If you cannot wait any more …..

pick the greatest weapon, and use it …

Personal morality is our greatest weapon

And we seldom use it

This is our tragedy

Everything flows from this

As you say “saying the same thing year after year” wont do. Our actions must speak and our tongues be stilled. We have no choice but to follow the paths of great men and women

- the masses may follow if they are ready and not if they are not ready

but those of us who can fulfil our personal journeys must not waste any more time

It is from the perspective of this personal journey that we must view the lives of Mohan, Charith and others. Lets get out of this sinhala and tamil thing. These are all human beings

they are all suffering

OL, you say that ‘this is not a process you can rush. Your sense of urgency – your anxiety to mass educate IS the problem.’ but how many generations must die off before we even wake up from this ’slumber’?

We cannot wait anymore…

It is the very blindness and lack of ‘real intelligence’ (your words) that I condemn. Especially among theatre goers who are rightly or wrongly expected to have deeper understanding of men and matters.

You must OL, forgive me for my impatience. But to me, 25 years of conflict is 83% of my life. And if in that quarter century the majority has not become aware of the unwitting torture they mete out to the minorities, then perhaps the time has come to fail them from the class of ‘human learning’.

The audience offered me no hope for potential learning or empathy or appreciation of differences. The lesson is a long time being taught. Hence the frustration.

While deeper human understanding and the pursuit of truth are all noble ideals, I am under no illusion that Forum at the Punchi will have achieved those ends by the end of its run. However, to ask that the audience appreciate the problems faced by the Tamil community, or at least begin to see that there is a problem - not much - I think, to ask.

T. Aruna makes a mistaken assumption that I wanted the audience to agree. No TA. I had no desire that they do. But disagreement must be borne of understanding, and a divergence of understood opinion.

Some of the comments, such as that Mohan should be shrug off his paranoia or - and this is verbatim - ‘be converted to the good side’, smacks more of incomprehension rather than reasoned disagreement.

Perhaps the chief fault I am guilty of is wanting people to realise the unacceptability of the current situation and climate, instead of which I should have been grateful that we took the first baby step on the long road to Utopia.

In Sri Lanka’s own case, with due consideration to its fractured history, the multi-ethnic polity that is should exercise due caution in all national security endeavours involving civic action. Thus, Ruwanthie’s efforts are welcome in the quest to encourage wider critical thought on such matters.

At the Punchi Theatre itself, it was apparent that the sentiments of the boys should have been duly explored. Yes, EVENTUALLY, they were. (As one member of the audience pointed out, there were inconsistencies in the personalities of the boys’ characters - which should have indicated the need for a closer look earlier on).

There is a pressing need to understand the root causes to the ethnic divide, no less so for the general population than for the political elite. It is thus that the sentiments that fuel various nationalisms need to be fully understood in order to introduce counter-measures and infuse political balance.

More strength to Ruwanthie and her team in their efforts to encourage deeper thought and exploration in the public sphere of these pressing socio-political issues that continually divide Sri Lankans.

Compassion is required not only for those who are suffering – but also for those who inflict suffering. When you divide your heart and love some and hate the others you are in conflict.

This is the inner dimension we all overlook – the dimension that Ruwanthie is trying very hard to bring out. We keep ignoring it.

Sophist says - “Forum at the Punchi was designed to raise awareness. It achieved its objectives. However, what it startlingly revealed was just how much more awareness needs to be raised and how soon it has to be done.”

The forum was designed to raise INNER awareness. And it seems to have failed. This is not a process you can rush. Your sense of urgency – your anxiety to mass educate IS the problem. Nothing is achieved without patience and without respect for the human process of learning.

This is what Gandhi and Mandela demonstrated …. And it is a lesson that continues to elude us.

I do agree that we all need rehabilitation – not just the “Sinhalese”

My apologies if this sounds “grand, static and uncompromising” Sometimes we need to be very very uncompromising ….

