Crop and Reframe: AN ISLAND WITH MANY NAMES: SRI LANKA

I chose my next destination on a whim -or maybe, come to think of how preconscious an act it always is, I was the chosen one. Anyway, the loud click of this mutual selection was a sure sign that I’m on the right path.

All right then, I said to myself, we’re going to Sri Lanka!

Check the security issue (current situation and in general), buy your plane ticket, just outline the places and things you’d like to see, and you’ll decide your itinerary day by day following your nose, or ear. In other words, except for a loose leading idea let you be as flexible as a belly dancer.

For a journey to the faraway places is first of all an excellent exercise of flexing your mind, body and spirit. Leaving the habitual behind to embrace the “other.”

Next, I bought the Sri Lanka edition of my travel Bible: Lonely Planet.

As I was turning the pages, my absolute ignorance of the country began to dissipate little by little like an early morning mist. I knew next to nothing. Just that this was the former Ceylon, the tea place, and was vaguely aware of the finally resolved conflict with Tamil.

Tamil? Weren’t they Indians, sort of? Well, yes and no. Part of this people came to the island from India in times immemorial and merged with the native Sinhala. Trouble only began when the British, having difficulty to find work force for their tea plantations (for which they annihilated the rain forests, mind you), let bring some more Tamil who lived apparently as a closed minority refusing to be assimilated. What began as a culture clash evolved over time into a blatant conflict. Ruthless. Bloody. Devastating. Until recently.

So, we have two people on this relatively small island with a poetically beautiful shape (like a fallen teardrop from India into the ocean, they say), situated 6 degrees off the Equator: The Hindu Tamil and the Buddhist Sinhala, the latter building the majority, each of them with their own language and distinct culture, customs.

Along with Buddhism and Hinduism, Islam (brought by the Arab merchants who married to the locals and settled) and Christianity are represented even if in fewer percentages.

Such a multifold input in a small area would not only bring occasional frictions but more important, color, richness of diversity, as well. A cultural equivalent, then, of their rice & curry to die for!

Hmm, delicious and very, very promising.