Somasiri Skandakumar in Sunday Island, 7 February 2021
As the clock moved towards 10.50 am on January 31, 2021, my mind went back 25 years to that fateful day. It was a Wednesday, and having finished our weekly meeting of the Parent Board of Directors in the Board Room on the eighth floor of Steuart House around 10.30 am, we sat around to exchange views on matters of a non-official nature as was customary, before returning to our rooms.
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S. Skandakumar
CALCUTTA, INDIA – MARCH 13: Sri Lanka captain and batsman Arjuna Ranatunga picks up some runs during his innings of 35 runs during the 1996 ICC Cricket World Cup semi final against India at Eden Gardens, Kolkata on March 13, 1996. (Photo by Mike Hewitt/Allsport/Getty Images)
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ONE — A Letter in Sadness from Professor Veena Das to Pradeep Jeganathan, January 2021
First of all, I want to convey my sadness and my gratefulness and to some extent my rage that this has happened and that I will never see that radiant smile and that integrity and brilliance anymore. Any such death at my stage of life makes me angry and sorrowful as to why the young are being taken. The war undid so many of us in so many ways and why would it not do that? So what kind of miracle is it that Malathi let herself be deeply affected by the war but not be undone by it? You must know that I loved her work and her personality just as I love your work and know what struggles you have been through.
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Michael Roberts
One day in 1996 our doorbell rang at Woodlark Grove in the suburb of Glenalta in Adelaide . …. And there was Joe Hoad with two paintings he had composed in celebration of Sri Lanka’s triumph at the World Cup earlier in the year. These products had not been commissioned. They were self-inspired and emanated from his profound joy at the manner in which a little island nation – one that was not unlike his own birthplace of Barbados – had tamed a powerful cricketing force that was a bullyboy in the cricketing politics of the 1990s.
This photograph taken there and then in our back garden marks the moment of the gifting ….. appropriately within an Australian backdrop of the bushfire danger kind. But, unlike that landscape, the paintings are unique. To my mind they are heirlooms. In conjunction with Verite Research and Shamara Wettimuny, I have approached the National Library Services Board in Colombo with the suggestion that they should be placed within its portals in public display with a suitable plaque.[1]
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Michael Roberts, 4 February 2021
Today, 4th February 1948, as we mark the day when Sri Lanka (aka Ceylon) secured political independence, I present a cohort of photographs marking the moment when Sri Lanka’s cricketers battled through fire to claim adulthood in the field of cricket.
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KLF Wijedasa, in The Island, 3 February 2021, with this title “A Historic Day for Ceylon”
Duncan White, Lakshman Kadirgamar, Sharm Mustafa and Oscar Wijesinghe are seen in this picture which appeared in The Ceylon Daily News decades ago. Duncan White, Lakshman Kadirgamar, Oscar Wijesinghe and M.A.M. Sherrif represented the four communities when they brought four scrolls to the Independence Square to be handed over to the Prime Minister D.S. Senanayake to be read for the public to hear.
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Michael Roberts, a reprint
Intrigued by my speech inflections and my appearance, a friend of mine, a teacher in English Literature,[1] made inquiries after my familial background and my ethnic identity within the melange of ethnic groups in Sri Lanka. She learnt that my Barbadian father had related very few stories in his life and times in Barbados and that my sense of West Indianness was muted. This puzzled her. Forced thus into retrospective reflection I now conclude that I lived my youthful life immersed in my everyday activities without much concern for a distinct self-identity of an ethnic sort.
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Suri Ratnapala, in The Australian, 2 February 2021, where the title reads thus “Proof of life on social media to screen out evils” …. with highlighting emphahsis imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
The suspension of Donald Trump’s accounts by Twitter and Facebook and the shutdown of Parler by Amazon following the events of January 6 heighten concerns about the power of the Big Tech firms to censor political information and debate.
First, a full disclosure. I am a critic of Trump of a classical liberal disposition. I am a social network recluse with only an email account. I believe the silencing of Trump by Facebook and Twitter may have served the immediate public interest but has troubling consequences for liberal democratic government.
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Vidya Balachander writing in December 2014 with this title “History Baked in Banana Leaf” ……………… How a savory rice and meat dish remains a fragile thread between modern Sri Lanka and 16th century Dutch Burgher settlers.
With the lamprais in the backseat, I could barely focus on anything else. The modest parcel of food wrapped in a banana leaf, freshly baked and still warm to the touch, was demanding my complete sensory attention. The mildly woody smell of the banana leaf mingled with the unmistakable aroma of meat, and like a gentle cloud the fragrance wafted up and settled comfortably in the car for the remainder of my journey home. They say you eat with your eyes first, but in this case, it was the aroma of the lamprais in my backseat that had me hooked.
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Unknown Author: “Diyatalawa, the watered valley”
The garrison town of Diyatalawa is, as its name denotes, a ‘watered valley,’ nestled between Haputale and Bandarawela, in the central highlands of Sri Lanka. Less known than Nuwara Eliya and Kandy, this eucalyptus and pine encrusted hill station has been associated with the military for almost a century. It is perhaps for this reason that the average Sri Lankan (with no military background) has little to no knowledge of it. But we hope to change this, because it is a pity to leave such a quaint location unexplored, at least in our national imagination.
thuppahi
