Some notes to family, friends, and fellow Fulbrighters

J--thank you for your note. I've had a chance to do so much here. Janet has been a great travel companion and game for anything. 

Next week we'll study small tanks east of the Mahaveli Oya around the towns Manampitiya, Sewanapitiya, and Welikanda. I visited Welikanda last week and by chance the president was there speaking right as I got off the bus. I was pretty freaked out about the whole scene there (not the president but as an aside you might want to see his 1-yr commemorative music video-it's a hoot) and here's what I wrote my post for that day:

http://scientistartist.blogspot.com/2016/01/a-garrison-town-and-garrison-village.html?m=1

I'm trying to write every day and I'm pretty amazed by the value of the activity as well as the response. In December there were over 16,000 hits. 

I'm curious whether we'll find the same "garrison" type conditions in Manampitiya and Sewanapitiya as I saw in Welikanda. I had read a few lines somewhere about the Mahaveli Project and it's ethnic implications but walking through the terrain is a chilling experience. These days I'm staying in Batticaloa. I have a gracious and well-educated host who is also a community leader. And getting the story of the past 30 years from his standpoint is jaw-dropping. 

Your mission of capacity-building in the universities is so valuable. I wonder what you found out in your sessions. I perceive here that our goals for students are much different than here in Sri Lanka. Where we take "broadening horizons" as a kind of bottom line for our students I have not perceived that as anywhere in the cosmos of goals here. I'm only running on evidence from what I've seen. Your perspective may be deeper so I hope you'll tell me your reflections.  

There's a RISD prof, Lily Herman here in Batticaloa. She's brought a group of students to do a 3-week exercise with locals. They're staying at the American Ceylon Mission and working at the St. John's Boys Home. Bringing the RISD approach to teaching (which it turns out I developed in my own classrooms at BU) is a tall order but way interesting to see how she's implementing it. 

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A bunch of expat Tamils from all over the world. Some have told me stories of their exile and it's incredibly poignant. Most have kids that grew up speaking English and at least the ones here are affluent and successful way beyond ppl here. But it's very sad. One person told me I speak great English considering that I'm jewish. It was hard for him to grasp that my grandparents came to America! So the world that we perceive as stable, more or less static, etc exists I think only for a small portion of the worlds population. Pretty crazy I think. Also struggling with questions of ethnic hatred which are so pronounced here among everyone. Whoa!!! Our little world of just avoiding the ppl you don't like is turned on its head here. I was with Thavarajah and again he was pulled over. Third time in a week!!!! Police presence mixes up everyone's mind. I started to wonder...is he under some kind of surveillance??? What kind of operative might he be or have been? And HE jokingly (kind of) said "they're pulling me over because they see your white face and they want to check on the CIA operative who's in the car with me!)!!!!!!! So can you imagine what life must be like in a police state? Or how it felt in Russia or Germany in the 30s? Or China for that matter???? So many things are turned on their head for me and I'm an old guy who's pretty well grounded in experience and knowledge of history. But it just goes to show.....surprising to me how all this goes beyond the surface questions that Jose presented in twelve reasons why he'd never come back to Sri Lanka. The twelve reasons are actually like a litany of plagues. Hatred. Jealousy. Mistrust. Violence. Etc. I've been writing about it in my blog and it gets heavier and more depressing as you go so finally I wrote a little piece tongue in cheek about using design principles to create peace. Who knows???

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Janet and I will go into the interior near Polonowurra where we were with Julia. There are a bunch of tanks there I want to explore. Then we'll come back to Batticaloa. My colleague is supposed to bring students here on the 30th & I want to be here for the Sri Lankans and Americans getting together. I have a sneaking suspicion he won't come bc I'm starting to understand that there's a different concept of "opportunity" here. We want our students to broaden their horizons. Students here are expected to pass through and sit at a desk. 

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Middle of the night I was thinking about informants and information. Wonder what you've been thinking.

Did I tell you already (sorry if me repeat self) about how everyone I talk to has their like 10-12 amazing things to say about tanks. There's lots of overlap but occasionally I get a bit of something new.

