course of that tragedy, and so, from the perspective of the world at large, it may as well never have happened.

The next biggest South Asian war as measured in blood and human suffering, and far bigger than most of the Indo-Pakistan skirmishes, is the Sri Lankan civil war. Grinding its way over 30 wasted years, it is a story of folly all through, with avoidable causes and lessons that have still not been learnt. It is another non-Western story that begs to be told. And Shoojit Sircar's "Madras Café" is the first attempt in that direction.

The very photogenic John Abraham and Nargis Fakhri in Shoojit Sircar's violent docu-drama

The official movie trailer

There are many factual errors that have been criticised in this movie, to be sure, ranging from the superficial to the substantive. But flawed as it is, the creation of this work is to be welcomed. It has started a conversation, if nothing else.

I have been an amateur student of world history for as long as I can remember, and have followed the Sri Lankan conflict since the early 1980s. I remember reading with horror about the Colombo riots of 1983, as reported in Indian newspapers. I also remember wondering why the Indian government was sitting by doing nothing while the Sri Lankan army was persecuting the Tamils in the north. And I remember feeling relieved in June 1987 when Rajiv Gandhi's government chose the middle path of airdropping food supplies over northern Sri Lanka, sending out a message to the Sri Lankan government that it would not stand idly by, and yet stopping short of actual military action.

It seemed at the time that President Junius Jayawardene's government saw the writing on the wall, since the airdrop was shortly followed by an invitation to India to send a peacekeeping force to Sri Lanka. But very soon, this became India's quagmire. Jayawardene, the wily fox, had seemingly trapped the inexperienced Rajiv Gandhi in a Vietnam-style guerilla war that India could not win.

Indian PM Rajiv Gandhi (left) signs an agreement with Sri Lankan President JR Jayawardene (right). The old fox died peacefully in his sleep at the age of 90. The brash young man stumbled into the old man's war and paid with his life.

However, even at the time, we knew that there was more to the story than this simplistic summary. Indira Gandhi had been fishing in Sri Lanka's troubled waters for years. While the Sinhalese did create the initial problem by deliberately disenfranchising the Tamils, Indira Gandhi helped the Tamil militant groups in a bid to keep the Sri Lankan government off balance. That was simply her DNA and her style, which she used against opponents both at home and abroad. The similar meddling she engaged in in Punjab created the Sikh terrorist monster that ultimately cost her her life.

Tamil Nadu's politicians were also enthusiastic partners of the militants, giving them the run of the state's coast, hiding places among the mangroves and a thriving traffic in arms. India's hands were thus hardly clean. It's one thing to support the rights of the Tamils against a very real political disenfranchisement in a neighbouring country. It's quite another for India to do in Sri Lanka exactly what it was accusing Pakistan of doing in Kashmir.

Even after the Indian Peace-Keeping Force (IPKF) landed in Sri Lanka and began to disarm the militants, stories began to emerge of Indian favouritism. There were many Tamil militant groups, of which the LTTE became the best-known in later years, but I remember others in 1989 with names like PLOTE and TELO. One of the smaller groups was called the ENDLF, and this was the group that India seemed to favour unfairly. While other militant groups had to hand their weapons over to the IPKF, the ENDLF cadres were seen strutting about with their guns. Little wonder that the LTTE grew alarmed at the selective disarming and pulled out of the peace accord.

So yes, the LTTE did break the accord, but it was at least partly because India didn't play fair as a referee.

The IPKF bungled its way through its peacekeeping duties almost from Day One. Its first commander was the flamboyant Maj Gen Harkirat Singh, who thought the whole exercise would be a walkover and loved holding press conferences. Once it became clear that Harkirat was in over his head, he was replaced by the vastly more serious and low-key Lt Gen AS Kalkat. But he couldn't retrieve the situation either, and the IPKF finally withdrew in disgrace.

