Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label Sri Lanka civil war

In times of War and Peace: Sri Lanka

When it comes to the people of a country, and I’m speaking as someone who doesn’t understand much about the subject, we must remember that it is culture, not war that cements our identity. Whether it was the Mughals or English or Dutch or Portuguese invading the Indian sub-continent, we have spent centuries killing each other. Today, we’ve (India) been at peace for nearly seventy years and no one realizes how amazing that is any more. Indeed, the very idea of a war again with a far flung foreign power provokes hilarity. Instead the enemy has now moved closer home. And for Sri Lanka it took a civil war to unite the people properly. After being at each other’s throats for three decades in fratricidal war, today the Tamils and the Sinhalese are now all culturally Sri Lankan. Despite spending a fair portion of my childhood in Tamil Nadu, I knew little about the Sri Lankan civil war. Where 130,000 people perished (source: Wikipedia) one would assume that we’d have some concrete kno