Sri Lanka Has A 2600 Year-Old Culture?
Sharmini Serasinghe
If what has become of Sri Lanka today is the legacy of a “2600-year old culture”, might we have been better off without any culture at all?
Ever so often we hear the famous cliché ‘dropped’ by our politicians- “………Sri Lanka’s 2600-year old culture……….” It is a sine qua non statement repeated ad nauseam at many a public and political forum (the most recent being CHOGM) to add ‘weight’ or to perhaps impress otherwise empty utterances. This is obviously done solely to awe the audience, especially a foreign one.
I recall, as an impressionable young girl, when Sri Lanka’s first Executive President J.R. Jayewardene made his State Visit to the USA during Ronald Reagan’s tenure as US President. In his televised address on the South Lawn of the White House, JRJ casting aside his noblesse oblige referred to the United States as “a country with only a 200-year old history, while Sri Lanka’s was over 2500 years old”!
This ‘casual’ or ‘calculated’ remark (with JRJ one never knew) has remained with me to date. To me even then, this ipse dixit remark reeked of an acute inferiority complex and I felt utterly embarrassed on his behalf.
For us Sri Lankans, we have heard this old-hat too often and, therefore it has no effect. But to an outsider hearing these words “Sri Lanka’s 2600-year old culture” and seeing for themselves how this “Buddhist culture” has shaped this country’s fortunes/misfortunes, it must be truly mindboggling! Read More
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Prosecute The War Criminals In Special Court Or Before International Criminal Court.
by L.Annadoure
( November 12, 2013, Chennai, Sri Lanka Guardian) The last phase of Eelam War had seen the internationalization of the internal civil strife at the behest of Sri Lanka and more than 20 Nations which have had vested interest on and over Sri Lanka had volunteered themselves for a conjoint operation against LTTE in annihilating them on the pretext that LTTE was a terrorist organisation which need to be quelled at any cost nay decimated from the face of earth.
