Eda Cleary, in Sunday Observer, 24 September 2023.… with highlighting imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi
The film Alborada by director Asoka Handagama was premiered in Chile recently with the Director of the Film School of the University of Valparaiso, film professor Rodrigo Cepeda, inviting academics, students and interested people to see the film.
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An Item in rtcom.news, 19 September 2023, with the hëadline “South Asian leader slams AUKUS pact” …..
Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe has condemned the AUKUS pact as an alliance designed to target China, calling it a “strategic misstep,” and insisting it will only divide Asia into rival camps and destabilize the region. Speaking on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly on Monday, Wickremesinghe took aim at AUKUS, which was formed by the US, UK, and Australia in 2021. “I don’t think it was needed,” he said. “I think it’s a strategic misstep. I think they made a mistake,” the president stated. “It is a military alliance moved against one country – China.”
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Compiled by Gp Capt Kumar Kirinde, SLAF [retd]: “A global counter-terrorism military campaign initiated by the U.S. in 2001” ……….. Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_terror, https://www.cia.gov/legacy/museum/exhibit/on-the-front-lines-cia-in-afghanistan/, ChatGPT, and Google Images … [with only some photographs
Introduction: …… The war on terror, officially the Global War on Terrorism”” (GWOT), is a global counterterrorism military campaign initiated by the United States following the September 11 attacks and is also the most recent global conflict spanning multiple wars. The main targets of the campaign were militant Islamist and Salafi jihadist armed organisations such as al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, and their international affiliates, which were waging military insurgencies to overthrow governments of various Muslim-majority countries. Other major targets included the Ba’athist regime in Iraq, which was deposed during an invasion in 2003, and various militant factions that fought during the ensuing insurgency
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Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake
The Disinformation is ramping up in preparation for the IMF visit this month to review SL’s prograss on the required IMF asset sale of coastal and highland lands of the strategic island, to monitor and surveill the Indian Ocean trade and Submarine Data cable Routes. The IMF assets strip and sale of Sri Lanka targets the same sectors and assets that Washington’s MCC Millennium Challenge Corporation Compact program did – Energy, Telecom, Transport Infrastructure back in 2019.
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Catherine Philp, in The AUSTRALIAN, 5 September 2023, where the title reads “British Documentary links powerful Sri Lanka family to bombings” ... where the item is from The TIMES
Sri Lankan officials loyal to the Rajapaksa family were complicit in the 2019 Easter Sunday bombings that killed more than 250 people, including eight British tourists, whistleblowers have alleged.
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There are several interpersonal exchanges which moulded my thinking before I presented this interpretation. They are all instructive. Some of these exchanges were combative; others unintentionally helpful. Take one insance when I was discussing the famous tale in the Alakeshvara Yuddhaya about local readings of the strange white-men from Portuguese ships (caravels) with Professor AV Suaraweera of Vidyodaya University (who had edited that tome). As I told my readers when traing my pathway: “when I referred to lime being the smell of the viper and Vasavārti Māraya, [Suraweera’s] eyes had widened and his face had lit up.” This was an ethnographic encounter of the anthropological kind that indicated that I was on a profitable track
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Chandra R. De Silva, refereed article originally pubd in Modern Ceylon Studies, Vol II/1, 1970, pp. 18-34.
At the end of the sixteenth century[ii] when the Portuguese came into possession of the south-western sea-board, Madampe proper, was a sizeable village inhabited by about a hundred families.[iii] Though situated some forty miles to the north of Colombo, the centre of Portuguese power and activity, Madampe was in some respects well located being within seven miles of the important port of Chilaw and within three miles of the sea, over which the Portuguese still had undisputed control.[iv] The village moreover, had twenty two minor villages attached to it, the whole forming the gabadagama[v] or royal demesne of Madampe, an area of approximately sixty square miles.
Statue of horse at Taniyavalla Devalaya, Madampe (constructed 1894) …… Photo from 2017
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Darini Rajasingham-Senanayake*…. with her choice of title being “Sri Lanka Back as Donor Darling Ignores the BRICS” and a sub-title that runs thus “France’s Macron and the US Fish in the Indian Ocean …. presented here with highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
Sri Lanka continues to swing wildly between being a ‘Donor Darling’ flooded with foreign ‘aid’ and ‘advisors’ on the one hand to a ‘bankrupt’ pariah or outcast on the other. Last year, the strategic Indian Ocean Island went from South Asia’s wealthiest nation with the best social and human development indicators to a beggar—humiliated and shunned by the ‘international community.’ This was after staging its first-ever Sovereign Default due to a Eurobond debt trap and purported lack of US dollars. The default triggered rapid rupee depreciation and instantly beggared citizens amid a distracting transnationally networked, remote-controlled ‘Aragalaya’ protest operation led by social media influencers. Ironically, there was a blockade on fuel shipments to the country amid the United States Marine’s ‘Sea Vision’ training program for the Sri Lanka Navy.
Newly formed Sri Lankan Marine Corps gets 241 years of experience in under a week. Credit: U.S. Marine Corps photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Jacob L. – Photo: 2023 .
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Thiru Arumugam in The Ceylankan Vol 26/3, August 2023, where the title reads “François Valentijn wrote a 462 page ‘Description of Ceylon’ 300 years ago … Part 2” ……… Part 1 having appeared in The Ceylankan J 102 Vol 26(2) May 2023, pp 24-25. ….. also by Thiru Arumugam
First and Second Chapters [Geography] For his sources of information about the geography and history of Ceylon up to the Portugueseperiod, Valentijn relies on the Portuguese writer Diogo do Couto’s Ceylon section of his books Decadas da Asia (Decades of Asia)5. Couto was Chief Keeper of the Records in Goa from 1595 to 1616. Goa was the Asian headquarters of the Portuguese. Valentijn also took information from the Dutch writer Father Philippus Baldeus6, who lived in Jaffna from about 1656 to 1665. For the description of the interior of Ceylon he relies on Robert Knox7, as the Portuguese and Dutch had limited access to these areas. There was a pirated Dutch translation of Knox’s book by S de Vries published in Utrecht in 1692 and Valentijn would have used this translation. Valentijn plagiarised freely, sometimes copying entire sections from these books. In those halcyon pre-copyright days, the printed word was considered public property!
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thuppahi