But even with the new stuff there's just so far I can go. And so a lot I have to piece together thoughts from how I interpret the material culture.

So in 2013 I was on top of this rock in Mihintale ("birthplace of Buddhism" in this country) and I looked down at dozens of stupas. Could see all the way to Anuradhapura and my immediate thought was--these stupas indicate ownership. They are a symbol and a tool of hegemony here.

So even like when you took us to the ponsala here in Batticaloa the other day. That place is so much an outpost of Buddhism. In my interpretation part of "staking their claim." And I've seen it in so many other places here.

So i never thought about this as a landscape of hegemony (or hegemonies) but it's so apparent here in the east (but even in Colombo). And besides for the Buddhist assertion of hegemony there's the whole issue of land and occupancy. I am dead curious about what you sense from your peeps in Kattankudy.

But in terms of tanks I got to thinking, what if they were built initially as a way of pre-Buddhist settlers "staking their claim" against the "Yakas." You could even think of the tank as a kind of lawn like they had in England by castles...a clear space across which you could see your enemies approaching. And you could get in a few boats surrounded by water and food if your aboriginal neighbors came up attack or pillage. (Or if Indian invaders came for that matter).

So later the tanks became used for irrigation and this whole narrative of "tank-village-ponsala" got built. But I'm wanting to look past that narrative and imagine an earlier landscape and how tanks played a role in that.

So part of the strangeness of that endeavor is it's about reading beyond what ppl tell me and piecing ideas together just from observing the contemporary landscape--like the way contemporary tanks have been constructed in the Mahaveli region as a way of staking a Sinhala claim on what was Tamil land.

Chilling and interesting. Would love to hear your thoughts about "how can we interpret things from the visual evidence we gather?"

Your sarong tells who you are

I'm in Batticaloa in the far eastern part of Sri Lanka. This geographical section of the country is a huge checkerboard of ethnicities and religions that live together in a sometimes uneasy balance of mutual coexistence. I have not heard nice things said by members of any group about members of any other group. 

At almost any hour of the day you may hear canned religious chanting of one group or another. Usually in this neighborhood, Kallady, the outermost island of Batticaloa, the canned music comes from the nearby Hindu kovil. Its lively cadence and sensuous melodies tell a tale (or tales) of worship that I know nearly nothing about. But I can count on being woken up by the bell ringing and cheerful sounds from the kovil, just a few moments after the first roosters crow their good mornings for the benefit of all. 

Close by church bells may ring, and for all I know they are the bell I hear in the morning and not the kovil. There are dozens of churches all around. Incidentally we are staying on Dutch Bar Road, so named because the old time Christian Burgher population (people descended from European colonists who made Sri Lanka their permanent home) built their community here in the breezy precincts of Kallady.  

A mile or two south of here is Kattankudy, a predominantly Muslim community. I haven't heard the distinctive wail of the muzzein calling people to worship up here in Kallady. But maybe I have. There's a large mosque in Batticaloa town and every  day early in the evening I hear a series of very deep vocals, a somber assemblage of dark tonalities, from that direction. 

But the canned music from across the lagoon could well be coming from the local Buddhist ponsala, one of very few in this part of the East. A bit strange that it's right next to the police station, a national institution dominated by the Sinhala majority. Bottom line here is that just as religions seem to stake their claim on the ground here they are also taking space in the airwaves. The sarongs men wear here make a similar territorial claim. 

I don't usually write about what people wear or about fabric though both interest me greatly. In fact there's almost nothing here that doesn't interest me. During a quiet moment at our guesthouse the other day, before Janet got back from a vacation down south with friends, I was asked whether I was bored. "Never," I answered. "I am always learning here." So it follows that the question of textiles has been inspired in part from my friend Lily Herman and her RISD students. They are in Batticaloa for these three weeks to work on a "capacity building" and "community empowerment" project. Their idealism, energy, and intellectual drive are certainly a demonstration of what "capacity" may mean, whether or not it's applicable to these stranded, incapacitated parts of Sri Lanka. 

