කූට ලේඛන සංස්කෘතිය (ජාතික හැඳුනුම්පත හා ගමන් බලපත්රය)
Answering officials who disputed details in his series on the bureaucracy, Ivan stands by his accounts and then turns to how deep forgery runs. Using Dayananda Dissanayake’s Nuwara Eliya deal, he calculates the Treasury’s loss at over Rs. 6.1 million on one plot. Birth certificates without serial numbers, a corrupt identity-card office that issued LTTE suicide bombers genuine-looking cards, and a passport office that keeps no copies have created an industry, fed above all by the trade in underage and overage housemaids for the Middle East. Forgery, he says, now runs from school admissions to medical licences and doctorates.
පරමාදර්ශී වීරයන් දෙදෙනකු සැමරීම
C.W.W. Kannangara and Professor Senaka Bibile, both remembered in the last week of September, meet Ivan’s test of the ideal hero: a large but practical dream for the public good, pursued by decent means against powerful opposition. Bibile’s drug policy broke the hold of the pharmaceutical companies before it was killed with him. Kannangara’s free education, won against the churches and D.S. Senanayake, spread literacy across the nation; yet, Ivan argues, it stressed quantity over quality, loaded parents’ duties onto the state, and failed in its stated goals of national unity and a thinking democratic citizenry.
වර්ගවාදය හා නායකත්වයේ අර්බුදය
Lee Kuan Yew was right, this piece argues, that Sri Lanka failed because its leaders could not manage racial passions. Bandaranaike knew Sinhala Only without provision for Tamil was unjust, yet tore up his pact with Chelvanayakam under pressure from militant monks; Dudley Senanayake lacked the courage to see his own pact through; J.R. Jayewardene legislated District Development Councils but could not bear to see the TULF win Jaffna. Mahinda Rajapaksa had the golden chance after the war and let it pass. The Northern Provincial Council election is a silver lining, if leaders on all sides stop inciting their people.
ජීවිතය හා මරණය
Ivan argues that the decay rotting Sri Lanka’s institutions has reached the family itself, where spouses, parents, children and grandparents live in mechanical relationships without purpose. He wrote a book to start a thoughtful conversation within families, and here records the responses: his wife read it in one sitting, a teacher who modelled his life on Aitmatov’s First Teacher called it his most useful work, a separated father bought copies for his wife and daughter hoping for reconciliation, and it sold fastest at the BMICH book fair. A book, he says, about the meaning of death as well as life.
කට්ටඩියා හා විද්යාඥයා එකකු බවට පත්වීම
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka’s media have never promoted primitive superstition as they do now, filling airtime with astrologers and sorcerers whose advertising has become a key source of revenue. He recounts testing an astrologer-candidate who claimed he could win elections by occult power, and a sorcerer-monk who threatened his life after Ravaya exposed abuse at his temple. Galileo, Newton and Einstein transformed human life yet have no followers; worse, some scientists now mimic the charlatans, spreading fear over kidney disease, milk powder and arsenic to suit political ends.
විග්නේශ්වරන් මුවහමක් කරගැනීම
Answering Sinhala nationalist attacks on C.V. Wigneswaran, the TNA’s Northern chief ministerial candidate, as a new Anton Balasingham, Ivan argues that the dream of Eelam died with the LTTE. The TNA’s surviving leaders were hostages of Prabhakaran, not his followers, and signalled goodwill that the victors ignored. Wigneswaran — a retired Supreme Court judge who refused to bow to Sarath N. Silva, never an LTTE sympathiser, with children married to Sinhalese — should be welcomed. As Europe learned after the Thirty Years’ War, racial and religious extremism is losing its hold in Sri Lanka too.
බිත්තරය සහ ගොළුබෙල්ලා
Ivan argues that Sri Lanka is turning its back on a globalised world in which two million of its people already work abroad and foreign workers fill jobs at home. Rather than despise young people’s dream of emigrating, the state should equip them with vocational training and English to go legally; the nursing schools, still teaching a 1935 syllabus in Sinhala, are his case in point. Those abroad must learn to live with other faiths and foods — the man who retches at snails peeled like eggs will not last — and Sri Lanka’s image, damaged by triumphalism, follows them.
හරක් මස් වාදය
After a monk set himself alight at the Temple of the Tooth on Vesak in protest at cattle slaughter, Ivan takes the anti-beef campaign apart on its own terms. A dairy industry, which the same patriots demand, cannot survive if spent cows cannot be sold for meat, as India’s Muslim market makes possible; vegetarianism without planning deprives people of complete protein; and ancient Sinhala Buddhist kings hunted and ate game. Beneath it, he argues, lies Dharmapala’s anti-Muslim racism — and a quarrel with a world Muslim community twenty times the size of the Tamils would be ruinous.
රාවය ප්රතිසංවිධාන
Ivan replies to Mahesh Hapugoda, who read his wish to make Ravaya a paper for readers’ wives and children as a slide into Nihal Peiris-style entertainment. He rejects both that reading and its view of women, and offers as proof a piece written for parents and daughters: on whether one needs a hero. His own is Gandhi, with Socrates second; he recalls his lawyer Suranjith Hewamanna, who modelled himself on Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin, contrasts J.R. Jayewardene’s Napoleon, and warns through Nietzsche, Wijeweera and Prabhakaran against hero worship.
මගේ සිහිනය ගැන වැඩිදුරටත්
Replying to readers’ reactions to his plan to reorganise Ravaya, Ivan explains his habit of seeing things unconventionally, as Gandhi and Mandela did, and sets his plan against his forecast that Sri Lanka is heading for anarchy. After Prabhakaran’s defeat the political system stood exposed; Mahinda Rajapaksa, the only leader left, failed to rebuild the state, and parties on both sides are historically spent. With a monk’s self-immolation over cattle slaughter and the row over the Thirteenth Amendment as signs, he argues Ravaya must be strengthened to guide readers through the coming collapse.