Five years ago, on a visit to the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo, Hawaii, I played an interesting simulation game: setting off an undersea earthquake and deciding whether or not to issue a tsunami warning to the many countries in and around the Pacific.

The volunteer-run museum, based in ‘the tsunami capital of the world’, engages visitors on the science, history and sociology of tsunamis. The exhibits are mostly mechanical or use basic electronic displays, but the messages are carefully thought out.

The game allowed me to imagine being Director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre (PTWC), a US government scientific facility in Ewa Beach, Hawaii, where geophysicists monitor seismic activity round the clock. When the magnitude exceeds 7.5, its epicentre is located and a tsunami watch is set up. Then, combining the seismic, sea level and historical data, PTWC decides if it should be upped to a warning.

The museum game allows players to choose one of three locations where an earthquake happens — Alaska, Chile or Japan — and also decide on its magnitude from 6.0 to 8.5 on the Richter Scale.

This is an instance where scientists must quickly process large volumes of information and add their own judgement to the mix. With rapid onset hazards like tsunamis, every second counts. Delays or inaction can be costly — but false alarms don’t come cheap either.

I played the game thrice, and erring on the side of caution, issued a local (Hawaiian) evacuation every time. If it were for real, that would have caused chaos and cost the islanders a lot of money.

In fact, those who make decisions on tsunami alerts or warnings have to take many factors into account – including safety, economic impact and even political fall-out.

PTWC is only an expert facility that recommends action: countries covered by its technical advisories are left to make their own national decisions. Depending on local circumstances and considerations, they may act on it immediately – or decide to wait and see.

After playing the simulation game, I can better appreciate the predicament government officials who shoulder this responsibility. They walk a tight rope, balancing short-term public safety and long term public trust in the entire early warning system.

“Tsunami prediction is an inexact art practised in conditions of imperfect information and time pressure,” says Dr Rohan Samarajiva, head of the regional think tank LIRNEasia and a former telecom regulator in Sri Lanka. “In the Pacific Basin, which has had the most experience with tsunamis, 75 per cent of all warnings are false.  But this causes little harm because the false warnings do not get through to the general population for the most part.”

Indian Ocean tsunamis

In contrast, countries in the Indian Ocean have less than a decade’s experience in dealing with tsunamis. There may have been killer waves in historical times, but modern memories begin with the devastating tsunami of 26 December 2004.

On that fateful day, PTWC detected and warned about it, but most countries in South and Southeast Asia lacked national decision making capacity and public warning systems to act on it quickly and resolutely. As a result, than 250,000 lives were lost.

Those memories no doubt played a big role on 11 April 2012, following a powerful undersea earthquake, government officials in many Indian Ocean rim countries agonised over the right response. To warn or not to warn — that was the question.

The 8.6 magnitude quake occurred at 8.38 UTC (14:08 Sri Lanka Time), 440 km southwest of Banda Aceh in Indonesia and 33 km beneath the ocean floor. That was relatively close to the location from where the December 2004 tsunami originated.

PTWC issued its first information bulletin six minutes after the 4/11 quake. It introduced an Indian Ocean-wide Tsunami Watch, recommending a state of readiness to act, covering 28 countries and territories.

Over the next few hours, they updated their assessment, but didn’t escalate the tsunami watch to a tsunami warning, as only minor tsunamis were generated during the aftermath. At 12:36 UCT (18:06 SL Time), they called off the tsunami watch.

This time around, the Indian Ocean had its own tsunami early warning system, set up under the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) following the 2004 tragedy.

Anchored around three early warning providers – operated by Australia, India and Indonesia – the Indian Ocean system combines data from underwater probes, orbiting global positioning system satellites and floating buoys to better detect a coming tidal wave.

On April 11, individual Indian Ocean countries reacted differently. Indonesia issued a warning five minutes after the quake. India’s was in eight minutes, and Australia’s, in 10. Several others issued warnings; some followed it up with coastal evacuation.

According to news reports, Thai authorities shut down the Phuket international airport, and evacuated hotel guests in the coastal resort area to the hills behind. In southern India, meanwhile, the port of Chennai closed down for a few hours. These were among the locations badly hit in 2004.

Sri Lanka’s official warning and coastal evacuation order came around 15:30 SL Time, issued by the Department of Meteorology and released to the media and public by the Disaster Management Centre (DMC).

If a trans-oceanic tsunami was indeed generated, it would have reached Sri Lanka’s east coast (Trincomalee) in just over two hours from the quake. So the window to act was tight – but long enough for coastal evacuation.

But there was considerable chaos just before and after the official warning. The undersea quake itself was felt almost instantaneously in many parts of Sri Lanka as a mild tremours, physically alerting people about the Indian Ocean’s rumble. Within minutes, at least two dozen radio and TV channels were in ‘Breaking News’ mode. The online social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter also exploded with citizen updates, opinions and emotions.

In the absence of a steady flow of official information, radio and TV kept repeating whatever they found online. Not all of it was drawn from credible or trusted sources. That, combined with inexperience of some announcers, contributed to public confusion.

“An ignorant public at a time chaos is not a good thing,” says journalist Amantha Perera, who reports from Sri Lanka for global media outlets including TIME Magazine. “There was also massive confusion: the government said it was a tsunami warning and got people out of the coast, but there was no follow-up information coming from official channels, which really led to chaos.”

Individual agencies acting in isolation belied the absence of a coordinated response strategy. Buses and train services were stopped on the coastal lines. Electricity supply was shut down in certain coastal areas. Public and private offices were closed early, with thousands of workers suddenly asked go home.

Dr Samarajiva sees these as “a disorganised random set of responses uninformed either by realistic assessments of the risk (exemplified by the model predicting arrival times) or by definitive guidance from the government.”

In a post mortem, he adds: “When it came to issuance of warnings, evacuation orders, etc., the government earned a failing grade. Not enough authoritative direction was provided in time.” (full text at: http://tiny.cc/RS411).

Fear and Panic

Journalist Amantha Perera felt that most mass decisions that day were motivated by fear. “Media, government and others did not do anything to keep the people clam and informed – telling them the situation was under control…it appeared no one was in charge, at least when it came to  keeping the public informed after the warning.”

He adds: “There was also no firm authoritative figure who came out and assured the people. [In contrast] we saw what the Indonesian president did: when it became very clear that a tsunami was unlikely, he was the one who assured the country.”

We also found the limits of early warning technology. Post-quake overloading of telecom networks was predictable. More worrying was how the DMC’s arrangement for cell broadcasting – a method that can send text messages simultaneously to a large number of mobile phone users in a given area – failed. Two weeks later, that has yet to be explained.

At least 10 coastal warning towers – built after 2004 with foreign aid – also didn’t work. This is being investigated and remedial action has been promised.

Thorkild Aarup, Head of the Tsunami Unit of the UN Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC), has acknowledged gaps in the Indian Ocean system.

Speaking within hours of the April 11 incident, he said: “But the Indian Ocean is much better prepared than it was in 2004. The tsunami early warning systems are like the atmospheric systems used by meteorologists which are constantly being improved by new technology. The same is true for the tsunami warning systems”.

In the end, the problems have less to do with specific technologies of monitoring and data gathering, and more rooted in the human systems of decision making and crisis response. The biggest challenge, for national authorities, is how to make the best possible decisions on the run, under immense pressure, and often with incomplete information.

Here too, the Indian Ocean can learn a few things from the Pacific experience. Since the system was set up in 1947, it has never missed warning of a damaging tsunami — but there have been a number of very expensive evacuations that turned out to be unnecessary.

“These precautions are needed to ensure public safety, but scientists are working to minimise unnecessary warnings without ever missing a hazardous event,” explains one panel at the Pacific Tsunami Museum.

Easier said than done! As Dr Samarajiva says: “Disaster risk-reduction professionals know that false warnings are an artefact of the inexact art of predicting the onset of hazards: but the general public does not.  If they are subject to too many false warnings, they will not respond even to true warnings.”

Too much of a good thing?

So was the tsunami warning and coastal evacuation on April 11 justified? This needs careful, dispassionate analysis in the coming weeks.

“Better safe than sorry” might work the first few times, but let us remember the cry-wolf syndrome. False alarms and evacuation orders can reduce public trust and cooperation over time.

Public behaviour – in both good times and bad — is a composite phenomenon made up of millions of individual citizens making private decisions in their self interest. While many heed their ‘herd instinct’ during emergencies, some can — and do — refuse due to their own reasoning. People can’t be saved at gun point.

A case in point is what happened in southern Bangladesh in November 2007 as cyclone Sidr approached. A false tsunami alert and evacuation two months earlier (on 13 September 2007) had led thousands of Bangladeshis to ignore cyclone early warnings. As villagers and officials later admitted, this accounted for many of the over 1,000 lives that were lost to the cyclone.

On the whole, Bangladesh is an outstanding success story in community based early warning systems – it saves thousands of lives from cyclones that regularly hit the deltaic country. But as the Sidr experience showed, too much of a good thing can be harmful.

The rapid spread of information and communication technologies (ICTs) introduces a new dimension to emergencies. The multiplicity of information sources, channels and access devices is certainly better than their absence. But they also make it harder to achieve a coherent and coordinated response. Controlled release of information is no longer an option for any government.

During those tensed hours on April 11, it is likely that many of the 15 to 20 per cent of Lankans with web access went online to look up and/or share information. We saw the power of social media: in a spontaneous collaboration, several regular Twitter users (tweeps) stayed active throughout the period.

Tweets not only updated on what was happening in Colombo and other coastal areas, but also relayed latest news from established wire news services (such as AP and Reuters) and mainstream media in Sri Lanka. When some radio broadcasts were creating panic, tweets pointed out that at first, it was a tsunami watch — not a warning.

In contrast, the official websites of the DMC  and the Met Department had no updates for at least 90 minutes after the quake.

As I noted in another recent essay, we can’t expect state agencies to become twitter-happy overnight (although timely updates of their websites would be a good idea). At a minimum, they must realise the info landscape is now transformed.

“If we don’t get the language and communication right, greater use of (social) media can actually aggravate confusion and chaos,” cautions Sanjana Hattotuwa, one of several Lankans who covered April 11 crisis on twitter, from @groundviews.

For a start, everyone needs to discern a tsunami WATCH (stand-by for more) from a WARNING (take action). Many – including some journalists – still don’t appreciate the difference. It is even more confusing when hastily translated into local languages.

A simple and language-neutral colour code system can help. As I’ve been saying, why not adopt the well known hierarchy of green–amber–red, already well known in traffic lights?

Yes, we have come a long way since 2004. But we still face many challenges, now of a different kind. A little learning can be dangerous. Patchy awareness – combined with fear and rumours — can easily trigger panic.

Disaster early warnings are pure public goods. But in our modern information societies, each member of the public must decide what is good for them. Public trust is the lubricant that will move the wheels of law and order as well as public safety in the right direction.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene has been covering disasters as a journalist and film maker for over 20 years. In 2007, he co-edited Communicating Disasters: An Asia Pacific Resource Book. 

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The year was 1989. Margaret Thatcher and George Bush, Snr., were in office. Mikhail Gorbachev was slowly but surely dismantling the Soviet Union. The infamous Iron Curtain was crumbling under pressure from ‘people power’ across Eastern Europe.

On the technology front, Personal Computers (PCs) had entered the market only a few years earlier: they were still gadgets in offices than homes. Mobile (cellular) phone services were just rolling out. The Internet was available only to privileged academics and military personnel. Its graphical interface – the World Wide Web – was not even invented.

In that year, sitting at his home in Colombo, Sri Lanka and using WordStar software on his Kaypro 2000 laptop (remember them, anyone?), Arthur C Clarke wrote a new science fiction novel. It was his own way of exorcising something that had haunted him for decades: the mighty ship Titanic.

As he reflected many years later, “I was born five years after the biggest maritime disaster the world had known: the sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ RMS Titanic while on her maiden voyage. My home town Minehead, in Somerset, was not more than a couple of hundred kilometres from Southampton, from where the Titanic set off. All my life, I have been intrigued by the Titanic disaster.”

The novel, published in late 1990 as The Ghost from the Grand Banks, was an ocean-based thriller set in the (then) near future. It revolved around rival British-American and Japanese teams trying to raise the legendary ship’s wreck in time for the centenary in 2012. Both teams mobilise mega-bucks and cutting edge technology: while one team relies on 50 billion little glass balls, the other’s ambitious plan involves making the world’s largest ice cube…

“It’s my first contemporary novel and is completely different from anything else. It begins in 1977 and goes up to 2012,” Clarke told a friend shortly after the manuscript was completed in early 1990.

When the book came out, it received mixed reviews. Although it had an exciting plot and interesting elements woven together, many reviewers found the characters to be weak – a common complaint about Clarke’s science fiction stories, especially his novels.

Kirkus Reviews, a leading American book review magazine, summed it up as follows: “Average Clarke, more emotional than usual, with excellent extrapolations of future technologies.”

In a more positive review, Gerald Jonas wrote in the New York Times: “He [Clarke] sees the universe as a marvellous toy, coquettishly begging to be understood yet always mocking our success with some deeper mystery…

The little lectures that he inserts to bring us painlessly up to speed on such matters are not digressions; his ability to keep a story moving ahead while teaching us what we must know to follow narrative logic wherever it leads is the very essence of his art. He only makes it look easy.”

A Pocketful of Asides

Nearly a quarter century after the book was written, those ‘little lectures’ and smart asides offer interesting glimpses into how Clarke’s mind worked. For decades, he was our amiable and playful “tour guide” to the future…

He has woven into the narrative a number of topics and ideas that he was deeply interested in at the time. These included fractal geometry of the Mandelbrot Set, campaigning against tobacco smoking, and the search for new energy sources to replace petroleum and coal.

Living as we do at the time when his story culminated, we can now compare his ‘extrapolations of the future’ – he carefully avoided labelling any of his ideas as ‘predictions’ – with what has become our reality.

On the information society front, at least, The Ghost from the Grand Banks stands up remarkably well in 2012. If we haven’t yet reached some heights of technological wizardry that Clarke imagined, that only leaves the geekdom with a few challenges to work on…

Clarke rightly anticipated the world of 2012 to be media-saturated, with governments and corporations deciding on key policies and actions with a careful eye on media relations (and fall-out). Call it the Age of Spin. Perhaps it’s an inevitable outcome of the chatty Global Family – created, in part, by the geostationary communication satellites that Clarke conceived in 1945.

