Five Years After The War: Meandering, Dreary Reminiscences Of My Losses
Five years after the war the situation for the Tamil in the North-East has few bright spots. We older folk do not matter. The young do. The schools in Sri Lanka are better built but bereft of the teachers who taught the older generation. The level of English has collapsed. Few Tamils from the North-East will get the required English scores to enter western universities. Even if they did, western universities that my generation had access to now have prohibitively high tuition fees. Migrating as a refugee is no longer an option. The Tamils who can most easily escape from Sri Lanka are those with family members who have already made it and whose sponsorship under family reunification will ultimately bear fruit. If they do manage to migrate, what awaits them?
Local Options
So those who are left behind in Sri Lanka are best off making the most of what there is. The universities are in a parlous state. The lucky ones, who get into Moratuwa, Colombo and Peradeniya, still have to contend with communalist teachers. For example, there are those who teach in Sinhalese after admitting Tamils to a so-called English medium course. Then there was the student at Peradeniya who topped his class of some 324 students and had difficulties getting postgraduate admission in the West. It turns out that a Peradeniya colleague of mine was asked to write a confidential reference to the university, and wrote that he did not think this batch-topper was capable of finishing his doctorate (I came to know through my colleague at this end who could not believe his eyes and took the student into his group).
