MEOW GOES MIA THAT SNARLING PUSSY

So okay! MIA or should we say Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam for those uninitiated in her hip-hop, reggae, noisy nonsense wrapped up in the garb of sick revolutionary chic, has started snarling and scratching again.
Those who did not read her recent remarks on a New York Times reference to Sri Lanka, have thankfully missed her linguistic profanity that seems to come to her easily as though she was born with the ‘F’ word in her mouth.
Whatever people might think of her music, as some call it, and her increasing political propensities, one wonders how Jaffna’s conservative Tamil society from which she seems to have originated would have reacted, had it been privy to Mathangi’s preference for the four-letter word.
But then her bawdiness is nothing compared to the language of some of her songs and the flitting imagery that feature bombs and killing and tigers as an intrinsic part of her music.
Those who love her kind of raucous music might find her singing style and feline ferociousness really top of the pops. But to others that has become just Salome- preferred veils to cover her promotion of Tiger terrorism even if such support is not always explicit.
MIA might deny this like a snarling pussy cornered in a cul de sac. But her recent comments following the top spot given to Sri Lanka in the New York Times list of 31 places to visit in 2010, is evidence enough of how she has begun to use her popularity as a rap singer to pursue her vendetta against Sri Lanka.
That has been made easy by doting and generally uninformed journalists who might know something about what they are pleased to call her music but are generally ignorant of Sri Lanka. They dare not expose their ignorance by asking Mathangi the kind of relevant, penetrating questions that would have come to them had they done their home work.
Had the doting journalists limited mainly to the UK and US and hardly any in continental Europe where MIA seems to be largely an unknown, asked her those pertinent questions thus exposing her political biases she would have been better contextualized.

Massacred by Tigers

Instead they seem to take her at her word about the grave human rights violations in Sri Lanka that she has claimed she witnessed. Mathangi was born in Hounslow in the UK before moving to Sri Lanka for a few years and then returning to London. If one reads what she has told the media at various times or written in her own blog or whatever these effusions of great insights are called, she claims to have witnessed at first hand human rights violations and what amounts to genocide.
So we have something called CraveOnline.com citing a piece by some chap who calls himself Johnny Firecloud, written on January 12th.
This chap Firecloud appears to have been set alight by Arulpragasam’s fiery passion. Quoth he: “For Sri Lankan native M.I.A. who’s witnessed the massive atrocities of human rights firsthand in her homeland, the promotion of the area as a vacation destination for Americans is enraging.”
Firecloud himself appears to be burning with the desire to place MIA’s views gathered from her twitter on record. So twit, twit goes Mathangi and tweet, tweet goes Firecloud determined to add more fuel to MIA’s burning anger.
Having quoted MIA including the four-letter word he talks of the “gruesome photo of stacked dead children covered in mud.” If Firecloud had only seen the hundreds upon hundreds of children in Sinhala villages who were massacred by the Tigers without any compunction, he might well have considered committing hara kiri through remorse.
Could Firecloud say with certainty that these pictures were not of such massacres, borrowed for a different purpose by MIA?
In the meanwhile, a brief aside about her penchant for the ‘F’ word. She probably picked it up during her early days at what seems like a Hounslow Council Estate where she began learning the English language.
As MIA had said somewhere she hardly knew an English word when she returned to the UK after a short time in Sri Lanka. So the four-letter word must indeed be an improvement in her linguistic learning curve.
Having said that her father was a Tamil political activist, Firecloud set afire by MIA’s political passion says that “she’s been highly vocal in voicing her disapproval of the Sri Lanka Government’s conduct.”
She would be, wouldn’t she dear Johnny, if the Tamil Tigers on whose behalf she has been singing praises and carrying tiger images, were decimated before they could decimate more innocent civilians, including Tamil civilians.
This fellow Firecloud is an insult to intelligent journalism. The man says this.
“Ms. Arulpragasam makes a very strong point.” He says that just two days after running an article with the headline ‘Video of Sri Lankan Executions appears authentic’ UN says, on their news blog The Lede, The New York Times travel section published Sri Lanka as the top place to visit.
Then he adds, bordering on libel “Evidently North Korea and Afghanistan didn’t grease the right palms this year.” But then MIA or her minders in the remnants of the LTTE seem to have found somebody else’s palm more readily susceptible to grease.
Palitha Kohona, when he was secretary to the Foreign Ministry was asked to comment on MIA’s political pronouncements. Kohona said that MIA should do what she does best - stick to music and keep out of politics.
That is indeed sound advice. She should sing punk without behaving like one.