In the Clarkian world of 2012, “Nippon-Turner Corporation” is the world’s largest media chain, reaching out to the whole world on multiple platforms and channels. Clarke used to tease CNN founder Ted Turner about deserving 10 per cent of the network’s profits. More seriously, he was intrigued by the ‘CNN Effect’ – the impact that CNN and other 24/7 global news channels on how states conduct their foreign policy.

Of course, at the time of writing, Japan was at the height of its property and stock market fuelled economic bubble. Clarke had no way of knowing how soon the bubble would burst, leading to a Lost Decade in which Japan would lose their leadership in many technologies and industries.

Curiously, a passing mention is made of a “celebrated media tycoon” (unnamed) who had placed his bet on the wrong system when high definition TV swept all before it at the end of the twentieth century. “Later attempts to restore his fortune also misfired, and he was now a guest of His Majesty’s Government for the next five years (assuming time off for good behaviour).”

Death of Geography

Throughout the pages of Ghost, almost like a sprinkling of pixie dust, we find insights into what ordinary life might be like in the early twenty first century – when access to information and communication is within reach of (almost) everyone, everywhere.

The divide between work and play has blurred for many of the 2.2 billion people regularly accessing the Internet today. It has also enabled new forms of real-time collaboration. Back in 1989, Clarke foresaw these trends being taken for granted by 2012.

For example, the Japanese-led attempt to raise the Titanic’s wreck involves working with some of America’s top engineers. Using encrypted (secure) communication networks, they work across many time zones. The internet is not mentioned by name, but Clarke’s vision of long-distance, multi-author collaborations is now commonplace.

Meanwhile, a billionaire inventor (Roy Emerson) is trying to keep himself usefully engaged now that he doesn’t have to work for a living. “Sometimes he would start on a project suggested by one of the countless network ‘magazines’, and join a group of similarly inclined hobbyists scattered all over the world. He seldom knew their names – only their often facetious call-signs – and he was careful not to give his. Since he had been listed as one of the hundred richest men in the United States, he had learned the value of anonymity.”

Clarke envisages Emerson becoming bored with some long-distance projects, and changing his ‘Ident Code’ completely so that he can exit the group without leaving a trace. He also “wastes time exploring Personal Notice Boards whose contents would have appalled the first pioneers of electronic communication”.

But “all play and no work was making Emerson a very dull Roy”. Luckily, a formidable challenge lands on his desk (electro-pad?) that saves him from terminal boredom: the British-American bid to raise the Titanic.

To better appreciate some of Clarke’s passing remarks, we have to remember tech trends as the 1980s decade drew to a close. Jason Bradley, the world’s leading oceanographer and underwater trouble-shooter, still uses a NeXT Mark 4. It is “hardly the last word in computers, but Bradley’s business had grown up with it, and he had resisted all updates, on the sound principle ‘If it works, don’t fix it’”.

In the real world, Steve Jobs – who launched NeXT Computers in 1988 after being forced out of Apple – discontinued that product line in 1990. Although NeXT was not a great commercial success, some machines are still used around the world as servers and hobbyist desktops.

Clarke describes another tech phenomenon that emerged in the first decade of the new millennium: Terabyte Interactive Microlibraries, or TIMs. These blocks of crystal, about the size of a matchbox, had made their way from Hong Kong via Cuba “had put so many US publishers out of business that Congress had dusted off legislation that dated back to the heyday of Prohibition”.

These sound much like today’s e-books, which have indeed shaken the traditional publishing industry and transformed the way many people read.

Beyond speculating on consumer tech trends, Clarke also touches on the communication infrastructure, the planet-wide wiring and ‘plumbing’ that enables our incessantly chattering planet.

An example is POLAR 1, the first fibre-optic cable to be laid under the Arctic icecap. Its benefit: “By eliminating the long haul up to the geostationary orbit, and its slight but annoying time-delay, the global phone system had been noticeably improved; speakers no longer kept interrupting each other, or wasting time waiting for replies.”

But Clarke is at his best when exploring the social, cultural and psychological impacts of technology. (He was happy to leave the complex engineering problems to the real geeks.)

For instance, he talks about the Rubik’s Cube making a comeback 30 years after its first appearance, and in a far more deadly mutation. A quick check on the official Rubik website, and a Google search, shows no such device has yet emerged. Perhaps that’s a fortune waiting to be made…

Ending a ‘Savage Century’

Despite all this and more, The Ghost from the Grand Banks isn’t just a potpourri of clever ideas held together by a motley collection of geeks and billionaires. The novel is, in fact, underpinned by a number of core themes.

Long-time Clarke fans will notice several recurrent ones, among them: studying and conserving the oceans as a global commons; finding alternatives for war to engage human aggression (competitive sport? space exploration?); and striking the right balance between technology, material progress and ethics.

Despite his well known enthusiasm for humanity’s technology-driven future, Clarke was well aware of its pitfalls and dangers. He once again uses a favourite phrase — ‘Artificial Stupidity’ — to caution about dangers of over-reliance on computers.

Clarke often acknowledged that economics and politics were his “blind spots” even if that didn’t stop him from imagining desirable near futures. He has written about the hazards of prophecy as it is impossible to predict near-term political developments with any degree of precision or certainty.

The Cold War had not quite ended when this novel was written (although the Berlin Wall came down during its creation). So Clarke was being cheeky – or whimsical — when he suggests nuclear-powered military submarines of the United States and the ‘land once more called Russia’ being commercially hired to fee-paying customers of 2012. (For Clarke’s perspectives on the far-reaching events of 1989-90, read How the World Was One: Beyond the Global Village, published in 1992.)

He can perhaps be forgiven for not anticipating the full turn of events that followed the Soviet Union’s collapse. Although they were already active in their own spheres of influence, both Vladimir Putin and Osama Bin Laden were still relatively unknown in 1989…

Clarke uses his cautious optimism to rekindle larger debates that are far from resolved, even today. For example, he imagines the editorial in the London Times of 15 April 2007 (“available in Hardcopy and NewsSat editions”) making a fervent plea for letting the Titanic “rest in peace” where it settled on the night of 15 April 1912.

It ends with these words: “There is no need to revisit her to be reminded of the most important lesson the Titanic can teach – the dangers of overconfidence, of technological hubris. Chernobyl, Challenger, Lagrange 3 and Experimental Fusor One have shown us where that can lead…”

He also briefly touches on a Big Question that he has regularly addressed for a long time, especially since he famously theorised the invention of tools by our ape ancestors in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968): can humanity outgrow its inherently violent adolescence?

From the vantage point of 2012, Clarke looks back at the “the blood-stained [twentieth] century…[which] now seemed to belong to another age”.

Then looking around and ahead, he adds: “The human race had matured a little — but still had far to go before it could claim to be civilised.”

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene worked with the late Sir Arthur C Clarke as his research assistant from 1987 to 2008, which included supporting the creative process of his Titanic novel. He is grateful to Clarke’s biographer Neil McAleer for collating many historical references. 

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Assorted charlatans and religious zealots across the island of Sri Lanka must have heaved a collective sigh of relief when they heard that Dharmapala Senaratne was no more. He had made it his business to make life difficult for those preying on the gullible public.

Rationalist and myth-buster Dharmapala made his final exist a few days before 2012 dawned. At 67, he still had a few more years of the good struggle left in him. He would surely have enjoyed countering the false prophets of doom — and their credulous followers — who predict the end of the world on 21 December 2012.

Although Dharmapala was also a teacher and lawyer with decades of experience, he was best known for his public activism as a rationalist. His was a determined and sceptical voice questioning fanatical peddlers of all kinds of dogmas, faiths and (mutually exclusive) brands of ‘salvation’.

Even more importantly, he fearlessly took on confidence tricksters hoodwinking superstitious people with black magic and cheap conjuring tricks. He was a courageous public intellectual in a land woefully short of their kind.

At its core, rationalism involves nurturing the spirit of enquiry and critical thinking in every aspect of life and living, at both private and public levels. In short, rationalists and sacred cows are mutually exclusive.

Dharmapala was President of the Sri Lanka Rationalist Association (SLRA), a small group of earnestly sceptical enquirers who won’t take anyone’s word about anything. They want to investigate and debate.

The voluntary group was originally set up in 1960 by the late Dr Abraham Thomas Kovoor (1898 – 1978), a Kerala-born science teacher who settled down in newly independent Ceylon and, after his retirement in 1959, took to investigating so-called supernatural phenomena and paranormal practices. He found adequate physical or psychological explanations for almost all of them. In that process, he exposed many so-called ‘god men’ and black magicians who thrive on people’s misery and superstitions.

In 1963, Kovoor issued an open challenge (with the then princely sum of LKR 100,000 tagged to it) for anyone who could demonstrate supernatural or miraculous powers under fool-proof and fraud-proof conditions. He also challenged the high profile Sathya Sai Baba of India, arguing that the latter’s ‘materialising’ of holy ash (vibuthi) out of thin air was nothing more than a sleight of hand. Kovoor’s challenges were consistently dodged by Sai Baba – and all others of his ilk.

Kovoor was fond of saying: “He who does not allow his miracles to be investigated is a crook; he who does not have the courage to investigate a miracle is gullible; and he who is prepared to believe without verification is a fool.”

These words, and the far-reaching influence of other well known rationalists like Bertrand Russell, inspired young Dharmapala Senaratne to promote rationalism in his spare time. Two other young men who joined Kovoor in the heyday of the Ceylon Rationalist Association: Amunugoda Thilakaratne and Ajith Thilakasena, both of who became writers of their own merit. Pooling their talents, the trio popularised Kovoor’s thinking and work among the Sinhala reading public.

Sri Lanka’s rationalist movement lost its lustre after Kovoor’s death in 1978, even though (lawyer and poet) Mervyn Casie Chetty kept it going for some more years. When the sceptical flames were reignited in the new millennium, Dharmapala became its new President by popular choice.

“Dharmapala was the bridge between generations when we set out to revive the rationalist movement of Sri Lanka in 2005,” recalls Tharaka Warapitiya, general secretary of SLRA. “He helped enormously to connect us with activists who had been heavily involved in its work during the Kovoor era.”

Different Times

By this time, however, the island of Lanka had been completely transformed. The Children of 1977 – products of economic liberalisation and Sri Lanka’s first television generation – had come of age.

Partly reflecting this new reality, Dharmapala’s style was different. While Kovoor had been charismatic and flamboyant, Dharmapala was measured and studious — yet no less passionate when it came to separating the wheat from the chaff.

He was astute enough to realise that the public moods and media attitudes had changed drastically from the more conducive 1960s and 1970s.

That was when a recent Indian immigrant (well, aren’t we all that, historically speaking?) could speak truth to power and command a sizeable audience of discerning Lankans as well as attract sufficient attention of the island’s media.

That was also a time when an eager young medical graduate (Dr Carlo Fonseka) could debunk the much-hyped ‘spiritual base’ for the ‘holy’ practice of fire walking. His finding – that ‘it’s the thickness of the sole and not the soul’ that matters in walking over red hot coal – shattered a core myth that propped up sacred cows of Kataragama.

While such acts elicited predictable resistance and threats from those afflicted, societal support at the time was more open and forthcoming. Many intellectuals and newspaper editors accommodated Kovoor, Fonseka and fellow sceptics, with a gleeful Arthur C Clarke cheering from the sidelines (he would later feature them in his global TV series).

It was the song — not the singer — that mattered then. Alas, not now.

Paradoxically, we now have far more communication channels and technologies yet decidedly fewer opportunities and platforms for dispassionate public debate. Today’s Lankan society welcomes and blindly follows an entirely different kind of Malayalis who claim to know more about our personal pasts and futures than we’d ever know ourselves. And when we see how our political and business elite patronise Sai Baba, Sri Chinmoy and other gurus so uncritically, we must wonder if there is intelligent life in Colombo…

Sacred cows, it seems, have multiplied faster than humans in the past half century. Our cacophonous airwaves and multi-colour Sunday newspapers are bustling with an embarrassment of choice for salvation, wealth, matrimony, retribution and various other ‘quick fixes’ for this life and (imagined) next ones.

Embarrassment, indeed!

So Dharmapala had to adopt different strategies to reach the same goals.

He was well versed in scientific thinking and principles, to which he added his own legal perspectives.

His position was unequivocal: “Let anyone believe in anything privately if they choose to — but no one has the right to mislead others or to hoodwink them into parting with money. That’s fraud, which is against the law!”

As he repeatedly pointed out, Sri Lanka has strict laws dealing with fraud. If anyone has been tricked into paying money on false promises, the affected may take civil or criminal legal action.

In reality, however, very few do so – lest it exposes their own gullibility! Apparently, when it comes to the occult and paranormal, many ignore the time-tested caution of “Caveat emptor” (Latin for ‘Let the buyer beware’).

“This is the very weakness that fraudsters exploit,” Dharmapala said. “These are organised rackets to rob people of their hard-earned money.”

Confronting conmen

Dharmapala took on the assorted charlatans by publicly exposing their conjuring tricks and bogus claims. He also used the media (especially television, not available during Kovoor’s time) to counter the mesmerising hype peddled by the other side.

A memorable example was when, in 2010, he pooh-poohed the hilarious practice of a ‘possessed’ wooden stool (kanappuwa) ‘walking’ down the streets in search of thieves.

“Inanimate objects are completely incapable of self-propelled motion,” he argued citing the laws of physics. “These furniture items are being manipulated by the humans involved. Kanappuwas most definitely can’t catch any thieves, or the police would employ them for their own crime investigations!”

On prime time TV, he offered LKR 100,000 for anyone who could prove beyond any doubt that a stool could ‘walk on its own’. He added: “This is a complete rip-off – further victimising persons who have already lost their belongings. It’s cruel to exploit such misery!”

He also cautioned against community divisions and hatred nurtured by dubious practices like walking stools and light-readings (anjanam): those falsely implicated are immediately (and unfairly) maligned by neighbours.

As an antidote, he called for more scientific thinking and attitude at all levels of society. “If we can get our people to think more logically and critically, we can easily dispel many myths and superstitions.”

But that is just not happening enough in Twenty First Century Lanka: a majority among its 20 million believe in a broad range of superstitions, some more harmful than others. Confronting conmen can be hazardous in a post-war society where trigger-happy goons are available for cheap.

