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BLAZING A TRAIL: THE PURPOSE AND PROJECT OF CHANDRA DE SILVA
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Sanja de Silva Jayatilleka, jan 30.
Trixie Marthenez’s book “Those Delhi Days (1950-54)” tells part of the story. Chandra Samarasinghe was barely out of her teens when she set off to New Delhi from Colombo in 1950, to start a new chapter in her life. She had dreamed of becoming a doctor and was studying for her university entrance exams but there she was sitting in a train with the two other Ceylonese girls who had been selected together with her, for four years at one of Asia’s leading Universities to do an honours degree, having won the coveted scholarships on offer beating a room full of extravagantly dressed applicants. Leaving Ceylon and heading off to a new country, a new way of life, she was soon to introduce herself to her Delhi classmates with a proudly delivered “I am from Lanka”.
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COULD THE LESSONS LEARNT HAVE BEEN FORSEEN?
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Dr DAYAN JAYATILLEKA, sep 1.
Testimony by former senior officials at the Lessons Learnt panel has provided useful insights into what went wrong with policy perceptions, process and prescriptions during the CFA. Meanwhile the grapevine has it that the Royal Norwegian Government has called for tenders for academics and think tanks which can participate in its own ‘lessons learnt’ inquiry into what went wrong with its own efforts at a ‘peace process’ in Sri Lanka.
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AN UNCOMFORTABLE PEACE IN SRI LANKA
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by Cédric Gouverneur, August 12, 2010.
Mahinda Rajapaksa, strengthened by military victory over the Tamil Tigers,
easily won the 2010 Sri Lanka elections. But his government's
authoritarianism is frightening the Sinhalese - and the Tamils are afraid of
colonisation by the Sinhalese majority
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THE SELF-IMMOLATION OF THE UNP
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DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA, Aug 1.
‘Change’ and ‘Unity’ are the two competing slogans within the UNP. Sadly the issue is wrongly framed for either slogan to do much good. The question should be whether change or unity should come first. If unity precedes change, it will also preclude change. Unity is thus being deployed as a slogan to counter that of reform aimed at leadership change or leadership change through reform.
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WORLD COURT ON KOSOVO: LESSONS FOR LANKA
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- DR. DAYAN JAYATILLEKA, Aug 1.
Students residing and schooling in Colombo had the bar to university entrance set higher in the mid 1970s, what with district and media wise standardisation the order of the day. For Arts students the Mt Olympus was the Faculty of Law, and those few who had done well enough were informed that they had qualified /been selected for the Law Fac. Getting their kids in over the high bar of standardisation was a dream for parents in Colombo. That year my name was on top of the list of Arts students eligible for the Law Faculty but as Prof Kamal Karunanayake, then registrar of the UGC would testify, I opted instead – over considerable parental pressure-- for Political Science at Peradeniya. The reason was a simple realisation that ‘law’ and ‘justice’ were two quite different things; that law was weighted in favour of the existing power structure and that politics, by contrast, would not veil reality so much as provide a key to the comprehension of the decision making core, which affected everything else including the law.
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INTERNATIONAL INTERVENTION & THE INTELLIGENTSIA
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DR DAYAN JAYATILLEKA, july 27.
When Julien Benda wrote of the treason of the intellectuals, he didn’t know the half of it.
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THE STATE & STRATEGY FOR THE NORTH AND EAST
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DR DAYAN JAYATILLEKA, July 20.
My first book had an awful title (‘Sri Lanka: The Travails of a Democracy’) conferred by the publisher in Delhi, but the subtitle was mine, and it was Unfinished War, Protracted Crisis. Today, that war is finished but the crisis protracts.
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THE POLITICS OF THE UN AND ‘POST-WAR’ SRI LANKA: A BRIEF CRITIQUE
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Kalana Senaratne, July 5.
The recent appointment of a Panel of Experts by the UN Secretary General (UNSG) is a disturbing development, even though it was bound to happen.
Discuss this story
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NO HOSTAGE TO THE PAST:
AN ENCOUNTER WITH MERVYN DE SILVA
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ASANGA WELIKALA, june 23.
The eleventh anniversary of the death of Mervyn de Silva, the great Sri Lankan journalist and editor, falls on 22nd June. I once had an extraordinary encounter with Mervyn, although sadly as it turned out, at the very empennage of his life. In a wholly spontaneous chat that lasted less than two hours, we (mostly he) talked about the international use of force for humanitarian interventions and Robin Cook’s ‘ethical foreign policy’ in the then fashionable Blairite project (Mervyn wasn’t impressed), F.C. de Saram and M. Sathasivam (and the politico-sociological implications of their fractious dispute over the All Ceylon captaincy in 1947), billiards and snooker (I knew that the latter was invented in the Indian Army, but did not know of the debate whether it was the Jalalabad officers’ mess or the Ootacamund Club), and the relative merits of a pre-prandial aperitif at lunchtime (for one of which he was on his way).
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By Carlo Fonseka, may 13.
At one point in your very perceptive editorial of 10 May titled ‘Pay them more; make them work harder’ you refer to President Mahinda Rajapaksha’s appeal to ‘expatriate Sri Lankan experts including academics to return and help develop the country’. Then you ask rhetorically: ‘But who will want to answer his call, return home and settle for a pittance?’ Please give me a little space to tell The Island the story of two such persons – Prof. Ratnajeevan Hoole and his wife Dr. Dushyanthi Hoole, who answered the President’s call and the consequent unhappiness they have had to endure.