Dushy Perera, at where the title is “Taking Farmer Field Schools to Sri Lankan Tea Plantations”
Partnership site 
ToT attendeesFarmer Field Schools Initiative on Sri Lankan Tea Plantations
ToT attendeesTourist spike from Indian Cricket?
Item in NewsInAsia, 10 September 2017, where the title reads “Sri Lanka tourist arrival up 2.5-pct in August driven by India”
Sri Lanka’s tourist arrivals rose 2.5 percent from a year earlier to 190,924 mostly driven by India, as explosive growth Chinese arrivals fell away, data from the state tourism office showed. Arrivals for the 8 months to August rose 3.5 percent to 1.406 million.
unIndian tourists arriving in planeloads
The New Constitution is a Neo-Colonial US Project
Tamara Kunanayakam, being the full text of a talk entitled “The new Constitution – a neo-colonial project!” at a Forum in Sri Lanka on 6th September 2017 .. with highlighting emphasis added by The Editor, Thuppahi
As we meet here this evening, a radical overhaul is underway – of our political, economic, financial, social and cultural system. A new Constitution is being discussed, at the same time a plethora of radical reforms are being rushed through. The fact that many of these reforms are being challenged as unconstitutional indicates that the new Constitution is aimed at making what is un-Constitutional today, Constitutional tomorrow, making legal what is illegal by a simple trick of changing the Law!
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Captain Cook’s Endeavours: Seen as “White Ghosts” by the Guugu Yimithirr People
Trent Dalton, in The Australian, 6 Septmber 2017, where the title is “Cook Rediscovered . Miracle on The Reef,”
She can hear the cannon blasting. She can see the worn, callused hands of Captain Cook’s men touching it. She can see where it sat on the Endeavour before it was desperately heaved overboard into the night-time waters of Endeavour Reef to be found 200 years later by researchers from the American Academy of Natural Sciences. Cook historian Michelle Hetherington draws a long breath. There’s no story she can tell more thrilling than the story of the black iron cannon she stares at now in a soft-lit room inside the National Museum of Australia. “This is our actual history sitting in front of us,” she says. “Who touched it? They may have all touched it! This is our link to that voyage in the 18th century.”
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Captain Cook’s Endeavours Revisited: ONE
Trent Dalton, from The Weekend Australian, 2 September 2017, where the main title is “The Story of Us”
The story was always too big, too complex to fit neatly inside the plaques of big city statues. The story of Captain Cook’s first epic voyage of discovery is too grand, too long to fit neatly inside a tweet or a T-shirt quip or a few cheap words spray-painted in a hurry.
The first man to tell the story was James Cook himself. He told it as it unfolded, the spellbinding tale of his three years aboard a frumpy-bottomed coal boat called Endeavour; three years of wonder, adventure, miraculous survival, navigational genius and breathtaking courage that he detailed in short, sharp sentences scribbled on to a series of cabin papers that would form a doorstopper of a journal that would come to be called “Manuscript One”, the founding document of the National Library of Australia.
Captain James Cook in a 1775 portrait by Nathaniel Dance-Holland, and HMS Endeavour in a painting by naval historian Gregory Robinson; next year marks the 250th anniversary of Endeavour’s sailing from Plymouth in England on a three-year journey that took it across the world and included the British discovery of Australia Continue reading
The War is Past. Paradise is Regained
Michael Buerk, in the The Telegraph, 5 September 2017, where the title is “The war is history: Michael Buerk returns to Sri Lanka” ** Note Editorial Comment at End
The Tigers’ lair was deep in the jungle. It was difficult to find and tough to get to; two hours jolting, semi-prone, in a trailer dragged by a tractor, watching for mines. This was a war zone for decades. The paddy fields were abandoned long ago to the peacocks and their perpetual courtship, dozens of them everywhere, each male made fabulous by desire. The man-made lake that once fed the fields was covered in lotus flowers. A crocodile basked on a rock in the shallows, jaws gaping as if in wonder at the lonely beauty of it all. Well into the thicker brush, down a maze of paths and tunnels through the thorn trees, we came first to what was left of the Tigers’ guard post. Just rubble now where 30 fighters held part of the perimeter of what was, in effect, a separate state. Their latrine, the only recognisable structure left, was now home to a 15ft Indian rock python.
