Geethasiri Karunatillake, … from Adelaide, Australia
I have always been passionate about music, but I never had the opportunity to study music or the ability to sing. That’s why when I learned about the capabilities of Chat-GPT, I knew I had to give it a try.
Undoubtedly, Batho was the most popular professor at the Engineering Faculty at Peradeniya University in the 1950s to 60s. I vividly recall how he could captivate us with his lectures, simplifying even the most intricate concepts and recapitulating in the end.
Tissa Jayatilaka, in The Island, 4 June 2023, … with highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
The splendid career and the many glittering prizes won by Jayantha Dhanapala is common knowledge and does not require reiteration here. Rather I wish to focus on the man himself in this tribute to an exceptional person whom I had the privilege of getting to know personally at the tail end of the 1980s – I had of course heard of Jayantha and his many accomplishments long before our first meeting. Having read a newspaper review of North-South Perspectives, an international affairs journal that I edited, which focused on the promotion of greater understanding between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world, Jayantha telephoned me to ask if we could meet. I readily agreed and thus began a friendship that lasted until his death a few days ago.
Ananda Abeysekara’s Academic Article: “On Rewriting Buddhism: Or, How Not to Write a History,”Religion and Society, vol. 13. 1(2022): 39-80.
ABSTRACT: Through a detailed reading of a recent study of medieval Buddhism and politics in Sri Lanka in conjunction with a number of other works, this article explores the troubling legacy of translating the historical questions of subjectivity into the modern language of ‘agency’, ‘autonomy’, ‘innovation’, and ‘creativity’. This legacy cannot easily be separated from the politics of white privilege in post-colonial studies of Buddhism and South Asian religion. The problem with trying to expose creativity, so pervasive in the studies of South Asian religion, is not merely a matter of anachronistic conceptualization of divergent historical forms of religious practice and subjectivity. It is that the very possibility of translating subjectivity into easily digestible aestheticized modes of being (e.g., creativity) is predicated on an uninterrogated assumption about the self-evidence of such concepts independent of temporal forms of power encountered in forms of life. Continue reading →
Sri Lanka will earn as much as Rs. 8.6 billion per year over a four-year period (Rs. 34.2 billion in total income) as the island’s allocation from the International Cricket Council’s annual payouts. In US dollars Sri Lanka’s share is 27.12 million compared to India’s lion’s share of USD 230 million but the amount in still massive by Sri Lanka’s standards. The International Cricket Council has made the allocations taking into account factors like performance in both the men’s and women’s teams on the international stage over the past 16 years and contribution to the ICC’s commercial value. The earnings of the ICC of over $3.2 billion come from the sale of its media rights alone, which recently, for the first time, were sold across five separate regions globally including the Indian market. The vast bulk of that money has come from the sale of rights in the Indian market, where Disney Star paid just over $3 billion for four years according to ESPNcricinfo (Sunday Observer, 14.5.2023).
The tale of AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’s operations vis a vis Hong Kong today runs parallel to the scenario that unfolded in Sri Lanka.There the campaign commenced some years back and reached its peak in whitewashing the LTTE and later spun along just before the aragalaya took off. The AI sleuths were in place when those protests were engineered in Sri Lanka.
Venkat B Krishna in The Indian Express,24 May 2023…. where the title reads “How CSK’s Tamil fans fell in love with two Sinhalese players Pathirana and Theekshana””
Things have changed after years of strained relationship when CSK were forced not to play Sri Lankan players at home, and a famous actor had to pull out of a Muralitharan biopic.
There is something special brewing in Chennai this season apart from their obsession with MS Dhoni. Two Sri Lankan cricketers – Matheesha Pathirana and Maheesh Theekshana – have become the fans favourite at the MA Chidambaram Stadium, where not so long ago players from the Island nation couldn’t take the field because political tensions in the aftermath of the Eelam war that ended in 2009.
Estelle Barbara Roberts was born as the second child from the second bed of Thomas Webb Roberts (1881-1978) on the 2nd May 1929. She was brought up within the Fort of Galle and received her education at Southlands, Sacred Heart Convent and Richmond Colleges; but was then swept off her feet by an earnest young government servant, Charles Hubert Fernando, who played tennis at the Galle Gymkhana Club (where TW was a kind of institution and a regular).
This lively presentation was sent to me as a venture of “Batticaloa Burghers singing in three languages”. But digital commentary indicates that the words are (mostly?) Konkani … and raises questions as to where exactly this lively collective was located when they sang. SEE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=munAPKRQ0nk So, that means we are definitely in Thuppahi territory! Ole! Ole! Hai Hoyi! ………. Thuppahi.
Rex Clementine, in The Island, 24 May 2023, where the title reads: “Matheesha: Cricket’s Latest Sensation” ….…. with highlighting imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
We’ve heard it from cricket’s supremo M.S. Dhoni that young fast bowling sensation Matheesha Pathirana should get nowhere near red ball cricket. There would have been quite a furore had Kumar Sangakkara or Mahela Jayawardene said it. Remember the reaction when they echoed similar sentiments in the case of Lasith Malinga all those years ago. But with talents like Matheesha and Malinga it seems a sensible move. After all, Sanga and MJ rarely get their facts wrong.