Dharmapala reserved his most scathing criticism for (apparently) educated Lankans dabbling in unproven or fraudulent practices. This includes a number of credentialed scientists trained in disciplines such as astrophysics, geology, atmospheric physics or nuclear chemistry.

“Tragically, certain individuals with legitimate Ph Ds in various branches of science also engage in peddling pseudo-science and bogus practices. Some are doing it with commercial motives. Others, for cheap popularity,” Dharmapala said.

As we saw during the 2011 controversy over arsenic in rice, some of these learned men and women won’t allow hard evidence get in the way of a good conspiracy theory! And large sections of our media (especially in Sinhala) hero-worship them uncritically, labelling them as ‘patriots’ and projecting them as ‘defenders of indigenous knowledge’.

Dharmapala entered many contentious debates when a majority of our intellectuals diligently avoided them. He didn’t mince words when taking on scientists indulging in pseudo-science or complete non-science. He wrote in one such debate on hypnotism as ‘proof’ of reincarnation: “When learned people like Dr. J propagate and disseminate misconceptions, ordinary folk tend to be misled and embrace wrong notions thereby rendering their thinking faculties blunt.”

Rational communicator

Frustrated by the limitations of our uncritical mainstream media, he also communicated through books and the new media, so that discerning readers can make up their own minds.

His lasting contribution to rationalist literature was translating two seminal works by Kovoor: Begone Godmen, and Gods, Demons and Spirits. He also penned three original books: Kovoor saha Hethuwadi Darshanaya (Kovoor and Rationalism); Sai Baabage Anduru Paththa (The Dark Side of Sai Baba); and Elowin Aa Jeewakaya saha Wenath Hethuwadi Lipi (The Healer from Outer Space and other Rationalist Essays).

Unlike many others of his generation, Dharmapala kept up with the march of communications technologies. Early on, he recognised the web’s potential for nurturing public debate and promoting the public interest. He joined the Secular Sri Lanka group blog, well aware how its thematic focus evokes the wrath of Sinhala Buddhist nationalists. He was also active in various online discussion forums and social media platforms (such as Facebook, Twitter, All Voices and LinkedIn), and was fond of sharing interesting weblinks.

While engaging the new media, Dharmapala never gave up on the old media. He was a prolific writer of letters to the editors of English newspapers in Sri Lanka. Whatever the topic – from faith healers and vegetarianism to demons and reincarnation – he was an indefatigable practitioner of this quaint craft: he would doggedly pursue an exchange until editors intervened to close a prolonged debate.

Hopefully, these multiple communications woke up a few from their culture-conditioned and society-enforced slumber. But how do we awaken those who only pretend to be asleep?

Why do otherwise moderate people turn emotional and fiercely defensive in any discussion about their religious faith?  Why is it that a majority of Lankans seem so threatened if anyone were to even mildly question the ‘certain certainties’ of a dogma randomly assigned to them at birth? How come any discussion on secularism in Sri Lanka elicit so much vitriolic comment from the virtuous defenders of a religious state?

Could it be because, as Mark Twain once remarked, “Faith is believing what you know ain’t true”?

Sure, it’s a free world: every individual may choose what to believe in, and also change beliefs from time to time. That’s fine — as long as believers confine it all to their own private lives. But when some try to force their beliefs on everyone else, or institutionalise these as state policies, it becomes hegemony.

In a heated newspaper exchange on the ultimately unverifiable existence of an afterlife, Dharmapala said December 2009: “Having been brainwashed from the very first day of birth and then throughout a lifetime, different religionists hold a deep rooted conviction in mind that only the particular dogma, taught by their respective religions, is the absolute truth and what is taught in other religions is false. Thus, while Buddhists and Hindus are absolutely certain of rebirth, Christians and Muslims are equally certain of Almighty God and Creation.”

Associates confirm that Dharmapala had worked on another Sinhala book, a critical look at reincarnation. Its posthumous publication could restore some sanity to the emotionally charged debates on this topic.

Credulous Nation?

Meanwhile, true Buddhists – may their tribe increase! – could finally start following what the Buddha taught. For half a century, Lankan rationalists have been citing, as one of their favourite quotes, the Buddha’s well known advice to the Kalamas, captured in the kalama sutra.

Kovoor used to quote this regularly at public meetings, as do his successors to this date. The Buddha’s rejection of authority, tradition, hearsay and dogma, and his position that one should accept something as true and valid only on the basis of verification by oneself, is probably one of the earliest rationalist principles expressed in history.

But as Colombo University’s historian and public intellectual Dr Nirmal Ranjith Dewasiri told a rationalists’ meeting in Colombo last week, a majority of today’s Lankan Buddhists would rather not follow that sound advice. Doing so risks shattering too many dogmas and contradictions on which their history and current political posturing are based…

It remains to be seen who among our rationalists would take up the daunting task of keeping the sceptical flame alive. Doing so now is even more critical than when Kovoor founded the movement. At stake is much more than debating religious faiths, or safeguarding the public from exploiters of ignorance and misery.

As astronomer and science populariser Carl Sagan put it so well in his last book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995): “If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness.”

Early in life, science writer Nalaka Gunawardene was influenced by educator and free thinker Dr E W Adikaram, and later worked with Sir Arthur C Clarke as his research assistant. He thanks Dr Kavan Ratnatunga and Tharaka Warapitiya for some information used in this essay, but the opinions are entirely his own. 

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Photo courtesy Sarvodaya Media Unit

When Dr A T Ariyaratne, founder and president of the Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka, turned 80 years on 5 November 2011, felicitations poured in from all over the world. This spontaneous act was an indication — if any were needed — of how much and how widely he has touched the lives of millions.

For someone with global stature, Ahangamage Tudor Ariyaratne is completely devoid of pomposity. In a career spanning six decades, he has received some three dozen awards and honours — including the ‘Asian Nobel’ Magsaysay Award (Community Leadership, 1969), honorary degrees and doctorates, and the highest national honour from his own country, SriLankabhimanya (Pride of Sri Lanka). But he remains a simple and amiable man. He is still ‘AT’ to contemporaries, ‘Ari’ to us fellow travellers, and ‘Loku Sir’ (Master) to all at Sarvodaya – the largest development organisation in Sri Lanka. The apolitical people’s movement has a presence in over 15,000 villages.

Ari is also our elder statesman of inclusive development. For over half a century, he and Sarvodaya have advocated a nuanced approach to overcoming poverty, illiteracy and various social exclusions. Unlike some die-hard activists, Ari doesn’t ask us to denounce materialism or revert to pre-industrial lifestyles. Instead, he seeks a world without extreme poverty or extreme affluence.

Suddenly, his quest for social justice and equality is resonating all over the world. In fact, Ari has been speaking out for the 99 per cent of less privileged people decades before a movement by that name emerged in the West. In a sense, those occupying Wall Street and other centres of affluence are all children of Sarvodaya.

While Ari shares their moral outrage, his own strategy has been quite different. He didn’t occupy physical spaces in his struggle; he went straight to the fount of all injustice – our minds.

Shared work, voluntary giving and sharing of resources form the bedrock of Sarvodaya’s approach to doing good, but these are not random acts of charity. They are all means to achieving the ‘awakening of everyone’ – starting from the individual and family, and going up to village, national and global levels. There is strong spiritual base to Sarvodaya, albeit a non-doctrinal one. It is inspired by Buddhism, yet not deep immersed in it.

Ari is the lead thinker of Sarvodaya. He has guided the movement from humble beginnings in 1958 to its globalised, internationally recognised level today. Luckily for everyone, Ari wasn’t just a deep thinker but also a practical and passionate activist. Early on, he struck a healthy balance between theory and practice.

Thanks to him, Sarvodaya’s vision is thoughtful without being pedantic; its work is systematic without being too bureaucratic. Sarvodaya staff and volunteers are not robotic do-gooders controlled from their headquarters: they are motivated, disciplined and resourceful (I’ve worked with many). At all levels, they know what to do, how – and more importantly, why.

In Ari, we find elements of Mahatma Gandhi (non-violent pursuit of the greater good); the Dalai Lama (interpreting Buddhist philosophy for the modern world); Martin Luther King, Jr. (struggling for the rights and dignity of marginalised people); Nelson Mandela (nurturing democracy and healing society); and Jimmy Carter (globalism with a humanitarian agenda).

Yet Ari is more than the sum of these noble parts; he is his own unique visionary. And an adroit ‘remixer’ who constantly blends the best of East and West. He adapts our civilisational heritage to tackle the Twenty First Century’s anxieties and uncertainties. Thankfully, though, he doesn’t peddle simplistic solutions to today’s complex problems.

On the Frontline

Ari is a man on the move, endlessly criss-crossing his island, leading from the front. When he turned 75, he told me that he was still averaging 100 to 150 km of inland travel every day. Come Hell or high water – he has faced plenty of both — he goes where the needs are. And he shows no sign of slowing down.

Ari has built more ‘bridges’ in Sri Lanka than all its post-independence governments. His ‘bridges’ are between people: he has connected all ethnic, religious and linguistic groups who share our island, nurturing trust and cooperation among them. As policy analyst Chanuka Wattegama says, Ari is perhaps the only leader in Sri Lanka to rally all Lankans under one umbrella — not a single politician has achieved this feat.

So how many lives has Sarvodaya saved over the decades?

The movement’s wide-ranging social development programmes have improved the lives of millions through better health, nutrition, literacy and education. Meanwhile, its humanitarian programmes have literally made the difference between life and death in times of disaster or conflict.

When the Indian Ocean Tsunami struck in December 2004, Ari and his team were the first responders, reaching some affected communities within six hours; government relief efforts took two or more days. Likewise, Sarvodaya maintained its non-partisan and humanitarian presence even during the height of hostilities between Lankan armed forces and Tamil Tigers in war-ravaged areas.

However, we must look deeper to discover Sarvodaya’s greatest accomplishment in preventive action. Consider the large number of Sarvodaya-affiliated young men and women who simply refused to join the Marxist insurrections in 1971 and 1987-89, and the separatist terror that triggered our civil war. If not for Sarvodaya’s positive engagement of youth, the death toll of our trinity of uprisings could have been far higher…

Courage of Conviction

While Ari is an avowed man of peace, he can be an indomitable defender of his movement and its principles. Faced with injustice, the genial ex-schoolmaster becomes a mighty force to reckon with. I witnessed that facet of Ari when I first interviewed him in early 1991.

For unclear reasons, President Premadasa had unleashed the full powers of the state to persecute Ari and Sarvodaya through an infamous NGO Commission. As the people’s movement was confronting a ruthless bureaucracy and opportunistic critics week after week, most of the media was too scared to carry Sarvodaya’s side of the story. My seniors at The Island were hesitant to interview the man at the centre of this storm; being idealistic and curious, I volunteered.

Ari spent an entire morning talking with me, then a cub reporter, placing everything on the record. I asked some piercing questions, all of which he answered with clarity and purpose. He systematically debunked the many allegations against Sarvodaya. He also called for a co-existence between government, private and people’s sectors: the problems of under-development and social exclusion were too enormous to be tackled individually, he argued.

Photo courtesy Sarvodaya Media Unit

Half way through the interview, I popped the question that everyone was asking: Are you politically ambitious?

“I have no ambition to hold political office,” he answered. Then he quickly added: “But I am very political – in the sense that I want power at the centre to be totally brought down to the people, so that we can enjoy our human rights – freedom of speech, freedom of expression, freedom of participation, and decision-making. Democracy to be really with the people.”

I had an explosive interview. But our editor was overseas, and no one else was willing to take responsibility. So my transcript went right up to the company’s managing director. James Lanerolle, the retired civil servant heading Upali Newspapers at the time, deemed it should be printed in full. So it appeared on one and a half broadsheet pages in The Island on 2 February 1991 with the provocative headline (not mine): “I am very political!”

Photo by Amal Samaraweera

A few months later, while the state was still bashing him mercilessly, Ari and I found ourselves departing Sri Lanka on the same flight. Concerned strangers surrounded Ari at Immigration, Customs and the flight gate,  expressing their dismay at the prevailing injustice and urging him to stand his ground. Ari later told me that this had become a daily occurrence: such solidarity only steeled his resolve.

It took a dramatic — and brutal — turn of events before Ari and Sarvodaya could breathe more easily again. Ari didn’t rejoice at the assassination of his tormentor. He just picked up from where he’d left off.

Before and since, Sarvodaya-bashing has been a popular pastime for some. Its critics remind me of the Lankan fable about five blind men meeting an elephant. Each feels one part of its body and imagines – very differently – what the whole being is like. None of them gets close to the real picture.

While a few critics helped the movement to sharpen its focus, many only held up progress. Journalist Gunadasa Liyanage, who wrote Ari’s first biography (Revolution Under the Breadfruit Tree, 1987) asserted that Ari had probably spent 75 per cent of his time defending himself and the movement from unfair attacks, or repairing the damage. Just imagine…

In his time, Ari has prevailed over many naysayers, back-stabbers and oppressors. He has survived thugs and death squads, and astounded doubting Thomases. He can have the last word and last laugh — but chooses not to. Such equanimity and compassion are uncommon.

Best of Sri Lanka 

Despite the occasional rough handling he received nationally, Ari has consistently promoted his country internationally. He is one of the best known Lankans in the world today, held in equally high esteem in both the East and West. In countries like Japan, India, the Netherlands and the United States, people pay and flock to hear his talks. From the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to economies in transition (in Eastern Europe), planners are studying Sarvodaya’s development model.

It’s not just talk. Ari’s global engagement has produced some tangible results. Beginning in the mid 1960s, Ari travelled the globe addressing numerous gatherings of academics, activists, development workers and politicians. His thinking influenced development and humanitarian policies. His vision inspired thousands of well-intended young people to pursue meaningful careers in the development and voluntary sectors. He gave purpose to hapless UN officials searching for the UN Charter’s goals of peace, security and development.

Each such act accrued goodwill for his country. With no official status or state resources, Ari has also done more to project a positive image of Sri Lanka than has our entire Foreign Service combined. Unlike our diplomats who feel the need to ‘lie abroad for their country’, however, Ari just speaks truth to power. He is accommodating and open to dialogue, with none of the dogma and self-righteousness of our nationalists.

As the Sri Lankan state searches for ways to reposition itself in the world after three decades of war, it can learn a few lessons from Ari. Sarvodaya showcases the finest that Sri Lanka can offer the world intellectually, spiritually and culturally. These experiences are well documented and available for free — even to expensive spin doctors!

