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.
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.
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.
ජාතියේ හා ආගමේ නාමයෙන් රට රැගෙන යන්නේ කොයිබටද?
Ivan warns that the anti-Muslim campaign now being led by groups of monks mirrors the climate before 1915, 1958 and 1983. He retells the 1915 Sinhala–Muslim riots, rooted in Dharmapala’s revival and Sinhala traders’ envy of Muslim commerce, and traces the Muslims’ long history in the island. Such a riot now, he argues, would be ruinous, and its premise betrays Buddhism itself: from the Kalama Sutta and the parable of the raft to Asoka’s edicts and Walpola Rahula, the Buddha’s teaching is one of free inquiry and tolerance.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (3) — ධර්මපාලගේ සිට පැරණි වම දක්වා
In the final part of the series Ivan surveys the currents that shaped modern Sinhala political thought and finds that none could build a nation. Anagarika Dharmapala’s liberationist vision had room only for Sinhala Buddhists; the Ceylon National Congress spoke of one Ceylonese nation but had no plan to unite it; the Gandhian Jaffna Youth Congress had the most progressive vision but wrecked itself with the 1931 election boycott; and the brilliant Marxist Old Left, schooled on Lenin and Trotsky rather than Locke and Mill, cared for class, not nation.
චින්තනයේ දුප්පත්කම (2)
Ivan argues that British rule transformed Ceylon’s economy and state but left its thinking feudal. Europe’s Renaissance and liberal philosophers — Copernicus to Locke and Mill — remade how people thought as well as how they lived; India’s Congress, under Gandhi and Nehru, used the freedom struggle itself as a revolution in thought against caste and communalism. Ceylon, handed independence on a tray, had only Buddhist and Hindu revivals that fought Christian dominance but, trapped by caste and unlike Ram Mohan Roy’s, never turned their criticism inward.
බොරුව හා රැවටිල්ල ජාතික ලක්ෂණයක්ද?
Ivan asks whether deceit is a national habit, and finds it at every turn of modern history: D.S. Senanayake’s staged ‘farmers’ and the governor-generalship promised to Lord Soulbury, the 1962 ‘gin-and-tonic’ coup plot, S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s Sinhala Only opportunism, and John D’Oyly’s bloodless capture of Kandy in 1815, whose native helpers’ descendants became the independence elite. Drawing on Marshall Singer, Henpitagedara Gnanaseeha and Robert Knox, he argues that leaders and people have deceived each other on language and religion until the country fell into an abyss.
මහගමසේකර ප්රහේලිකාව හා අර්බුදයට තිබෙන අර්ථකථනයේ දුගීභාවය
Mahagama Sekera was an artist the country loved and respected, of the first rank in several branches of art at once, and the authenticity in his work was the artistic expression of the authenticity in his life. Ivan had a puzzle about him he could not settle for years: why the statue of him at the junction where you enter his village had been attacked, several times, by somebody.
මර්වින් සිල්වාගේ ගව මස් තහනම
The minister of public relations and public affairs told the Lankadeepa that the sale of beef in the butchers’ shops of the Gampaha district would be banned from next week — that killing and eating an animal which does such great service to agriculture is a great sin, and that the ban is meant to set the country an example from Gampaha in protecting the cattle resource.
ශ්රද්ධාව ඵලදායී කරගැනීම
Two young men from the village came to the house for a contribution to an alms-giving before Vesak. What usually happens is that something is put on the subscription list; this time, because Ivan knew one of them well, he fell into a plain conversation with them about what the alms-giving would cost and what it was meant to achieve.