Amazing yesterday one of the students who's a textile major explained knots to me. She taught  me how basically the same knot whether large or small influences the look, the feel, and the absorptive capacity of a fabric. 

In the same way, a line, a pattern, or a color makes a statement of who the wearer of a particular sarong is. Actually I had intuited this and asked a few people though I never got an answer. Sometime later, when I was wearing one of my sarongs, a Sri Lankan acquaintance offered the information to me unsolicited. 

The first sarong I bought on this trip was purchased with the help of a motley crew who took me to a couple of local tanks. The chief irrigation engineer of the Batticaloa Agriculture Department, his assistant, and their driver. The three gentlemen were, in order, a Tamil Muslim, a Tamil Hindu, and the driver was a Sinhalese gentleman. We had stopped in Eravur, a predominantly Muslim town a few miles north of Batticaloa and I pointed to the sarong I wanted. A good ten minutes of examining and handling the fabric, yelling at each other and at the shopkeeper, and bargaining (which I hadn't asked for) resulted in a price one third below the ticketed amount. "He'll take Rs 650," I was told. When I reached into my pocket all of them, even the shopkeeper, were sheepishly downcast. Their expressions asked why I hadn't bargained for Rs 600. 

The sarong, a lovely understated  blue green tartan with just enough bright touches to cheer the eye, is still, in a way, my favorite. It was a couple of months later wearing it at our Colombo guesthouse when I was told it was a distinctly Muslim outfit. 

No offense meant and I hope none taken, but as a foreigner here you're pretty much a walking freak show. Just look at the way Sri Lankans dress to see why and how you are out of context. So no matter what you wear you are bound to offend and amuse in equal measure but in general your intent is not taken quite seriously. In other words you can pretty much get away with whatever you want to wear, as long as it doesn't fly in the face of perceived decency. But during a trip to the far south of the country, which is primarily Buddhist, I made the decision to leave my Eravur sarong (made in India by the way) behind. 

Instead I wore a sarong I had bought back in 2013 at the Paradise Road shop in Colombo. It's one of two sarongs I bought then (could have bought the whole shop) and I thought gorgeous threads like these were a bargain for the Rs 1950 I paid at the time (you can get a feeling for tourist prices by this comparison). One sarong I wear at home in Boston on our very few hot days. If I'm entertaining my kids they make no effort to hide their feelings, "Daddy, not that dress again! Take it off. Please." I brought to Sri Lanka this time the companion sarong to the culprit, which is blue. This black and gold striped version, the first time I wore it at our Colombo guesthouse, was almost torn off of me with admiration shown by one of the workers. I guess it does have a certain air of elegance, maybe even worth what I paid. Anyway it doesn't insult anyone. I guess it's pretty neutral in the ethnicity department. 

I just got a new sarong that Janet bought in the south at a large batik factory. Its spectacular random pattern of color and texture is, I think, a real delight. I haven't seen any sarongs like this though I've seen a lot by now. Sarongs come in a dazzling range of colors and tones, some patterns painted, others woven, or like my new one, batiked. Men wear them in bright colors, sulky colors, even light pink and blue. But I haven't seen much green. This sarong got a special reception by our Batticaloa guest house staff. Yes, one or two of them took the material in hand like at the Colombo guesthouse. "Nice material," they seem to say, as the old joke goes. But this sarong collected stares. I've been around here more than a week and we spent two weeks here before. So people know me. They've seen me in my improperly tied sarong, worn a bit too high, so I imagine they expect pretty much anything. But I think it was the color of this sarong they took notice of. Why?

The Sri Lankan flag is dominated by the lion symbol, the totem animal of the Singhala (lion = Singha). There is a green stripe on the flag to symbolize the Tamil minority, an unfairness (I think) that could be rectified by abstracting the flag in its already beautiful array of hues. So, the sarong Janet bought me is green. An inadvertent choice except that it does happen to be my favorite color. My conjecture is that by displaying this color, I am also displaying my sympathetic feelings for the people I live among here. Just a conjecture. But maybe what you put on your body does count. 

