press on

There's something about classical music isn't there. About Bach perhaps to more of an extent than Beethoven who's slightly darker but equally passionate. Bach is falsely thought to be lighter, the notes are higher, but the music is more complex, full of mathematically complex arias. Plotting pitch against time yields an approximate fractal curve,the same curve that delineates the space-time continuum, quantum physics and the natural structure of snowflakes and mountains, river networks and blood vessel systems. And yet the limited human mind is able to perhaps, be paralysed by the music, recognizing its depth, without comprehending the parameters of the depth, if that makes sense. It all gives one some kind of faith in humanity.

A crisis of faith. Talking about Sri Lanka with some non-domiciled sri lankans and remarking on the scale of the backward decline since the Kumaratunga presidency although no doubt the roots can be traced to beyond that, perhaps from Sirimavo Bandaranaike herself, the first woman prime minister in the world (one small step for feminists, one giant leap backward for a nation). How the country used to be far ahead than India on nearly every human development index indicator. How now it is mired, irrevocably perhaps in its futile ethnic politics, how everything becomes politicized in individual, institutional and state power grabs. How perhaps the biggest obstacle to true liberalization, in both an economic, social and political sense is the absence of a free press, instead of what exists now, lackeys of the Sinhala Buddhist polity. How newspapers that start up, mysteriously get shut down soon after, either due to depletion of funds or more prosaically, the disappearances and murders of journalists and editors. Mired in a quagmire of their own making. Bureaucracy, corruption for the smallest of things (such as getting a goddamned car license or getting a passport paperwork filled out).