Last evening, I got to hear Shehan Karunatilika conversing with Jerry Pinto at the Kozhikode Lit Fest. The discussion was centered around his Booker award and when asked to read a few lines from the book, Karunatilaka read out the following passage:
Sri Lankan visionary Arthur C. Clarke said thirty ghosts stand behind everyone alive, the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.
You look around you and fear the great man’s estimate might have been conservative. Every person you see has a spirit crouching behind them. Some have guardians hovering above and swatting away the ghouls, the pretas, the rahu and the demons. Some have distinguished members of these latter groups standing before them, hissing idle thoughts in their faces. A few have devils squatting on their shoulders and filling their ears with bile.
Sir Arthur has spent three decades of his life on these haunted shores and is clearly a Sri Lankan. Austria convinced the world that Hitler was German and Mozart was theirs. Surely, after centuries of armed plunder, courtesy of the sea pirates from London, Amsterdam and Lisbon, may we Lankans at least help ourselves to one sci-fi visionary?
He concluded by apologizing for appropriating Arthur C Clarke. Pinto, without batting an eyelid retorted: “It’s fine to appropriate a pedophile’!!
I did some digging up and got to know that Clarke was accused of pedophilia in the late 1990s by The Sunday Mirror and later cleared of the charges by the Govt of Sri Lanka. This whole controversy erupted a day before he was supposed to receive a honorary knighthood from Prince Charles! Link to the news item
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