There were a dozen other wrinkles to the conflict as well. In addition to all the militant Tamil groups, there was a moderate political faction called TULF, led by the mild-mannered Amirthalingam, who was rewarded with a bullet for his moderation. As in Kashmir, moderates who are willing to talk to the government are executed by the militants, and peace never really has a chance.

It's unrealistic to expect Shoojit Sircar's movie to go into all of these issues, especially when it pretends to be a work of fiction. Hopefully, other moviemakers, encouraged by its commercial success, will follow with more focused narratives. Given the limited time into which to squeeze fictionalised versions of real-life people and events, it's quite amazing what the movie does manage to do.

For example, it was only after some research that I realised there were strong parallels between the movie's journalist who interviews the militants' leader and the real-life Anita Pratap's interview with the LTTE's Pirabakaran. Even more striking is the parallel between the movie's Malayalam-speaking RAW Madras desk head Bala and the real-life KV Unnikrishnan, also RAW's Madras desk head, who had been similarly honey-trapped by foreign intelligence agencies, but whose story remains unknown to most. In retrospect, the conspiracy theory espoused by the movie seems increasingly plausible. According to this theory, foreign corporate interests with advisors drawn from the ranks of retired secret service men, rather than just governments, were responsible for arming the militants and prolonging the civil war.

As an Indian movie about Sri Lanka, "Madras Café" suffers from its own version of parochialism. In the minds of Indians, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi towers over so many other events of that war, and Sri Lankans can be forgiven for viewing this as Indian self-importance and arrogance. But it isn't all parochialism. After all, it was Rajiv Gandhi's assassination that shattered the cosy romance between India and the Tamil militants, paving the way for the latter's eventual defeat by the Sri Lankan army, so that was a watershed event even from a dispassionate analysis.

One of the strengths of this movie is the depth of the "bench", i.e., the uniformly good performances by all characters in the movie, not just the leads. They were all very believable. And that's my definition of good acting. If I find a character authentic, it says to me that the actor has done a good job. By that token, all the actors in "Madras Café" were excellent. So I really can't understand the comment I keep coming across in multiple reviews - "John Abraham can't act." I think this is just a euphemism for "John Abraham is very good-looking and I'm jealous"!

Another notable aspect of "Madras Café" is the complete absence of songs and dances so characteristic of the Bollywood genre. I guess this burnishes its credentials as a "serious" movie. But by whose standards, I wonder. Different cultural traditions have different styles of telling stories, and it's disturbing that one culture's (i.e., Western culture's) yardstick of "serious" storytelling has begun to influence others. More on this in a separate post.

In short, I think "Madras Café" is more of a conversation-starter than a definitive documentary of the Sri Lankan civil war. I hope it opens the floodgates, because we need more non-Western voices talking about the events that have affected non-Western people. It may not gather much of a Western audience, even with its attempts to be a Western-style movie. But it will surely capture the traditionally large Bollywood audience in Asia and Africa, and that's a good thing. There are important aspects of world history that should not be neglected, and if non-Western people don't talk about the events that have affected them, no one will.

Guilt By Association - A Fallacy We're All Guilty Of, By Association

When I have been asked during these last weeks who caused the riots and the killing in L.A., my answer has been direct and simple: Who is to blame for the riots? The rioters are to blame. Who is to blame for the killings? The killers are to blame.

- Former US Vice-President Dan Quayle after the 1992 Los Angeles riots 

But much as we may laugh, Mr Quayle actually had it right! No one but those who commit crimes are ever to blame for them - not any group they belong to, and certainly not other individuals.

A Sri Lankan Buddhist monk was recently roughed up in Tamil Nadu, India, for nothing more than the crime of being a Sinhalese Buddhist. The mob that did this obviously believed that it was quite all right to punish an individual for the actions of other individuals who shared the same faith and ethnicity, even if the individual in question had nothing at all to do with the actions that they objected to. In this case, the mob was protesting the treatment of Tamils in Sri Lanka, and the monk who happened to be visiting India and hence within reach, paid the price. 

