Sanjeewa Kaviratne: A Sensitive Human Being Dedicated To Citizens Politics
By Lionel Guruge - March 19, 2014
(The funeral of Central Province Provincial Councilor Sanjeewa Kaviratne is today 19 -3-2014 .This is a brief note in commemoration.)
His death is not comparable to the death of an ordinary politician.From him we learnt that party politics is very narrow and limited.
His father was a minister and a politician, and also a poet.
He too became a politician but not a poet.
Nevertheless he had in him the sensitivity and humanness of a poet and this was embodied in his politics. A love for the environment too, was apparent in his life, not giving a place to material riches but venerating nature, trees, rivers and the wonders of the environment. Any activity he carried out was planned in harmony with the environment.
Since the time he was studying he also had a good rapport with media and in his education too, his main subject area was environmental conservation.
Home To Lanka
By Wilfred Jayasuriya -March 18, 2014
Prof. Wilfred Jayasuriya
Homing stories may be a genre; if so, the genre would include stories likeRunning in the Family by Michael Ondaatje and Return to Fontamara by Ignazio Silone. Silone’s story is about a man who has been convicted of murder, in Italy in the mid-nineteenth century, but who returns after reprieve to his village in Southern Italy. He had not commited the murder, but he refrained from proving his innocence before the court, as that would have resulted in his fianceé being brought to dishonor instead. That was an example of sacrificial love. But his release from prison is not greeted by fanfare, as was Nelson Mandela’s. There is no one left who knows him.
In Ondaatje’s fictionalized memoir, a multiplicity of intertwining stories create an impression of a land once lost and found again. He left Ceylon as a child and after twenty-five years in Canada, returns to his childhood places and times and recreates them with magic realism. The unreality of the past as seen from the sober present is the source of the “mythisizing” narrative, which is both real and unreal, making it one of the great stories of modern fiction.
The book that concerns me at present, Home to Lanka, is an account of a similar return of a Jaffna man, who had lived in this country, Ceylon, when it was a “native land” for the multiple races that lived comfortably in it, for most of the one and a half centuries of British rule and its “wonderful peace,” which was the seed bed on which grew, for the first time, a Ceylonese middle class. He had been at Peradeniya University in the luscious post-independence decade of the fifties, and then gone to USA to study, and work thereafter. He is an academic, who marries another academic, meeting each other when they were postgraduate students. The story is an interwoven account of the past and the present, both abroad and in Lanka. In such a situation how or where does one begin and where end?
