Sunday February 5, 2012 By Kishali Pinto Jayawardene
Appropriately for Independence Day, I just completed reading the letter of a young student who had gone abroad to pursue her postgraduate studies after benefiting from the country's free education systems and then returned home in the expectation of making up her mind whether to stay or return overseas. What prompted my interest was that the letter was written with feeling and with emotion. These were not deep esoteric meanderings. This was clearly not a person who had tracked political developments in Sri Lanka or had participated in debates on the 13th Amendment plus or minus as the case may be. It was also not written with any particular sensitivity for those whom we refer to as the minorities. Nevertheless, it was a letter written with great pain of mind by a young person who felt that she had to 'give back' to Sri Lanka but was struggling to come to terms with what Sri Lanka had become, in her own mind.Read more..