The movement epitomises Lankan ‘soft power’ at its best: engaging the world on our own terms, and earning global goodwill for fresh thinking, principled positions and exemplary service or performance. Also in this select group – albeit for different reasons — are the Sri Lanka Eye Donation Society and our Cricket Team. We must nurture many more.

Trouble maker?

Ari is still as open-minded, eager to learn and willing to share as I first found him two decades ago. He is a voice of reason and moderation, fearlessly speaking out on matters of national and global importance.

He is also a first class communicator. He speaks eloquently, passionately – and with malice towards none. His writing and speeches are philosophical yet eminently accessible for their simplicity and sincerity. The science teacher who followed his own conscience to work for rural upliftment and social justice has now become the conscience of a whole nation.

His mastery of modern communications technologies is impressive. He keeps up with his email. He carries around his own digital camera, and clicks liberally. He knows the power of still and moving images. He can convert cynics, disarm critics or energise thousands – all with a few carefully chosen words or images.

Oh, Ari isn’t perfect – but I find his imperfections just as endearing. He trusts people too much, and hasn’t changed that trait even after many betrayals. He can be a bit naïve in believing that mass meditation by peace-loving men and women can dissuade warring politicians or rebels.

Speaking his mind has often landed Ari in ‘trouble’, but the man refuses shut up. At 80, he still plays the role of that irrepressible little boy who had the courage to say the Emperor was naked. He speaks not just for the voiceless majority, but also for many tongue-tied intellectuals who seek refuge in conformist – and cosy — silence.

Here is a recent example. In November 2010, Ari gave an outspoken submission to the Lessons Learnt and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC) of Sri Lanka, set up by the President as part of the post-war healing process. Drawing on Sarvodaya’s many and varied experiences, he offered seven salient lessons for a more stable and prosperous future for all Lankans (see: http://tiny.cc/LLRC-ATA). We shall soon know if he was heard, when the Commission report is released.

Sprinkled throughout his submission are profound insights and cautions not just for the current custodians of political power, but all of us who have entrusted them with that power. Here are a few striking quotes: Governments cannot legislate the feelings of people. State should be sensitive to feelings, needs and aspirations of people in a plural society. Militarisation of the country is not the answer. Every non-Sri Lankan is not out to destabilise the country. Treat the voluntary sector with respect and understanding. Governments should never depend on corrupt people, thugs, criminals and lawless elements to come into power or remain in power.

Ari kept his best to the last: “If any government thinks that national problems could be solved by military might, bureaucratic control and media propaganda, hasty legislation, over-reliance on the Prevention of Terrorism Act and such other legislation, it is committing a grave mistake which will reverberate on the government later.”

No wonder his submission didn’t get much media coverage in Sri Lanka. It was just too hot to handle.

Do we — as citizens and voters — have the capacity to heed such distilled wisdom? It’s not good enough to celebrate Ari’s eight decades of life or hail him as the Pride of Lanka.

Ari keeps on speaking for many of us who don’t have the right words, or the courage – or both. He is the conscience-keeper of our bruised nation.

We ignore this little man at our own peril.

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Science writer and development communicator Nalaka Gunawardene considers himself a ‘critical cheer-leader’ of Sarvodaya. As a secular humanist, he has never felt out of place in Sarvodaya’s form of inclusive Buddhism. He blogs at http://nalakagunawardene.com

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Titus Thotawatte, 1929 – 2011

Emmanuel Titus de Silva, better known as Titus Thotawatte, was the finest editor in the six decades long history of the Lankan cinema. He was also a great assimilator and remixer – a veritable ‘builder of bridges’ across cultures, media genres and generations.

Titus straddled the distinctive spheres of cinema and television with a technical dexterity and creativity rarely seen in either one. Both spheres involve playing with sound and pictures, but at different levels of scale, texture and ambition. Having excelled in the craft of making movies in the 1960s and 1970s, Titus successfully switched to television in the 1980s and 1990s. There, he again blazed his own trail in Sri Lanka’s nascent television industry. As a result, my generation remembers him for his television legacy whereas my patents’ generation recall more of his cinematic accomplishments.

Titus left an indelible mark in the history of moving images. The unifying thread that continued from 16mm and 35mm formats in the cine world to U-matic and Betacam of the TV world was his formidable genius for story telling. He was a magician who played endless tricks with our eyes and mind. We encored for more.

Titus de Silva, as he was then known, was a member of the ‘three musketeers’ who left the Ceylon Government Film Unit (GFU) in the mid 1950s to take their chances in making their own films. The other two were director Lester James Peries and cinematographer Willie Blake. Lester recalls Titus as “an extraordinarily talented but refreshingly undisciplined character” who had been shunned from department to department at GFU “as he was by nature a somewhat disruptive force”.

The trio would go on to make Rekava (Line of Destiny, 1956) – and make history. In his biography by A J Gunawardana, Lester recalls how they were full of self-confidence — “cocky as hell” — and determined to overcome the artificiality of studio sets. “We were revolutionaries, shooting our enemies with the camera, and set on changing the course of Sinhala film. In our ignorance, we were blissfully unaware of the hazards ahead – seemingly insurmountable problems we had to face, problems that no book on film-making can ever tell you about!”

Titus Thotawatte – photo courtesy biography by Nuwan Nayanajith Kumara

In the star-obsessed world of cinema, the technical craftsmen who work the real magic rarely get the credit or popularity they deserve. Editors, in particular, must perform a delicate balancing task – between the director, who has his own vision of how a story should be told, and the audience that fully expects to be lulled into suspending their disbelief. Good editors distinguish themselves as much for what they include (and how) as for what they leave on the ‘cutting room floor’…

The tango between Lester and Titus worked well, both in the documentaries they made while at GFU, and the two feature films they did afterwards: Rekava was followed by Sandeshaya (The Message, 1960).

They also became close friends. At his own expense, Titus accompanied Lester to London where they re-edited and sub-titled Rekava (into French) for screening at the Cannes festival of 1957.  As Lester recalls with gratitude, “Titus was a great source of moral and technical strength to me; his presence was invaluable during sub-titling of the film”.

In all, Titus edited a total of 25 feature films, nine of which he also directed. The cinematic trail that started with Rekava in 1956 continued till Handaya in 1979. While most were in black and white, typical of the era, Titus also edited the first full length colour feature film made in Sri Lanka: Ran Muthu Duwa (1962).

His dexterity and versatility in editing and making films were such that his creations are incomparable among themselves. In the popular consciousness, however, Titus will be remembered the most for his last feature film Handaya, which he both directed and edited. Ostensibly labelled as a children’s film, it reached out and touched the child in all of us (from 8 to 80, as the film’s promotional line said). It was an upbeat story of a group of children and a pony – powerful visual metaphors for the human spirit triumphing in a harsh urban reality that has only exacerbated in the three decades since the film’s creation.

Handaya swept the local film awards at the Saravaviya, OCIC and Presidential film awards for 1979/1980. It also won the Grand Prix at the International Children and Youth Film Festival in Giffoni, Italy, in 1980. That a black and white, low-budget film outcompeted colour films from around the world was impressive enough, but the festival jury had watched the film without English subtitles was testimony to Titus’s ability to create cine-magic that transcended language.

Despite the accolades from near and afar, a sequel to Handaya was scripted but never made: the award-winning director just couldn’t raise the money! This and other might-have-beens are revealed in the insightful biography written by journalist Nuwan Nayanajith Kumara. Had he been born in a country with a more advanced film industry with greater access to capital, the biographer speculates, Titus could have become another Steven Spielberg or Walt Disney.

Titus Thotawatte was indeed the closest we had to a Disney. As the pioneer in language versioning at Rupavahini from its early days in 1982, he not only voice dubbed some of the world’s most popular cartoon animations and classical dramas, but localised them so cleverly that some stories felt better than the originals! Working long hours with basic facilities but abundant talent, Titus once again sprinkled his ‘pixie dust’ on everything he came across in the formative years of national television.

In May 2002, when veteran broadcaster (and good friend) H M Gunasekera passed away, I called him the personification of the famous cartoon character Tintin. I never associated Titus personally, but having grown up in the indigenised cartoon universe that he created, I feel as if I have known him for long. Therefore, I hope Titus won’t mind my looking for a cartoon analogy for himself.

I don’t have to look very far. According to his loyal colleagues (and biographer), Titus was a good-hearted and jovial man with a quick temper and scathing vocabulary. It wasn’t easy working with him. That sounds a bit like the inimitable Captain Haddock, the retired merchant sailor who was Tintin’s most dependable human companion. Haddock had a unique collection of expletives and insults, providing some counterbalance to the exceedingly polite Tintin. Yet beneath the veneer of gruffness, Haddock was kind and generous. It was their complementarity that livened up the globally popular stories, now a Hollywood movie by Steven Spielberg awaiting December release.

Perhaps that’s too simplistic an analogy for Titus. From all accounts, he was a brilliantly creative and multi-layered personality who embodied parts of Dr Doolittle (Dosthara Honda Hitha), Top Cat (Pissu Poosa), Bugs Bunny (Haa Haa Hari Haawa) and a myriad other characters that he rendered so well into Sinhala that some of my peers in Sri Lanka’s first television generation had no idea of their ‘foreign’ origins…

Titus was also a ‘Gulliver’ whose restlessly imaginative mind traversed space and time, even when he was confined to one place during the last dozen years of his life.

A pity he spent too much time in Lilliput…

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After years of cartoon watching, Nalaka Gunawardene is hopelessly confused about reality and make-belief. He blogs on moving images and popular culture at http://nalakagunawardene.com, where this tribute first appeared on the day of Thotawatte’s funeral.

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Steve Jobs would have been bemused by the many epithets assigned to him in the wake of his death on 5 October 2011.

He was described variously an inventor, digital entrepreneur and marketer. From humble origins in 1976, he – more than anyone else – propelled Apple, Inc. into one of the world’s best known and most admired consumer electronics companies. That was achieved through a relentless pursuit of innovation, technical perfection and high emphasis on design aesthetics. He inspired a cult-like following for himself and Apple products, many of which bore his signature style.

All very true — but also very passé. The minimalist Jobs would have settled for just four words: he changed the world.

And change he did — in many ways, some already known, the rest still unfolding. He used to say that Apple sat “at the intersection of the liberal arts and technology.” Similarly, for 35 years, Steven Paul Jobs stood like a colossus at the global intersection of computers, consumer electronics, popular culture and fine design. There were other giants in each realm, but none that straddled and cross-fertilised as much.

He was listed as either primary inventor or co-inventor in 338 US patents or patent applications. Impressive — but nowhere near the top among the most prolific inventors. Thomas Edison held over a thousand. Polaroid inventor Edwin Land, one of Jobs’ heroes, had 535.

The legacy of Steve Jobs was not in piling up patents or turning them into dollars. TIME magazine got it right when they called him technology’s great reinventor. In a world sinking under the weight of patents — many for marginal ideas or devices — we badly need reinventors to shake up entire industries. Market and social transformation requires more than fancy gadgets and clever marketing. It needs systemic thinking, the ability to grasp the Bigger Picture – and then reconfigure it. Jobs had this talent.

He paid attention to details too – obsessively so! A fine balance between functionality and design elegance characterised their products. In pursuit of this, he may have been influenced by the thinking of another American design maestro: Richard Buckminster Fuller. The American engineer and systems theorist once said: “When I am working on a problem, I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

All his life, Jobs looked for ways to enhance humans’ interactions with computers and electronics. For example, early developers of Personal Computers (PCs) didn’t see anything wrong with all interfaces being heavily text dependent. In 1979, while visiting Xerox’s PARC research lab in Palo Alto, California, Jobs saw an experimental computer with a mouse and a graphical user interface (GUI) – one that allows users to interact with electronic devices through images rather than text commands. As he later said, “Within 10 minutes… it was clear to me that all computers would work this way someday.”

Xerox was the first to market a PC with GUI in 1981, but Apple really exploited the concept. The Apple Lisa (1983) and Apple Macintosh 128K (1984) both used menu bars and window controls. All others followed.

Needs vs. Wants

By going beyond functionality and creating elaborate — and more expensive — products, Jobs also distorted our perceptions of ‘needs’ and ‘wants’. Consider the mobile phone. A decade ago, Nokia looked set to dominate the low and middle range mobile handsets, while BlackBerry had cornered the emerging smartphone market.

The iPhone, introduced in 2007, challenged that. It not only became a toy among the more affluent, but raised aspirations for tens of millions of mobile phone users around the world. Other smartphones can serve our communication needs just as well; however, they no longer satisfy our wants. Someday, it seems, we all want to brandish an iPhone…

Such unapologetic pandering to consumerism got Apple ahead of the pack. The company apparently didn’t invest in market research; instead it relied on its maverick CEO’s instincts on what consumers truly wanted.

How did Jobs get things right most of the time? Which roots of his complex personality – Californian, hippie, Zen or geeky — contributed the most? In what proportion did the Western and Eastern influences shape his thinking? We can only speculate.

For over a decade, Apple and Jobs have virtually owned the letter ‘i’ in the Roman alphabet. It started with the iMac (1998) and continued with the iPod (2001), iPhone (2007) and iPad (2010).

Officially, the ‘i’ stood for “Internet”. To many, it also represented the product’s focus as a personal device — ‘i’ for “individual”. The ‘i’ can also stand for innovative, iconoclastic and ‘insanely great’, a favourite phrase of Jobs’ to describe his products. And, we might add: impatient, impetuous and irreverent. All attributes that made Jobs a culture-changing force, and a fine example of American soft power in action.

However idiosyncratic Steve Jobs was, his carefully orchestrated public appearances were a lot more than mere acts of corporate one-upmanship. They ultimately defied entire systems of thinking and practice: unilateral declarations of independence (UDI) from the status quo.

Only the most gifted – and gutsy — mavericks can get away with that in an increasingly discerning global marketplace. Many tributes have acknowledged that Jobs was a maverick, which he turned into a core value at Apple. As he said, “Those who are crazy enough to believe they can change the world, are the ones that do!”

That was the basis of an advertising slogan – ‘Think Different’ – that boosted the sagging image of Apple in 1997. Jobs had just returned to the company after spending 11 years in the tech ‘wilderness’, and wanted to send a strong message. His PR team couldn’t have picked a better theme. 

