Courtesy of Nandasiri Jasentuliyane,** who was known to us then as N. De Silva
Category Archives: modernity & modernization
Caste & Politics in the Sri Lankan Tamil World
Robert Siddharthan Perinpanayagam, in Groundviews, 22 August 2011, where the title reads “Caste And Politics” …. An article that drew 19 comments including some responses from “Sid”… reproduced here with highlighting imposed by The Editor in circumstances where my friend “Sid” from Peradeniya days is no longer around to dispute matters … as he surely would have.
Over the years, the claims of the Tamil people for justice, equalty and dignity have been rejected with a variety of specious arguments. It is not necessary to go into these exercises here again. However, the latest attempt in this direction is to raise the issue of caste in Jaffna society. Former civil servants, who spent three or four years being de facto kings of the North, have sought to comment on this issue in many recent hero-stories that they have published in the newspapers. In these hero-stories they report not only how they defeated one departmental head or another or humiliated a hapless village headman, but how they vanquished the evil designs of the Tamils as well. Indeed everything seems to become grist to the mill of Tamil-bashing. Even a casual remark made in a cricket match is used by a famous historian to claim that the Tamils of Jaffna are cravenly caste-conscious. Off-the-cuff social commentators as well as the tribalist pundits in the newspapers have also got into this act. The implication of these commentaries is that the Sinhalese do not have the problem of castism and only Tamils do. One recent commentator is so ignorant of the political history of the island as to invoke Ponnambalam Ramanathan’s castism! It was indeed the fear of Karava ascendancy by the Goigamas that elevated Ramanathan to high stature by making him the representative of the “Educated Ceylonese” in the Legislative Council.
Filed under accountability, anti-racism, authoritarian regimes, caste issues, centre-periphery relations, communal relations, cultural transmission, discrimination, disparagement, economic processes, education, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian traditions, landscape wondrous, life stories, modernity & modernization, politIcal discourse, power sharing, self-reflexivity, social justice, sri lankan society, Tamil civilians, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, working class conditions, world events & processes
Remembering Revd WJT Small, A Saint In Our Times
Nihal de Alwis, presenting a Memoir on Revd Small, the dedicated Principal of Richmond who became a Ceylonese ….
Rev. Walter Joseph Thombleson Small was born on the 4th of July 1883 in Boston, England. He lived in Sri Lanka from 1906 to 1926 and again from 1953 to 1979. He died in Sri Lanka after an accident on the 28th of December 1979. He grew up during the Victorian era and grew up in a Methodist environment imbued with Christian values.
Filed under accountability, anti-racism, art & allure bewitching, British colonialism, charitable outreach, cultural transmission, democratic measures, education, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, island economy, landscape wondrous, language policies, life stories, modernity & modernization, patriotism, performance, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, tolerance, travelogue, unusual people, welfare & philanthophy, world events & processes
Profound Currents of Thought at Trinity College: Fraser, Martin Wickramasinghe & Bishop Wickremesinghe
Uditha Devapriya, whose chosen title was “Martin Wickramasinghe and A. G. Fraser.”
On 7 February 1971, Trinity College, Kandy held its 99th annual Prize Giving. Presided by the then Anglican Bishop of Kurunegala, Lakshman Wickremesinghe, the ceremony featured Martin Wickramasinghe as its Chief Guest. By this point Wickramasinghe had established himself as Sri Lanka’s leading literary figure. A grand old man of 80, he was now writing on a whole range of topics outside culture and literature. His essays addressed some of the more compelling socio-political issues of the day, including youth unrest. His speech at the Prize Giving dwelt on these issues and reflected his concerns.
Filed under accountability, British colonialism, centre-periphery relations, charitable outreach, chauvinism, communal relations, cultural transmission, economic processes, education, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, language policies, life stories, literary achievements, meditations, modernity & modernization, patriotism, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, tolerance, unusual people, world events & processes
Sinhala Village Roots and Jungle Lore at Discerning Depth
Sugath Kulatunga,
responding to an Invitation from The Editor, Thuppahi after the latter had seen an extract of this detailed and invaluable autobiography in Facebook in 2023 **
1/10/2014: Written for the reading pleasure of my grandchildren.
As a child and in school:
I am very fortunate to have been brought up as a small child in a rural village in the Kalutara District of Sri Lanka, in a setting under relatively comfortable and caring conditions. I was the number two of three brothers and two younger sisters. Two more brothers were added to the family later on. We were the masters of our time and life was totally carefree. Our parents had an abundance of time for us. In addition, most of the time during the early childhood we had my mother’s sisters, who adored us, staying with the family. We also had the loving but respectful attention of the senior schoolgirls.
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, British colonialism, commoditification, cultural transmission, economic processes, education, heritage, historical interpretation, island economy, landscape wondrous, life stories, meditations, modernity & modernization, nature's wonders, patriotism, politIcal discourse, religiosity, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, teaching profession, travelogue, unusual people, working class conditions
Artificial Intelligence: Humankind’s Master or Servant?
Chandre Dharmawardana, in The Island, 17 April 2023 , ….. whose preferred title is “The relevant and irrelevant fear of Artificial Intelligence”
The oracle-like power of the ‘large-language’ Chatbot named chatGPT has frightened rational techies and mystic mullahs alike. Elon Musk, Steve Wozniac who co-founded Apple Inc., historians like Yuval Harari, and academics like the Turing-prize winner Yoshua Bengio of Montreal University called for a six-month pause for developing AI beyond GPT-4, the latest technology released by OpenAI.
