Pigs can fly

A rather wonderful new website, this, which I only began yesterday. And yet, I find myself possessed by a peculiar urge to write and upload something about myself every single day, purely for the sake of consistency. (I am, by the way, a rather good writer.) Today, then, I shall set down my own story. This isn't about my company, but rather about something I believe in with a conviction that is, perhaps, a little startling.

The tale begins, as so many do, in the first years of primary school. I was never what one might call a 'social butterfly'. I always had this... thing... with people. To be blunt, I simply couldn't grasp the common currency of their conversation. The "what did you have for dinner?" or the "how are you feeling?" or, heaven help us, the "how's the weather?" You know, small talk. As a result, I was not, to put it mildly, a socially adapted child. My comforts were reading and writing, and I lived quite happily in my own world.

"A world of fantasy," my father used to call it. A kind description, but one I must dispute. I've rather come to believe that other people are the ones living in a fantasy. Theirs is a world where they have been told precisely how to act and what to do; a world where thinking beyond the prescribed lines is frightfully bad form. It is a world where they cannot distinguish truth from a lie, or fiction from science; a world where a falsehood is readily embraced if it just sounds more interesting than the truth. A world where, thanks to the 'Halo Effect', if someone is famous, almost everything they say is inexplicably deemed true. A world where people fight over their differences, even when those differences harm no one, and brawl over things they cannot prove even exist.

My world, or so I felt, was different. In my world, I was open to any possibility. I was always open to chance. I simply wanted to know how things had actually happened in the past. Eventually, however, I figured something out: the sort of people I wanted to live with either didn't exist or were nowhere to be found in my particular part of the world—a developing country, and not even the urban bit of it, which is where I resided.

So, I kept reading. And reading. I didn't necessarily accept everything I read or was told, but I acknowledged it. I understood the possibilities. I used to say I'd read a great many books... until, of course, I met people who had read a great many more. A humbling, but necessary, education.

Now, back to the story. I was, I suppose, not a fully functioning child. I was dreadful at sports and that sort of thing. I also had asthma when I was young, which meant I was unwell a good deal of the time.

My primary school belonged to the army; it was maintained and built by them, initially for the children of soldiers. I always enjoyed my time there. It was a beautiful school, wonderfully green. We had a garden of tall trees—I can't recall their exact type, but they were splendidly tall and green. I remember some jack trees in the midst of it all. The first day my parents and I visited, one of them asked, "Do you like the school?" I simply nodded. I recall now it was mostly because of those trees and the lovely, cooling chilliness they provided.

Then, when I was in grade 2, the principal changed. The new one was a lady. One day, I was going to see those trees, and... they were gone. All of them. Pulled up by a backhoe. They just lay there on the school grounds. I couldn't understand why they would do such a thing. It later turned out it was to make an assembly ground near the principal's office. But to cut down fifteen-odd tall, beautiful trees for that?

I was sad, but at the same time, I must admit, I was interested. I had never seen the roots of a big tree before. They hadn't been cut down, you see, they had been pulled from the ground, so one could see the entire, sprawling root system. I went to have a closer look.

About five minutes later, while I was staring intently at the roots, things suddenly went dark. It turned out someone had pushed me into one of the pits left by the trees. The pit was taller than me, much taller. Well, I did scream, but there was rather no point; it was the school interval. So, I just stayed in there. I don't remember what I was thinking, but I do know I wasn't afraid. I just... stayed. I also don't remember who eventually fished me out, though I have a vague, fond remembrance of my good friend Malindu being involved.

Somehow, I made it back to the classroom. I had no idea what I looked like, nor did I particularly care, but my uniform was caked in mud. The teacher—an older woman, who was due to retire after our year—commanded that I could not stay in that state. I had to change my clothes, and another kind aunty provided me with some. But later that day, the teacher began a speech. A speech that depicted, in great detail, how utterly dirty and disgusting pigs are. How they ate mud. It was a Buddhist school, and she even implored us not to eat pork, so loathsome were they. And then, for better or worse, she pointed to me as the exemplar of the pig.