Trying to learn Tamil

I'm drawn to the East for so many reasons. The soft and harsh beauty of the place, all of it heartbreaking. The gentleness and refinement of our guesthouse. The complexity of human geography out here. The stress on geography shouldn't be "geo." It should be "human." And the human equation means language. So there's no excuse. I just have to dig in and learn a bit of Tamil. 

What a great language it is. Spoken on the street it sounds like bullets flying. The quick staccato of each sentence, a heated cadence of discourse and command from the mouths of smart, gentle people. I got the inspiration to ask my guesthouse staff to say a few words into my iPhone. I can practice that way. 

A cool thing about the recordings is that I can press "edit" and see the patterns of sound. I captured a couple of things that I find interesting in the language, revealed by these patterns. First, the staccato sharpness. Can you see the first and third words, uhrtr (eight) and pahtr (ten) on either side of the soft ombudehr (nine)? Now if only I can remember them.

Another sound to the language is the very frequent, barely pronounced "r" sound at the end and elsewhere in so many words. It's a sort of swallowed "r," somewhere between a gurgle and a growl. You seem to have to swallow your tongue to achieve it. Here are the numbers "one, two, three." They sound to me like "ondr, undr, mondr." Notice how each one tapers off at the end of the word. I just think it's cool to capture images of these words. You can almost "read" them. 

Here at our guesthouse it's almost always quiet. The ground crew go about their business day in and day out mostly making noise with their machinery. The well-oiled kitchen operation is the same. You hear pots and pans and sounds like grinding coconut but you barely hear a word. The front office staff, who are pretty much under constant assault working tirelessly for guests' comfort, operates far out of their own comfort zone in a world of demands, questions, and hurried negotiations. I think but I can't tell for sure that they appreciate our quieter, less rushed approach. And we've been here long enough that they can pretty well anticipate our modest requests. 

But yesterday and today the Thavarajahs are in Colombo and the eruption of voices is marvelous. There's no fighting going on but you wouldn't know it. There is a pretty steady raising of voices, good natured but surprising in its occasional loudness, that's lasted most of the day. I bet it will clamp down the moment the owners drive up the front gate. 

When the serving boys here learned I was trying to pick up Tamil they were shy at first, but then took great pleasure in recording their voices for me. We have to do much more. Then came the flood of phrases. I guess they think I can speak and I'm just fooling them by playing dumb. Or maybe it's just them trying to teach me. It's incredibly prodding and encouraging but almost completely useless. It's like they're talking to a baby brother, an intelligent looking toddler who might understand if only they spoke directly enough and loudly enough right in his face. I can only stare blankly because there's no explaining or even miming what they're trying to get across. 

Finally there was the slightly older Ravi, whose voice is featured in many of my counting recordings. His diction is excellent and straightforward and his English is also slightly better than the boys'. He came to me the other day, apologetically. "Please don't upset you, sir," he started, after I had asked him to teach me how to say, "I have a question." "But I have a question. Hope you won't be angry." "Of course not," I stared at him with the widest most reassuring smile I could muster." "Why you want study Tamil, sir?" 

Because I'm here. 

Designing Peace

It's been awhile--I should say a very long time, since I thought about peace. Realistically I would say it was during high school, almost 50 years ago, that I thought about solutions to the problem of warfare. That was during the Vietnam era. 

So it's a bit disconcerting but also a bit refreshing as well to come back to the problem at this late stage in my life and within a thoroughly different context. 

Partly it comes from the inspiration of having my friend Lili Dean Herman here in Batticaloa. Lili is in the sixth year of a project in which she brings teaching the RISD way to the community here. Her solutions to local problems, which have been going on here for more than 30 years, are rooted in design principles. 