And in a response entirely oblivious to irony, one of my Sri Lankan Facebook friends condemned the incident, saying, "Shame on you, India".

Yes, shame on all 1.2 billion of you! How dare all of you gang up and assault an innocent monk?

Shame on me?! Eh? What's a srilanka?

I was reminded of several other such incidents, and human history is surely littered with millions more. We (and I'm generalising here) tend to generalise about groups of people based on the actions and behaviour of individuals. I'm sure this is an aspect of the survival instinct we owe to evolution. If a big, striped, furry animal attacks and kills some of your tribe, then you must quickly learn to drive off or kill any other big, striped, furry animal you come across from then on. We don't have to worry about unfairly attacking the odd vegetarian tiger. The stereotype works well in this case.

In the modern world, such conflation from an individual to a group and subsequent transference of responsibility for their actions to other individuals in that group is not just arbitrary and unfair, but has the potential to create never-ending strife.

In October 1984, two bodyguards from Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's security detail shot her dead. They were Sikh. One of them was killed on the spot by other guards. The other was arrested, tried and hanged later on. But the matter did not stop with these two individuals who pulled the trigger, nor even with those who were part of the plot (another conspirator was also tried and hanged). Oh, no. Over the four days following Mrs. Gandhi's assassination, mobs, organised and directed by her Congress party, systematically targeted and killed about 3000 other Sikhs in the capital, New Delhi. [The leaders of that pogrom have been identified and their names are common knowledge, yet they have never been convicted, and the wound festers in the Indian psyche.] Where was the need to punish anyone other than the individuals actually responsible for the assassination? 

In 2002, some unidentified persons set fire to a train carriage in the Indian state of Gujarat, an act that resulted in the deaths of almost a hundred people. The victims were Hindu, and it was believed that the perpetrators were Muslim. Interestingly, none of the individuals involved in that crime was ever investigated, caught or punished. Instead, in a chilling reprise of the 1984 reprisal, mobs, organised and directed by the state government of Gujarat, systematically targeted and killed about 2000 other Muslims across the state. None of these people was even remotely connected with the train fire. Yet they were deemed guilty by association, and suffered mob justice. It would have been bad enough if the mob had taken the law into their own hands and lynched those individuals responsible for the fire. It could have been considered vigilante justice. But the horror of the reprisal lies in the fact that entirely innocent third parties were victimised for no fault of theirs. [Some of these rioters and organisers, including a senior minister, were later tried and convicted, but most continue to evade justice.]

In 2012, an American gunman shot and killed 7 people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. He had developed a hatred for people of a certain kind after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When he saw people wearing turbans and beards (never mind that they were of a different ethnicity, language and religion altogether from the 9/11 terrorists), he considered them similar enough to be worthy of killing. 

Later in 2012, an American woman in New York pushed a man onto the path of a train and to his death. Like the Wisconsin gunman, she had developed a hatred for the people responsible for 9/11, as she admitted later. But the man she killed was Indian and Hindu. 

Two levels of conflation were at work in these latter cases. Not only were completely different individuals targeted, the victims only bore a very superficial cultural resemblance to the group that was being hated. [It's also ironical in that Hindus and Sikhs have often fought against Muslims during the long history of the Indian subcontinent, yet are often taken to be the same people.]

If we are to progress at all as a civilisation and to enjoy the peace that comes with the rule of law, we must overcome the primitive tribal urge to generalise from the individual to the group. We have to re-learn the ability to see individual acts purely as individual acts. The rational response must be to hold individuals accountable for their actions. Transferring accountability for an act from one individual to another, or conflating from the individual to a group, or from one group to a superficially similar group, leads not to justice but its very opposite.

As a contribution towards a fairer and more just world, let's all resolve to avoid the fallacy of guilt by association. The educated among us must lead the way.

