Dive into an archive of over 5,000+ published articles…
Archives: Articles
ගාන්ධි නූතන ශ්රී ලංකාවට ගෙන්වා ගැනීම (II)
Victor Ivan
Ravaya
It was Gandhi who showed the world that spiritual strength joined to popular power can be turned into an undefeated motive force working for the progress, the justice and the liberation of ordinary people, free of self-interest, malice and hatred. Einstein said at his death that a powerful following can
A pradeshiya sabha election is the lowest of the four tiers at which elections are held, and looking at what the candidates spend on campaigning it might be a parliamentary election. The public had the same unpleasant experience at the last provincial council poll: the salary of a provincial member
Before Japan the world's attention was on the Arab world and the risings against its autocratic rulers. Beginning in Tunisia they spread to Egypt and other Arab countries, peaceful everywhere except Libya, where the movement took an armed form — and the thing that gave the young generation the political
Suppose Gandhi could be met, brought to Sri Lanka and asked to look into the country as it now is, and to give his guidance on the main problems it faces and how they should be settled. What analysis would he make of Sri Lanka, and what roads would he
A member of the Tamil alliance charged in parliament that 200 of the 500 tractors India gave to farmers in the north had been handed to two state institutions. If that is true it is a wrong, and putting it right is the government's responsibility. Resettlement and the projects planned
What will the large-scale risings against the autocratic rulers of the Muslim world — beginning in Tunisia, passing through Egypt and into North Africa and the Middle East — do to that world and then to the whole world? What is the social background of those struggles, and what are
Public health has always interested Ivan, and what made him write this was not that interest but a personal reason: a blood test done for an illness of his wife's, an ESR eight times the normal level, and the run of investigations the doctors had to send her through to
The heavy rain and the flooding it keeps producing have been destructive to the country's food crops, and this is not a condition peculiar to Sri Lanka. 2011 has already been named a La Niña year, one in which heavy rainfall may do the world great damage, and China —
The risings in Tunisia and then Egypt have made the autocratic rulers of both countries give up power, and the wave may spread through the Middle East. Risings like these have happened before — Iran drove out the Shah, the Philippines drove out Marcos, eastern Europe followed the fall of
The local government election has sharpened the contest between the government and the opposition, and the effect has been to limit the political attention reaching the people hurt by the floods. That cannot be called a good state of affairs: the property damage in the three provinces is larger than
The damage done to the Northern, Eastern and North Central provinces by the flooding is enormous. Measured against the tsunami the loss of life is far smaller and the loss of property is larger: tanks destroyed wholly or in part, newly built and newly repaired highways damaged, and heavy losses
At a media ministry workshop for journalists a questioner raised something that interested the whole hall: why is Ivan silent now, when he used to fight? The article is his answer — that the people whose institutions are being attacked today are in part the people who did their back-door
The savage attack on the Lanka e-News office should be condemned by the whole country: it is hard for it to have been done by anyone other than the government or people attached to it, and it disgraces not only the president and his government but the country. Ivan then
Among the bad features native to this political system, one of the most important is that there is no orderly way of weighing the good and the bad of a state transaction — sometimes worth hundreds of millions — before final approval is given to it. The article works through
Foreign employment is one of the country's main sources of income: it is the chief earner of foreign exchange, it lightens the weight of unemployment, and it is one of the main things easing rural poverty. Ivan asks for a policy that treats the recruitment agents as people who do
Gandhi can be called the greatest theorist the world has produced on popular struggle for social justice, and its greatest fighter. Before he introduced his non-violent tradition the world had only a method of fighting evil with evil; he gave it a way of defeating evil without becoming evil, and
Amid heated argument the shape of education is changing and being changed. Serious changes are visible in higher and vocational education; at school level Ivan can see no such change yet, and the national education commission's proposals for what school education needs are still proposals.
On the morning of the 13th there was a friendly but heated exchange of views between the president and the newspaper editors and heads of media institutions, and one thing the president said with feeling deserves everyone's attention. From there Ivan works through the defeat of Prabhakaran, the war crimes
The damage done by the heavy rain and the floods is enormous, worst in the North Central, Eastern, Northern and Central provinces. Close to nine hundred thousand people are affected and more than two hundred thousand are in camps; across five districts 116 tanks are wholly damaged and another 238
There have been three violent insurrections in Sri Lanka since independence, all of them youth insurrections, two Sinhala and one Tamil. The JVP's 1971 rising was the first attempt by a political organisation to seize power by armed revolt, and a simple one that the forces put down easily in
