Category Archives: psychological urges

November 7, 2021 · 1:00 pm

Paliganeema: Cycles of Revenge…. Kill … Retaliate … Kill in the 1980s

Sanjeewa Karunaratne, whose chosen title = ” Stories from Civil War– Young Girl’s Wish” …. see http://www.sanjeewakarunaratne.com/index.php/blogs/hungry-counsel/stories-from-sri-lanka-s-civil-war-young-girl-s-wish

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pix from Stephen Champion’s pictorial book inserrted here to highlight the ‘fiesta’ of kill and counter-kill

I call him Jayantha to protect his identity. Calm and collected, he was a good friend at high school. His parents were middle-class schoolteachers. During high school, some of the friends visited Jayantha’s home; and they were talking weeks about how pretty his elder sister was. Not surprisingly, she was to become the beauty queen of this small town. Inspector Dammika was in charge of the police station in this town. Through my good friend Mike, I met this soft-speaking police officer and happened to spend a night at his bungalow. He was Mike’s brother-in-law. At the time, I did not know that he got charged with her murder. A few years later, Dammika and his father-in-law were assassinated. A couple of year later Mike got killed.

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October 3, 2021 · 12:14 am

Pablo Neruda in British Ceylon: Literary and Sexual Flowerings in Wellawatte and Beyond

  Jamie James, initially presented in Literary Hub, 3 June 2019, with this title “Pablo Neruda’s Life as a Struggling Poet in Sri Lanka: A Young Poet’s Adventures in the Foreign Service”

At 22, Pablo Neruda was an international literary celebrity—and desperately poor. His second book, Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, had been a sensational success and would eventually become one of the bestselling books of poetry in the 20th century (more than 20 million copies to date), but he was paid almost nothing for it. He was a student at the Universidad de Santiago in Chile, and hunger was an issue; he wore a billowing cape to conceal his emaciated physique and a wide-brimmed hat that hoped for an air of mystery.

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August 17, 2021 · 11:56 am

Afghanistan’s Turmoil Replayed at Lords Cricket Ground

Michael Roberts

In my reading, the spirit of cricket was spiked and shattered at its iconic home-ground of Lords yesterday. Not only yesterday –the fifth day. IThe “spiking” occurred throughout the match  with (A) tailenders’ bombarded with headhigh short-pitched bowling by both sides; (B) verbal badinage and assualts — camouflaged as “badinage” and presented with smiles — from both parties; and (C) the spiking of the ball by Jimmy Anderson [according to one report] among the events on the ground.

Kumar Oh Kumar …. what future for “The Spirit of Cricket” talk you delivered during the famous COWDREY LECTURE some years back!

… https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/kumar-sangakkara-s-mcc-spirit-of-cricket-lecture-522183

….. https://www.cricketcountry.com/articles/kumar-sangakkaras-spirit-of-cricket-speech-tugs-the-heart-3891

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June 20, 2021 · 2:18 pm

Basil Fernando’s Searing Protest against Violence in All Its Forms

Basil Fernando: A Short Abstract re the book Body, Mind, Soul, Society: An Autobiographical Account

 This book (176 pages) is an attempt to contribute towards an understanding of the impact of violence on human persons and the society. It is based on the direct experience of living and working in Sri Lanka and Cambodia. However, references are also made to several more developing countries in Asia with which I have been engaged in working after the experiences in Sri Lanka and Cambodia. The book is written from the perspective of a victim who is also an observer.

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December 15, 2020 · 11:05 pm

The Spy Thriller: John le Carre leaves us ….

Jason Steger, in  Sydney Morning Herald, 14 December 2020, where the title runs thus: “A sit-down with a spy novelist: what John le Carre learnt from the secret service”

“When you enter the secret world and you are engaged in the intensive examination of your enemy, your opponent, you in a sense begin to know him and think about him not just as an opponent but some kind of secret sharer.”

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November 12, 2020 · 2:27 pm

Kamikaze, Mujahid, Tamil Tiger: Sacrificial Devotion in Comparative Lens

Michael Roberts, reprinting an essay drafted in 2007 and since presented in Fire & Storm in 2010 (chapter 19: 131-38)

  • “Gandhi tried for years to reduce himself to zero” (Dennis Hudson 2002: 132).
  • Hitler: “You are nothing, your nation is everything” (quoted in Koenigsberg 2009: 13).
  • LTTE: “the martyr sacrifices himself for the whole by destroying the I…” (Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam’s interpretation of a Tamil Tiger supporter’s poem; 2005: 134).
  • Spokesman for Al Qaida after the Madrid bombing: “You love life and we love death”
  • Col. Karuna, ex-LTTE: “Death means nothing to me….”
  • The Hagakure is “a living philosophy that holds that life and death [are] the two sides of the same shield” (Yoshio Mishima in his The Way of the Samurai, quoted in Moeren 1986: 109-10).
  • “Bushido means to die” (Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney 2002: 117).
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVpbl0azdFM …. Kamikaze strike

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November 10, 2020 · 8:24 am

The Ideology of Sacrificial Death and Australian Nationalism during World War One

ALSThis short essay appeared  in the year K????K within the Website run the Library of Social Science headed by Richard Koenigsberg and he has sent it to me this month (November 2020) — presumably inspired by the recent jihadist attacks in Europe and by Thuppahi’s determined pursuit of the comparative literature on martyrdom pursued in a variety of contexts by diverse forces (not merely Islamic).

Michael Roberts

Addressing the practices of remembrance in Australia, Richard Koenigsberg has noted the irony that a battlefield defeat at Gallipoli in World War One, 1915, served a people as an emblem of nationhood: the “Australian nation, came into being on the foundations provided by the slaughter of its young men.”

Burying the dead at Gallipoli in 1915 ,,,and The Last Post

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September 25, 2020 · 1:53 pm

Sri Lankan Expressiveness: Warm Gratitude and Vicious Vituperation

Michael Roberts

I did not see the article that highlighted the manner in which the Tamil people of Vishvamadu feted and lamented the departure of the Sinhalese Military Commander of that arena, Ratnapriya Bandu, when it was originally placed in the public domain in late 2018. This striking presentation was the result of a combination between Shenali Waduge in Lanka and the SPUR organisation in Melbourne, an alliance that immediately indicates orientations laced with sentiments of a chauvinist Sinhala hue.

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September 11, 2020 · 1:10 pm

Myth-making Ridiculous: Raavana on Fire!

Grace Bains in  Scoopwhoop where the title is “A Demon For Us But A Hero For Sri Lankans, The Fascinating Story Of Ravana, According To Lanka” and Chandre Dharmawardena, in Island, 11 September 2020

As we celebrate Dussehra, we recount Ramayana and the lessons that come with it. For us, the Ramayana isn’t just a story of Lord Rama winning over Ravana and rescuing Sita. It is about good winning over evil despite the many obstacles. It is the story that gives Indians hope and motivation to keep fighting for what they know is right.

But we all know that every story has two sides.

Source: Daily Mirror

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July 20, 2020 · 4:38 pm

Donald Friend assessed by Venerable Bhikkhu Dhammika in 2003

In this era of political correctness and moral extremism exemplified in the Me Too movement, the assault on ‘offensive’ statues of famous men with questionable attributes, etc, etc, let me tweak the nether regions of these evangelical reformists by featuring Donald Friend, an Australian homosexual and paedophile of a brazen disposition, who displayed a wide range of artistic talents and happened to sojourn in Ceylon for quite a while — linking up with the talented and wealthy Bawa brothers (themselves members of the gay middle class community in the island’s tolerant ‘climate’– an environment that also attracted Arthur C. Clarke) …. Michael Roberts

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