The War Is Over

It has been seven years since the end of the war, many of us still remember that day. Where were you on that day? What were you doing?

For me it has a hectic time, my advanced level examination was just few months away. I was attending a chemistry class in Kandy. Back in the day there was no Twitter in Sri Lanka, I was not on Facebook and Facebook was still not popular that day. Oh how things would have been different if we had social media in our country back in 2009.

How would the tweets have been? would there be snapchats about the war? Imagine things would have been much different if we had social media.

Anyway I was at the chemistry class, we had sms news alerts enabled on an old nokia phone. Now I don’t use SMS anymore I just read my news on Twitter.

So around May 17, 18 we knew it was just a matter of time everyone knew the war will be over very soon. I still remember how all the news alerts came in, I was going through each and every one of those messages, I thought every message will be the message that war has finally ended.

There was a stream of messages, messages of top LTTE ranks getting killed during the battle. Then came a message about an ambulance where LTTE leader was killed while planning to escape, then about another message denying it. It was so much excitement that I could hardly focus on the chemistry lesson.

Finally around mid day while I was on my way from Kandy I got the message that war is finally over, as there was no internet on mobile phones back in the day most of the people in the bus did not knew that war ended.

It was all celebrations when I came to Kegalle, there flags, firecrackers, everyone was happy. It was the only time I’ve seen so many people celebrating at the same time. Even I was happy, classes were ended soon and we were allowed to go out and celebrate.

I really believe that we had a great chance of uniting the country and make it into developing the country like Japan did after the world war, as always I think we just missed the bus.

I don’t know whether we should celebrate today in winning the war or not. Both sides have their own argument. We Sri Lankans like to celebrate/dwell in the past, Sri Lankans don’t like to look towards the future.

We went on celebrating this day over and over and let corrupt politicians to make use of it for 5–6 years dividing us until we got bored of it. When did we think about uniting the people using that day and build a better future.

We missed the bus in 2004 tsunami, we missed the bus in 2009, seven years on are we waiting for another bus?

The war is over, let us celebrate it.