Binding Up A Nation's Wounds - What Sri Lanka Should Learn From Lincoln

This last week has seen new and dramatic evidence of war crimes that occurred towards the end of the 30-year Sri Lankan civil war, but the more dangerous and disturbing problem for the country is the rise of a culture of triumphalism. It signals that the country's government, army and sections of its society have learnt nothing from its long and debilitating internal conflict, and we are witnessing a return to the attitudes that led to that war in the first place. If measured by its potential impact on the country's fortunes, such stupidity is positively treasonous.

Who could have imagined that Buddhists could be violent?

The LTTE was a terror outfit that had to be crushed, but with the luxury of peace, the root cause behind the rise of such an outfit (i.e., the calculated disenfranchisement of the Tamil minority) deserves to be investigated and addressed. That is the only way for the country to move on rather than set in motion a fresh cycle of injustice, resentment and conflict.

When Singapore became independent in 1965, about 20 years after many other former European colonies, its leaders had the great advantage of observing which of their predecessors failed and why. Lee Kuan Yew explicitly mentions Sri Lanka as one of those that served as a warning to the fledgling nation of Singapore. 

[...] the advantage we had was that we became independent late. In 1965, we had 20 years of examples of failed states. So, we knew what to avoid - racial conflict, linguistic strife, religious conflict. We saw Ceylon.

[...]

Had we chosen Chinese, which was our majority language, we would have perished, economically and politically. [...] Riots - we've seen Sri Lanka, when they switched from English to Sinhala and disenfranchised the Tamils and so strife ever after. We chose - we didn't say it was our national language - we said it was our working language, that everybody learns English whatever language medium school you go to. Which means nobody needs interpretation to read English.

Lee's memoirs elaborate on these points.

Even after a crippling war, Sri Lanka is fortunate enough to remain the best-positioned country in South Asia to become the next Singapore. But that entails learning lessons from its past self-destructive policies and taking steps to ensure that such conflict is never again allowed to come in the way of its citizens' progress. Disappointingly, this kind of mature soul-searching doesn't seem to be happening in the public sphere except for a few lone voices here and there.

I am by no means an expert on Sri Lanka, its culture, history or politics. I have visited the capital, Colombo (and was vastly impressed, by the way). In some ways, my Indian background gives me a unique window into this neighbouring country, and in other ways, it may actually hamper my understanding. I'm aware of these limitations. Yet this is what I see.

1. Sri Lanka has not treated its Tamil citizens as equals, and today, with the Tamil independence movement crushed, the temptation to ignore even the legitimate demands of the Tamils seems to have won out. Now a new front seems to have opened up between the Sinhalese Buddhist majority and the Muslim minority. Regardless of who started this latest round of confrontation, it shows that the seeds of internal strife continue to be sown, and that the popular leaders and groups of the majority community are not taking the long view or a statesmanlike pro-national position but are reverting to narrow identity politics. An important lesson of history, as Lee's Singapore was quick to learn, is that a society must carry its minorities along as equal citizens if the country is to be peaceful and prosperous. At the very least, it must avoid actively alienating its minorities. 

2. Organised religions have a lot of power over the minds of people who do not rely on reason and empathy to provide their moral compass. Allowing the clergy to influence politics is a really bad idea. Saudi Arabia and Iran stand as stark warnings to the world. It is difficult to imagine such a phenomenon occurring in a democratic country, or with a religion like Buddhism (which is generally considered peaceful), but the world is full of surprises. It would appear that Sri Lanka's monks are Buddhist only in name. They seem to be little better than militants in pious robes. As far back as 1959, prime minister Solomon Bandaranaike was assassinated by a Buddhist monk who carried a revolver hidden in his yellow robes. So much for being an exemplar of non-violence. The influence of the clergy on the Sinhalese Buddhist electorate, and through them, on elected governments, is a chilling confirmation of Ayn Rand's warning that democracy is nothing but mob rule that threatens the rights of individuals. The important lesson from history, as Western nations learnt over a period of 500 bloody years, is that religion, when taken out of the purely personal sphere, becomes a political philosophy as ruthless as any other. Church and state must stay in their separate spheres.