The Crazy Ones

The campaign’s television component comprised a commercial titled “The Crazy Ones” which paid tribute to mavericks through history. The entirely black-and-white creation featured 17 iconic personalities – among them Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Buckminster Fuller, Thomas Edison and Amelia Earhart. Also included, interestingly, were singers Bob Dylan and John Lennon, artist Pablo Picasso, boxer Muhammad Ali and the muppets inventor Jim Henson.

The voiceover of the shorter, 30-second version said: “Here’s to the crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently. While some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Jobs narrated the first commercial which was never aired. Instead, what went public was the version voiced by actor Richard Dreyfuss. Those 30 seconds – and a longer, 60 second variation – captured the very essence of Apple. It did not show a single tech product. There was no need.

Over a dozen years later what does all this mean to us in Asia?

We might admire – even revere – mavericks like Steve Jobs from afar, but few Asians have any idea where mavericks come from, or how best to deal with them. Our conformist and hierarchical societies don’t nurture mavericks. Our cultures tend to suppress odd-balls and iconoclasts. That’s probably why we don’t have enough of our own Steve Jobses, Richard Bransons and Anita Roddicks.

Oh sure, we Asians are smarter than most other nationals in science, maths and engineering. We can master all things geeky in next to no time. And thanks largely to China, India and Japan, Asia’s share of global research, knowledge creation and patents is steadily increasing. Asians have world class laboratories and high tech corporations churning a dazzling gadgets and gizmos that now compete with the finest brands of the West.

Yes, we excel in the collective form — just like honey bees — and that is no mean accomplishment. But how many Asian tech mavericks can we think of in everyday technology? Does anyone know – or care – who heads the Samsung Corporation in Korea, the closest rival to Apple in smartphones? Or do we know the Japanese inventor of the Sony Walkman?

There are reasons for this. Information technology and electronics industries are accelerated by impatient consumer demands as never before. Armies of wizards must work 24/7 like elves to keep up.

Nevertheless, there is still a place for lone inventors tinkering in a backyard and maverick scientists swimming against the currents of conventional wisdom. The crazy ones. The rebels. The troublemakers. The ones who see things differently.

Mark Twin said: “The man with a new idea is a crank – until the idea succeeds”. The question is: do we Asians hush down our home-grown cranks even before they have a sporting chance? Are we culturally too biased against individualism that propels useful – and potentially transformative — mavericks?

As a ‘maverick spotter’ and cheerleader for all types of innovation, I often worry that we do. I have come across bright young men and women who were ridiculed in the classroom (‘freaks!’) or scorned at home (‘losers!’) for not wanting to be doctors, engineers or lawyers.

Or think of how our societies treat the left-handers among us. Now you know why mavericks don’t stand a chance…

Toy Maker – or Magician?

While Apple’s marketing campaigns celebrated mavericks, the company itself was run in a very businesslike manner with no touchy-feely sentimentalities. In fact, Apple was – and still is — every bit as proprietary as Microsoft, but perhaps a bit cleverer at disguising it.

It made no concessions to popular movements advocating ‘software freedom’ and open source software. Apple staff was sworn to secrecy and the company’s public image was tightly controlled. In recent months, there have been media reports about appalling working conditions in factories in southern China manufacturing Apple products. Apple’s App Store has been accused of censoring content: leading industry critics have called for clearer, more transparent guidelines on what is allowed.

Meanwhile, despite his personal worth estimated to exceed USD 8 billion, Jobs was not particularly philanthropic. At least not publicly.

Yet somehow, Apple’s adoring fans – many liberals among them – have reconciled with these and other contradictions. Evidently, Bill Gates was held to a stricter standard…

But before you dismiss Steve Jobs as a cold-hearted genius who was simply out to reshape the world, consider the other half of his illustrious legacy: Pixar Animation Studios.

The movie company, started by George Lucas in 1979 and acquired by Jobs in 1986, has produced a total of 12 animated feature films. To date, it has won 26 Academy Awards among many other accolades, and grossed USD 6.3 billion at the box office.

Pixar is further evidence that Jobs knew we are all ruled primarily by our hearts than brains. Movies like Toy Story and Finding Nemo tugged at our hearts in ways that only Walt Disney’s army of illustrators had succeeded before. This time around, computers were generating all the images. In the two decades he owned Pixar, Jobs firmly bridged Silicon Valley with Hollywood.

It’s no coincidence that Toy Story and its sequels are among the most popular films made entirely with computer generated images, or CGI. Tapping into our emotions deeper than we understand, they make the Global Family laugh and cry.

But toys have a deeper meaning as well. Jobs knew we are all children at heart. By giving us fancy new toys at regular intervals, he kept us contented even as he made Apple the richest tech corporation in the world.

Apple and Steve Jobs were not really making computers or consumer electronics. It manufactured personalised dreams for seven billion human beings. We readily suspended our disbelief for Pixar movies – and for many Apple products.

Now that our planet’s favourite Pied Piper has moved on, whose mesmerising tune are we going to follow — and to where?

HELP!

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene has been profiling triumphs and struggles of Lankan inventors for two decades, and written widely on policy and institutional reforms needed for nurturing a culture of innovation. During 2009-2010, he hosted a weekly TV show on innovation, and is a trustee of the Ray Wijewardene Charitable Trust that seeks to promote innovation in Sri Lanka. He blogs at http://nalakagunawardene.com

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Sir Arthur Clarke with his Celestron 14-inch telescope – photo by Rohan de Silva, circa 2001

Every newshound must survive a ‘lean news’ day. Most know what to do when that happens: sniff around, or dig deeper.

But like our canine friends, newshounds too occasionally bark up the wrong tree or dig in vain. Pressures of feeding the 24/7 news cycle can be immense, especially when the war has ended and no cricket matches or ‘grease devil’ performances are on.

On 27 September 2011, News First ran a story titled ‘Arthur C Clarke’s telescope sold by an assistant’. It said a ‘telescope owned by the late Sir Arthur C Clarke has been sold by an assistant for one million rupees’ through a newspaper advertisement. The buyer’s identity was not disclosed.

The story added: “Astrologists (sic) say the telescope belonging to the late science visionary is a valuable artefact not only to Sri Lanka but to the entire world. They point out that it is the government’s responsibility to safeguard such an item.

The astronomer/astrologer mix-up is common in Sri Lanka. The Sinhala news story, which the same website published a few hours earlier, got the label right. Both quoted the same atmospheric physicist: Dr Chandana Jayaratne of the University of Colombo.

Dr Jayaratne was reported as saying that “such belongings of Arthur C Clarke must be restored and kept at a public location so that future generations can also learn about the history behind it.”

Lofty words, indeed. But neither the reporter nor the physicist seemed to be interested in going beyond rumours and rhetoric. The facts are not that hard to come by, if only they researched the story a bit further. 

Celestial Knight

The telescope concerned is a Celestron 14 reflector that Sir Arthur imported from its US-based manufacturer in the 1980s. It was among many items that Sir Arthur bequeathed on his adopted Sri Lankan family, the Ekanayakes, and the Dr Arthur C Clarke Trust, a legal entity registered while he was still living.

Sir Arthur’s Last Will went through the usual testamentary proceedings in the Sri Lankan judicial system. No objections were raised by anyone. The beneficiaries are now free to retain, modify or sell what they received as they deem fit. Despite the public figure involved, it is entirely a private matter.

Following the news story, I checked with the Sir Arthur’s trusted business partner for half a century, Hector Ekanayake. Yes, the telescope was recently advertised in the classifieds for sale. No, it hasn’t found a buyer yet. The ‘sale price’ of one million rupees (USD 9,070 at current exchange rates) probably stemmed from the reporter’s imagination.

Legalities and shoddy journalism apart, is there any museum value in this telescope? Let’s investigate.

The Celestron-14 was the last – and most sophisticated – in a series of telescopes that Sir Arthur owned and used for night sky observations. As a young farm lad growing up in the 1920s, he home-built his own first telescope in Minehead, rural England. Over the next few decades, he bought a succession of telescopes intended for the serious amateur astronomer.

Sir Arthur earned a living as a writer of science fiction and science fact, who only dabbled in amateur astronomy and undersea diving as serious hobbies. When he settled down in Ceylon in 1956, he realised that most of the northern and southern skies were visible from this almost-Equatorial location. But he also found out that observations were not easy since “half the year we can’t observe due to cloud cover”.

Undaunted, he became an opportunistic night sky watcher, catching a glimpse of the heavens when weather and schedule permitted. The astronomy ‘bug’ soon spread and the Ceylon Astronomical Association (CAA) was established in June 1959 to promote organised amateur astronomy. Arthur C Clarke became its founder president.

So the Celestron-14 had many antecedents. Upon its arrival in Sri Lanka, it was located on the balcony of his Cinnamon Gardens home, and used for occasional star gazing. In his latter years, when Sir Arthur was wheel-chaired by Post Polio Syndrome and direct observations became difficult, he even coupled a television camera to the telescope. “I can now ‘hover’ over the Moon from the comfort of my living room!” he told his friends at the time.

For a few years, this Celestron 14-inch (36cm) was the largest telescope in Sri Lanka. Then in 1994, the Japanese government donated a GOTO 18-inch (45cm) Cassegrain telescope to the government as part of bilateral aid.

Teenaged Arthur Clarke observes night sky using home-made telescope in Minehead, UK – circa 1933 –  Photo owned by Arthur C Clarke Estate.

Misplaced gift

Sir Arthur wasn’t too happy when bureaucrats in the Ministry of Science and Technology decided to locate the Japanese telescope at the government institute in Moratuwa named after him. Other amateur and professional astronomers shared his concern because of urban light pollution, air pollution and weather factors.

Simon Tulloch, a British astronomer living in Sri Lanka at the time, carried out an independent site survey and found that two locations in the Kandy district — Kirimetiyakanda and Karagahatenna — were far superior to Moratuwa. But the babus ignored Tulloch’s recommendation that the Japanese-gifted telescope be relocated to one of these locations after studying their local weather for one year.

Fifteen years on, the GOTO telescope remains firmly rooted in Moratuwa — another reminder how expedience rules over evidence-based decision making in Sri Lanka. What serious observation or research this expensive instrument can make in suburban Colombo?

“It has not produced a single paper published in a refereed Journal during the 15 years of its operation”, says Dr Kavan Ratnatunga, an astrophysicist who was motivated by Sir Arthur to study astronomy.

Ratnatunga, now retired to Sri Lanka after an international research career, finds it ‘amusing’ that anyone should recommend Sir Arthur’s modern 14-inch Celestron be protected in a museum ‘for posterity’.

He adds: “Ironically, it’s the younger and larger 18-inch telescope gifted by Japan, and now at the institution that bears Arthur’s name, which has practically become a museum piece — being shown off to visiting school children!”

Ratnatunga’s exasperation was shared by Sir Arthur when, during his last decade, he heard how schools were being asked to visit the telescope during the working hours of 9 to 5!

In contrast, Sir Arthur’s privately-owned Celestron-14 was used for real observations by its owner and occasionally by his amateur astronomer friends. To them, astronomy was a passion, not a day-time job!

It also earned honourable mentions in Sir Arthur’s writing. For example, in an Op-Ed titled ‘Killer Comets Are Out There. Now What?’, he wrote in the New York Times on 14 August 1994:

“Soon after the last fragments of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter last month, the monsoon skies above my home in Colombo cleared momentarily and I hurried to set up my 14-inch Celestron telescope. I didn’t really expect to see anything, so I could hardly believe my eyes when I clearly observed a line of dark bruises spread out across the planet’s southern hemisphere.

“Some imaginative souls suggested that the comet might have a catastrophic impact on Jupiter, but its effect will be largely cosmetic. And it will certainly have no effect on Earth, despite the inevitable alarmist warnings by religious fanatics. But the spectacular collision between the newly discovered comet with the solar system’s largest planet has brought sudden new attention to a genuine threat: the chance that a rogue comet or asteroid could strike Earth, with possibly devastating consequences.”

That was classic Clarke, no doubt, but not exactly frontier research. In fact, Celestron-14 always remained a toy, albeit an expensive one, of that boy who never grew up…

Sir Arthur Clarke at the Colombo University observatory where the Molesworth telescope was housed – 2003 photo by Rohan de Silva

Vandalised History

So is there any historical significance in this commercially-made telescope used for hobby astronomy by a celebrity owner for a couple of decades?

We can debate it, for sure. But current physicists at the University of Colombo, of all people, have no moral right to talk about ‘protecting’ any telescope. Not after they completely and miserably failed to look after Sri Lanka’s most historic telescope that was entrusted to their care.

That was the telescope used by  Percy Braybrooke Molesworth (1867 – 1908), who lived and worked in Trincomalee, and regarded as one of the world’s leading astronomers at the beginning of the last century.

By profession, Molesworth was a major in corps of Royal Engineers, an Englishman by birth who — like Arthur C Clarke — spent the better part of his life in Ceylon. From his private observatory in Trincomalee, Molesworth observed the night sky and photographed celestial bodies, the results of which were shared with leading astronomical groups in the west. Armed only with a basic telescope, a sharp eye and good drawing skills, he made significant contributions to advancing our knowledge of the heavens at the time.

For example, in February 1901, Molesworth was the first observer in the world to notice the beginning of the great South Tropical Zone Disturbance on Jupiter that was to last until 1939. This discovery made an important contribution in understanding Jovian atmospheric currents.

Decades later in 1973, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) named one of the largest Martian craters in Molesworth’s honour. He is the first Ceylonese on Mars, and one of the very few Lankans to leave their name in the sky…

But his legacy is both forgotten and neglected in Sri Lanka. After his premature death in 1908 aged 41, his custom-made 12.5-inch (32cm) Calver reflector telescope went into disuse. Some years later, it found its way to the University of Colombo, which housed it in a small dome on the grounds adjoining Reid Avenue.

Astrophysicist Ratnatunga, who studied at the University of Colombo in the early 1970s, recalls repairing the Molesworth’s telescope with science faculty lecturer late Dr V K Samaranayake. Afterwards, they used it for night sky observations.

That ended in 1988, when vandals looted the telescope for its metallic value. The culprits were never caught; with a youth insurgency in full swing, the university authorities and police had more pressing concerns.

I covered that incident as a young science journalist, and have been interested in it since. As I wrote in a death centennial tribute to Percy Molesworth in 2008, the telescope never recovered from that looting, and the University has shown little enthusiasm in preserving it.