From that day on, I became "the pig."

I didn't agree with my teacher, though. I had read or heard somewhere that in terms of organs, skin, and muscles, humans and pigs share a remarkable resemblance. According to the records of cannibals (a curious reading list, I'll admit), human flesh tastes much the same as pork. And pigs, I mused, have a certain freedom, don't they? They just play in the mud, without a care, even if in a few hours they might be destined for an oven.

So, my friends started calling me "pig," and the teacher did too. I suppose I had both the freedom and the validation to think like one. I gave it a shot. And, somehow, it made me happy. Whenever I had something to decide, I would ask myself, "What would the pig do?" I remember my friend Hansini once asked me, if I could be any animal, what would I be? I said, "A pig." (This isn't strictly true; my favourite animal is the Kangaroo. Pig is perhaps third or fourth. Oh, wait, no, I change my answer. If I wanted a pet, I'd have a Blue Whale.) My friends all laughed, of course, and asked why. I gave them my answer: freedom. I later realised the correct answer was "blue whale," but I knew precious little about them back then.

There is another aspect to this story. It's about my identity. As I grew older, I figured out that I see things differently than other people. Of course, everyone does, to an extent. But the things a majority might consider 'beautiful' or 'sexy', I simply... don't. It didn't take long to figure out what I was, but I never bothered to label it. I just let it be me. Let it be Kesaru.

I've always rather liked my name. My father, a bit of a wonderful geek who adored poetry, took it from the The Starling's Message, a work of great significance in Sinhala literature. My name became, as a result, very unique. I've yet to find anyone else with it. Now, at twenty, I feel that if someone else did have the same name, they'd surely have been named after me. (A harmless, if slightly grandiose, little thought.)

In the course of this self-discovery, I stumbled upon a book: Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai. It was the first novel that truly seemed to resemble my own story. And its first chapter? It was titled 'Pigs Can't Fly'. In it, the protagonist Arjie asks why he can't be something unusual, something not dictated by society. His mother replies, "because the sky is so high and pigs can’t fly."

That quote stayed with me for a very long time. I thought about it. A few millennia ago, in terms of flying, we humans were no better off than pigs. Given that we're made of rather similar stuff, one could say we are pigs, in a manner of speaking. But some of these "human pigs" believed so fervently that the sky was not so high after all. They believed it with such thorough, unshakeable conviction that, for all of us, it became true.

Human pigs began to fly. It didn't matter how fat we were, what gender we possessed, what colour we were, or what our preferences might be. Anything could fly, because some pigs simply believed the sky was not an insurmountable barrier. And fly we did. We didn't just fly; we utterly shattered the horizons.

And we are still breaking them. All because some people managed to strip away all the stupid, distracting noise—everything apart from the fundamental rules defined by the universe (what some call 'physics')—and gave themselves the freedom to wonder, to question, to reason, and to build.

To ourselves, we are pigs. Among ourselves, we have pigs who possess the freedom to do things. To be whatever we want and to make this world an amazing place. And those pigs will fly. As for the pigs who feel bound, who live in fear of those stupid, man-made rules (distinct from the universal ones, of course), I say this: do not be afraid to break them. You might just be the next person to break the horizon.

I believe that everyone in this world is, at heart, a pig. Please, find your pig. And be one. My goal is for everyone to find their pig and make this world a beautiful, colourful place. Just as a pig would enjoy it.

And so, we arrive at the rather splendid and inescapable conclusion. Pigs can fly. I am utterly serious. This isn't some whimsical notion, no flight of fancy, if you'll pardon the pun. It is the fundamental, horizon-breaking truth of the human spirit. It is the engine of all our progress. So, I implore you, believe it. Believe it as thoroughly and steadfastly as you believe in the sky itself. For in that belief... well, everything becomes possible.

'Sky is not that high, pigs can fly'
Courtesy to Shyam Selvadurai the book Funny Boy.