3. I have a deep and abiding suspicion of men in uniform. Give a man a uniform and a gun, wrap him up in the national flag so no "patriot" dares to criticise him, exonerate him from all accountability, and watch the human rights abuses begin. This is nothing specific to Sri Lanka. Virtually every army in history has been guilty of it. In spite of the tight clamp that exists on the media in conflict areas (often augmented by willing self-censorship), stories do get out. We do hear of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, and (thanks to Wikileaks) of the Apache helicopter shooting of civilians in Iraq. We do hear about the Indian army and paramilitary forces, protected by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, and the things they have been up to in Kashmir, Manipur, and the Naxalite belt. We do hear about Pakistan's Frontier Corps and what is happening in Balochistan. So the photographic evidence of the Sri Lankan army killing a 12-year old boy in cold blood is shocking, but in a larger sense not really surprising. This is exactly what armed men with no accountability tend to do. The lesson is that we must insist on accountability from our armed forces, and treat accusations of rights violations as true unless proven otherwise. When the onus of establishing innocence falls on the generals, transparency will follow. Otherwise, with soldiers like these, who needs terrorists?

One of the things I was struck by when watching Steven Spielberg's "Abraham Lincoln" a few days ago was Lincoln's attitude to the South after the war was won. Southerners were not treated as a conquered people. There were no treason trials of former confederate leaders and no mass executions. In one of the final scenes of the movie, he tells General Ulysses Grant that since the war is now over, there should be "no more corpses".

Lincoln's second inaugural address is world-famous, especially this part:

With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

Lincoln's assassination robbed the South of a friend, and his successors were perhaps not as generous in their treatment of the South as Lincoln might have been, and Southern resentment lingers on, even to this day.

It should be clear by now that any nation coming out of civil war needs healing, which only a wise leadership can provide.

The American Civil War lasted just 4 years. The warring factions were virtually identical on racial, religious and linguistic grounds, and the only differences between them were cultural and ideological. Even a rift as narrow as this has not yet fully healed.

US civil war soldiers - virtually identical but for ideology

Sri Lanka has endured a generation of civil war, and there are deep ethnic, religious and linguistic divisions between the victorious majority and the defeated minority. Healing Sri Lanka will be a far harder task.

Unfortunately, President Rajapaksa is no Lincoln. And that is why I fear Sri Lanka will never become the next Singapore.

A Few More Photos of Colombo

Now this is rush hour in Colombo (Thursday evening, 1730).

And this.

The reach of Bollywood celebrities - Aamir Khan sells mobiles here. (A passerby stared curiously at me, wondering what the heck I saw worth clicking in a roadside poster.)

And Aamir Khan isn't the only one. Priyanka Chopra and Shilpa Shetty stared haughtily down at me from the cosmetics aisle of the Arpico supermarket.


I snagged my bag on a protruding screw inside this autorickshaw. I realised that this sort of workmanship is perfectly acceptable in India and Sri Lanka, but Australians would probably make an OH&S (Occupational Health and Safety) issue out of it.


There's a beautiful Buddha shrine on my street (Park Street), just a couple of minutes' walk from the hotel.


I murmured a 'thank you' to him. This trip has been pure magic.

Evening Walk in Downtown Colombo

The evening was cooler and a lot less sultry, so it was quite pleasant to walk. By the way, this is the sign at the end of my street. The Sri Lankans seem to have mastered the Three Language Formula :-).

I went to a nearby KFC where I found to my pleasant surprise that veggie burgers were available. KFC in Australia doesn't serve veggie burgers but KFC in Dubai did when I was there in 1995-98. It says something about demographics and consumer demand, but I'm not sure what. The burger cost LKR 255, and the counter guy asked if I wanted cheese. I said yes, and the price then came to LKR 285. The burger was only half the size of the Hungry Jack's veggie burger in Sydney, so the PPP equation really holds. For the price of a single veggie burger in Sydney, you can get two half-size ones in Colombo. Hats off to The Economist!