In 2003, Sir Arthur wrote to the then Vice Chancellor in 2003 drawing his attention to “what is possibly the oldest piece of scientific equipment in their inventory”. The letters were not even acknowledged.

So when a Colombo University physicist calls for protecting Arthur Clarke’s hobby telescope, we have to point out his own institution’s appalling track record in protecting what was entrusted to them!

What about the Arthur Clarke Institute for Modern Technologies (ACCIMT)? Founded by the Jayewardene government in the mid 1980s with noble objectives and international goodwill, it never really took off.

When assessed using universally accepted measures of scientific productivity -– such as research publications in refereed international journals, peer citations and patents for innovation — it shows a dismally poor track record. It is today a disgrace to the very man it was meant to honour.

For 25 years, the Arthur Clarke institute took cover behind its famous patron to avoid adequate public and media scrutiny. Many Lankans mistakenly believed that Sir Arthur Clarke was involved in its management and research. In fact, he distanced himself from it during the last decade of his life.

Unlike Sir Arthur’s private office in Colombo (now closed), the Clarke Institute is a government body being sustained by taxpayers. My questions about the Clarke Institute’s poor performance, posed in a media article published in April 2009, have gone unanswered for over two years.

That, to me, is the real story. For any journalist dogged enough to follow these leads, there is a matter of public interest in Moratuwa — one about missed opportunities, misplaced priorities and continuing waste of Lankan (and Japanese) tax payer money.

Sadly, a nation and its news media blinded by hype keep missing it!

Note: All the information in this essay is only a Google search or phone call away — well within the reach of any serious journalist or researcher.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene worked for Sir Arthur Clarke’s personal office in Colombo (1987-2008), which was totally separate from the government’s Arthur Clarke Institute. He writs a weekly science and media column in Ravaya newspaper, and blogs at: http://nalakagunawardene.com

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A website about the life and vision of the late Dr Ray Wijewardene, one of the most accomplished and innovative engineers and scientists produced by Sri Lanka, is being officially launched on September 28. In this article, the website’s principal writer Nalaka Gunawardene recalls working with an original thinker who also tinkered more than most.

If I had to condense the multi-faceted and fascinating life of Ray Wijewardene, I would reduce it to a whole lot of question marks and exclamation marks. In his 86 years, Ray generated more than his fair share of both.

He was unpigeonholeable: engineer, farmer, inventor, aviator and sportsman all rolled into one. Whether at work or play, he was an innovative thinker who rose above his culture and training to grasp the bigger picture.

As an inventor, Ray was into problem solving, not piling up patents or publishing research papers in scholarly journals. Theory was important, but only as a means to figuring things out. He was both a quintessential tinkerer and a perennial fixer.

Ray has been rightly compared with Leonardo da Vinci, the Renaissance Man, and with the appropriate technology promoter Ernst Schumacher (of Small Is Beautiful fame). To me, he was our own version of Caractacus Potts — the eccentric yet lovable inventor in Ian Fleming’s children’s story Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, written in 1964 and adapted as a popular Hollywood movie in 1968.

Indeed, the parallels are striking. Both men experimented on a wide array of gadgets and devices at the family farm. Neither was very good at commercially exploiting their ideas (with one exception each). Whereas Caractacus made a fantastic car that could fly and float in addition to running on land, Ray built light aircraft using motor car engines!

As a pilot, Ray was licensed to fly all three kinds of flying machines: fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and autogyros. But while his industrialist cousin Upali Wijewardene was flying around in factory-made corporate jets and helicopters, Ray chose to make his own flying machines. Ray built perfectly airworthy designs in his own garage, many of them costing — and weighing — less than an average SUV.

Ray was particularly keen to build amphibious small planes that could also land on, and take off from water bodies. That made perfect sense as numerous lakes and reservoirs cover more than a tenth of Sri Lanka’s total land area.

First Encounter
It was among his flying machines that I first met Ray in late 1986 at the Ratmalana Airport, just south of Colombo. One Sunday morning, he took time off to talk to a group of us high school leavers participating in the Science for Youth programme, organised by the Arthur C Clarke Centre. It exposed us to various (then) modern technologies over six consecutive weekends. Much of that ‘new knowledge’ has long become obsolete; but the inspiration propelled many of us to pursue careers in science.

That inspiration stemmed mostly from the shy and unorthodox Ray Wijewardene. Although he was then in his early 60s, he had the sense of wonder of a 10-year-old. He gave us practical demonstrations about problem solving and innovation in three areas close to his heart: energy, agriculture and transport.

At the time, he was looking for ways to improve the ordinary bicycle, so that riders could go faster with less effort. He also talked about buffalos, earthworms and growing our food and energy to become truly ‘non-dependent’ on costly imports. But it was his flying machines that fascinated us the most.

Flying was also the theme of the first media interview that I had with Ray, which was published in December 1988. For two hours, Ray talked enthusiastically about his favourite inventors — the Wright brothers, and how ‘right’ they have been proven, over and over again.

Several others had designed heavier-than-air machines during the 19th Century, he said, but none had been as practical as the Wright brothers. While other experimenters put more emphasis on developing powerful engines, the Wright brothers focused on developing a reliable method of pilot control.

As cycle repairers, they believed – correctly – that an unstable vehicle like a flying machine could be controlled and balanced with enough practice. They tinkered endlessly with models and prototypes, and also used a small, home-built wind tunnel to collect more accurate data and insights. Such experimentation made their design more efficient and navigable. The rest is history…

Ray felt that the Wright brothers had set the ‘gold standard’ for all innovators and inventors. He was a firm believer in learning by doing, even if that meant getting your hands dirty, or worse, risking life and limb. Although he taught himself to use personal computers later in life, he was truly in his element amidst nuts, bolts, grease and soil.

As a young man, Ray apprenticed under the British aviation pioneer and aircraft engineer Sir Geoffrey de Havilland. After Ray had successfully test-flown an aircraft he himself had made, Sir Geoffrey remarked: “This very seldom happens nowadays, that one person designs an aircraft, builds it and also test-flies it. Large teams are now required for each of these operations. But mind you, the old way had its advantages…it quickly eliminated the bad designers!”

Ray never forgot those words. He was always the first flyer of his home-built aircraft. In nearly 50 years of flying, he was involved in three serious crashes and several minor mishaps — but each time, he lived to fly another day. (It was Sri Lanka’s civil war that finally grounded him.)

Refreshing Perspectives
His refreshing perspectives on agriculture, energy and environment were drawn from this rare combination of the bird’s eye view with the toad’s eye view.

For Ray, “farming was bread and butter – and flying the jam on top”. So he had his head in the clouds, but feet firmly on the ground. He brought the aviator’s precision and engineer’s pragmatism into agriculture — and topped it up with a genuine concern for the small, subsistence farmer.

In his view, a key problem with agricultural research in Sri Lanka (and in much of the developing world) was that those studied farming didn’t rely practise for their own living. In contrast, the small farmer must eke out a meagre existence from whatever land, water, seeds or livestock available. Her stark choice: innovate or perish.

“I’ve rarely been able to get one of my (learned) colleagues to step into a paddy field with me and plough behind a buffalo,” he once lamented. “Yet that is where you BEGIN the process of development, by doing it yourself. You soon begin to rationalise the situation, and realise that a tractor does not mechanise agriculture; it merely mechanises the buffalo!”

From that vantage point, you then ask: why do we plough the fields at all? Eventually, Ray figured out that the main purpose of ploughing in the tropics was weed control. “Now that presents a totally different insight into the problem, and you can then start resolving that REAL problem, which is to do with weed control rather than earth-moving.”

That was typical of Ray who remained eager for new knowledge, clarity and self-improvement to the very end. I can’t think of a better embodiment of Thomas R. Dewar’s words: “Minds are like parachutes – they only function when open.”

For a quarter century, Ray was my own ‘mind-opener’. He was also my mentor, ardent reader and gentle critic. Each encounter and each exchange of letters or emails enriched me. In turn, I shared Ray’s distilled wisdom as often and widely as I could.

For example, in mid 1995, the noted Indian environmentalist Anil Agarwal commissioned me to interview Ray for Down to Earth, the science and environmental fortnightly magazine he founded in the early 1990s. Anil said: “Ray is not only a top agricultural expert in the whole developing world, but one of our most original thinkers.”

Over a few days, I recorded a wide-ranging interview with Ray covering many aspects of science, technology and development. It remains one of the most memorable among hundreds I have done in print and broadcast media. Down to Earth published a compact version in their issue dated 31 October 1995. I released our full exchange on Groundviews on that sombre day in August 2010 when Ray’s body was finally returned to the elements.

So what was it like to have walked in the nurturing shadow of Ray Wijewardene?

In his own style, I’d say: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For more information and memories, visit: www.raywijewardene.net or on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/RayWijewardene

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Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene first met Ray Wijewardene in the mid 1980s when he covered the latter’s work for the local and international media. Later, they collaborated in various science communication projects – the last was on climate change for the Sri Lanka 2048 TV debate series.

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[Editors note: Also read Do we need a street address? by Sivam Krish]

• The Loss of Identity: Development and Agriculture
• Feature article: Who Speaks for Small Farmers, Earthworms and Cow Dung?
• Do we need a street address?
• Agricultural Madness
• Flying Tigers…

[Editors note: For an in-depth interview on Sri Lanka's human-elephant conflict, see Humans vs. elephants: Sri Lanka’s tragic on-going conflict]

If those hardy Englishmen and Scotsmen who ran large tea plantations in Ceylon were far removed from the local people and realities, western movie makers were much more so. They could just as well have come from another planet to catch glimpses of an exotic island.

But feature film makers everywhere enjoy the artistic license to create whole new worlds, and we willingly suspend our disbelief when watching their creations. Elephant Walk (103 mins, colour), released by Paramount Pictures in April 1954, may not be the most artistic or technically perfect movie from that era. Yet, more than half a century after it was shot on location in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), the film can still hold an audience captivated with a sense of drama and intrigue.

Elephant Walk was directed by William Dieterle, and based on the 1948 novel with the same title, written by “Robert Standish” — actually the pseudonym of English novelist Digby George Gerahty (1898-1981). It starred Elizabeth Taylor, Dana Andrews, Peter Finch and Abraham Sofaer.

This film was among several that were shot on location in Ceylon in the 1950s when Hollywood studios ‘discovered’ the island as an exotic, relatively inexpensive and hassle-free location. But this is the only one whose story is actually set in Ceylon.

Much of the movie’s historical appeal stems from the involvement of Elizabeth Taylor. She plays the character of Ruth, a young woman who marries a British tea planter, John Wiley, and follows him to Ceylon. She soon finds out that things aren’t entirely idyllic in the tropical paradise.

The husband’s late father had built the estate bungalow on the path where elephants routinely migrate. With their long memories and entrenched habits, they have resented that misappropriation ever since. The occasional confrontations between estate workers and elephants culminate when the pachyderms charge en masse just when the estate’s population is weakened and distracted by a cholera epidemic…

Vivien Leigh, one of Hollywood’s biggest stars at the time, was originally cast to play Ruth Wiley’s role. She even arrived in Ceylon and filmed some scenes before she developed bipolar disorder. So Liz Taylor, at 22 already well on her way to the A-List, was hurriedly called in. (Many long shots — and some from behind — used in the final edit are actually those of Leigh!)

Prescient movie?

However, Elephant Walk’s significance does not rely solely on Liz Taylor’s alluring screen presence or Vivien Leigh’s derrière. The movie has been remarkably prescient on several fronts, which can only be appreciated now — in another century, and on a wholly different island. A key theme of the movie was the human-elephant conflict, but passing references to social exclusion and rampant poverty in post-independent Ceylon are also of much interest.

I doubt if Paramount’s writers were intentionally making any social commentary. One of the studio’s co-founders, Samuel Goldwyn, had famously cautioned against it. When asked about movies with a “message” some years earlier, he had replied, “If you want to send a message, use Western Union.”

Nevertheless, the movie (and perhaps the book on which it is based, which I haven’t read) was contrasting the British planters’ opulent lifestyle with the forced austerity in post-War Britain. Even more striking is the poverty and squalor among the hundreds of resident workers whose sweat, toil — and occasional tears — ensured that the ‘cups that cheer’ were always brimming.

Perhaps it wasn’t so evident at the time the movie was first released, but it is also a celluloid requiem to the British Empire on which the sun was decidedly setting, and the Plantation Raj whose halcyon days were receding into the past. The hard-working and hard-drinking white males, taming the hilly terrain in the humid tropics, would be the last of their kind.

‘Brown Sahibs’ had already taken over the reins of political power in Colombo. Up in the salubrious hills, where life moved at a slower pace, the winds of change had just begun to gain momentum. In less than half a generation, it would become a gale of nationalisation dismantling one of the most efficient inter-continental industrial operations launched during the Victorian era.

The 1970s were particularly turbulent for the island’s plantation sector. The remaining British plantation companies were unceremoniously ushered out. Well-intended but badly implemented land reforms brought down the quality, productivity and global competitiveness of Ceylon Tea. Although these socialist misadventures were mercifully short-lived, they inflicted enough damage: even after three decades of economic liberalisation, the industry has yet to recover completely.

Despite all the socialist rhetoric that justified it, nationalisation didn’t deliver that many social benefits either. A case in point: Sri Lanka’s one million strong plantation workers still have markedly lower social indicators. In fact, the poor housing and sanitary conditions that triggered an outbreak of cholera in Elephant Walk still persist on some tea estates. There is still an enormous gulf in the quality of living (and lifestyles) of plantation managers and their resident workers — except that the masters are no longer white.

In the mid 1990s, while researching a series of articles on the socio-economic status of plantation communities, I came face to face with this stark reality. The workers, descendents of indentured labourers that the British brought in from southern India, remain trapped in the past. Their deprivation is often masked by the country’s impressive national level human development indicators.

DDT Generation

But back in the early 1950s, when the movie’s story takes place, the party was still in full swing — albeit under the bemused eyes of the locals and the piercing gaze of the elephants.

In 1953, the year Elephant Walk was filmed, Ceylon was experiencing a post-War and post-independence population boom, aided and abetted by DDT that had drastically reduced deaths from malaria. A census that year revealed a little over 8 million people. This number has swelled more than two and half times since: exactly how many of us walk this island will be known by end 2011, when our first full head count in 30 years is completed.

