14 years ago there was cricket, but no SMS.

The challenge then was to communicate a ball-by-ball account of Royal’s tawdry batting and its inevitable and ignominious defeat to an enthusiastic Thomian old boy network outside the grounds and abroad on the days of the Big Match. Things were simpler then.

A few of us had a bottle of Mendis Arrack stashed in a safe place, ensconced in more newspaper than was necessary (a broken bottle was to be avoided at all costs), and checked up on more frequently than consumed. We were College or House Prefects then, and drinking alcohol in public was to undermine an existing social, political and moral order. We were also young, our live(r)s fresh, our teenage libido priapic at the mere hint of any skin from girls, and for some, boys. Teachers in vain tried to give us oodles of homework, which was faithfully untouched. Their vexation sometimes faked, for they too revelled in the Big Match fever and cared little about formal education.

There were the unmistakable papara bands that sober or legless, played age old tunes with unerring aplomb and vigour. We scaled walls, fell down trees, played with irate authorities, threw water into classrooms, shrieked, screamed, ran, clambered, drank and then ran some more. We were effectively disruptive. It was quasi-primordial. For the casual reader or observer, perhaps even wrong and uncivilised. But for the partaker and participant, this was a time of unbridled fun – most good natured – and part of a longer tradition of schoolboy (and quite often school girl) revelry.

14 years ago, we hadn’t heard of sexual harassment or gender violence. We didn’t know. We didn’t care because 14 years ago, Sri Lanka was a different place. We were happier. Less stressed. Less anxious. Less politically correct. Schools looked like schools. There were no barricades, no army, no armed guards, no Police, no checkpoints. IDs were optional and parents weren’t on edge and on civil defence committees. We could go to Galle Face, sit on grass (there was still grass then) and just be. No questions would be asked. No security forces would be seen. No one would care. We were free and felt free.

Interspersed with cricket, thoughts about love, life and sex dominated our lives at Big Match time. And yet, our identity was anchored to one that was larger – we were Thomians. Never a Sinhala Buddhist Thomian, a Govigama Thomian, an Up-Country Tamil Thomian or a Burgher Minority Thomian. Class was evident in how we came and left College, but repeatedly throughout College, we never failed to cough up fees for the one or two who suddenly could not afford to pay for a term. Of course, being Sinhala Buddhist, I was then largely blind to what was a different reality for Tamils, who were even then much more acutely aware of their identity. Yet, to retrospectively dissect our collegial interactions through the critical lens of experience or the scalpel of anthropology is folly – we were young, and all was well as long as the guiding fiction of a Thomian victory was strong.

I used a cellular phone for the first time 14 years ago. It was a Motorola. Big and heavy, I lugged it to the scoreboard and relayed information back to a friend in College in charge of uploading it to the web. It was the most sophisticated piece of technology at the Big Match and weighed close to a kilo. Each call cost over ten to fifteen times more than what one pays today, and there was only one mobile phone service provider. Carrying this car battery size device around, worth over a lakh at the time, require a security detail of slightly drunk prefects surrounding the bearer of the phone. I once happened to be this bearer and am guilty of adding four runs to the Thomian batting when in fact it was just a single run. Perhaps the tipple contributed. Or maybe I was just bored in the prison of the scoreboard. Today, I can get my Big Match updates wherever I am in the world in real time. I can get thousands of photos and videos streamed or downloaded to my mobile. I can eye ball, on demand, a lissom fan as easily as the third umpire can order an obdurate Royalist who refuses to leave the crease. I can now hurl insults to blind umpires on Facebook, join the Captain’s harem on MySpace and become a secret voyeur at the team’s wild post-victory soirée streamed through 3G. 14 years ago, you couldn’t find any technology to switch on. Today, you can’t switch off.

