Already, three or four days before the SAARC Summit on 29-31 July, Colombo residents were experiencing grave disruption in their lives as the traffic police went about practising the fine art of blocking roads and diverting traffic. It got worse once South Asia's collection of sorry excuses for democrats and leaders actually landed at Katunayake Airport. We would probably have somehow survived this phase of conferencing and media frenzy better had the 84,000 deities of the Sinhala pantheon been in a good mood. But the offerings of fretful Buddhist commuters did nothing to assuage these deities and the streets of Colombo reeled from the devastating impact.
One of the things that was going on in the minds of the thousands who were stuck for hours by road closures near and far from the conference venue of Bauddhaloka Mawata was, why on earth did we bring this upon ourselves? After all, this summit was to have been held in Nepal, and this traffic horror would have been Kathmandu's problem. Alternatively, the Nepalis could have airlifted this bunch of politicos to some mountain resort in a remote corner of the Himalaya. There, they could have been made to eat momos.
But no, that was not to be. The Sri Lankan government actually asked for special consideration to be able to hold the conference out of turn in Colombo in order to show off in the 50th year of Independence. I suppose the Nepalis happily agreed so that they could keep their own hills unpolluted by the presence of South Asian nuclear thugs and their apologists. Or, more likely, since the Nepali government is not known for its own principled positions on anything that is worth having a principle about, they perhaps agreed simply to avoid the nuisance.
On the other hand, perhaps it was a good idea to have the summit in Colombo to mark the nation's 50 years of Independence. For one thing, the siege conditions under which the conference was held, restricting the ability of citizens to move around freely, closure of major highways or parts of them, ad hoc holidays declared for some individuals because they could not come to work, were all indicative of Sri Lanka's failure as a nation-state, a country at war with herself, where chaos has become routinised.