By coincidence, the first ever scientific census of wild elephants in Sri Lanka is also taking place this year. It should reveal just how much our growing numbers — and rising consumption patterns — have impacted the largest mammals who share this crowded island.

Elephant Walk ends with the dispossessed herd reclaiming its lost migratory route. The luxurious bungalow burns down in the climaxing rampage. (To the discerning eye, the elephants look too tame, and the ‘rampage’ too orderly. That is understandable: even the most dare-devil Hollywood stunt director can’t get wild elephants to follow a script. So, according to the Internet Movie Database, circus elephants were used.)

As the humans escape with their lives, John Wiley looks at his house on fire with equanimity. He promises Ruth to build a new place “somewhere else.” Let the elephants have this patch.

If only life imitated art in this respect, the story of the Lankan elephant might have been different. But the determination and ruthlessness with which large scale irrigation and agricultural development projects were pursued since the 1950s left no room for such sentimentality.

Tracing the roots of Sri Lanka’s human-elephant conflict, conservationist Jayantha Jayewardene wrote in 1994: “Where their normal migratory routes were impeded by development, the elephants came into confrontation with the new settlers who had displaced them from their habitats. Here they found a ready source of food in the new crops that had been cultivated. The human-elephant confrontations and subsequently conflicts began. With the increasing pressure for sufficient food in the forests, the elephants not only moved into the new settlements but were practically forced to move into the old (purana) villages as well. The elephants had hitherto co-existed peacefully with the purana villages but here too, conflicts began to surface.” (The Elephant in Sri Lanka, p96).

How best to resolve this long-simmering conflict is still being debated by scientists, environmentalists and officials. Meanwhile, every passing year, a few dozen elephants and humans are killed in increasingly violent encounters, further diminishing the prospects of a peaceful co-existence.

Finally, Elephant Walk to me is yet another visual reminder of just how dependent we are on the seasonal Indian Oceanic winds called the Monsoons that bring us most of our rain. Everyone — from the mighty tuskers and arrogant planters to the humblest subsistence farmers — hopes and yearns for a timely and ample Monsoon. (As I write this, in late May, 20 million Lankans are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the more potent South-west Monsoon.)

We are not alone. Close to two billion other Asians share our climatic legacy and predicament. Faced with accelerated climate change, we should worry far more about likely disruptions to these life-giving, rain-bearing winds. Scientists have recently warned that delayed and/or weakened Monsoons could hit us sooner — and harder — than the widely feared rise in sea levels.

Like it or not, we are all Children of the Monsoon.

PS: The mix of Empire, Plantation Raj and the Monsoon continues to attract film makers. An enchanting treatment of these elements, somewhat reminiscent of Elephant Walk but with a clear political element, is found in Before the Rains (98 mins, 2007). This Indian-British production, directed (and beautifully shot) by Santosh Sivan and featuring Nandita Das in a lead role, is set in Kerala’s Malabar District in the 1930s. The story — with much stronger characters and ‘native’ sentiments — unfolds against the backdrop of a growing Indian nationalist movement.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene is far more interested in human-induced wild-life than wildlife in the jungles. He blogs on science, development and conservation issues at https://movingimages.wordpress.com He thanks Richard Boyle for his inputs to this essay.

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DON’T PANIC (always written in upper-case) was timeless advice that writer Douglas Adams deeply etched into the minds of all who read his famous novel, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Arthur C Clarke once called it ‘the best possible advice for the human race’.

But panic we do, regularly, as individuals, communities and sometimes as a whole country. The latest was on 15 April 2011, when confusion and panic were reported from many coastal areas of Sri Lanka following rumours of an oncoming tsunami. It was attributed to a television channel that had broadcast the views of a Lankan geologist who is speculating on predicting earthquakes with a little help from the heavens. Well, at least certain planets in the Solar System.

Scientific speculation is one thing, but causing public alarm and panic – especially at holiday time – is quite another. The Disaster Management Centre (DMC) was quoted as saying its units in the southern coastal areas had to take special measures to assure the people that there was no threat. The media reported how some people in Matara, Galle, Kalutara, Negombo, Trincomalee and Batticaloa fled their homes fearing another tsunami. Many of these areas were battered by the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

The panic prompted the Disaster Management Minister to say that ‘legal action will be taken against astrologers, academics or others who make predictions on natural disasters and thereby cause panic among the people’.

However, the ‘panic broadcast’ was not an isolated incident. The matter had been building up from early or mid March 2011, when reports started appearing in mainstream newspapers as well as news websites of a Peradeniya university geologist team claiming to have found a new method to predict earthquakes. These reports appeared in privately owned media (example: The Nation, 27 March 2011) as well as in state owned media (examples: Lankapuvath, 9 April 2011; Daily News, 9 April 2011). Soon, the regional news media also picked up the story (example: Times of India/PTI, 9 April 2011).

Sinhala newspapers went further. Some openly cheered this ‘triumph’ of a local scientist in a quest where hundreds of scientists worldwide have not yet succeeded. There were also suggestions of ‘astrology being proved right’ and ‘Eastern knowledge knowing far more than western science’. Many of these ideas were opinions of individual journalists who didn’t bother to separate their reportage from commentary.

I was concerned. The spirit of enquiry is essential for new knowledge to be created, but science is a peer-reviewed and self-critical process. All ideas must be discussed and debated, ideally by fellow specialists competent and experienced in the same discipline. I wasn’t sure if that was happening. Our mainstream media were not helping either.

Prof. Kapila Dahanayake

So I decided to get to find out more. I first spoke to an old contact, Professor Kapila Dahanayake, Senior Professor of Geology at the University of Peradeniya. Among many other things, he is a member of the Technical Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Disaster Management. This is a summary of what he said (and has been saying for a long time):

An earthquake can happen anywhere, anytime – on land, or under the sea. According to current knowledge, it is not possible to predict an earthquake in advance.

For an earthquake to trigger a tsunami, several conditions have to be satisfied:

• It happens under the sea.
• Focus of the earthquake should be within 100 kilometres below the seabed.
• Magnitude of the quake should be 6.5 or higher.
• Disposition of the quake should be vertical or near vertical.

A tsunami can occur when all these conditions come together. Only after an earthquake happens and the tsunami generation is monitored can a specific warning be given with any specificity. Not before.

Scientists have been trying to anticipate earthquakes or discern probabilities for a long time. But current scientific knowledge is not adequate to make any kind of advance prediction about an earthquake, still less of a tsunami.

Prof. Atula Senaratne

I then spoke to the man at the centre of the current controversy: Professor Atula Senaratne, Associate Professor in Geology at University of Peradeniya. This was my first contact with him. Typed below is a near-verbatim version of my phone conversation which took place on the morning of 18 April 2011. I approached this with an open mind. I hope experts will join this debate to take this forward.

Nalaka Gunawardene: What is the basis of recent claims attributed to you in the media that you have found a new method to anticipate or predict earthquakes?

Atula Senaratne: Many people have been asking me if there is a basis for a Mayan warning suggesting the world could end in 2012 with a geological catastrophe. There is no current capability in geoscience to predict this, but this made us curious. So my team and I looked up the historical data on all the major earthquakes, and in particular those that have occurred during the past 100 years.

Q: What was your source for this data?

A: US Geological Survey, USGS. It is publicly available data with worldwide coverage. We studied the characteristics of these earthquakes – when and where they occurred. We were aware of various ancient beliefs in different cultures, both eastern and western, that relate the occurrence of earthquakes to solar eclipses, new Moon and full Moon, etc. We also noted that the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which triggered the massive tsunami, occurred on a full Moon day. But this co-relation was only sometimes, not always.

Q: Do these beliefs have any basis in current geological science?

A: Well, there is no clear statement from anyone so far on how earthquakes happen. They are said to happen along the geological (tectonic) plate boundaries, and rarely within the plates. We looked at 100 years of actual data. The plates within the Earth are moving all the time, but earthquakes don’t happen all the time when such movements are on a normal scale. It must need a sudden change in plate movement. Could there be an extraneous influence? Could it come from outside our planet – for example, gravitational pull from the Sun, Moon or the other planets in the Solar System? We wondered.

Q: How did you investigate your hypothesis?

A: We couldn’t find a direct co-relation with the Sun and Moon, although we know that these two bodies are principally responsible for tides on our planet. We then asked: what about the planets? We took the dates of the 136 significant earthquakes and, using a commercial astronomical software, we plotted the historical position/location of the planets for the date and time when those earthquakes are recorded to have occurred.

Q: What was the software you used?

A: Well, it’s a commercially available software. I can’t remember its exact name. When we did this plotting, we found a special kind of planetary configuration involving Jupiter, Uranus, Mars and Saturn.

Q: What exactly was the configuration?

A: They were aligned within a small angle. And the Sun and Moon were also on the same side, or in the same direction, or on the opposite side. In short, the planets were not scattered all over the sky. We looked carefully, went back and forth many times, and we found that this kind of planetary arrangement was there about 75 per cent of the time when the 136 key earthquakes have occurred during the past 100 years. This was not always, but statistically significant enough. So we asked: maybe we can use this factor as a way to assess future probability of significant earthquakes occurring?

Q: What did you do next with this speculation?

A: We wanted to test this. So we made several predictions among the geologist groups we are in contact with both nationally and internationally. We noted that there could be such a planetary alignment again on 20, 21 and 22 February 2011. And the Christchurch earthquake happened on 22 February. We prepared a research paper, which was presented at the Geological Society of Sri Lanka (GGSL) annual sessions on February 25 and 26.

Q: Where was it held?

A: It was held at the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Kandy. We said this was pure statistical analysis and as curious scientists we had noticed a co-relation which we wanted to probe further.

Q: Was there much discussion?

A: Well, we were encouraged to investigate more, which is how science works.

Q: Did you present and publish a paper?

A: The abstract is available online. We presented it as PowerPoint. We will write it up as a paper soon. (Writer’s note: The abstracts for the February 2011 symposium are not to be found on GGSL as at 18 April 2011. Previous session abstracts are given.)

Q: What happened next?

A: We made three or four further forecasts for March 2011. One was that there could be a significant earthquake over the north Pacific ocean between 3 and 10 March. The Sendai (Tohoku) earthquake occurred on March 11, devastating northern Japan and triggering a major tsunami. We realised our predictions are coming true one by one. We then made a forecast for April 2011, trying to test our hypothesis further. We said there could be significant quakes close to Turkey and on the China-India border. These did happen, as you can find on the USGS website. It was by this time that we also thought about releasing these initial speculations to the media, as this is a topic of considerable public interest.

Q: The media picked up some elements of your investigation, and then ran with it. Is that how it happened?

A: Well, some people – including some journalists – asked me: is there any possibility of a tsunami occurring in the Indian Ocean? I clearly said that tsunami is a secondary thing, that is sometimes triggered when an earthquake happens under the ocean under certain conditions. I stressed in all my media interviews that tsunamis are not predictable.

Q: What really happened with the so-called ‘panic broadcast’ that was carried on Swarnavahini TV channel on April 15?

A: I carefully explained that we are looking for a way to predict earthquakes, and that it is just not possible to predict any tsunamis. During this broadcast, the TV station showed some images from the 2004 tsunami. Maybe that created a false impression in the minds of some viewers. The announcer clearly said this is only an attempt to some interesting new information, and not meant to panic anyone. But it is human nature for people to assume the worst. This may have been the reason for the panic that resulted…

Q: Are you taken aback by the allegations of scaremongering implicating yourself and the TV station?

A: I did all this in good faith, and had no intention of scaring anyone or creating any panic. This is an emerging science, and we are working hard to push its frontiers.

Q: Science advances by peer review and critique. Have you published your hypothesis or speculations in a peer reviewed scientific journal?

A: Not yet, but we are working on a research paper for precisely such an international, peer reviewed scientific journal. I have more than 40 such papers already published in my name so far.

Q: When you publish, how do you plan to explain the statistical co-relationship you’ve noticed?

A: We want to theorise about this (connection). It could be either gravitational or magnetic. We know that deep inside our planet, below the crust and mantle, there is a liquid zone sometimes called the ‘metallic ocean’. We suspect that perhaps this metallic zone is somehow affected by the influence of certain celestial bodies.

Q: But we know that gravity weakens with distance. The planets you mention are so many millions of kilometres away. So, assuming your theory holds, can such far away bodies exert a noticeable influence?

A: Well, maybe it’s not gravity. Yes, gravitational pull is based on distance. Maybe it has something to do with magnetic fields. There is so much we still don’t know! That is why we want to study more. I call this astrogeophysics, a new and emerging science. (Writer’s note: There is already a branch of science by this name, defined in the Encarta dictionary as ‘the study of the surface and internal physical processes of planets and moons excluding the Earth’).

Q: Considering your line of enquiry is now extending beyond our planet, don’t you need an astronomer involved?

A: At the moment we don’t have any. I want to make it very clear that our work has nothing to do with astrology! We are using the scientific method.

Q: The Daily Mirror newspaper ran a news story on 16 April 2011 (curiously, not included in its website archive) that quoted you as saying “it is not possible to explain the method to laymen”. That’s a bit presumptuous – did you really say so?

A: No, I did not say such a thing. I have just explained to you the gist of what we are thinking and investigating.

Q: So what happens next?

A: There is a curious statistical co-relation we have found by just looking at data that has been available to many others. We may take years to understand this. But we feel it is definitely worth asking these questions and probing further, both to advance knowledge and also considering the massive potential to save lives by improving our ability to predict earthquakes.

###

Trained as a science writer, one-time journalist Nalaka Gunawardene still asks lots of questions. He blogs at http://movingimages.wordpress.com/ and writes a weekly column on science, environment and media in the Ravaya newspaper.

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Tambiaiah Sabaratnam (1932 – 2011)

Veteran journalist Tambiaiah Sabaratnam, who has died aged 79, was a pathfinder and leading light in Sri Lankan science journalism for over a generation. Throughout his long association with the English and Tamil press, he advocated the pursuit of public science: tax-payer funded scientific research for the benefit of the people and economy.

Having joined the Thinakaran newspaper in 1957 as a trainee journalist, he switched to the English media in the late 1970s and retired as Senior Deputy Editor of Daily News in 1997. His 40 years at Lake House — the country’s largest publishing house, nationalized in 1973 — spanned eight governments. In retirement, he remained active as a columnist, journalist trainer and author.

