January 5, 2015 · 3:17 am

Gerald Peiris in Slashing Critique of Sally’s Evaluation of Sri Lanka’s Political Economy

gerald peirisGerald Peiris, 18 and 20 December 2014

Michael,

This is unadulterated ‘Common Opposition’ propaganda and wishful thinking.

My prognosis is that things are proceeding much better for MR than initially expected, and he will win with a comfortable, (but smaller than in 2010) margin. It is the hotchpotch of parties behind the Maithreepala nomination that is disintegrating. Moreover, while the Joint Opposition has been able to buy a few high profile defectors from the MR camp, there are numerically large defections of the local government politicians from parties of the JO to the government side. They are the people who really understand their own grass-root situations.  Even the SLMC which was expected to join the JO is now having second thoughts, a large segment of its politburo wanting to remain in the ranks of the government. (Their leader Rauf Hakim has a record of being thoroughly unreliable, but has always displayed a good understanding of what is good for him.). The JO will undoubtedly stage a massive campaign, with the funds it gets from some of the US-led embassies. But the government also has funds and other resources to match. Some highly damaging disclosures are also been made by Attanayake, the former General Secy. of the UNP, against key leaders of the JO like Ranil, Mangala and Chandrika .…..

Best regards, Gerry Continue reading →

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January 5, 2015 · 3:07 am

Engaging Razeen Sally’s Review of Sri Lanka’s Economic and Political Scenario

Michael Roberts

razeen sallyRazeen Sally is an acquaintance and a reputed scholar attached to the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore. When I spotted his review of the Sri Lankan economy and its political setting in the prestigious Wall Street Journal in mid-December, I immediately inserted it in THUPPAHI with a feisty title of my own coinage. This was in part because I had reservations about some of his evaluations. These thoughts arose in part from some of the economic indicators emphasised by one Jon Springer of the prestigious Forbes agency in USA.

In part my queries arose from my readings of the political economy of Sri Lanka in spatio-economic terms on the basis of my historical and political researches. Several themes associated with this peculiar respective had already been presented in my review of the issues surrounding the construction of a cricket stadium at Sooriyawewa as one pillar in the Rajapaksa family’s “cultivation” of their “home garden,” viz., Hambantota District — an essay that had earned me a reprimand (private email) from a good friend in Jayantha Dhanapala and attracted sarcastic comments in transcurrents. Continue reading →

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January 4, 2015 · 2:56 pm

Chitrasena’s “Dancing for the Gods” to perform in Canberra …. and Sydney

 DANCING FOR THE GODS About Chitrasena and His Heritage

As a teenager, Chitrasena, the founder of the Dance Co, was inspired by the visit of Rabindranath Tagore’s Indian dance troupe to Sri Lanka in 1934. Tagore stressed the need for a people to discover their own culture to be able to assimilate the best of other cultures. At his father’s insistence, Chitrasena first spent over six years in a Sri Lankan village studying the Kohomba Kankariya dance ritual under one of the great masters. Continue reading →

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January 3, 2015 · 1:18 am

Dhanapala evaluates the Lead-up to Sri Lanka’s Presidential Election and Its Main Issues

jayantha_dhanapala 22Jayantha Dhanapala, courtesy of IDN or In-Depth news, 1 January 2014, at http://www.eurasiareview.com/01012015-sri-lanka-presidential-election-third-term-fresh-start-analysis/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+eurasiareview%2FVsnE+%28Eurasia+Review%29

President Mahinda Rajapakse’s proclamation on November 20 last year decreeing a Presidential Election two years before the expiry of his second term of office has provided the voters of Sri Lanka with an unexpected opportunity to make a unique democratic choice on January 8, 2015. With the Sri Lankan voter enjoying universal adult franchise from 1931 – even when the country was a colony of Britain – this island nation has, since gaining independence in 1948, changed its rulers through the peaceful use of the ballot a total of nine times. The choice has been between the United National Party (UNP) and the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) or coalitions led by each of them.

MR 22Since 1978, under a Republican Constitution, the elections, with admirably high voter out-turns, have been for both Parliament and the Executive Presidency (EP). The electoral choices hitherto has resulted in a series of false dawns for the citizens of the country with extravagant promises only being implemented with more of the same – corruption in high places; jobs for the boys and girls; high costs of living; lumpen development and widening inequalities. Continue reading →

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January 1, 2015 · 2:01 pm

“I was once a corporal.” Graphic Images of HITLER in all his Power & Potency

SEE  Photos rares du 3e Reich conservées par la revue Life

AT https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?shva=1#inbox/14aa5b5291ff242a?projector=1

HITLER - THE AUSTRALIAN COM www.theaustralian.com.auHITLER - www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org

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December 31, 2014 · 12:13 pm

Three Aussie Lankan Amigos forge a Amazing 3-Minute Film in Sri Lanka

laura MaLaura Ma, for CNN Travel, with a different title at http://www.dailynews.lk/?q=features/filmmakers-release-amazing-three-minute-sri-lanka-tour

the three-CNNThey met a daring cliff jumper. They followed the path of religious pilgrims. They negotiated with a road-blocking elephant.And then a team of Australia-based cinematophers on a two-week road trip through Sri Lanka produced a three-minute memoir of their trip that ranks as the most “I wanna go there!” videos we’ve seen in a while.

