David Sansoni, whose preferred title is “STC – an unauthorised history of Lanka’s greatest Public School”
Richard Simon’s ‘history of Lanka’s greatest public school’, is an epic poem!
Epic, in its reach; poetic, in its lyricism, this towering, magnificent opus is a pearl, of both history and literature. “STC” touches the soul and core, of historophile, linguaphile and bibliophile; Christian, Lankan and, above all, Thomian.
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DL Sirimanne from Kohuwela has reached his century and proceeded another three years beyond. From the vantage of age, he is quite scathing in his concluding summary …. in the Sunday Observer 22 January 2023 … where the title is “A bit of Ceylon History. Pass it on to you children”
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The Tamil Progressive Alliance (TPA) leader and Colombo District MP, Mano Ganesan received a telephone call from Ranil Wickremesinghe on 19 July 2022
It was a day before the Presidential election where the MPs were scheduled to vote and elect a new executive President to fill the vacancy created by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation. Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was the then Prime Minister and acting as the interim President, was a candidate for the Presidential election.
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Chandre Dharmawardana, in The Island, 02 January 2023 where the preferred title runs thus: “Using SORTITION to prevent electing of same crooks to parliament”
The terrorism of the LTTE ended in May 2009, and most Sri Lankans looked forward to a dawn of peace, reconciliation and progress. Even Poongkothai Chandrahasan, the granddaughter of SJV Chelvanayagam could state that ‘what touched me the most that day was that these were poor people with no agenda ~ wearing their feelings on their sleeves~. Every single person I spoke to said to me, “The war is over, we are so happy”. They were not celebrating the defeat of the Tamils. They were celebrating the fact that now there would be peace in Sri Lanka’ (The Island, 23rd August 2009, http://archive.island.
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Michael Roberts
Dr Barclay Reid, “Buddy Reid” in most minds, has this week related his role in medically examining Muralitharan’s peculiar physiognomy and clarifying the process of mystification that led some Australian umpires to no-ball him in late 1995 as part of a process — as they thought — of cleansing the cricket field of “throwers” (see https://thuppahis.com/2022/12/21/muralitharan-the-arm-that-did-not-chuck/).
Jacqueline Alderson of UWA’s Technology team preparing Murali for a test as part of Foster’s team …
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Karthigesu Sivathamby
This item now presented in Thuppahi is the first part of a book in pdf format entitled The Tamils of Sri Lanka. In converting the pdf the whole text went haywire and the paragraph divisions were all over the shop. I cannot guarantee that my painstaking editorial reconstruction stuck to Siva’s original design. I have refrained from inserting any highlighting emphasis on the text: so the highlighting you see is there in the original… As far as I could work out, this work was finalized in 1989, but that point is subject to correction ………….. Michael Roberts Continue reading
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Eardley Lieversz
I spoke to Michael Wille over the phone on 7th July of this year. I was visiting a former neighbour and she got Michael on the line.
I confessed to him that he was my first cricketing hero and that the 1957 Royal-Thomian was the first one I remember watching. I repeated what my dad told me about him sleeping on his late father’s bed before the game.
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Michael Wille passed away in Melbourne this week. His account of cricketing life at Royal College in the mid-1950s and his experiences in Melbourne in subsequent decades was, I am proud to say, featured in oneof my defunct websites a few years back and Ralph Wickremaratne & Justin Labrooy brought it to my attention. HERE it is word for word. May he rest peacefully …. with a bat alongside him … Michael Roberts
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Michael Roberts
The ‘discovery’ of the Lorenz Cabinet in the Royal Asiatic Society in the 1980s led me to combine with Percy Colin-Thome[1] and Ismeth Raheem in working up this material into a plan envisaging a set of books (four volumes).[2] The first in this projected series was drafted by me and came out in 1989 courtesy of Sarvodaya Publishing Services (within the limitations of book production in that period).[3] This book, People Inbetween, has been out of print for quite a while.
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Ahilan Kadirgamar, in Daily Mirror, 21 November 2022, where the title reads “Hill-country Tamils and Crisis Times” …. with highlighting imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
When our country collapses before our own eyes with one of the deepest crises in historical memory, from what vantage point should we analyse our predicament? Sri Lanka’s political economy over the last two centuries is anchored in the travails and strivings of Hill Country Tamils. Their sweat and blood, that began with the horrifying journey from South India two centuries ago as indentured labour to work in the coffee and later tea plantations, were central to building the country’s modern economy under British colonialism. However, their position in society, and for that matter even the writing of their history, was marginalised. And despite the great democratic and social welfare advances in Sri Lanka with universal suffrage in 1931 and a powerful legacy of free healthcare and education, the social, economic and political life of the Hill Country Tamil community is characterised by struggle amidst persistent crisis times.
‘Ceylon tea’ gave Sri Lanka the recognition in the world map, but the plantation workers are still languishing in their ages-old abode, known as line rooms and continue to be marginalised in education, community wellbeing and healthcare.
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