Buerk was in Sri Lanka for the BBC at the beginning of the war, in the Eighties
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Political Fiddling undermines Economic Growth and Stability in Sri Lanka
Sirimevan Colombage, courtesy of Daily Mirror, 4 September 2017,where the title is “Politics of Socio-economic Development in Sri Lanka”
The ultimate goal of socio-economic development is to improve people’s quality of life dependent on access to the basic needs such as food, safe drinking water, shelter, clothing, education and healthcare. An important factor that determines these dimensions of quality of life is income – usually measured in terms of the per capita income, which is equivalent to gross domestic product (GDP) divided by population. Money is not everything but one could also argue that money is needed to buy everything to fill the basket of basic needs listed above. Hence, GDP growth is an essential ingredient for socio-economic development.
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Bracegirdle as a David taking on the British Plantation Goliath in 1937
Bernard Vancuylenberg, August 26, 2017, whose original title is “David and Goliath” … with highlights imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi …then and now in 2025
During the colonial period of the late 1930s, a tea plantation in the Madulkelle district Relugas Estate, was the place where what appeared to be a simple act of insubordination by an assistant superintendent, was to have far reaching consequences and wider ramifications not only for the company concerned, but for the colonial government of the time and a left leaning socialist political party called the “Lanka Sama Samaja Party” (The Lanka Socialist Party), popularly known as the LSSP. The “David” in this case was a young assistant superintendent named Mark Bracegirdle and the “Goliath” was the government of the day – at first glance an uneven match.
Bracegirdle with LSSP leaders at Horana– Colvin R. de Silva seated and Philip Gunawardena, Wilmot Perera and Leslie Goonewardena among those standing behind.
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Vale. In Memoriam. Dr. Rajasingham Narendran
In sadness, we record the passing away of Dr. Rajasingham Narendran, truly a Tamil intellectual in difficult times who did not let his ethnic sentiments distort his commitment to fact and realistic assessment. There cannot be a greater testament to his commitment to TRUTH than his terse description of the discovery of the rotting corpse sof his mother, brother and family aides after they had been killed by the IPKF in 1987 (repeated below in full to remind readers of their own frailties and the realities of war).
“Naren,” alas, was man whom I met only once …. a man who traversed investigative paths far removed from his training and did so in the incisive ways expected in his specialist field. I borrow his familial details from the VALE recorded in COLOMBO TELEGRAPH where he was a contributor of informative articles. Continue reading
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Speaking of the Self: Gender Issues in South Asia
Niroshini Somasundaram, in IIAS Newsletter, reviewing A. Malhotra & S. Lambert-Hurley. 2015. Speaking of the self: gender, performance, and autobiography in South Asia. Durham: Duke University Press. ISBN 9780822359838
In the last few decades, scholars of South Asian history have disputed the notion that South Asian cultures do not possess the autonomous representation of the individual, particularly in documenting histories, compared to their European counterparts. To that end, the numerous ways in which self-representation has been practiced in this region in different forms and time periods have been increasingly explored in scholarship. The rich collection of essays in this volume, edited by Anshu Malhotra and Siobhan Lambert-Hurley, challenge the existing boundaries and discourses surrounding autobiography, performance and gender in South Asian history by presenting a varied and fresh selection of women’s autobiographical writing and practices from the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The compelling choice of authors explored in the essays include Urdu novelists, a Muslim prostitute in nineteenth century Punjab, a Mughal princess, a courtesan in the Hyderabad court and male actors who perform as female characters. It moreover challenges conventional narratives in the field of autobiographical studies by relaying in careful detail the different forms which ought to be encompassed within the genre of autobiography such as poetry, patronage of architecture and fiction. Continue reading
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