සිංහල ප්රභාකරන්ලාගෙන් පරිස්සම් වෙමු
It is not only the politicians who have made the country wretched, Ivan writes: it is the unreason that rules the society, and the educated who hold the ideological ground are less educated than the unlettered. From the Peradeniya hostel dispute he turns to C. Suntharalingam, whom he calls the political midwife who cut Prabhakaran’s cord, and to Nalin de Silva, who he says would earn the same honour on the day a Sinhala Prabhakaran is born.
The end of an era of extremism
From the Mahavamsa to Gotabaya Rajapaksa, Victor Ivan follows one line of thought through Sri Lankan history and argues that the era it produced is now, at last, ending.
ජනතා විමුක්ති පෙරමුණේ දෙකඩවීම
Prompted by a 71-year-old reader in Kandy who hoped the JVP’s breakaway ‘people’s struggle’ group might revive Marxism, Ivan reflects on Marxism as a secular religion whose paradise collapsed with the socialist world, leaving devoted followers stranded. He remembers his lawyer and friend Suranjith, who gave years to the Communist Party, and the short story he wrote in prison after 1971 predicting that Mao’s own people would one day strike his statue. He recalls Leslie Goonewardene’s view that the LSSP split merely scattered a brilliant young generation — a warning for the new group — and argues that the old Left’s intellectual, liberal-democratic tradition deserves respect, that Wijeweera’s rejection of it was wrong, and that the dissidents stop their self-criticism short of Wijeweera and the two insurrections.
නලින් ද සිල්වාගේ ආසනික් විප්ලවය.
According to reports in the press and on television, what has caused the kidney disease among the people of Rajarata is arsenic in the water, put there by agricultural chemicals — and the arsenic problem has grown so large that there is arsenic in the rice we eat. The discovery was made by a group of scientists at the University of Kelaniya, in an investigation into the causes of the Rajarata kidney disease.
අභ්යන්තර තුවාල හඳුනාගැනීම
Writing after a workshop in Austria led by conflict-resolution scholar Johan Galtung, Ivan takes up Galtung’s point that history and myth feed Sri Lanka’s conflict. Drawing on B.H. Farmer’s ‘Ceylon: A Divided Nation’, he traces how the Mahavamsa’s stories of Vijaya, Mahinda and Dutugemunu shaped a Sinhala sense of special origin and of the Tamil as historic enemy, a potential tapped from Dharmapala and S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike to the JVP, and argues that these inner wounds must be treated along with the outer ones.