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, economic processes, education, energy resources, governance, landscape wondrous, legal issues, life stories, medical puzzles, meditations, modernity & modernization, politIcal discourse, security, self-reflexivity, the imaginary and the real, transport and communications, trauma
Revisiting FIRE & STORM
Michael Roberts
In presenting a Zoom Lecture relating to the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka in April 2021 for Dr. Geethika Dharmasinghe’s class at Colgate University in USA a month or so back, I deplyed the work that went into one of books: that entitled FIRE & STORM.
I now atempt to schock people around the world with pictorial illustrations of some — note “Some” (with all its partialities) — photographs of the political and Eelam War scenarios in Sri Lanka displayed in Fire & Storm.
Filed under accountability, atrocities, centre-periphery relations, chauvinism, communal relations, cultural transmission, demography, discrimination, disparagement, economic processes, Eelam, electoral structures, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, insurrections, island economy, jihadists, landscape wondrous, language policies, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, meditations, military strategy, modernity & modernization, nationalism, performance, photography, politIcal discourse, power politics, religiosity, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil civilians, Tamil Tiger fighters, trauma, truth as casualty of war, vengeance, violence of language, world events & processes
Dharshan Weerasekera’s Array of Essays and Books
Author Archive for Dharshan Weerasekera
International Law Implications of Canadian Parliament’s Motion on ‘Tamil Genocide’
Saturday, November 26th, 2022
By Dharshan Weerasekera Courtesy The Island On 18 May 2022, the Canadian House of Commons adopted without opposition a motion introduced by Rep. Gary Anandasangaree recognising 18 May of each year as Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day” (www.parliament.ca). This follows a Bill adopted by the Ontario legislature in May 2021 calling for the week following May […]
Filed under accountability, British imperialism, centre-periphery relations, citizen journalism, communal relations, economic processes, education, ethnicity, governance, historical interpretation, IMF, Indian Ocean politics, island economy, legal issues, life stories, LTTE, modernity & modernization, parliamentary elections, patriotism, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, prabhakaran, press freedom & censorship, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, Tamil Tiger fighters, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, world events & processes
The Insidious Work of American Soft-Power Agencies
An Observer in a Georgian Black Sea Resort Town
The NED/CIA have been using soft power to target the youth and media institutions in countries around the world. Take Georgia and Hong Kong as case studies.
Protestors rally against the draft law outside the Georgian parliament in Tbilisi.
In the last few weeks, the Georgian parliament, the elected representatives of the country, tried to introduce a Foreign Agent’s Register Act just like the one Australia introduced in 2018. The Georgian version used very similar language to the US foreign agent’s registration law which was passed in the 1930s. Suddenly, the Georgian youth came out on to street demanding the government reject this draft law. EU leaders labelled the proposed Georgian foreign register law as being “against EU values”, even though almost all EU countries have the same law. This is a repeat performance of what happened in Hong Kong in 2018-2019.
Filed under accountability, american imperialism, art & allure bewitching, centre-periphery relations, conspiracies, cultural transmission, discrimination, economic processes, education, foreign policy, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, Indian Ocean politics, landscape wondrous, legal issues, life stories, meditations, modernity & modernization, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, propaganda, self-reflexivity, slanted reportage, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, world events & processes
The Marga Institute: Debating Sri Lanka’s Way Forward …. From Way Back
Uditha Devapriya, in The Island, 10 March 2023, where the title reads “A visit to Marga” …. and where the highlighting embodies editorial intervention by Thuppahi
Sri Lanka’s oldest development think-tank, Marga Institute was formed in 1972, at a time of deep social unrest.
“The ideological direction of the journal will be radical in that it will unremittingly question the values and systems that hinder development. It stands for an equitable and humane social order which will eradicate social and economic privilege and which will leave no room for the concentration and arbitrary exercise of power in any form.” ………. “About Marga”, Marga Journal, Volume I, 1971
photo by Uthpala
A random jaunt in Borella took me and my research assistant to Marga Institute, in my old hometown at Kotte. Sri Lanka’s oldest development think-tank — and Sri Lanka’s oldest such institution — Marga was formed in 1972 to promote and facilitate research into the island’s socioeconomic problems. That its founding coincided with the first JVP insurrection is not fortuitous: as Gamini Samaranayake would point out, the insurrection proved for the first time that an armed group could threaten the State. Among other commentators, Gamini Keerawella, Gananath Obeyesekere, Fred Halliday, and Hector Abhayavardhana grappled with the JVP’s origins, what it was doing, and where it intended to go. It was in the midst of these often-fiery debates and discussions that Marga came to be. This essay is an attempt at framing and understanding these debates, and how Marga emerged from them.
Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, citizen journalism, communal relations, constitutional amendments, democratic measures, economic processes, education, electoral structures, ethnicity, governance, heritage, historical interpretation, island economy, language policies, Left politics, life stories, literary achievements, modernity & modernization, nationalism, politIcal discourse, power politics, press freedom & censorship, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, the imaginary and the real, unusual people, world events & processes
