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නීති වෘත්තියේ සදාචාර පරිහානිය
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
Professionals are those who have completed the education and the other qualifications a particular calling requires. They are the backbone of any field, and they make up the most important stratum of a country's middle class. This article is about what has become of one of those professions, and much
An interview with Dr Sunil Wijesiriwardena on the Tamil question appeared in the last Ravaya, and the purpose of this article is to question one idea in it — the idea that governs everything else he says there. The claim that no attempt was made to give a fair political
Two young men from the village came to the house for a contribution to an alms-giving before Vesak. What usually happens is that something is put on the subscription list; this time, because Ivan knew one of them well, he fell into a plain conversation with them about what the
University teachers are agitating for a 200 per cent pay rise, and their withdrawal from the administrative work they do voluntarily is pushing university administration into a crisis — and it has come up while the higher education minister is carrying out a programme to reorganise the university system.
The government had a programme with a strong vision for defeating Prabhakaran's separatist terrorism at home. It had no such vision for the international questions that would follow the victory: it failed to see them coming, and even once they had become serious it did not manage to build a
Bin Laden was a terrorist leader who had become a great threat to America, and America had the right to destroy him — we can be glad of it too. But America paid an enormous price for a partial victory: it overthrew the governments of two countries, and hundreds of
America has at last managed to end the life of Bin Laden, the terrorist who held the whole of America in dread. Ivan sets that beside the two Sri Lankan cases — Wijeweera's second insurrection and the defeat of Prabhakaran — and asks what a war against terrorism is, and
A psychiatrist has published an 855-page book on the 1971 insurrection under the title 'The 71 Insurrection — a complete review from the beginning to the end', priced at 1,500 rupees. Ivan knew the book was being written; what he did not know was that an interview of his had
If Sri Lanka fails to overcome the confusion the report of the Secretary-General's advisory committee has created, and will go on creating, then all the great hopes the victory in the war gave the country will collapse. The government should make meeting this crisis with self-confidence the first and largest
Whatever the wrongs and shortcomings within the counter-campaigns launched to defeat the terrorist war Prabhakaran led and the terrorist war Wijeweera led, had those campaigns failed and those two movements won, what could have followed was a great destruction. In that sense, Ivan writes, whatever their faults, those campaigns protected
The recommendations of the panel of experts appointed by the UN Secretary-General may work as a factor damaging Sri Lanka's progress, and the challenge arising from them may be as large as the one Prabhakaran posed and more complicated than that. It can still be settled to our advantage, or
The disagreement between Sri Lanka and the United Nations over the war against the LTTE is ripening into something that will go a long way, and personal factors have influenced its growth more than they should have. The way Sri Lanka responded when the UN asked its questions of a
After the government decided to move the St John's fish market and the Manning market out of Pettah, an alternative wholesale fish market was built at Peliyagoda — and while traders were complaining that not all of them had been given stalls in it, an organised business of taking protection
As in many other colonised countries, the political awakening that sought reform came out of the religious revival — the native religions, pushed into a low condition under foreign rule, working to recover the standing they had held. In Ceylon that happened in the closing decades of the nineteenth century.
Not having enough internal unity is a large challenge Sri Lanka faced in the past and faces now, and it can be seen not in one place but everywhere. The country needs a strong government, and equally an opposition with the strength to control a government's wrong actions; there must
The British took the Kandyan kingdom in 1815 not by battle but by a crafty programme, and Sir John D'Oyly admitted as much in a long conversation, describing the programme he had run and naming several of the natives who acted as its chief pawns. It succeeded because of the
The great disaster in Japan cannot but affect the world economy and, to a greater or lesser degree, Sri Lanka's. What Ivan draws from it is a set of duties at home: protect what forest is left, since felling is a way a few businessmen make large money under political
Gandhi's analysis of the crisis modern Sri Lanka faces and of the way to overcome it comes with his commentary on Sri Lankan history, and this instalment is his reading of the Portuguese and Dutch periods: the conversions, the Karava and Salagama communities, the Malays, and the taking of the
The prime minister told parliament during the emergency debate that the intelligence services had information about training at three secret camps in Tamil Nadu, aimed at killing Indian leaders and re-establishing the LTTE in Sri Lanka. If there is no true basis for it, Ivan replies, talk of that kind
By development Ivan means progress in any field — a country's as a whole, or the economy, politics, health, transport, education, science, the environment, the spiritual — and what he wants to talk about is what a journalist's part in that process should be. Seven sections follow, from Warren Buffett
