VANNI HOPE – It’s Motto: “Be the reason someone smiles today”
MESSAGE: Dear Friends, Relatives and Wellwishers
Once Again many thanks for helping us to serve indivduals and famlies in the poorest comunties in Sri Lanka. We indicate BELOW some of the enterprises in educational support for students in the face of the current covid pandemic — deploying brief You Tube Presentations.
ONE: HARSHINI – LAW DEGREE – LAPTOP – ONLINE CLASSES …. https://youtu.be/ixXniHBs96E
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HistoricalDialogue.lk
Dear Friends of HistoricalDialogue.lk, …. We’re happy to announce the launch of our new podcast series, ‘Witnesses to History’. Hosted by Smriti Daniel, the tri-part series is now live on our website and takes you on a journey through Sri Lanka’s history as living memories. Listen to the first episode ‘Holders of History’ which gives an insight into our shared understanding of identity and our shared past – Episode 01 ( 28 mins). Follow the link to also view some exciting bonus material that is archived on the page.
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Hugh Karunanayake: “OBITUARY: Dr, Brendon Gooneratne, 28 March 1938-22 June 2021)”
Dr Brendon Gooneratne, an acclaimed physician, entrepreneur, author, antiquarian, collector, environmentalist and all round sportsman, passed away in Welimada where he was receiving treatment after a fall. The news of Brendon’s demise was communicated by his daughter Devika just a day following his death.
A Pseudo-Filipino named “Sir” Roger O’Neil
I can well understand why some Canadians knocked Captain Cook’s statue of its perch into a harbour in British Columbia.
The only reason the Canadian PM has given a token apology about colonial crimes against indigenous peoples in Canada is because Canada has just been caught with its hands in the cookie jar with the discovery of mass graves. The Canadian government pursued a genocidal policy against indigenous peoples for 150 years — depriving them of language, forbidding the use of their indigenous birth names, medical neglect, sexual abuse, to name a few of their crimes. The government knew of it and were responsible for it for 150 years.
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Will Swanton, in The Weekend Australian, 3-4 July 2021, where the title runs “Lionel Rose: battler who united Australia”
Lionel Rose unified the nation more powerfully than Bradman, if more briefly — Bradman never had 250,000 cheering him through the streets.
Lionel Rose turns to embrace Fighting Harada … after he is pronounced the winner
Lionel Rose met Paul Keating. Snipped him for a hundred. The Prime Minister reckoned he never carried any cash. Rose persisted. Did him slowly. Come on, mate. Can’t you spare a lousy hundred for a battler? Larrikinism abounded in Australia’s sporting stars of the 1960s and 1970s. Rose, Dawn Fraser, John Newcombe, larger than-life characters. It was the 1990s by the time Rose hit Keating where it hurt. The hip-pocket. Mischievousness was alive and kicking in Rose, and part of the reason for the request, but he needed the dough, too.
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Catherine Overington, in The Australian, 2 July 2021, where the title runs thus: “Harmful: warning to ‘race shifters’,” …. with underlining imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
In the US they are known as “race-shifters”; in Canada they are “Pretendians”; and in Australia, they are more commonly known as “box-tickers” – people who discover, or else simply claim an Indigenous or First Nations heritage for themselves.
Some do so because they want to adopt a more exotic profile; others because being “just white” doesn’t have quite the cache it once did, especially in academia. But the sheer number of people now laying claim to an Indigenous identity has begun to distort national statistics, at least according to Indigenous Australian academics and a group of international writers who took part in a lively roundtable on the topic of “race-shifting” at an anthropology conference in May.
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ONE: A NOTE from Mevan Pieris in Colombo, 1 July 2021[i]
The underlining in bold Black is HSM Pieris’s work; that in red has been imposed by the Editor, Thuppahi….. and so, too, any red underlining in Vinod Moonesinghe’s intervention. Both sets of Comments were sent by Email in response to my invitation to a cluster of personnel.
Thanks Michael. Read with interest Premachandra Atukorala’s paper…. [viz. https://thuppahis.com/2021/07/01/an-appraisal-of-sri-lankas-industrialization-strategy/#more-52644%5D
The platform JR Jayawardene Government laid starting in 1977 for an industrial revolution supported by availability of adequate hydroelectric power, was dashed on the ground by the LTTE war with Indian interference, which was beyond even for JRJ to manage in his second term of office. Thereafter the assassinations of strong political successors to JRJ too diluted the leadership of our country. An industrial revolution can only be sustained by a continuity of strong leadership; but with the assassination of Lalith Athulathmudali and Gamini Dissanayake we lost all of it. Leave alone policy making, not even the Central Bank could be protected. So why waste time trying to figure out what went wrong in industrial policy.
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I first encountered Brendon Gooneratne as a formidable fast bowler playing for the Colombo branch of the University of Ceylon against against my Peradeniya branch around 1959/60, mainly as a pace bowler. Thereafter, I encountered him briefly as he courted Yasmine Dias Bandaranaike, a colleague in the Arts Faculty at Peradeniya …. and then for a month or so when the married couple were neighbours of my household at Augusta Hill in Peradeniya University in late 1971. We have met subsequently on and off in Colombo and Sydney because of our strong interest in Ceyloniana.
A reproduction of a framed photo of Brendon at Mount Kosciusko taken by his wife Yasmine
Meeting and listening to Yasmine at the Galle Literary Festival in 2008 was a great pleasure. Her ‘imprint’ has been captured for one and all in an essay I presented then as “January 2008 – When all roads led to Galle” [web-location lost].
Their continued ‘investments’ in the island were deepened by the residences which this couple invested in within the city of Colombo and as “Pemberton” (a conversion of a planting bungalow named ‘Pemberton’) in the upcountry terrain of Uva. So, Brendon’s ‘departure’ from our life-world is a loss of some magnitude. I mark it here in Thuppahi with (A) the mundane account in Wikipedia and (B) a moving testimony from his daughter Devika Gooneratne, …. a farewell that is as remarkable as it is worthy as epitaph — not least for its grounded assessment of the medical staff in Badulla area upcountry in ways that speak volumes for the personnel and system.
So, this Note is a “Hurrah” for Brendon and “Three Cheers” for Devika and her mother.
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Prema-chandra Athukorala
The history of industrialization strategy in Sri Lanka is characterized by abrupt episodes of substantial changes associated with political regime shifts without settling to a stable path required for self-sustained growth. During the first decade after independence in 1948, development of industry was not a policy priority in Sri Lanka, unlike in many other newly independent nations. From about the late 1950s, a combination of the influence of the development thinking at the time and growing balance-of-payments problems induced a policy shift towards state-led import-substitution industrialization. In 1977 Sri Lanka embarked on an extensive economic liberalization reforms process that marked a decisive break with a two decades of state-led import-substitution industrialization strategy.
a garment factory … and tyre production 
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thuppahi
