Given the context of this post, I thought the title was rather appropriate. Colombo, and all of Sri Lanka I would imagine, is full of military checkpoints. We’re a country that has been raped by civil war. We’ve been at war with a group of people calling themselves the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, who, in their mind, are fighting for a separate state – away from the rest of predominantly-Singhalese Sri Lanka. Why? Because a few warped people (coincidentally Singhalese), tortured an entire village of Tamil people and then continued doing so. Shooting them in broad daylight. Raping wives, mothers and daughters. Cutting their genitals, decapitating them. The suffering was endless! In retaliation to this, the LTTE was formed. Considering what had been done to them, they armed themselves, and pioneered the technique of suicide bombing. Bombs have gone off left, right and center. And ended up taking a lot of people with them – loved ones, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers – no one is spared. Hence the checkpoints.
Some of these checkpoints are manned by the army, some by the navy, then there are those by the air force, and finally there are even those manned by armed police officers. Now however, one finds hybrid checkpoints – manned by officers of multiple forces. It was about 2 days ago, when I was returning from work in the Virtusa shuttle. We were driving down D R Wijewardana Mawatha and we were stopped by one of the two checkpoints along the road. It’s almost an automatic reaction to curse the soldier who stopped you – thinking to yourself “Surely, it says Virtusa on the front of the van and this very same van has been driving up and down this road throughout the day now!! Why on earth don’t they stop the real terrorists??” You are after a hard day’s work after all, and all you can think of is going home and just unwinding, but anyway. So we pulled over to the side of the road, I was seated in front. The soldier signaled for me to put my window down, so I did. Then, with the broadest, nicest smile I’d seen on the face of someone in the forces, he said to me “Good Evening Sir.. ID eka poddak check karanna puluwan da?” All I was able to do was smile back and say to him, “Minnittuwak denna mama dennang.” He read it, and gave it back to me, still with that smile on his face! I was completely blown away! Not for anything else, but for the fact that his smile said so much. It was a genuine smile. A smile that spoke volumes to me and told me that he enjoyed doing what he was doing. That’s something one doesn’t see too often. No matter where they are. We’re all striving to reach the top. We’re all trying to be the boss. And in doing that, what we fail to realize is that it makes us unhappy to be where we are. This unhappiness is projected through our expressions and won’t necessarily make people feel good at all. Think about it. That officer let us go without even looking at the rest of our IDs and for the rest of that journey, I couldn’t help but smile to myself. That’s how his positive immensely his positive attitude affected me! All he needed to do was smile. And to think, you do get some assholes out there. Those who are rude and think they are beyond us all. Those who think the sun shines on their backsides! In most circumstances, they end up giving these poor guys attitude. They’d shout at them, they’d berate them. But still for all, this soldier smiled. And that’s what made the whole difference.
