Here's my article in the Daily Mirror last week about how the latest lockdown is affecting people. 

All it takes is a little compassion

By Gamini Akmeemana

There is widespread hunger. I don’t need to read someone’s research data to know this – as I do my regular nocturnal rounds feeding stray dogs and cats, more and more people turn up asking me for food.

It’s heartbreaking. I tell them it’s animal feed, rice boiled together with leftover from the butcher’s,  and not fit for human consumption (I was able to feed these animals continuously throughout the lockdown only because my butcher has been kind enough to deliver the meat to my home, and a friendly CMC security guard with a travel pass procures the rice for me from the Narahenpita market).

I now take some biscuits with me to give these people as it’s beyond my own meager resources to feed both – hungry humans as well as animals. In this context, some are bound to question the ethicality of feeding dogs and cats while people are starving. My answer is simple. I don’t have the resources to feed both. My choice is personal and deliberate, and based on the following logic. It’s up to the compassion of individuals to feed starving animals who do not have a voice or representation. As for people, that’s why the government is there. It has been elected to look after everyone – voters, non voters, the rich, the middle class, the poor, and the beggars. If anyone goes hungry during a time of national crisis, someone has failed them badly somewhere.

In the government’s defense, one could say that Sri Lanka simply doesn’t have the resources to look after the needy during a prolonged, unprecedented crisis such as the pandemic (suddenly, we are a poor country? I’ve been told repeatedly that we are now a middle income country. I remember a call from SOS Villages Sri Lanka. They were calling everyone and asking for help – after we got elevated to that middle income bracket, that charity lost its funding from abroad. These are the ironies of life, lost on those cruising around in their six cylinder or eight cylinder monsters).

If the government can’t do it, then it’s up to individuals. As for the four legged, those feeding them, then and now, have been a very mixed lot  -- a few rich people along with thousands of ‘ordinary’ (like myself) to the downright poor. Everyone is struggling now, but many are somehow meeting these self-imposed obligations, though I find it hard to believe that someone driving around in a multi-cylinder vehicle sporting a carbon footprint the size of Yeti’s is struggling as much as I – unless they have  borrowed so much they find it hard to pay it back. I suspect that if it comes to the crunch and they must make the hard choice between the multi-cylinder dream and the laughable budget for feeding the four legged, it’s the latter that will have to go. In my case, with no bank loans to pay on my bicycle, I can at least afford to feed the dogs.

But now the onus for giving a decent meal at least once a day to the two legged (and one-legged, too) who are going hungry must fall on the same ladies and gentlemen living with perpetual nightmares of their dream vehicles seized without warning by hard-nosed X men from the finance companies. Undoubtedly, I’m imagining or exaggerating things here. After all, such people have more than one vehicle in their garages, and losing one would not cripple them the way it would a three wheeler driver or ambitious young executives falling behind payments on their Marutis and Renaults.

Yes, it’s time to stop worrying about the X men and feel a little compassion towards the Les Miserables of this country – people who were always miserable before the pandemic but now sliding from the frying pan into the fire. This is just a thought – if a thousand businesspersons (I don’t mean people running shoe marts, tea shops or those selling rejected stock from garment factories. Let’s aim a little higher) joined together and formed a fund, each undertaking to give one meal per day to ten starving people, we would be having ten thousand people with happily churning stomachs and lovely burps.

Surely, we can find not just 1000 such philanthropists from our business community – in a middle income country with a population of 20 million plus, we could find ten thousand such people, twenty thousand, or more? Or have the economists lied to us all along?

And let’s not forget the doctors. I’m told by reliable sources that some of them earn several million rupees a month – some as much as thirty million. While such figures maybe exaggerated by those livid with jealousy, even someone as bad at figures such as myself can plainly see that many doctors are well off.  Even if we accept that  Covid 19 must have dented  their incomes, I think such channelling wizards can still afford to hand out a few food parcels to the needy if I can  afford to feed the dogs and cats down my street.

All it takes is a little compassion. Or is that asking for too much?