14 years ago there were no cheerleaders who risked great harm to mammaries by wearing loose bras, or none at all, to enhance their visual appeal and augment the sense of movement. We didn’t have sponsored ads blaring out from loudspeakers. Commercial sponsorship was less garish. There was no brand war, no competing mobile phone companies, and no blimps. We were also poorer. Few of us had the essential bling of teenage life today – no iPods, no mobiles. No one, mercifully, wore Crocs. We were happy with lots of coke and a smidgen of arrack. If the match was no particularly in our favour, we were drunk after a quarter, legless after half and senseless as the afternoon progressed with much remaining still in the bottle. We fought ugly fights and have an uncanny ability to remember our opponents and their nicknames. But your author has yet to meet anyone who precisely remembers the bones of contestation. We all agree that the fights then weren’t the result of or based on ethnic or religious fault lines. An empty bottle, a petulant vagina, a sorry arse or a vagrant dick even was oftentimes involved or the cause of conflict – but nothing more. No one had even imagined carrying arms or knives. When the gauntlet was thrown, the fist quickly took over, followed by arms (of the physical, muscular sort), body, bodies of one’s supporters, then their supporters until finally everyone and everything was dust, sweat and madness.

If this description of Big Match carnivalesque smacks of some hedonistic domain that needs to be reviled and rejected, I wonder what the reader thinks of the brutality of war today. Of people forced to reside in tin sheds in the sweltering heat. Of babies killed, dismembered and scarred for life by shelling. Of men, women and children with nothing to look forward to – communities without an iota hope. Where there is no cricket. Where there has never been cricket. No laughter. No music. Nothing. Where’s the cricket in this?

14 years ago, the war against terror was distant reality, at best. In our revelry and our innocence, we lived lives in College and at home anchored to and around a single Big Match each year. Our worst drudgery was exams. Our worst torture, a talented Royalist cricketer (fortunately, this rare animal was endangered even then). More seriously though, our memories of the Big Match still draw us together. It was an uncomplicated chapter in our lives; easy to romanticise and imbue with what was as much as what was not. Mindful today of the violence and uncertainty surrounding us, many of us look at the Big Match with an air of nostalgia and longing, to be on the grounds again, straw hat donned, souvenir in hand and the promise of melted ice, coke and the dregs of Mendis at the end of the day.

14 years hence, times have changed. The Rajapakse regime today is not cricket. It’s spin is inelegant and violent, its score deplorable on many counts. The big match is still escape from all this, but less enjoyable because of it. To see the symbols of violence – yellow barricades, barrels, armed guards, Police jeeps and sniffer dogs – intermingled with the bacchanalia is a strange juxtaposition for us used to a different atmosphere. Perhaps it’s normal for Thomians 14 years younger. Perhaps it’s not even a problem. Perhaps it’s us that’s the problem, hankering after a memory we can never relive. But as the sounds of baila and the Naga Salam caress disused muscles to dance, the crack of a Thomian willow cutting the aroma of a fresh Mendis mingling with the fizz of EGB Ginger Beer mid-day, your author will necessarily forget all that’s wrong with Sri Lanka today.

If only for a few days, when he is a schoolboy again.

[Authors note: I was invited by the Thomian Tent Committee of the 130th Battle of the Blues to contribute an article to the Thomian souvenir back in November 2008. After submitting this piece in February this year, I was told that the Editor had issues with my suggestion that that Rajapakse regime today is not cricket and wanted to change this line to "The regime of today's political wolves is not cricket". This was apparently because the Tent Committee felt that the souvenir should not directly address any particular political party or actor, and that any criticism should be general in nature.

My response was the following:

I wrote that knowing full well that it would be the one sentence that would cause problems, given the President's connections to College. Sadly yet predictably, the Editor has demonstrated a singular lack of courage and a supine subservience to political authority gone amok. I wrote what I meant, and do not find agreeable what the Editor has suggested.

Asanga Welikala and I wrote a joint editorial in 1995 that was the first editorial in the history of the magazine that espoused federalism as the essential foundation of a lasting political settlement to the ethnic conflict. The author's own satirical contributions to the College magazine under the pseudonym Hell's Dire Agent in the mid-90's marked in pointed jest well known contemporaries in the student and staff body. College was the grounding of being purposefully irreverent in thought, writing and action in later years. To this day, I don't believe any other school in Sri Lanka offered the same space for liberal thought and free expression to blossom.

The tragic confusion between Thomian grit and grovel by the Editor of the souvenir demonstrates the pervasive nature of anxiety in Sri Lanka today, an essential cowardice that risks prostituting our guiding motto for 14 years and for some, in adult life - Esto Perpetua.]

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