Latest / What’s the Story: The Sri Lanka Podcast / What Sets You Free | Why May Days Matter In Sri Lanka
Transcript
- What Sets You Free | Why May Days Matter In Sri Lanka Is May the moment to forsake madness and put aside all but the best supporting gods? The 2nd of May 2025. Yesterday, of course, was the 1st of May, the day when people celebrate the start of spring. Or at least they used to, until most of them moved into towns and cities and forgot the countryside. In Oxford, of course, they do it in a particularly old-fashioned and bafflingly erudite way. They sing Latin hymns and dance fifteenth-century dance numbers beneath Magdalen Tower, built in the year Henry VIII came to the throne. Although the king was to mature into the terrifying opposite of a spring chicken, the festival celebrating this part of the calendar continued through all his troubled marriages and the centuries of war, wealth, regret and change that were to follow. Yesterday was no different. Watched by hundreds of townsfolk, the festival was carried out, the tower bells rang, and the students flung themselves drunkenly into the freezing river. Spring was welcomed in. Writing about this kind of May in June, Philip Larkin said: The trees are coming into leaf Like something almost being said; The recent buds relax and spread, Their greenness is a kind of grief. Is it that they are born again And we grow old? No, they die too, Their yearly trick of looking new It is written down in rings of grain. Yet still the unresting castles thresh In full-grown thickness every May. Last year is dead, they seem to say, Begin afresh, afresh, afresh. But by the first of May, of course, spring has long since sprung - and things are already afresh - so it really ought to be summer that is welcomed in. Maybe it's a hinge thing, a bit of both. But whatever it really is, it is a matter of great and monstrous marvel that a festival about growth, freedom and life should have been hijacked by the arms industry, generals, and war-mongering political leaders as the best time to show off their arms – their tanks, rockets and other expensive military equipment. An optimist might say this is getting a bit better. In the old days, not so long since passed, the star of the international stage was the Kremlin. It was noted for its interminable drive-pasts of tanks and guns and fly-pasts of military jets. Most countries have a moment for similar shows of force, though none so cold-blooded. Here in Sri Lanka, Independence Day – the 4th of February – is the day designated for its show of force. Special wooden stalls are built facing the sea along Galle Face Green, with white-clad chairs set out for the dignitaries. And then, under shade with the hot sun all around them, they all sit down and watch Sri Lanka's military walk past. Flags are hosted - here and at Sri Lankan embassies abroad, priests of all sorts murmur their blessings, and the navy offers a 21-gun salute. They are part of a quite formidable military, with over 150,000 personnel, half of what it was at the height of the civil war, and reducing still. And a third larger than the British Army, or just 10% of the size of the Indian army. Not that Sri Lanka has any external enemies bent on invading its shores. It takes a while for politicians to learn how to wind down overextended armies, so they don't become the people in charge, as they did in Turkey, or as they still are in Egypt. But compared to most of its near neighbours – in the Maldives, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the army here in Sri Lanka plays a remarkably backseat role in politics and has avoided making any significant direct interventions to influence or redirect elections. But nowadays, May has to share its symbolic moment with all sorts of other things. Counties and organisations may borrow the month to commemorate martyrs, medical cures, national heroes, flowers, truculent dictators, pizzas – even military spouses, smiles and the statehood of Minnesota. But really, and most of all, though May is the moment to forsake madness and put aside its main promoter - the bleak winter, darkness, circumscribed dreams, cold and thick pyjamas. Nothing too hard, too impossible, too ungraspable is any longer out of reach. With spring under your belt, you can go about your life with some degree of optimistic serenity, certain that for some months to come, the sun will shine, even if only metaphorically. And with that simple, critical readjustment, you feel free. Perhaps the most telling of all May Day celebrations was that one back on 4th May 1961, when Bayard Rustin led the first freedom ride to challenge the racist segregation in practice on the buses of the American South. I hang on to this thought of freedom, even though such memories of winter austerity are rather wasted here in tropical Sri Lanka, where the weather is either dry or wet, hot or warm. May on this island is traditionally wet, and on the cool side of warmer. Every tree and spice bush, rambling jungle creeper, and fallen seed puts aside the dozy dry drought and gets growing again. You can smell it as much as see it. Having only just woken, I sit here looking at my valley from my sometimes-accustomed seat, and the air smells green; the land below me, once patchy brown, is now rampant with plants that defy regulation. My dogs are scattered around me, coming in and out as I watch the parakeets and blue kingfishers flitting between tufty arecanut and colossal jack trees – and the almost countless variety of other trees on the mountains and hills beyond. And I feel grateful to my army of small supporting gods that help me. Calm. Sane even. Ready to grow in my trifling, excited way; and planning - today anyway - a day of finessing my HTML coding skills, my database construction techniques, and all the other solutions and squiggles I have dreamed up overnight to refine and remake a raft of websites, eBooks, podcasts, and content management systems. It is still a wonder to me that, despite being in so remote a place, everything that I might ever need – for design for digital, for writing, recording, distributing: it is all as easily available here in the middle of the jungle as it would ever be at my flat in Notting Hill, with central London buzzing all around. Grateful, too, for being the lucky recipient of a structure that allows me to enjoy and occupy my space in such an unimpeded way. Routine, far from being a constraint, is also a liberator, giving you the time and structure you need to do all the other things you want to. Here I can get on with it. There is no A4-sized officer from HR waving a monstrous 360-degree, Myers-Briggs, or Leadership blind-spot assessment form at me, determined to nail my strengths and weaknesses to the corporate mask. From Zoom to Slack, Working Genius to Jung Type Indicators, I am free of the ropes that tie the tent; that keep it from getting flappy in the breeze and floating away. Today I can hatch out, unrestrained, all I have incubated overnight, splicing work between a swim, walking the dogs, and positioning the scores of tiny new orange trees we have bought to plant. And of course, having my hair cut – for Dilruk is coming soon to give me a short back and sides under the frangipani trees. That was a production written and recorded by David Swarbrick at The Ceylon Press, based in the jungle north of Kandy, at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel, and set up to tell the story of Sri Lanka.