Partly the impetus for this discussion comes from the human heartache I've witnessed here in Sri Lanka. I've written so many posts now about injustices and mistrust. My informants and friends are all people of goodwill. Yet everyone I talk to has developed a cloud of hate around them. Some hold it closer to their chest. Others let me know right away. But no one I've spent significant time with has not reflected on ethnic and religious rivalry, mutual distrust, and fear. It's different from the world I'm used to and not as nice. 

In my mind good design boils down to a few things. First, considering your users, present and projected. This means spending a lot of time on the ground observing, determining problems and preferences, and quietly letting the landscape, or facts on the ground (as the case may be) roll themselves out for you. User experience (UX), which our software designers have championed, is a construct all of us in the design world need to take a better look at. And adapt. Designers, let's think about our users more than we think about our great ideas. Let's step back, observe deeply, and respond with meaning. 

The second principle of design I think is that design is an iterative process. We can look at this in so many ways. One way to look at it is to say that design moves in stages from learning (which should take up 100% of the early design process and recede slowly) to doing. The doing or building phase should proceed slowly from the learning phase, and is intricately dependent upon it. 

An iterative process also means that at every stage the designer must ask, is this working? What are the  criteria that you apply to whether something is working? I think it goes back to UX. How are your people responding? Are they responding?

As an iterative process design also proceeds in a non-linear fashion. You may start with a particular set of questions and work toward a whole different set of questions. I think that in good design this happens several times in the design process. You look at your work and ask, "is this working?" Back to UX! If your design is working or not you need to brainstorm a new set of questions. It's a frustrating process and it feels like you're not getting anyplace. But as you grind your way to "solution" you do so on the shoulders of innumerable questions--most of them developed in the wake of mistakes or dead-ends. As we become more experienced as designers the learning curve of developing and asking questions becomes less steep. It may seem like it's taking too much time, especially at first. But asking questions as an iterative process means that our designs will respond to the most relevant questions possible--not just to arbitrary thoughts we throw out there. 

I guess my third principle of design would be to "under design." Intricate plans, social or otherwise, may just not do the trick. I remember when I started teaching at Boston University's College of General Studies. The more instructions I gave for an assignment the more they seemed to be ignored by my students. I found in this context that less is more, let the chips fall where they may. While this may sound like a cop-out I think it goes right back to user experiences. Trust your users to respond. Let them build into the process by their own volition and in ways they deem appropriate. Keep the big goal in mind and use input from your users to make it work for them the way they want it to. 

My idea for minimal design comes from two places. The first is a student crit I participated in at Moratuwa University with my friend and colleague Janaka Wijesundara. One student was designing a facility for children who had been traumatized by war. Her design was intricate, down to the bathrooms and the rest area for lady staff members. She considered studies of PTSD in planning carefully for shady areas, light areas, hiding spaces for children and counseling rooms. Her design looked like a prison. Janaka and I asked her to take her design down several notches, perhaps to introduce as her focal point an outdoor play area where kids could touch water and soil, do some play farming, and hang out with tame animals. 

I don't know how she responded ultimately. The MO of Moratuwa students seems to be to keep pushing their own design agenda no matter what advice they're given. It's a good thing in a way to exert your own ideas. But I've come home beaten and bent by crit sessions where bad ideas are defended by "I couldn't explain myself in English" though students told fellow jurors the very same story in their own language, and received the same criticisms. 

My other example for under design is the iPhone, a tool I rely on every single day (I'm writing on it right now). It is supremely versatile and user friendly and of course, intricately designed under its handsome blank screen. But I think its real beauty is how every person can "program" it in their own way. I'm talking less about preferences or apps than I am about the haptic environment of the iPhone. Everyone touches it differently and each phone carries its owner's personal touch. This is how we must design (or under design) peace. 

Everyone needs a stake in peace and the peace process. It can't be imposed and it can't be engineered. It should have a blank and beautiful visage that everyone can perceive their own way. The process must consider its users and how they will experience it. Its brokers must accept that it is an iterative process with an intrinsic process of mistakes and questioning. 

