The late Parami Kulatunge

Many who shed tears for Deputy Chief of Staff Parami Kulatunge last week did so for the quite simple reason that they were genuinely touched that a man of almost extreme dedication to duty was murdered on the street. But it is worth a cautious query on what exactly has been learnt from Major General Parami Kulatunge's passing. In the vast universal scheme of things there is no gainsaying that he becomes another statistic in the list of casualties from conflict.

That can however, be put down to the cruelties of the general human condition.

But the milling crowd that mourned his passing last week, is also not necessarily being particularly retentive about the man or the circumstances that took his life. There is invariably the latest news theory to be worried about, and in Sri Lanka the new one is consistently more exciting than the one that has just washed out of the news cycle. Similar tears were shed for Tuan Muthaliph more than a year back, but how many memories would recall the name of this intelligence officer whose death aroused the same incredulous reaction from out of the chattering-sessions in Colombo's leisure class conclaves? For all the talk of security lapses, there seems to be but one clear conclusion that can be drawn about the parlous sense of insecurity that hangs like a fog over the minds of the same chattering classes. The lapses are also a source of excitement in their lives, to be chewed on, talked about, and forgotten almost at the same speed that Parami Kulatunge also becomes another statistic in their heads.

If that strikes as odd to the uninitiated, multiply this sense of jadedness by a ten, perhaps, for arriving at the exact mindset of the folks that determine the security needs of those such as the departed and much lamented Major General Parami.

If the assassinated officer Muthaliph was taking the same route through rush hour traffic every morning, that's exactly what Parami Kulatunge was doing with clockwork regularity. This is not Israel it may be said emphatically, and there is no Mossad-archetype obsession to outsmart the enemy here in Colombo, but there is some point at which in our minds eye we conjure images of sitting ducks when we think of officers and gentlemen who meet with their deaths in the line of duty -- even if the duty they were carrying out at the time they met with their deaths, was the mundane one of getting to their places of work through the rush hour snarl of mostly Japanese made automobiles.....

The narrative, if you will, on Parami Kulatunge's death is markedly eerie in the midst of the almost ghostly pall that is cast upon the chattering populous after the killing. This narrative would induce a Martian who came down to earth on a flying saucer and landed in Colombo, to believe that this was a singularly unfortunate event, which called for a certain amount of hear-tearing and breast beating, all of which is legitimate considering that human beings quite notoriously cannot bear too much of reality.........

Such a Martian would probably consider it impolite - almost odious - to consider the other narrative to events such as this, which is the one that is being written here.

This one is not necessarily the cynics' version. It's the narrative that checks the reality about this whole business of too much of reality. This version says that there is a certain play-acting that goes on about dealing with sudden deaths such as these on the streets.

These are treated ritualistically, and lamented periodically. To make sense of the absurd regularity of these killings and the almost hackneyed tales about security, there is now what is almost a routine that is installed in the Colombo establishment, which is followed to the point of making it something scared and inviolable.

One mourns the man, and venerates the photograph, and embarrassingly talks of what could have been done - security wise - to avoid this kind of utter waste of valuable human life. But then comes some more shocking news, or the more titillating breaking-news that just cannot be avoided, and all is forgotten even though not quite forgiven, until the next statistic on the street comes up, and the same ritual is reinstated for the purposes of getting over the shock of the inconveniently passing moment. ....