A Canary Club Reader
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This Australian is obviously a subscriber to Australian media outlets such as Sky News, The Australian, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Herald Sun – an avid reader of the ideological nonsense written by people like Andrew Bolt, Peter Jennings, John Lee, Gerald Henderson, Paul Dibbs, Paul Kelly, Greg Sheridan, to name a few. (I need not list them all here because their names are well known).
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Michael Roberts on his Essays on this Theme within the Global Context ………… https://thuppahis.com/2017/07/21/sacrificial-devotion-how-i-entered-this-terrain/…. JULY 21, 2017 · …………..“Sacrificial Devotion” — How I Entered This Terrain
Tiger fighters relax in camp, late 1980s—Pic by Shyam Tekwani who was embedded with LTTE for a while.
With the benefit of a Teen Murti Fellowship I was collecting data on communal violence in India in 1995 when my readings of news archives indicated that the death of Mrs Indira Gandhi by assassination in Delhi induced a handful of individuals in southern India to commit sympathetic suicide. Since news reports did not indicate similar reactions in other parts of India, I began to reflect on the cultural foundations that promoted such expressions – acting, of course, in contexts that also could provide political and economic inspirations. This eventually led to my first essay on this topic: “Filial Devotion and the Tiger Cult of Suicide,” Contributions to Indian Sociology, 1996, 30: 245-72.
Filed under accountability, anton balasingham, atrocities, authoritarian regimes, communal relations, cultural transmission, Eelam, ethnicity, historical interpretation, human rights, Indian Ocean politics, insurrections, life stories, LTTE, martyrdom, military strategy, patriotism, politIcal discourse, power politics, security, self-reflexivity, Sinhala-Tamil Relations, sri lankan society, suicide bombing, Tamil civilians, Tamil migration, Tamil Tiger fighters, terrorism, the imaginary and the real, trauma, truth as casualty of war, unusual people, vengeance, violence of language, war crimes, world events & processes, zealotry
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.
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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.
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Mary Kostakidis, in https://johnmenadue.com/wong-defines-australias-foreign-policy/ …. where the title reads “Wong defines Australia’s foreign policy … all the way with the USA”
It was an extraordinary feel-good speech that nevertheless sent a very clear message to the region: the vehicle through which Australia will ensure we participate in shaping in the region, is AUKUS – an Anglosphere alliance to steer the Asia Pacific.
Australian Foreign Affairs Minister Senator Penny Wong addresses the National Press Club in Canberra, Monday, April 17, 2023. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch) NO ARCHIVING
Regardless of reassurances and pledges regarding respect, inclusiveness and sovereignty, Asian leaders will understand well the essence of her message, in spite of the dulcet tones, the dignity and gravitas.
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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.
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Christine Middap in The Weekend Australian, 15/16 April 2023, where the title is “Pocock’s Progress”
He tries to start the day with some quiet contemplation.
David Pocock in the Senate.….Pix by Martin Ollman
Pocock with a redneck rock wallaby , …. Pix by Rohan Thomson
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Shamara Wettimuny in Financial Times, 12 April 2023 … with highlighting added by The Editor, Thuppahi
On a muggy Friday afternoon, the auditorium of the National Library of Sri Lanka slowly filled with an eager audience from Colombo, the Hill Country and beyond. It was the launch of a book by Associate Professor of Anthropology, Dr. Mythri Jegathesan, of Santa Clara University.
Mythri Jegathesan
Her book, a work on and of solidarity with the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka, ‘Tea and Solidarity: Tamil Women and Work in Post-war Sri Lanka’ was originally published by the University of Washington Press in 2019 to widespread acclaim. It was awarded the 2020 Diane Forsyth Prize for the best book featuring feminist anthropology research and in 2021, it won the Michelle Z. Rosaldo Book Prize for its significant contribution to feminist anthropology.
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TULANA is a Sri Lanka Jesuit Province Apostolate mandated by the Superiors and founded in 1974 by its current Director, the Asian Jesuit Theologian, Indologist and Buddhist Scholar, Fr. Aloysius Pieris, s.j.
“The name TULANA has its roots in Sanskrit and means four things taken together: elevation, weighing, comparing and deciding for the weightier things – in short DISCERNMENT.”
Revd Aloysius Peiris, s.j.
Its primary founding motivation was as a response to two challenges – the challenge of the spirituality and philosophy of Sri Lanka’s major religion, Buddhism, and the challenge of the socio-political aspirations of the highly educated but marginalised rural youth.
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thuppahi
