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Just the other day our nice neighbours nearly blew themselves up with their nuclear playthings so that our egg-headed bureaucrats could sit back in their cosy chairs and tell each other how to spell their president’s name in the English language.

Either we kill each other or misspell names hardly worth the salt we can no longer produce and need to import because our agglomeration of scientific maestros are balancing on some murunga attha or chasing monkeys round the next door garden, while the poor get poorer so the masterminds in the presidential secretariat could eliminate another word without getting entangled in etymology.

Meanwhile, the nouveau riche, which some thought would never be born again with the death of the ancien regime after the last election, seem to have risen quicker than Lazarus, judging by the spick and span four-wheelers rolling off the ramps by the Presidential House of Socrates to change hands and sahodara mudalalis to drive to their penthouses soon to be turned into spent houses.

As though the world is not mad enough, we have leaders not only at the top but bottom too to keep the bottom half entertained, for they have nothing else to do with Donald Duck playing Tariffs
and Trumps.

Just a couple of months ago, the eight South Asian nations that make up SAARC met at its headquarters in Kathmandu to map out the programme for the countries’ coming years. For years, the organisation had been struggling to work together to produce a cohesive and productive regional body that could match something of the strides its neighbouring regional group ASEAN had achieved over the years despite its early political and ideological divisiveness.

While SAARC continued to mouth its intentions to strengthen its regional ties and band together for the good of the South Asian nations, words superseded real goals and intentions.

Even as the SAARC nations were showing their goodwill by seemingly planning new programmes, armed clashes broke out in the neighbourhood that dragged SAARC’s two major nations and nuclear powers into a conflict which might well have dragged our blessed little place into a nuclear hell-hole had dear old Trumpy not been busy elsewhere.

Why would he care? After all, we are not selling him noodles and charging him a dollar for a pack that he needs to send his dilapidated Air Force One screaming over C7’s fake Chinese restaurants and accidentally drop the missiles over the Maldives, such being the mental condition of the owner, not the mechanical/electronic state of the presidential aircraft.

Just think of Donald Trump threatening to blow up President Li’s chicken noodles factory all the way to Taiwan along with the island some
call a nation, which, he said last time round, he would defend against outdated Commie missiles.

What would not do to Modi’s pooja-paying stooges around the place had he got an inkling that the one-time chieftain of Gujerat was suddenly thumbing his nose at Trump the second. Would he have cared about a case of coconut water? What would have happened if Modi was blown over to the other side of the Himalayas?

Lest we forget, it was a saner and therefore a safer president who sat at the White House when India officially exploded its first nuclear device (Pokhran-11) tests in May
1988, followed almost immediately by Pakistan.

I remember it well enough, for I was still in Hong Kong, and I was attending a Vin d’honneur a couple of days later, though I cannot remember for whom. Among those attending were the Consul General for India, Veena Sikri, and Consul General for Pakistan, Tariq Puri.

Since their countries were very much in the world news, I was determined to have the Hong Kong Standard photographer get a picture of them together, but I could not get them together. But we were such good friends that I cajoled the two into a picture.

Still, it never got published. As we were leaving, Tariq Puri pleaded with me to drop it—he was worried about the reaction of the Pakistani—and perhaps—Muslim community in Hong Kong. I did concede, though I know I have the picture somewhere at home still.

But the story of the early days of SAARC must still be told, for it was that political history dating back to South Asia’s independence days that still persists today and might have ended up in nuclear fisticuffs if saner counsel did not prevail and muscle talk did not ultimately concede to missile power.

Back in Colombo, I attended the first meeting of the foreign secretaries of the seven South Asian nations held in Colombo to pave the way for the new grouping. I talked to all of them. There were two stories. The six smaller nations—particularly those from the Indian/Himalayan continent—were worried they would be dominated by India, and India was concerned the others would gang up against it. And it is those fears that prevail even today.

Days before the nuclear show in the Himalayas, President Anura Kumara Disanayake/Dissanayake (take your pick) showed a particular inclination to Sri Lanka towards Indian interests, saying he would not allow his nation to be used in a way that would endanger Indian security.

Maybe even now he and his advisors who meddle in foreign policy and world affairs should learn from how the then Prime Minister, Sirima Bandaranaike, handled Sri Lankan affairs at the time of the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence, still adhering to Sri Lanka’s commitment to its nonaligned policy without bowing to a major neighbour.

How muddled we are today! Sri Lanka’s two big policy makers cannot even decide how to spell the president’s name in the English language, with the foreign ministry joining hands with the Indian External Affairs Ministry, as I first said when spotting it in the December 2024 Joint Statement, and the Presidential Secretariat dropping one letter ‘s’ from
the Dissanayake.

Now that is what is called NPP cost-cutting. That should save much on printing.

(Neville de Silva is a veteran Sri Lankan journalist who was assistant editor of the Hong Kong Standard and worked for Gemini News Service in London. Later, he was deputy chief of mission in Bangkok and deputy high
commissioner in London).