How can we lower barriers and dissolve borders? How can we disarm? How can we allow open movement, trade, and opportunity? I'll stop here as these are daunting enough questions. But here in Sri Lanka, in what looks like a peaceful place to the outsider, lies a bristling tinderbox filled with resentment, distrust, and fear. I can't begin to think of how to clear up this mess. But I would love to see design principles used in the service of that ideal. 

Picking up on energy, licenses, and a tsunami dream

A family comes to dinner, expats who live in London. There are two daughters, animated and excited, highly educated professionals who describe themselves as "on the wrong side of thirty." Both parents have excellent English and the lady is a close cousin of Mr. Thavarajah, he later tells me. But the first night they're here Thavarajah doesn't come out. He's had a long couple of days, several funerals to attend, some encounters with the police (I find out later, after his third time being pulled over in a week, they are always on the road in force like this, not just because it is holiday season). 

The girls tell me it's their first time to Sri Lanka, at least the first time they can remember. The family always went to Malaysia where Dad's relatives lived. They travel around for a couple of days and I don't see them but yesterday afternoon ebullient Dad sticks his head in and says hi. Then I see them at dinner and the family dynamic is different. 

Mom has brought a small gift for Thavarajah in a red bag. The only animation she shows is when she gives it to him. She is very quiet. From the back she looks almost shrunken. Her head is bent slightly. She's not eating the crabs that Dad happily snaps and devours. The girls banter and I have the strong impression they are trying to lighten the mood. The younger girl especially. She kibitzes with her father and they tease each other. She says a few happy things to Mom. The older daughter too, but she seems almost as serious as Mom. 

I'm only conjecturing. Making assumptions based on body language and speech I can't quite hear. It's none of my business. 

Thavarajah is at the table not eating but smiling. He keeps on a steady smile, I think like the girls, to cheer Mom along. I've never seen him smile this much. What is he saying with his steady happy face? It was a long day visiting Mom's ancestral village. How can it have been a happy day? There is so much sadness in the air. I am attuned to this sadness because I know something about history and I've been in Israel many times. It is a sadness of permanent loss, a world wiped away. Here it was violence and exile and brutality and terror and occupation. Children and family and good good can go only so far in remedying these experiences. 

I can't know what the family saw yesterday or how they perceived it. I can infer from my day with Thavarajah and his son Darshan. We drove south yesterday from Pasakudah, a ruined beach where they had a meeting in the kind of gorgeous hotel tourists expect. Besides for the dead beach, shored up by sandbags, bits of broken coral on the shrunken sand strip I saw two things we lack here at the modest Riviera Resort in Kallady. First, an extensive lawn. Not littered the Sri Lankan way. Littered the western way with cigarette butts, cellophane from cigarette packs, drinking straws, things strewn and hidden. I collect some to show my grinning hosts. "This is what's missing at the Riviera!" They get the joke. 

The other thing we see driving out is the massive asphalted parking lot, exactly like we have built in the United States. A great place for the tour buses that must come here, unloading guests, spewing and idling in the sun. A parking lot like this draws heat during the day and absorbs it, creating an island of fierce heat that defies the moderating breezes from the coast. It creates a desert. All the more reason to crank up that AC! The asphalt surface repels water, which collects and drains away into the ocean, lowering the local water table (it's all sand here), creating erosion (means we have to pave more since the soil surface is unstable), and flooding in the rain. There are no trees. 

The hotel has built a perfectly ruined ecosystem, including blasting away the reef next to the shore so tourists could bathe. But the surface is rough. Most people stay near the sun-blasted pool. 

As we drive south from the hotel I'm told that the nearby liquor store was opened by the hotel owners, a perfectly legal way to use your license and expand business. Liquor licenses are expensive (Thavarajah tells me he pays Rs 600,000 annually for his) and he could open a liquor store too. "But local people will abuse it." The people who own this hotel are outsiders (Sinhalese, I'm told) and Im told further that they don't care about the community. So here it's a clear equation. Money or community. What about karma?

