Archive for Identity
July 26, 2010 at 3:14 pm · Categories: Colombo, Identity, Sport | by Publius
Photo credit: Associated Press, published in Sydney Morning Herald
Savouring the richly deserved cascades of press coverage last week of Muttiah Muralidaran’s retirement from Test cricket on the magnificent record of 800 wickets, it is difficult to resist a surge of heart-warming patriotism. It was not only the doosra-like sequence of events in the last day of the Galle Test against India – wholly implausible had it been a fictional plot – that precipitated this onrush of Sri Lankan pride in your columnist. For once, international media coverage was depicting Sri Lanka, due to the achievement of a man who epitomises the best in it, as it always …
July 15, 2010 at 3:11 pm · Categories: Identity, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Dhammika Dharmawardhane
The swift annihilation of the Tamil Tigers was a surprise to me. A war that was 30 years long, finished so quickly with an undignified death for the leader of the LTTE. Yet, so many unanswered questions.
The man on the street, people like myself, we’ll never know the whole truth. Some of us don’t care, terrorism, the LTTE were wiped out. That’s all that matters. We celebrated the great victory. In my corner of the stix in England, I celebrated the new sovereignty of my motherland, my country, my Paradise Island. My tears of joy like acid on their faces for the Tamil Diaspora.
It’s easy for me, for I don’t live there anymore. I am but the tourist who returns …
July 9, 2010 at 6:30 am · Categories: Advocacy, Colombo, Gender, Healthcare, Human Rights, Identity | by Equal Ground
11th June 2010 – 11th July 2010 marks PRIDE month in Sri Lanka. Historically stemming from the watershed Stonewall riots in 1969, which broke out when police raided a gay bar in New York City, it has now evolved into a global celebration of diversity. In recent years the South Asian region has become a prominent feature in PRIDE celebrations. For example in the cities of Delhi, Bangalore, Calcutta, Mumbai, LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Questioning) persons together with their heterosexual allies march the streets peacefully demanding they be recognised equally before the law. A year has now passed since India decriminalised homosexuality during PRIDE month by reading down section 377 of the Indian Penal Code that criminalised …
July 7, 2010 at 3:14 pm · Categories: Advocacy, Colombo, Gender, Identity | by Groundviews
Rosanna Flamer-Caldera is the Executive Director of Equal Ground. This interview was held soon after the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka said he was open to dialogue with the gay community, but “would not take any decision which could hurt the culture of the country”.
Almost exactly one year ago, India decriminalised gay sex. As the Times of India noted at the time,
India took a giant, albeit belated, step towards globalisation on Thursday when the Delhi high court delivered a historic judgement to amend a 149-year-old colonial-era law — Section 377 of the IPC — and decriminalise …
July 5, 2010 at 7:45 am · Categories: Colombo, Identity, Language, Poetry | by Sivamohan Sumathy
my teacher talks of a sri lankan english-poem ii
(a responsive thing)
by sumathy
ooo, how sad that
thing called a sri lankan-thing
who
thinging this thing of
of englees or inglisss
has no capacity, no?
for funny funny joking thing
in the morning,
day, evening or
night. only thing
he, boyfriend, can find is thing
that, thing this, and good old papa shakes
peare, no great shakes
but sitting on the fence of the globe, passing on
this or that thing frommm
eliza to james, accumulating
primitively othello’s thing? of course,
this is way above the ways of pearl,
bin dalen or the pumpkin lovers of the
fricative z, but
write i, nevertheless, of
the base indian, richer than all his tribe,
this thing, no caring no, meyler’s
injunction against poetry
in the sri lankan
that thing.
July 2, 2010 at 6:30 am · Categories: Colombo, Fiction / Creative Writing, Identity | by Mahesan Niranjan
My name is Polgahawela Aarachchige Junius Soloman Hickmana Thanthiriya Bandarawela, and I am a taxi driver in Colombo — you can call me Hick, for short. I am about to tell you my encounters with a Sri Lankan Tamil fellow, Sivapuranam Thevaram. This man hired my taxi three times in the last couple of years, twice for airport drops and once on a weekend trip to Dambulla. Thevaram is someone best described as a “Kalu Sudda” [Black, White man] – black skin, but carries a Thatcherland passport. Often he thinks and behaves like these foreign fellows, with his priorities in stuff like individual liberty, journalistic freedom and human rights, worrying about these just the same way I do about …
July 1, 2010 at 10:15 am · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, Development, Diplomacy, Economy, End of war special edition, Foreign Relations, Gender, Human Rights, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Identity, International Relations, Media and Communications, Peace and Conflict, Poetry, Politics and Governance, Post-War, Reconciliation, War Crimes | by Groundviews
Download the 162 page compilation of content as a PDF in high quality (25.4Mb), or low quality (3.7Mb). The low quality version is good enough to read, but the photos will look and print much better in the high quality version.
