පිළිකාවේ සදාචාරය හා සදාචාරයේ පිළිකාව
The death of a village teacher, a neighbour and relative, from cancer, and the difficulty of recovering her body, lead Ivan to examine the state of cancer care and medical ethics in Sri Lanka. Drawing on a conversation with his daughter, a professor’s account of radiation equipment, his family’s own hospital experiences and a doctor he respects, he describes failing diagnostic equipment, the dominance of private channelling, rushed surgery in state hospitals and a change in the class character of the medical profession.
ජාතියේ අන්ධකාරය
Starting from Gandhi’s view of struggle, Ivan examines the militarisation of Sri Lanka since 1971: by global indices it is among the most militarised countries in South Asia, and the forces grew hugely for the final war. He asks who is responsible for the rebellions, citing Bertrand Russell on the state, argues that the nation owes a debt to all who suffered, and warns that five years after the war the army has not been reduced and the national mood, driven by secret political movements, has turned against human rights.
ගෝඨාභයගේ හෙවණැල්ල
Ivan credits Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa with driving the war to a conclusion, but argues that he failed at what must follow the defeat of an internal rebellion: the humane rehabilitation of the defeated, as after 1971 and 1989, and letting a people mourn its dead. His gravest wrongs, Ivan writes, were the killing of criminals without trial, which continued after the war, and his patronage of extremist groups, from the halal campaign to the Beruwala and Aluthgama violence, which threatens to undo the peace won by defeating Prabhakaran.
ඊළඟ මුවහම මුස්ලිම්වරුන්ද?
Ivan warns that a handful of extremist groups acting in the name of Buddhism, apparently with state protection, are pushing the country towards bloodshed again. Black July 1983 internationalised the Tamil question and fed the northern insurgency; turning on the Muslims now would isolate Sri Lanka in a world with a vast Muslim population. He traces the Muslims’ history in the island, their ties with Sinhala castes such as the Salagama noted by Ananda Coomaraswamy and Ralph Pieris, and argues that envy of Muslim success in trade lies behind the hostility.
වරද කාගේද අපේද? මහින්දගේද?
Ivan argues that once the country turned to violence, both rebels and the state came to rule through fear and to believe only their own convictions. The state crushed the Sinhala youth rebellion, then the Tamil one, and in the process the South killed Wijeweera and many of its own. The tragedy, he writes, is that after these victories the country learned nothing: there was no Emperor Asoka turning from war to righteousness, only a triumphalism that left the nation where it started. Blame lies with society as well as with Mahinda Rajapaksa.
සමාජ පාදඩකරණය
Starting from P.B. Jayasekera’s first novel, whose hero is a former rebel of the second JVP rising turned political fixer, Ivan traces how a lumpen class has come to dominate Sri Lankan society. A black economy existed before 1977, but the executive presidency, the open economy and patronage let thugs, criminals and politicians form an alliance, strengthened by the private militias of the 1988–89 terror and the war. The LTTE was defeated, he writes, yet violent crime has become an everyday event, and he asks where the country is heading.
මැන්ඩෙලාගෙන් උගත යුතු පාඩම්
Nelson Mandela, Ivan writes, is second in greatness only to Gandhi, and in nation-building he surpassed him: he united two races divided for centuries by hatred, making whites part of the nation rather than overthrowing them, then left power when his work was done. Both leaders refused to hate their oppressors and kept Marxism within their movements without becoming its prisoners. Sri Lanka’s divisions of race, religion, caste and class are far smaller than South Africa’s; what it lacks is an ideological movement that changes attitudes, which no constitution alone can do.
නීති විද්යාලයේ විදුහල්පති ගෙදර යැවීම
The new Chief Justice’s suspension of the Principal of the Law College, reportedly for ensuring his own son passed with distinction, lays bare the rot in the legal community and the examination system, Ivan argues. The principal might well reply that he did the same for the children of the powerful for years without complaint. Ivan recalls a deputy examinations commissioner jailed for fixing A-level results, a Supreme Court bench that ordered a judge’s daughter admitted to law school without the marks, the Attorney General’s Department as a preserve of elite families, and principals who justify admission bribes by the lifestyle their schools demand.
ජනමාධ්ය හැසිරීම ගැන
A friend who has read Ivan’s book on the Lenin Ratnayake affair many times asked him why no newspaper reported the day a remand prisoner struck Magistrate Lenin Ratnayake with a bag of excrement in the Nikaweratiya court, after the magistrate had abused the prisoner’s wife. Local reporters, Ivan concludes, stayed silent to please the magistrate. He then recounts how a former court officer turned television court reporter brokered favourable judgments for his channel’s owner in exchange for coverage that propped up Chief Justice Sarath N. Silva. Sri Lanka’s media culture, he argues, is as corrupt as its political culture.
සිංහල-බෞද්ධ මනස තේරුම් ගැනීම
Responding to Kusal Perera’s ‘In Search of the New Man’, Ivan revisits two debates: Newton Gunasinghe’s great and little traditions, which suggest Sinhala cultural narrowness belongs to the era of decline rather than all history, and Sarachchandra’s claim, contested by Martin Wickramasinghe, that Buddhism does not see art as purifying. Europe escaped a similar world-denial through the Renaissance; Sri Lanka’s revivals, independence movement and parties never produced one. Every movement from Dharmapala and Bandaranaike to Wijeweera and the JHU has pandered to the Sinhala-Buddhist mind, shaped by an island that kept its identity against India, rather than changing it.