We drive further south to Chenkalady. Janet and I spent an hour here waiting for the bus to Maha Oya. Here a major roadblock stood during the war. It was the town just next to Eastern University where Darshan majored in math, and he tells me it took over an hour to go the 20km or so into Batticaloa. It wasn't the only roadblock. 

I know that in Israel roadblocks stopped terror. I know also that they caused a huge inconvenience and shame to people who had to put up with them day after day. The world made a hue and cry over the "cruelty" of roadblocks in the West Bank. How did the world respond to the situation in eastern Sri Lanka? Terror here was stopped too, but at the expense of the social fabric. People hated these roadblocks and they still bristle under police presence. How can you attain peace when these animosities continue? Can't we design a better way?

I'm shown houses, lots of them, that were confiscated by the military to house officers within military camps, suddenly visible on either side of the road. These camps, which were somehow invisible to me before, drive home the seriousness of the military's presence around Batticaloa. During the war and still now. 

Thavarajah is pulled over by the police, incredibly, for a third time this week. His license is checked and for the first time there's no citation. I am incredulous. What am I seeing?

I ask about tourists. They were blocked until 2009 I'm told. How did you get along as a guesthouse? There were lots of NGO people staying. What about the military. Did you have up accommodate them? Only on Poya. They'd come to demand alcohol (it's illegal to serve it on Poya days). So I'm introduced to yet another facet of Thavarajah's tale of repression and brutality. Something I can still only dimly understand, if not for the constant pulling-over by the police. 

Our trips to the devastated villages haven't been happy. Nor was this trip though we all were jovial enough. How was it for this UK mom with lovely grown UK daughters to see her ancestral village in Akkaraipattu?

Years ago when we were in the Yucatan, in Valladolid where the Mayan rebellion took place, I dreamt I was sleeping on a bed of knives. It was the most unsettling thing. I think I was picking up on some kind of feverish fierce energy there in that lovely still-barely-ruined-by-tourism place. Last evening I picked up on Mom's sad energy. And there are many, many energies like that around. I dreamt six hours ago that a wave, powerful and steady, shook the foundations of this place. I looked out to sea and another wave, stronger and more massive, was on its way. 

Thai Pongol, the consistency of milk rice, and what I've learned about Sri Lanka.

The dramatic holiday of Thai Pongol, celebrated by Tamil people around the world, is upon us. Thai Pongol is an agriculture-based holiday that I'm told always falls on January 14th or 15th. The sun is thanked for the energy it provides for farmers (and for all of us-who exist thanks to the food they produce). What an amazingly scientific concept! In agricultural communities farm animals are also commemorated, decorated, and thanked. Thai Pongol starts at dawn with a cooking pot of milk rice that is set to boil over. It's a beautiful thing to see. Later in the day the "Pongol" is prepared with jaggery, cashews, cardamom pods, and other ingredients. 

This morning my dear host and friend Mr. Thavarajah ordered breakfast for me before we took a little trip to Pasakudah Beach with his son Darshan. It was a lovely portion of milk rice and hot spicy  seemi sambol, precursors to the Pongol disn that comes later. 

Milk rice is a delicacy. Rice that has been cooked in coconut milk is rich and aromatic, smooth and delectable. It's like nothing you've ever had, especially if you eat it with your fingers (as we do here). 

I like milk rice everywhere. I've had it in Jaffna and Colombo and in the rural south and in distant Hambantota. But I never had anything like what I was served this morning. The moist sensual consistency, the purity of color, and I have to say the love with which it was prepared set it apart and surprised me. A supremely smooth dish startled me with its adorable softness. 

So what have I learned (or what do I think I've learned) in Sri Lanka? My new friend Lili Herman, a professor at RISD, shared her students with me yesterday. She was also kind enough to share her brilliant, inspired, and idealistic thoughts with me. Her approach to teaching (what she-modestly I think-calls the RISD approach) is a wonderful thing. And I'm happy to say close to the way I run shop with my students--egalitarianism-exploration-abstraction-connection. And her social action project here in Batticaloa is equally compelling. And possibly game-changing. 