From 19 – 27 May 2010, Groundviews ran a special edition on the end of war in Sri Lanka. Over this week alone, the site received over forty thousand readers and exclusively featured over eighty thousand words of original content, one video premiere, over a dozen photos, generating over one hundred and fifty thousand words of commentary. Tens of thousands more have read …
June 17, 2010 at 7:33 am · Categories: Colombo, Identity, Religion and faith | by Pearl Thevanayagam
In the black and white photographs of my childhood, my sisters and I look pretty smart, standing to attention under the spreading mango tree which Rajaratnam Uncle took every year to record our development for future reference.
But there was one major flaw. We all had hideous black pottus the size of an Orange Barley bottle top on our foreheads. The pottu is to ward off evil-eyes which could ruin our beauty. But then none of us were Ajantha frescoes but parents being parents obviously thought we were.
Then my father was cleaning the cobwebs in our rather ancient house with two kokkathadis ( two large poles tied together) to reach the ceiling-less roof on a Friday when our neighbour, Mr Jacob, …
June 14, 2010 at 5:47 pm · Categories: Development, Economy, Human Rights, Human Security, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War, Reconciliation | by Groundviews
From the psycho-social trauma and destruction of the social fabric in Jaffna after close upon three decades of brutal war to the challenges of post-war development, entrepreneurship and economic revival, these two interviews focus on two leading Tamil civil society activists who have lived in Jaffna from when the war was still raging.
Dr. Muttukrishna Sarvananthan is the Principal Researcher at the Point Pedro Institute of Development and author of three well read articles on Groundviews. Our conversation was pegged to the socio-economic aspects of post-war scenarios in the North and East. Dr. Sarvananthan’s key ideas for post-war development are …
June 3, 2010 at 10:32 am · Categories: Identity, Language | by Michael Meyler
[Editor's note: The following article is a riposte to Malinda Seneviratne's article, published in the Sunday Observer on the 23rd of May 2010.]
One of the points I made in my article “Sri Lankan English: the state of the debate” was that the level of debate on the issue in the public forum remains simplistic. For this reason I welcome the fact that Malinda Seneviratne has entered the fray (“Sri Lankan English: another Snooty English speakers’ project?” Sunday Observer 23/05/2010). The fact that he has put the opposition case so forcefully can only be a good thing for “the state of the debate”. But unfortunately, he couches his argument in language so unwieldy (dare I say, snooty?) as to be …
May 31, 2010 at 9:36 pm · Categories: Advocacy, Colombo, Identity, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Polls | by Samanmalee Unanthenna
Nationalism in our post-modern era is an extremely suspect concept. It smacks of homogeneity, patriarchy and insularity; all ideas and concepts that our generation has learned with good reason to suspect. Most difficult of all, it has often been anti-minority. My intention in this article is not to defend nationalism but rather to inquire into the particular characteristics of Sinhala nationalism and to interrogate the relationship of Sri Lankan civil society organisations and movements with it. I would also like put forward some ideas regarding ways of engagement as part of civil society in these times of totalitarianism and government supported racism. By civil society organisations and movements I mean those that purport to …
May 29, 2010 at 1:47 am · Categories: Colombo, Diaspora, Identity, International Relations, Peace and Conflict, Post-War | by Tanuja Thurairajah
‘Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign.
But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize.’[1]
Chimamanda Adichie
I was inspired by the above words of Chimamanda Adichie talking about the ¨Danger of a single story’ and I reflected on how true this has been and will be in the case of Sri Lanka and its instrasigient history of political misfortune and human suffering. It’s been a year since the decisive end of the military offensive that had succeeded in re-claiming territorial sovereignity of the Sri Lankan state, but it was a victory that failed in claiming the Tamils as an integral and respected part of it is citizenry.
The recently concluded elections in Sri Lanka which registered a …
May 27, 2010 at 12:00 pm · Categories: Colombo, Diaspora, End of war special edition, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Darini Rajasingham Senanayake
“Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain. And no sooner did Don Quixote see them that he said to his squire, “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished. Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them. With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.”
“What giants?” asked Sancho Panza.”Those you see over there,” replied his master, “with their long arms. Some of them …
May 27, 2010 at 10:15 am · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, End of war special edition, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Dayan Jayatilleka
Interestingly of the four best pieces I have read on the first anniversary of the war, three are by Indian analyst/commentators, of whom two are military professionals: Gen Ashok K. Mehta’s Manekshaw paper No 22 for the Centre for Land Warfare Studies (New Delhi) on ‘How Eelam war 4 was Won’ (which cannot be read by any patriot or anti-fascist without a lump in one’s throat or mist in one’s eyes), the piece by Col R Hariharan in The Hindu and by PK Balachandran in the Indian Express. The fourth is by a youthful security researcher Sergei de Silva Ranasinghe writing in the respected Australian periodical, The Diplomat.
