Downfall of Sri Lanka: The root cause
Not corruption but ignorance, Victor Ivan argues — a literate society that never learned to think. He traces it through the colonial historians, through Dharmapala, and through a constitution violated since 1948 without protest.
More about the ‘end of an era of extremism’
A sequel to the previous week’s column. Victor Ivan goes back to Turnour’s Mahavamsa, to Anagarika Dharmapala and to the growth of literacy to show where Sinhala-Buddhist racism got its history from.
Making the nation a bunch of morons
A school system built on memorising, and a country that has stopped being able to reason. Victor Ivan argues the damage runs from Grade 1 to the way Sri Lanka has understood the pandemic.
A questionnaire for presidential candidates
Nine questions Victor Ivan puts to every presidential candidate — on national security, the assets law, schools, garbage, the killing of journalists, and whether a new constitution will be written by MPs or by the people.
Ours is a failed state
Victor Ivan measures the failure of the state by what has happened to rural life — the collapse of peasant agriculture, the plunder of land, and a school system that sorts children by their parents’ means.
The State and the bulldozer
A state that knows only how to bulldoze: Victor Ivan runs the argument through garbage, schools, paddy land, caste and fake passports, and concludes that structural reform must come before any election.
The messed-up lives
Why are people who have everything still unhappy? Victor Ivan writes about death, parental care, superstition taught as education, and what Einstein and Freud had to say to each other about it.
Honesty and sincerity
Falsehood has become an operating principle, Victor Ivan writes — in what is sold as kithul treacle, in what tourists are offered, in what schools certify, and in what professionals are licensed to do without ever being re-examined.
What went wrong with Sri Lanka?
Seventy-one years after independence, countries that were behind Sri Lanka have overtaken it. Victor Ivan looks for the answer in the colonial inheritance, the uses made of ancient history, and the poverty of the country’s intellectual life.
Understanding Sri Lanka through education and agriculture
Rote learning from Grade 1 to Advanced Level; paddy land worked at a loss; wild animals destroying two-fifths of the crop. Victor Ivan uses education and agriculture to show how far the country’s thinking has fallen behind.