But this morning as I tucked into my milk rice (fingers first) I got to wondering. What is Thai Pongol? What is the consistency of this day? Does the milk rice give us a clue? What does it tell us about the way we interact-or can interact-with this deeply complex culture?

You stick your fingers into the milk rice and relish its consistency. You mix it and ball it up and get ready to savor it. But you don't change its consistency or the way it's put together. Maybe Sri Lanka is the same. It's built of an amalgam of ingredients that produce a particular texture-one you can't quite determine, let alone change. We may stick our fingers into this gorgeous milk rice of a country with all our good intentions and ingenious concepts. But it is Sri Lanka, a place of enigmatic and unadulterable consistency, something we from the outside cannot change. 

Tanks not used for irrigation? Tanks as a symbol of power?

I'm always writing about how things in this part of the world are not as they appear. Yet I think like most people, it's difficult to see beyond my own shortsighted insights when it comes to larger concepts in cultural landscape ecology. Irrigation tanks, which I'm here in Sri Lanka to study, are used to irrigate rice, right?

People who have written about tanks in Sri Lanka acknowledge that they have many purposes and I agree. They have been used traditionally for drinking water, bathing, wildlife refuges, fishing resources, lotus ponds, and the source of edible water plants. Tank silt has been used widely in the manufacture of tiles, pottery, and bricks. Thanks to their differential deposits of soil minerals (due to circulation of water in the tank and subsequent depositional patterns) tanks have also been used as a source of calcium carbonate and perhaps other minerals as well. In contemporary times we've come to understand that they improve the water table and ameliorate climate, things the ancients may have understood too, but in different parlance. Tanks may be misused. For example for washing tuktuks or tractors, both of which I've seen, unbelieving, with my own eyes. I've also seen tank beds misused for building, tropical fish aquaculture, and even grazing pigs. 

One thing I've spent less time thinking about is the way tanks and tank bunds (dams) are seen universally as a nexus of beauty. It's strange that I've ignored it because I'm always curious about how people perceive their local environment. I know for example that tanks are widely used as a setting in movies or in the endless music videos you see on buses.They are a backdrop for lovers. 

They are also a backdrop for power. In a controversial music video just released (and quickly withdrawn after sharp criticism) a tank bund is traversed by a white horse, its rider carrying the Sinhala flag, as god-kings look down from the clouds at the visage of President Sirisena. The video, which plays I think to a very low cultural and political denominator, was allegedly produced to commemorate and promote Sirisena's first year in office. What does it tell us about tanks?

It tells us something we already know, at least in part. Tanks are seen as wealth and by extension, as symbols of power. The so-named "Magul Pokuna" (marriage pond) tank that I saw the other day near Welikanda was part of a contemporary landscape of power. The tank, like the same-named village, was an outpost, a Sinhala settlement at the borderlands of Tamil Sri Lanka, a statement of hegemony. Might the ancient tanks have represented the same kind of claiming of the territory?

Let's consider a broad jungle landscape of roughly 2500-3000 years ago. It is inhabited by aboriginal peoples (the devilish "Yakas" who lord Buddha brought under control) who by the way have their own religious practices, settlements, and other cultural patterns. The "invaders" (pre-Buddhist people presumably from India) must make a home for themselves in this rich but inhospitable land. In pre-revolutionary America they built stockades. What if here in pre-Buddhist Sri Lanka they built tanks? A tank provides a more or less permanent clearing (like the lawns of old England) across which you can see your if your enemies try to encroach. You can even take refuge on boats in your artificial lake, water and food all around you, until your enemies give up and go away. A tank provides a reliable source of fish and plant food for a permanent settlement. You don't have to venture into the dangerous forest to find game (later you make vegetarianism part of your religion). And the tank, like the dagoba later, is emblematic of your inviolable ownership of this place. Did the tanks evolve to become sources of irrigation? Of course they did. But they have always symbolized the landscape of Sri Lanka, especially but not exclusively in the Dry Zone. Perhaps they began here as a symbol of ownership, hegemony, and power.