Before this momentous month meanders off the calendar and its events become the stuff with which historians work, Lanka would have ended thirty years of war. How long is thirty years?

I certainly don’t know.

Perhaps it’s long enough for people to marry and have children, and in turn for their children to grow up, long enough for a revolution, and in turn for their own corrupt system to be established. Thirty years is long enough for you to forget what it was like to have fallen in love for the first time and remember the innocence you regarded the world at first.

Thirty years is long enough for schoolboys to grow up and become soldiers but not long enough to permit you to forget the friends who have died.

It’s plenty of time for empires to change hands, for the social, economic and political fabric of nations to be ripped to shreds. Damage that is done in thirty years cannot be measured in dollars or pounds. Millions of people can be made destitute; hundreds of thousands may starve or be butchered. There’s plenty of time for a civilization to die and probably enough for a new one on the becoming...probably?