The Rajpal Abeynayake column:

So what's patriotism to you?

Patriotism. It is not difficult to deride the word. In history, patriotism has been a word more derided and invoked in the pejorative, than celebrated, and the hoary reference to patriotism 'being the last resort of the scoundrel' does not help.

Which is why any presentation for the case on 'patriotism' needs to be far more nuanced. Patriotism becomes suspect, when the condition described thus is abstracted and presented as about the 'country' and not the 'country's people', if you would pause to get the drift please...

But what is a country, other than her people? This writer can remember sitting in a seminar in Bangladesh, where there was at the height of the war against the LTTE in Sri Lanka, an intense discussion on terrorism and counter-terrorism. A Pakistani scholar now working in Singapore - though misquoting Samuel Johnson and saying 'patriotism is the last resort of the fool' or something like that - opined essentially that there is no point in defending country, as 'patriotism was an abstraction, and a 'last resort (of the scoundrel.)''

But it took this writer some time to intervene, and flesh out the concept of patriotism. Patriotism is about the people of a country, I ventured.

Patriotism is about not letting our wives, mothers and sisters be consumed by terrorist bombs. Patriotism is about not having a wife and a husband go in two different buses to work, so that one would survive to look after the children if the other dies in a terrorist attack.

Probably, there was not a dry eye in the crowd after patriotism was in this way, given flesh as it were, and presented as something tangible that can be quantified - rather than be packaged and sold as a vague abstraction.

So, patriotism is about the people of a country - but more importantly it is about how the people of a country fare because there is no country sans her people. It may be the last refuge of the scoundrel to talk of country but there is never a constituency that fails to be moved by soaring and resonant rhetoric about saving the people from terror, sickness or deprivation.

But, especially in these parts, the habit is to tend not to give flesh to the abstraction of 'patriotism.' The habit is to talk of flags, anthems and symbols as entities that are divorced from the governing dynamic in the concept of patriotism, which is the collective well being of a country's mass of people.

This is why it needs to be said that after the war ended, it's better to drown or ignore the rhetoric, and look at the facts. The rhetoric says the most virulent terror group in the world was defeated, and that's probably right.

But the fact is that people go out at night, there is no existential angst that drives husbands and wives to go for work in separate buses - and people have work, because establishments particularly in the hospitality industry, are operating into the night and are not shuttered at dusk.

So, its patriotic to say that the people have been given a new lease of life, and there is nothing that I remotely suspect or shady about such an assertion and certainly, nobody would remind us when patriotism is taken in this context that 'that's the last refuge of the scoundrel,' with apologies to the lamented Mr. Johnson.

Populists always talked about the people, even as they talk about country, and that had befuddled and frustrated their opponents. The Venezuelan Opposition for instance must be contemplating this, even as it collectively tries to oust Chavez, who is struggling with chronic food shortages etc., as a result of his experiment with modern socialism with the presidential election scheduled for November staring him in the face...

The problem of the Opposition is that despite all these shortages, and almost mocking takes about how Chavez plays Santa Claus with Venezuela's oil wealth, Chavez invariably wins. Everybody knows that the Chavez brand is of connecting organically with the people.

There is no evocation of patriotism in Venezuela, without reference to the barrios and the poverty in these urban ghettos which Chavez has uplifted with his people-centric policies.

The fact is that Chavez and his experiment may be almost absurdly flawed - but yet, it's better for the Venezuelan people than what the corrupt multinational controlled oligarchic opposition has had to offer!

So while the Opposition talks of regaining 'Venezuela' Chavez talks of restoring dignity in a barrio, and uplifting the poorest of the poor and affording children opportunities they never before enjoyed.

There are more of those latter kind in Venezuela than any other demographic. A populist's patriotism is mediated via the people, whereas fire and brimstone patriotism of the jaded demagogue is mediated via the abstractions of 'country', 'flag' ' anthem' or symbol.

There is nothing wrong in any of these, but they are all taken together the symbols of the life of a country, and a country cannot be represented fully by any of these symbols any more than a cricket team can succeed on the playing arena without human forms filling out the jerseys and the flannels emblazoned with the country' flag and insignia.

It is good to watch the national narrative shift from the symbols to the flesh and blood, and to see that the debate is moving ground from abstractions of GDP and statistics, to real people.

The Minister of Higher Education for instance, spoke to media heads last Thursday about the universities being taken away from JVP control and handed back to the vice chancellors. He spoke of times in universities when students were bashed up for speaking in English, to these times when English is made part of core curricula so that graduates can pass out of campuses and hope to secure jobs.

Now, it's easy to see here that the narrative has shifted from numbers, to 'people.' Academics and other interested parties may argue with the minister, and the debate could still be alive whether he is in the main, wrong or right.

That's a different matter. The achievement is that the narrative has shifted from the abstractions of World Bank figures on education, to the reality of students jobs and their futures.

You would be excused for feeling a flush of patriotic pride about that. Patriotic pride that the people are again the defining factor in the national equation, and not the abstraction of numbers symbols and concepts. I would gladly be a scoundrel any day if that means that I have been constantly thinking about the well being of this country's people, never mind this 'country' per se.