Within Sri Lanka and among Sri Lankans, the debate on the war may …
May 27, 2010 at 8:30 am · Categories: Colombo, End of war special edition, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Chaminda WEERAWARDHANA
Prelude: The following is a ‘fragmented reflection’, on present-day Sri Lanka, war’s end and related issues. The objective was to capture the thought process of a citizen ‘thinking’ about these issues as realistically as possible, hence the fragmented nature of the rendering, and the frequent passage from one point to an(unrelated)other.
A war was thus fought. It all started decades ago, when the colonial alcohol was well-absorbed into her, leading to inevitably sheer tipsiness, and the long-lasting ‘hangover’ was just about to begin.
As some said Sinhala should be the national language of independent Ceylon and Buddhism the state religion, some others felt insecure and concerned for their future in the island. Insecurity is a dangerously devastating feeling that’s always better …
May 27, 2010 at 6:30 am · Categories: Colombo, End of war special edition, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Pushpi Weerakoon
Background
On Tuesday 19th May 2009 – the day after the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – Mahinda Rajapaksa, the President of Sri Lanka, declared victory over the Tamil Tigers, bringing to a close 26 years of conflict. With the routing of the LTTE, and the reclamation of all occupied territory, it was announced that the conflict in Sri Lanka had come to an end.
The cost of this declared victory was immense. At least 90,000 people were estimated to have been killed, the majority of those innocent civilians; hundreds of thousands were internally displaced, and interned, having lost everything they owned; tens of thousands of families were left without an adult who could …
May 26, 2010 at 4:10 pm · Categories: Colombo, End of war special edition, Human Rights, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War, Vavuniya | by Ruki
About six months after the end of the war, in November 2009, the government of Sri Lanka relaxed restrictions on travel to the Vanni[1] and started to allow some of the displaced people to go back to their villages.
Although the government still maintains some restrictions on travel, I managed to visit these areas many times. My visits including overnight stay in Vanni without beds, attached bathrooms, running water, electricity, helped me to better experience and understand life there after the war. It also increased my admiration for some of my friends, Catholic priests and sisters, who warmly welcomed and hosted me and my friends every time we visited, despite the very basic and difficult life they had opted to …
May 26, 2010 at 6:30 am · Categories: Colombo, End of war special edition, Human Rights, Human Security, IDPs and Refugees, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Kalana Senaratne
It was, unfortunately, a necessary war, for terrorism had to be defeated, eliminated. After some thirty long years, on or around the 19th of May 2009, Sri Lanka gained liberation; liberation from the clutches of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), from the clutches of terrorism (May, 2010: The Prime Minister states in Parliament that a new military wing of the LTTE is being formed, is getting ready to raise its ugly head).
‘Terrorism’, however, was only one facet of the problem. The moment that ugly facet becomes non-existent, the moment there is an absence of a violent armed conflict, problems which remained unresolved, problems which could not be resolved through the use of force, re-emerge, re-surface. Political developments which …
May 25, 2010 at 3:30 pm · Categories: Colombo, Constitutional Reform, Development, End of war special edition, Human Security, Identity, International Relations, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War | by Sumanasiri Liyanage
My focus in this essay is not what happened in the past but what can be envisioned in the near future particularly with regard to the national question in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan security forces comprehensively defeated the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) one year ago. However, the transformation of peace writ small that was achieved in May 2009 to peace writ large has yet to be achieved and the steps taken in that direction are, in my opinion, inadequate. Although the simultaneous operation of so many variables in complex situations makes predictions almost impossible in social science, it is possible to identify possible future scenarios through the analysis of key drivers that undergird future changes. Here I …
May 25, 2010 at 1:00 pm · Categories: Colombo, End of war special edition, Human Rights, Human Security, Identity, Jaffna, Peace and Conflict, Politics and Governance, Post-War, Reconciliation | by Lalith Gunaratne
The teenage girls singing a Tamil song “Tomorrow is Ours” is interrupted by my wife Samantha and I walking in to the classroom. They giggled coyly as we looked around at them. They were being trained to be Girl Guides and did not seem any different to any of the many young people I have encountered over the years.
One of the leaders, Deepa (fictitious name) walked up to us in curiosity and introduced by the Girl Guide trainer. She had a presence but seemed restless.
Deepa was abducted by the LTTE at age 16 from her Aunt’s home in the Wanni and was trained as a soldier. She had not seen combat as she was found by the Army in a …
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