“We all have Sri Lankan backgrounds and as we were growing up, we heard many stories from our parents about their childhoods in Sri Lanka,” says Rukshan Fernando, co-founder of Melbourne-based Ferndara Creative and Creative Motion Cinematography. Together with Ferndara co-founder Chamika Bandara and assistant Niha Sathasivam, the team has travelled often to Sri Lanka to film destination weddings for private clients. Continue reading →

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December 30, 2014 · 1:40 pm

Former Tigresses and their Sufferings in the North Today: More Comments

36b-T-tigressesTamil Tigress fighters  

tiger female fighters --in GajaaniTigresses in “My daughter the terrorist” — a film by Beate Arnestad

NOTE: these images 9and those below) serve to set the preceding context and are NOT aspects depicted in the documentary HAUNTED TIGRESSES. Michael Roberts

    MY STEPS … Michael Roberts

STEP I: in May 2013 the anonymous collective known as the SOCIAL ARCHITECTS ( a collective whose work has featured before in Groundviews) carried out investigative research with video camera and ethnographic work and composed a documentary film with the title “Haunted Tigresses” which described the pressures and oppression encountered by a handful of former female fighters from the LTTE who were living in the Tamil areas of the north and/or east. See the results in https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nSSv9Kk3tkI

STEP II: I sent this documentary to several friends who had engaged in research and/or social service in the Tamil regions and asked them to pen their comments on the work. Five responded and their thoughts have been available on web since 9 October 2014 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=nSSv9Kk3tkI Continue reading →

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December 29, 2014 · 3:41 am

Count de Mauny’s Island as “Taprobane” today in Lanka — itself “Taprobane” in Ancient Times

Michelle Green in The New York Times,  26 December 2014, where the title reads “In Sri Lanka, an Island of Detachment and Desire **

Bare-chested fishermen idled on the rocks one afternoon and argued mellifluously. Bony children bobbed in the water, and tinny music drifted from a stall where glistening mahi-mahi was on offer. Not one head turned when cows stumbled into an empty beach cafe, scattering chairs and then wandering into the surf.

TAP ISLAND  Girls play in the bay at Weligama with Taprobane Island in the background. Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

But the slow-motion beach scene isn’t the attraction at Weligama, an escapist paradise open to the Indian Ocean and an infinite distance from angst. It is outshone by a dollop of an island 200 yards offshore. Ringed by gleaming boulders and topped by a cloud-white villa, Taprobane is now a landmark in Sri Lanka. Created in the 1920s by a Frenchman who claimed to be an aristocrat, the property was once owned by the writer Paul Bowles. Continue reading →

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December 27, 2014 · 9:54 am

The Third Wave: Welcome to Jihad 3.0, the Unpredictable Third Generation of Terrorists

Michael Wesley, in The Weekend Australian, 21 December 2014 , where the title is “Sydney siege: Welcome to Jihad 3.0, the third wave of terrorism and the most unpredictable”

JIHAD 3.0 arrived in Australia at 9.44am on Monday morning. This is a new and more dangerous form of terrorism, and if we misunderstand its methods and intentions, we risk getting our response to it badly wrong. Some commentators argue that because Man Haron Monis had no formal connection to Islamic State, the Martin Place siege should not be regarded as terrorism. Others have argued it was no more than a “lone wolf” attack, a law-and-order issue. But this is a profound misunderstanding of what terrorism has morphed into.

The attack at Martin Place was very different from first-generation or second-generation terrorist attacks — but it was terrorism, and terrorism of a brutal and more unpredictable sort.

sydney siege -APPolice assist a hostage who escaped from the Martin Place siege in Sydney- Pic from AP

First-generation terrorism, which emerged in its modern form in the late 1960s, was waged by secretive, hierarchic organisations such as the Irish Republican Army or the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Its violence was targeted and calibrated, its victims more often than not chosen carefully to be symbolically significant to the terrorist cause. Continue reading →

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December 27, 2014 · 8:18 am

From within the Heart from within Lanka: Two Poignant Tales in Poem & Prose

PERALIYA plus

I. Chandra Wickramsasinghe: “Death of a Son – A Tsunami story”

As the gigantic wave hit the train,

Things seemed to roll over violently

And I found myself in deep water,

Being swept away

So fast, that I could only thrash out and struggle

And think frantically about my son,

My precious child, still in the train,

Till I brushed against some branches

To which I hung on instinctively,

Till the waters ebbed and receded,

Revealing a terrible spectacle of death and devastation,

With dead bodies strewn all over,

Around the grotesquely mangled

Wreckage of the rail track and the train.

After a desperate search,

I found my little boy dead, inside a carriage,

And as I carried his limp body,

With no visible wounds on his tender face,

He seemed in a deep sleep,

From which I fervently prayed, he would wake up. Continue reading →

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