I read Aruna’s comment above and fully agree with his idea about descending to the particularities of every situation …

Truth - for the participants in real life means different things - simply relating to this and understnding WHY we are all differently conditioned and WHY it is futile to despair over differences that are perhaps rooted in some common human frailties like greed, agression and indifference may be necessary ….

The lack of compassion makes us blind. Real Intellignece requires heart.

As much as I was moved and engaged by the event, in the final analysis I was also disappointed by its inability to move the audience (me/us/them) beyond a mere recognition of difference. This failing is more to do with design than with execution (or indeed with the audience), and has to do with the distinction between the version of forum theatre employed at the Punchi Theatre and the tradition associated with Augusto Boal. Forum at the Punchi used the forum theatre form to perform a liberal political exercise, enabling multiple perspectives and voices to be heard and voted on within a pluralist commons. By contrast, the forum theatre of Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed enables a more radical liberationist politics that identifies with the perspective of a primary protagonist. In the Boalian tradition, audience members are compelled to come on stage to work through a problem by replacing the actor playing the protagonist character and literally trying out ways of escaping the predicament she/he is in. Whilst this approach (at face value) may seem too crude or one-sided for dealing with the complexities and complicities of the Sri Lankan situation, it needn’t be so. Rather than permitting audience members the luxury of comfortably judging the characters and our fellow punters from a god-like ‘perspective from nowhere’, forcing the audience to work through the agency of a particular character (Mohan, Charith, Anushka or indeed any other) may have challenged us to acknowledge the constraints that they face by virtue of their social identities, and be more sympathetic and humble in our suggestions for how they might transcend these. People who wanted Mohan to shake off his paranoia could be faced with the task of making a police complaint in his skin. Those who wanted Charith to embrace an understanding of systemic racism might have the task of defending his views at his workplace. And others who wanted the teenage Anushka to confront a group of disaffected young men could be given a chance to do just that.

Leaving aside the details of how it might have been different, the architecture of Forum at the Punchi allowed the audience to remain mired in the usual competition between different truths about what it is to live in Sri Lanka. As worthy (and perhaps necessary) as these debates are, I’m not sure that they really get us anywhere - as they seem to always be articulated in rather grand, static and uncompromising terms. For me, the prospects for peaceful and dignified cohabitation lie more in our ability to descend into the particularities of others’ lives, where tasting the desires and fears of those who live with us on this island may awaken in us some dormant humanity. The challenge for those of us who wish to follow this path is how to facilitate this for ourselves and our fellow islanders.

T. Aruna

With repeated occurences of injustice and discrimination, any event involving the oppressor will be viewed with suspicion by the oppressed. This is a natural tendency of human kind and that is what happened to Mohan and that is a defensive reaction, which should be understood and addressed in this matter. It is not a matter for any ridicule.

Sinhalese nation is too defiant, arrogant and stubborn to accept this logic. Lack of comprehension on the part of the Sinhalese arises from this ugly character of injustice and oppression from the Sinhalese nation.

What is urgently required is addressing this character problem. The only way of addressing is through a process of rehabilitation of the entire Sinhala nation, and make the nation to realise this truth with remorsefulness.

“Rock solid layer of mistrust on the part of the Tamils”. is an acceptable reaction in such a situation. It is totally resistive.

I agree that “trust is necessarily something that must be won.” But it can only be achieved through the elimination of injustice and discrimination to the Tamil nation. Not through humour or ridicule.

It is indeed quite tragic that such ‘denseness’ exists in ’sophisticated’ Colombo, especially given a fairly accurate presumption that such an event would have been attended by many Sri Lankans and expats who are working on ethnic conflict issues.

On the flip side, I hope this also highlights to many, especially my Tamil brothers and sisters, that we cannot really live away from the forces of racism and indifference, ensconced in our own little ’separate state’, and that we need to find better ways and means of fighting for equality instead of further moving away from being humane Tamils to becoming demonic Tamils, through our lust for a VIOLENT emancipation of rights…..