I've been seeing another amusing sight on the roads - buses with the name "Lanka Ashok Leyland" on them. This is amusing because I grew up seeing "Ashok Leyland" buses in India, and I learnt only much later that this was a joint undertaking between Ashok Motors and British Leyland. Now as the model has travelled further, the name has been further localised by prefixing "Lanka" to it.



Looks like the long arm of the Internet equalises the whole world. Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, they're everywhere!


A petrol bunk. Nothing special about it. It's just slightly different from anything I've seen before.


This sign caught my attention for a reason. Long ago, when on a tourist bus in Singapore with my parents, my father pointed to a sign on a ministry building and remarked about the difference between the Tamil word for "ministry" as used in Singapore and in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu. It was spelt "Amaichchu" (அமைச்சு) in Singaporean Tamil, while in Tamil Nadu, the word is "Amaichchagam" (அமைச்சகம், with the 'g' pronounced almost like 'h'). It was interesting to see from the sign below that Sri Lankan Tamil also has it as "Amaichchu". When it comes to Tamil usage, is the mother country out of step? I wonder how Malaysian Tamils spell the word.


Bollywood-style film posters in Sri Lanka! I love these familiar-yet-different experiences. It turns out this is a hit movie (Mahindagamanaya).


Then I went back to Arpico (the supermarket) for some shopping. I bought some tea for my relatives in India when I go there next week. It was at the shopping centre that I saw my first Buddhist monk in the flesh! He was in brick red robes and was probably doing some shopping himself. I saw another person approach him and bow to him, and I heard the monk say something with the word "Deerghaayu" (Sanskrit for "long life") in it. I love it when I can pierce the veil of another culture, even if only for a moment, and understand what's happening. I'm also grateful that through spending my formative years in India, I've been able to pick up so much linguistic and cultural background without conscious effort. I'm sure if I go to Pakistan, all the conscious and unconscious Hindi/Urdu learning will similarly pay off. I remember reading the phrase "India's cultural penumbra" in some article somewhere that talked about the entire region from Africa to Southeast Asia. It's at moments like this that its meaning comes home to me with full force.

I also bought a T-shirt at Arpico because I found it very interesting. It's part of a series of artifacts labelled "Mother Sri Lanka" (like "Mera Bharat Mahaan", I guess). What I thought was clever was the way they spelt the three words in the three languages of the country - English, Tamil and Sinhalese. In fact, it was the red Tamil "Shree" that first caught my eye.



"Help spread the message of pride and honour of a great nation by purchasing this product."

Done!

Lunchtime Walk in Downtown Colombo

I took a walk around noon to see some sights. It was hot and muggy. I think it must have rained recently.

There were soldiers standing outside my hotel and I saw them wave down an autorickshaw and ask the passenger some questions, but they took no notice of me. It was a reminder that this is a nation that has very recently emerged from a civil war and the constant threat of terrorist violence.

My driver of last night had recommended a small restaurant near my hotel, so I walked there.

The Sri Krishna Villas (double L!) is a fairly downmarket Tamil restaurant, but like a western tourist, I was interested in an "authentic cultural experience" complete with cuisine. I ordered a standard meal plate. There was no spoon provided, so I washed my hands and went for it. I don't eat with my fingers even at home, so this would have been amusing to my family :-). Surprisingly, there was no yoghurt or buttermilk to have as the last rice course, but there was a sweet dish. The bill came to LKR 115, perhaps AUD 2.30 in PPP terms. Cheap at the price, but it wasn't a great meal all told, and I probably won't go there again.

It was fairly hot and uncomfortable to walk in the sun, but I wanted to buy a street map of Colombo. Again, surprisingly, this proved very hard to do. I was directed from place to place, but no one seemed to have street maps. The last place I visited was a supermarket (Arpico), which seemed very like a supermarket in India. There were guards milling around the supermarket, so I didn't dare take any pictures.

