Senaka Weeraratna
Give Aussies a Ticker Tape parade as a farewell gesture by driving them through the streets of Colombo (near Galle Face Green) once this popular Australian cricket tour is over.
This is exactly what the Australians did in Melbourne on February 20, 1961 when they bid goodbye to the West Indian Cricket Team led by Frank Worrell. Australia beat West Indies by 3 to 2 in a close contest which went down to the wire.
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Tony Donaldson’s Capsule Comment in Facebook A Few Years Back++
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Uditha Devapriya, in The Island, 21 May 2022, where the title runs thus “DS Senanayake and the Indian Tamil Question”
In his recent work on D. S. Senanayake, K. M. de Silva explores certain controversial aspects of Ceylon’s lurch into independent statehood. Among these is the issue of the fate of the country’s Indian Tamils. Brought to the island from South India amidst conditions of famine and mass starvation in the early part of the 19th century, Indian Tamil workers replaced Sinhalese and resident Tamil labour in the island. Governed by a semifeudal set-up that shut them out from the world outside, Indian Tamil labour grew up in a world of their own. It was their tragic fate that while the colonial government feigned little interest in their welfare, their lives lay in the hands of that government.
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Meera Srinivasan, in The Hindu, 18 May 2022, where the title is “Sri Lanka’s War Aniversary: Tamil Victims remembered in Colombo”
Scores of people on Wednesday gathered in Mullivaikkal village, in Sri Lanka’s northern Mullaitivu district, to remember the tens of thousands of Tamil civilians who were brutally killed in the final stages of the civil war in May 2009, when the armed forces crushed the LTTE.
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Mr C .… an orignal piece for Thuppahi** … with highlighting being the work of The Editor, Thuppahi
I found Asoka Bandarage’s essay was okay, but it suffers from a few argumentative flaws I will discuss in this article. The writer has made many claims. Some of these I agree with. Her main argument comes towards the end of the article which may be summarized as follows: Sri Lanka must avoid being exploited by foreign powers or caught up in geopolitical adventures played out between India, China and the US – a goal which it can achieve by creating food and energy security for itself by exploiting natural resources, and she mentions an area of Sri Lanka containing oil and gas resources. We know Sri Lanka is a fertile land and can easily sustain rice and food crops, if managed properly.
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Michael Roberts
The four-volume edition of DOCUMENTS OF THE CEYLON NATIONAL CONGRESS was presented by the Department of National Archives in 1977 and has been out of stock for some time now.
Haris De Silva — Deputy Director, DNA in the 1970s
Volume ONE contains a book within a book written by me and entitled ELITES, NATIONALISMS and the NATIONALIST MOVEMENT IN BRITISH CEYLON – in seven chapters and running to ccxxii pages.
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Asanga Welikala, in ConstitutionNet, 2 May 2022, where the title reads “Economic Crisis and Constitutional Reform in Sri Lanka”
In Sri Lanka, mass protests against the unaffordable cost of living have coalesced on a central demand: the resignation of the President, Prime Minister, and Finance Minister, who are brothers. Against this background, three proposals for constitutional reform have surfaced – from the Opposition, a breakaway group of MPs, and the government respectively. The Opposition’s Bill would, among other important features, abolish presidentialism and return Sri Lanka to a parliamentary form of government, while reinforcing constitutional democracy through the separation of powers and strong checks and balances. From a design and democratisation point of view, it is the only credible constitutional reform proposal on the table, but its passage is far from guaranteed – writes Dr. Asanga Welikala
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While the political activists of the first half of the twentieth century were drawn from both the national and the local elites, the political leadership (at significant island-wide levels) was largely composed of individuals who could be ranked among the national elite. As indicated earlier, the national elite was a small segment of the Ceylonese population. Its levels of wealth, power and status, its lifestyle, and its value-system marked it off from the rest of the population.
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Michael Roberts
On the 25th of April, ANZAC DAY, Australia honoured its war dead in ceremonies large and small throughout the country. This moment has been marked every year –beginning with a ceremony in London in 1916 which recognised the deadly toll and the bravery shown on the Gallipoli Peninsula in Turkey where so many colonial Aussies fought … and died … on behalf of the British state (their “mother-country” to many Aussies then).
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Michael Roberts
In 1977 a sizeable stock of historical manuscripts was made available to the public by the Department of National Archives in four volumes entitled Documents of the Ceylon National Congress and Nationalist Politics in Ceylon, 1929-1950. This outcome was the result of a substantial body of work. It was also the outcome of several fortuitous encounters.
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thuppahi
