ඉංග්රීසි භාෂාව හා තොරතුරු තාක්ෂණය
Following the government’s declaration of a year dedicated to Information Technology and English, this article critiques the poor state of digitalization in Sri Lanka’s public sector. Pointing to outdated practices in Parliament, Customs, and the CID, the author advocates for robust e-governance to curb corruption and increase efficiency. Furthermore, it addresses the national failure in English proficiency, contrasting Sri Lanka’s rigid, pronunciation-obsessed approach with India’s practical and fearless adoption of the language.
පෞද්ගලික වෛද්ය විද්යාලයක් ආරම්භ කිරීම හොඳ ද නරකද?
This article examines the controversy surrounding the government’s decision to allow the establishment of a private medical college by Dr. Neville Fernando. Countering the protests of student unions, the author argues that breaking the state monopoly on higher education is a progressive necessity. The piece highlights the severe shortage of state university placements, the massive outflow of national wealth to foreign universities, and the urgent need for a properly regulated private higher education sector.
අනාගතය ගැන අලුතෙන් හිතමු
The war’s quick end is now in sight, and the largest remaining problem is how to free the civilians trapped on a small strip of land. The government has declared a no-fire zone, but the LTTE, using those people as a shield, is unlikely to let them cross into it. Once that is resolved the LTTE can only take to the jungle — and the jungle left to it, however thick, is not as large as Thoppigala. Ivan doubts a movement developed to that level can easily revert to guerrilla warfare. The end of the LTTE would widen both the country’s development space and its democratic space: resettlement, rebuilding, provincial and local elections in the north. The most contested question will be what answer is given to Tamil grievances, and it can only be answered if government and opposition work together. The country needs a large change, not a small one.
ලසන්ත වික්රමතුංග
Ten days after the murder, Ivan writes about a friend he had fallen out with. Lasantha was the finest investigative journalist Sri Lanka has produced — the instinct, the persistence, the ability to read what documents concealed — but the politician inside him was a small man, wielding the pen to install a UNP government in which he expected a senior ministry. He exposed his opponents’ corruption without mercy and covered up his own side’s. Ivan recounts the 1999 Town Hall bomb, when both were to be arrested and they packed bags for Singapore until Ranil Wickremesinghe called Lasantha back; Chandrika Kumaratunga’s later claim that she stopped a minister’s plan to kill them; and the quarrel over her interview and Ivan’s book that soured the friendship. Assassination, he writes, gave the life its meaning.
සිරසේ සිරසට පහරදීම
The Claymore detonated inside Sirasa’s operations room symbolises the security forces, whoever ordered it: only the forces and the LTTE hold Claymores or know how to handle them, and if the forces did this the signal it sends is more frightening still. Ivan traces the campaign that preceded it — Wimal Weerawansa’s JVP putting up posters nationwide calling Kili Maharaja and Sirasa a front for the LTTE after Sirasa depicted Weerawansa as a donkey, Mervyn Silva calling the channel a Tiger supporter, and public accusations over its coverage of the airbase attack on the day Kilinochchi fell. The attack was the logical outcome of that campaign. Naming political opponents as LTTE supporters, and rejoicing when they are killed by the LTTE, is an established habit here: SLFP supporters let off firecrackers when Premadasa was assassinated, and UNP supporters painted a pottu on Chandrika’s posters in 1994.
ගෝල්ඩන් ක්රෙඩිට් අර්බුදයෙන් රට උගත යුතු පාඩම්
The Ceylinco crisis will hurt more than its owners — depositors’ lives are ruined and employees face losing their jobs, and the damage runs back into the economy. Golden Key took public deposits without registering with the Central Bank, which shows the rule of law is as absent in the private sector as anywhere else. Depositors were not uneducated people; they attended to the high interest rate and ignored the risk, never asking how a rate above the commercial banks could be paid at all. Ivan asks how a monthly package of 6.5 million rupees and six luxury vehicles can be called a salary, and whether those drawing it could not see whose flesh they were living on. When politicians plunder the state and eminent men in the private sector plunder their own depositors, the country has no good future. Golden Key attended to quantity and not quality — the same fault that has damaged tea and education.
වඩා වැදගත් කවුද?
Ivan discovered on a Friday that most of Ravaya’s ten-member editorial board are Marxists of one school or another. From there he argues the case against: the socialist experiments that failed, Pol Pot’s regime killing people for wearing sunglasses, Wijeweera’s two attempts at armed seizure — and sets against them the India Gandhi made, the largest democracy on earth, beside which he thinks Marx looks small.
සමාජ අධ්යාත්මය ඝාතනය කරනු ලැබුවෝ කවුද?
Learning from experience is what separates people from animals, Ivan writes, and Sri Lankan society — literate, pleasant, clean — is at the bottom of the table for it. He tells of showing three professional visitors the published lists of office-holders under two governments, between 86 and 103 in each, and their astonishment; and asks what half-killed the country’s social spirit and what would revive it.
ගෘහ සේවය වෙනුවට හෙද සේවය
Training nurses rather than exporting housemaids is the best thing the health minister has done, Ivan writes, and Ravaya argued for it as far back as 1994. Nursing is respected here, pays several times what domestic service abroad pays, and Kerala and the Philippines have built industries on it — and the same case can be made for masons, carpenters, welders, tilers and electricians.
ද්රෝහියෙකු ලෙස අභිෂේක කිරීමට නියමිත විමල් වීරවංශ
Weerawansa is the largest political figure the JVP built after its second insurrection, Ivan writes, and he built himself — training his voice and his gestures on recordings of Wijeweera. The article follows him from that apprenticeship to the edge of expulsion, and sets his rise against the rural, under-privileged, low-caste base that both the JVP and the LTTE have drawn into violence and buried.