Some street scenes were amusing, and I snapped them. I find it surreal when things are familiar yet different, like my trip to Mauritius in 1991.

The Sinhalese script looks hauntingly familiar, like I should know it. It looks South Indian (although I'm told Sinhalese is related to Oriya rather than to any of the South Indian languages), but I can't read it for the life of me, though I can read two South Indian scripts (Kannada and Tamil) and sort of decipher a third (Telugu).

There are autorickshaws on the streets, just like in India, and they're made by Bajaj too. People refer to them as tuk-tuks, but then the driver of a passing tuk-tuk called out to me, "Auto?", just like in India.

I thought this poster ad for a DVD was interesting.

This is a nice banyan tree at one end of Park Street, where my hotel is.

This is the entrance to Park Street hotel.

The hotel has a colonial style. I think I can understand why the British colonised our countries in the first place ;-).

And this is my room. Ver-ry nice.

Sri Lanka - First Impressions

I'm in Sri Lanka, on a trip combining business with pleasure. Here are some initial impressions.

When departing Sydney for Colombo (via Singapore), I was struck by two curious facts. One, no currency exchange counter had Sri Lankan rupees. Two, neither of the two bookstores I saw in the airport had travel guides on Sri Lanka. Mind you, there are travel guides for virtually every country from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe and even for cities (San Francisco, for example), but the omission of an entire country was very strange. I put these down to the fact that Sri Lanka is only just emerging as a travel destination after decades of civil war. Let's see how things look next year.

[I did manage to find a travel guide for Sri Lanka at Singapore airport, but the currency exchange counters there had no Sri Lankan rupees either. I had to wait till I reached Colombo for that.]

Coming to currency exchange, an Australian dollar (AUD) trades for about 110 Sri Lankan rupees (LKR), but that still gave me no indication of what I could consider cheap or expensive by local standards. [1 AUD is currently 46 INR (Indian rupees).] Remembering the informal Purchasing Power Parity calculator of The Economist, I asked the driver of the airport pickup car about the price of a burger at McDonalds. He said it was between LKR 250 and 300. A burger in Sydney costs between AUD 5 and 6, so that's a factor of 50. Taking the official exchange rate into account, it means one can buy two burgers in Colombo for the price of one in Sydney. In other words, I should expect things to be half as expensive in Colombo when I convert their prices to Australian dollars.

Cultural curiosities: As an Indian emigré in Australia, I'm gifted with two lenses with which to see the world. My first impression of the streets of Colombo (at least at midnight, which is when I was driven from the airport to the hotel) was that they were definitely not of First World standards, but seemed far cleaner and in better condition than roads in many Indian cities. (Having said that, the roads in Chennai have been getting better the last few times I was there.)

We were averaging 80 kmph, but my driver Harish (short for Harishchandran), said it was impossible to do more than 25 kmph during rush hour.

Harish, as it turned out, was a Tamil, but after an initial attempt to converse with me in Tamil, he decided it was better to fall back to English! I realised the truth of George Bernard Shaw's comment about England and America. Indian Tamils and Sri Lankan Tamils are two people separated by the same language!

Three are huge Buddha statues at prominent roundabouts in the city, which I have never seen anywhere else. The airport also featured sayings and slogans based on Buddhism, and I realised I have never before been to a Buddhist country. [India is culturally diverse but overwhelmingly Hindu, Australia is similarly diverse but predominantly Christian, and even relatively cosmopolitan Dubai is unmistakeably Muslim.]

Talking of Muslim, I saw many groups of young men playing cricket on the main roads at one o'clock in the morning! Harish explained that these were Muslims, and since the month was Ramadan, they were enjoying life at night (when there were no fasting restrictions). The next day was a Sunday as well, so it was Saturday Night Fever for these youths.

The next few posts will have more of my impressions as I see more of Colombo.