And the people...

Most of the members look up to the field staff for solving their problems. The field staff work in the districts and the estates and travel to different places in the field area. They don't have good and comfortable means of transport. It is important to have your own means of transport, so that you not only cover the field areas but also return in good time to your family station. The disparity in living conditions is considerable across the metro, the district towns, the area towns and the field places including estates. Hence it is the field staff's major concern to be staying at a place of reasonable comforts. They are employees of the organisation. But there is no employer-employee contractual relationship. It is more of a community-based organisation. So the staff are full-time activists and workers who are committed to the cause for which the organisation stands.

It is not in the field staff's powers to redress major grievances. They have to escalate such matters to the district level leadership. They become the conduit through which the member's views and woes are transmitted to the upper echelons. The leader by rule is handling several matters broadly categorised into industrial relations and development.

If the leader holds a public office such as an MLA, he tends to give more weightage to the redressal of general developmental issues and relegates the industrial relations matters. He has to also find time to meet the delegations of members, hear them out, understand and deliberate on the thorny matters. At times he has to seek intervention of the national leaders. Apart from communication, personal equations, trust and rapport play a very crucial role in the interactions of the staff with their leadership.

Over decades, the staff had experienced powerlessness on account of the peculiar situation of most of the labour who had been denied for a long time basic citizenship rights. The staff in such cases reported matters to the national leadership which alone was capable of moving matters through political negotiations at the highest levels.

In turn,the staff carried out the directives of the national leadership for launching agitational programmes in the field. Hence the legacy of the past lies in the expectation of the staff to have a direct link with the national leadership.

In most cases, the staff are simple, sincere and committed people working on low salaries, transferable on the basis of personal equations with the leaders and not possessing own means of transport. Their commitment to the organisation is rock solid.

The people's leaders

The people who make up the organisation are of various types. First, there is a small group based in the capital city. These are English-speaking, western-educated men and women of independent means of livelihood. They have the metro style and attend to the problems of people in the districts in an official way. They have to keep track of political developments and manouevre things in the crafty ways required by realpolitik.

There are also the leaders who grew under Ayya's benign patronage and tutelage. They have roughed it out and are seasoned, but not polished, by years of struggle. They are simple, speak workable English and do not possess style. They are selected for government posts on the strength of their grass-root support. They are the old guard, who swear by Ayya's legacy and don't mind calling a spade a spade with the present leader. Thambi respects them but has no patience with their long-winded expositions which smack of self-importance to the young generation.

The third are the leaders from the districts. They are either MP's in the national parliament or MLA's in the provincial assemblies. They are middle aged, again have independent sources of income in most cases, speak English and the mothertongue, preferring the latter for mass appeal. They belong to second or third generation of plantation labour. Their forefathers survived misery, injustice and despair all around guided by the light of Ayya's determined leadership. The present group lives amidst comfort, living down the dreadful past with greater zest. This group exudes energy and is willing to exercise its newfound muscle in an assertive way at the command of thambigaru.

The organisation

CTS is a unique organisation, totally identified with Ayya today. Ayya is no more. Thambigaru is in saddle for the last 7 years. Ayya was an astute politician, who worked in a principled way, without being rigid. He followed Krishnaniti without being devious in any way. In an alien land, he stood up fearlessly for his people and their rights. He eschewed the path of violence but did not flinch from it in self defence. He worked from the ground level up and observed the ways of other schools of politics closely. While appreciating the golden brains of his rivals, he saved himself from their mistakes by keeping feet on the ground and listening to the basic human reaction as he called it. Steadfast he was in his pursuit of goals over nearly six decades and failures did nothing to deter or demotivate him. Can we feel the nerves of steel that made this man struggle for SIX decades? How can a people NOT worship such a leader?

Once the goal of citizenship was achieved the whole complexion of the organisation changed. From a union of workers, it has become a political party commanding a small but decisive number of MPs in a divided house. Union leaders who for long eked out a meek existence in an uncertain climate and a hostile environment are now tasting the fruits of political office and power. The old guard are disciplined and committed, yet not wholly comfortable with the young upstarts. With power, there are trappings of resources, but challenges of meeting unrealistic expectations. The young are ambitious and euphoric by early successes. Little do they realise the compulsions of statecraft and governance in a small and developing country rife with ethnic conflicts.

The Ritual

The opening ritual started with building the context. The elders in the tribe heard intimations of Akashwani. They knew something good was going to happen to the community. But the Akashwani would ask them to work for it.

The Akashwani took the seat at the instance of the Hotra(anchor). Each group was then led to the Akashwani, who asked: What do you offer? The group's micro alterego answered in terms of the positives and the negatives that the group brought with it. The Akashwani then gifted a question to the group to work on. The macro alterego then summed up the gift of the Akashwani for the group as well as the community. The group then lit the lamp in the symbolism of taking the realisation with them. This sequence repeated for all groups including faculty group.

There was a feeling of incompleteness in the faculty about the ritual. The first step towards movement was not clearly imprinted. The symbolism of each one lighting one wick wasn't also captured.

I then looked up Pulin's writings on Rituals in the Aphorisms. A ritual has a definite design, rhythm and pace. There is the ritualiser(Hotra) and the actor(Karta). There is the invocation of the universal self, which accommodates all diversities and contradictions and yet rises above them. The ritual brings the actors in confrontation with the limits that have come into place on their movement. The ritual touches the existential level, unlike the psychodrama which moves from the transactional to the phenomenological level.

I have a feeling that we did invoke the universal self in the form of Akashwani, albeit in a cognitive and not evocative manner. However, both the articulation by micro alterego and the gift from the Akashwani remained at the phenomenological level. The macro alter ego also did not raise it to the existential level. We need to explore this further.

In the symbolic act of moving from darkness to light, we could ask the groups to move over and sit behind the Akashwani.