He was a source of inspiration and encouragement to me during my early years in science journalism. Our paths crossed often in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he and I covered many of the same scientific events. He was approachable and helpful, but I could never bring myself to call him ‘Saba’. When I knew him, he had already been in journalism for longer than I’d been alive. To me, he was always ‘Mr Sabaratnam’.

He reached out despite our generational, media house and other divides. He was genuinely interested in my progress as a science journalist, and offered me advice on both style and substance. Occasionally, he also cautioned me about various ‘pitfalls’ in the local scientific scene  personal rivalries, exaggerated claims or oversized egos.

Although he wrote features and columns, and even authored biographies of political personalities in his spare time, he remained a news reporter at heart. He was not only very well informed about the twin spheres of politics and science, but also had the dexterity to get to the heart of any ‘story’.

Because he covered both politics and science, he often placed science and technology stories within a wider social and economic context — as indeed they should be. He was generally supportive of researchers and their institutions, but called for rigour and relevance in their output. Press officers or senior scientists could not charm him into giving favourable coverage –- he demanded proof, albeit in the nicest possible manner.

Precise and brief
For many years, he wrote a weekly column called ‘Science Notes’ in the Daily News. As a scientifically inclined schoolboy in the 1980s, I grew up reading (and collecting) it. As a young science reporter with a rival English daily (The Island), I followed it diligently as an ideal standard.

His writing style was simple, precise and brief — his prose was eminently readable in the classical Reader’s Digest sense. When he expressed opinions, sparingly, they were measured and optimistic.

That was the hallmark of Sabaratnam: he had a childlike enthusiasm for people and issues – both political and scientific. The latter is a harder ‘beat’ to cover in the media: science is widely perceived as an esoteric pursuit carried out in sterilised laboratories or ivory towers of academia. Similarly, its practitioners are seen as far removed from the real world, churning out research papers that no one else could understand.

Sabaratnam could sift through reams of scientific papers and tons of jargon, and distil the essence into a few well crafted paragraphs. He looked for the bright sparks – young and old – trying to solve national problems using the methods and tools of science. Ph Ds of irrelevance didn’t impress him.

If Sabaratnam was unassuming as a person, he was proud as a journalist and upheld the dignity of his profession. He ignored the arrogance of certain senior scientists who tried to dictate to journalists what to report, and how. As journalists, he used to say, our job — first and last — was to serve our readers. Despite being a good Hindu, he had no ‘sacred cows’ in his journalism.

I learnt much from him, including how to be courteous without being obsequious. Once Sabaratnam and I jointly interviewed Professor Dayantha Wijeyesekera, who was then Vice Chancellor of the Open University of Sri Lanka where I was a student. When the genial engineer entered the room, Sabaratnam was quick to notice my dilemma. He quipped: “As a journalist, Nalaka won’t stand up for you. But as your student, he is wondering what he should do!” (I remained seated.)

Scientists and their institutions respected him for this independence. When the Sri Lanka Association for the Advancement of Science (SLAAS) started an award scheme in 1986 to recognise the best science writing, Sabaratnam of Daily News was the most deserving first winner in English.

T Sabaratnam felicitated at Journalism Awards for Excellence 2007. Photo by DushiYanthini Kanagasabapathipillai

Bigger Picture
Unlike many of his peers, Sabaratnam didn’t turn cynical after bearing witness to so much of hypocrisy, duplicity and wrong turns in post-independent Sri Lanka. Neither was he in denial, the favoured option among many journalists and editors in the state controlled media. He was acutely aware of the political undercurrents constantly sweeping across our island. He covered the ethnic tensions from the early days, and chronicled political manipulations that fuelled these into a full scale civil war.

It can’t have been easy to tell this unfolding story within the confines of a state-run media house that switched allegiance so completely each time governments changed. I never asked him about this, but remember him saying that determined journalists could ‘always get the story out’.

Predictably, Sabaratnam the columnist was more opinionated than Sabaratnam the news reporter. In the wake of a series of dastardly attacks on newspaper editors and media houses, he wrote in January 2009: “If the present situation had prevailed in 1957, I would not have chosen journalism as my profession. Those were placid days, when an occasional murder, somewhere in the country, was big news, meriting page one display in newspapers.”

Those ‘placid days’ now belong to another time in another century that recedes further from us as we hurtle into the uncertainties of the Undiscovered Country. However, the need for promoting the public interest and public science through the media remains as urgent as ever.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene dreams of being a news reporter again and meanwhile blogs at http://movingimages.wordpress.com

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I researched the essay over a few days in early December 2010. While following the unfolding cablegate saga with much interest, I looked up and re-read many published articles and speeches of Sir Arthur related to the social and political impacts of new communications technologies. I was already familiar with his thinking on the subject, but was still amazed to discover the extent of his prescience. And dismayed by how little his timeless advice was being followed.

My essay was first published on 19 December 2010 by Groundviews.org; it has since been reproduced widely, and my own compact versions have appeared in a number of print media outlets. Just ask Google.

In the intervening weeks, WikiLeaks and its public face Julian Assange have kept us enthralled. Last week saw political unrest boil over in Tunisia that eventually forced its long-ruling autocratic President Ben Ali to flee the country. Foreign Policy called it the ‘first WikiLeaks Revolution’.

The influential journal noted: “Tunisians didn’t need any more reasons to protest when they took to the streets these past weeks — food prices were rising, corruption was rampant, and unemployment was staggering. But we might also count Tunisia as the first time that WikiLeaks pushed people over the brink.”

As I watched Tunis erupt on satellite TV, I recalled a brief visit to that city five years ago to attend the World Summit on the Information Society (phase 2). It was an unlikely place to talk about the rise of information and communications technologies: the locals were kept at bay, and their access to the Internet was tightly controlled. There is some irony that WikiLeaks should trigger long overdue political reform in such a society…

If you thought that was explosive, consider this. The UK’s Observer newspaper reported on 16 January 2011 that the Swiss whistleblower Rudolf Elmer plans to hand over offshore banking secrets of the rich and famous to WikiLeaks. Elmer is a former chief operating officer in the Cayman Islands and employee of the Julius Baer bank, which accuses him of stealing the information.

The Observer, sister newspaper of the UK Guardian — one of five mainstream media outlets working with WikiLeaks — reported: “The offshore bank account details of 2,000 ‘high net worth individuals’ and corporations – detailing massive potential tax evasion – will be handed over to the WikiLeaks organisation in London tomorrow by the most important and boldest whistleblower in Swiss banking history, Rudolf Elmer, two days before he goes on trial in his native Switzerland.”

It added: “British and American individuals and companies are among the offshore clients whose details will be contained on CDs presented to WikiLeaks at the Frontline Club in London.”

Those involved include, Elmer has told the Observer, “approximately 40 politicians”.

Hmm, that should be an interesting list. When it gets published, that would be another reminder – if any more were needed – that we are well and truly living in the Global Glass House. In this WikiLeakable world, Swiss bankers will soon have to some up with a different sales pitch: how can anyone, anywhere guarantee complete secrecy and confidentiality anymore?

While waiting, here’s something to brood over. Once again, Arthur C Clarke got there at least a generation ahead of the rest of us.

“When the Twerms Came” is one of the less known short stories by the doyen of science fiction. Julian Assange was not even born when Sir Arthur churned out this cheeky little story in 1970.

As author later remarked, the 360-word tale was intended as an Invasion-of-Earth story to end all Invasion-of-Earth stories. While it didn’t succeed in this laudable objective, the editors of Playboy loved it – and used it as the basis for a psychedelic comic strip illustrated by the American underground cartoonist Skip Williamson.

“I can still recall the anxiety with which the editors nervously revealed the layout to me,” Sir Arthur wrote in his 1978 collection, The View from Serendip.  “They were so relieved when I laughed.”

The comic strip was published in the Playboy issue for May 1972, with the top cover blurb promoting it: “Arthur C Clarke teams up with underground artist Skip Williamson”. I’ve just spent a few interesting minutes trying to locate it online (all in the name of scholarly research, of course!). But our usually reliable friend Google can’t help with this one: it’s either behind a pay-wall, or lies somewhere with little or no indexing by search engines.

If anyone can find the actual comic strip, that would be an interesting piece of pop culture to place online for free public viewing — even if it might elicit some protests from the House of Hefner.

The short story itself has been remarkably obscure. It was included in The View from Serendip, where all the rest was non-fiction essays, and added to his short story collection The Wind from the Sun (1987 edition). But, for some reason, it is not in the Collected Stories of Arthur C Clarke (Tor Books, New York. 2000), which brought together (almost) all the short stories in one large volume of nearly one thousand pages. (Conspiracy theories welcome on why the story was missing.)

In the wake of recent developments, the story deserves better recognition and wider circulation. So here it is, 40 years after it was written (reproduced with the kind courtesy of the Arthur C Clarke Estate).

When the Twerms Came

By Arthur C Clarke

We now know (little consolation though this provides) that the Twerms were fleeing their hereditary enemies the Mucoids when they first detected Earth on their far-ranging Omphalmoscopes. Thereafter, they reacted with astonishing speed and cunning.

In a few weeks of radio-monitoring, they accumulated billions of words of electroprint from the satellite Newspad services. Miraculous linguists, they swiftly mastered the main terrestrial languages; more than that, they analysed our culture, our technology, our political-economic systems – our defences. Their keen intellects, goaded by desperation, took only months to identify our weak points, and to devise a diabolically effective plan of campaign.

They knew that the US and the USSR possessed between them almost a teraton of warheads. The fifteen other nuclear powers might only muster a few score gigatons, and limited delivery systems, but even this modest contribution could be embarrassing to an invader. It was therefore essential that the assault should be swift, totally unexpected, and absolutely overwhelming. Perhaps they did consider a direct attack on the Pentagon, the Red Fort, the Kremlin and the other centres of military power. If so, they soon dismissed such naïve concepts.

With a subtlety which, after the event, we can now ruefully appreciate, they selected our most compact, and most vulnerable area of sensitivity…

Their insultingly miniscule fleet attacked at 4 AM European time on a wet Sunday morning. The weapons they employed were the irresistible Psychedelic Ray, the Itching Beam (which turned staid burghers into instant nudists), the dreaded Diarrhoea Bomb, and the debilitating Tumescent Aerosol Spray. The total human casualties were thirty-six, mostly through exhaustion or heart failure.

Their main force (three ships) attacked Zurich. One vessel each sufficed for Geneva, Basle and Berne. They also sent what appears to have been a small tugboat to deal with Vaduz.

No armourplate could resist their laser-equipped robots. The scanning cameras they carried in their ventral palps could record a billion bits of information a second. Before breakfast time, they knew the owners of every numbered bank account in Switzerland.

Thereafter, apart from the dispatch of several thousand special delivery letters by first post Monday morning, the conquest of Earth was complete.

Post script: Politicians, generals and bankers should really start looking up the nearly 100 books and around 1,000 short stories and essays that the late author and futurist left behind. Who knows what other cautions and history lessons are lurking there?

###

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene worked with Sir Arthur Clarke for 21 years as a research assistant, and has a strange fascination for alien invasions of our planet. He blogs on media, society and development issues at http://movingimages.wordpress.com

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Colombo, Sri Lanka: 16 December 2010

Dear Sir Arthur,

I write this on your 93rd birth anniversary. Just over a thousand days have passed since you departed.

Like all true rationalists, you didn’t believe in any afterlife. So I don’t expect you to be somewhere there, ‘keeping an eye on us’. You did enough of that during your 90 years on this planet! But as the first decade of the Twenty First Century draws to a close, I find it helpful to address this to you, and to reflect on some of your timeless ideas.

You not only had remarkable powers of prescience and imagination, but also remained upbeat that humanity will survive its turbulent adolescence. As you were fond of saying, you had great faith optimism as a guiding principle, “if only because it offers us the opportunity of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy”.

Three years ago this month, I worked with you in drafting and filming your 90th birthday reflections on YouTube. In just nine minutes, you outlined your vision and aspirations for the key areas of your prolific life: space travel, communication technologies and writing. We had no idea at the time that you had only 100 days left, or that this short video would soon become your public farewell…

Every one of those 900 words is worth another careful read, but I find these to be particularly timely: “Communication technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, for us humans to get along with each other. This is why we still have many disputes and conflicts in the world. Technology tools help us to gather and disseminate information, but we also need qualities like tolerance and compassion to achieve greater understanding between peoples and nations.” (Emphasis mine.)

Easier said than done! Of course, you’d been saying this for several decades about information and communications technologies (ICTs). Few individuals have played a greater role than you in shaping today’s information society. Part of it involved proposing the geosynchronous communications satellite (comsat) and inspiring the world wide web. You also helped build that information society by mentoring technical professionals, advising the United Nations agencies, and gradually preparing humanity to live in an always-connected, transparent world.

For all these reasons, techies worldwide idolised you: some of the planet’s best known geeks were your ardent fans. Among the numerous tributes that poured out after your departure, I found one especially poignant. It was a Joy of Tech cartoon, showing the sentient computer HAL 9000 (from 2001: A Space Odyssey) shedding a single tear in your memory…

In fact, researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) are still trying to create a real-life HAL, which remains the ‘Holy Grail’ in their line of work.

Technology, not politics

Meanwhile, the rest of us are happy (most of the time) with our everyday ICTs. The International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which keeps track of such matters, says the total number of mobile phone subscriptions worldwide will exceed 5 billion by end 2010. There now are 2 billion Internet users in the world, more than half of them in the developing world. Several countries, including Estonia, Finland and Spain, have already declared Internet access as a legal right for all citizens.

For sure, we still have disparities among the connected: for example, between narrowband and broadband, or between 2G and 3G. With so many people getting connected to global telecom networks during the past decade, we are only just beginning to tackle the many legal, social and cultural implications. In finding our way forward in this always-on, multi-channel world, we can do no better than to look up your substantial writing on the subject.

One such profound idea, which many people have been citing in recent weeks, reads: “In the struggle for freedom of information, technology, not politics will be the ultimate decider.”

Wow! In 15 words, you summed up a whole debate that has been raging on for centuries. I recall how you were amused to hear that Rupert Murdoch was fond of quoting these words as he consolidated his ‘Empire of Eyeballs’. You might be intrigued to know that right now, your words are being cited in relation to another Australian: Julian Assange.

The co-founder and editor in chief of WikiLeaks has suddenly become one of the planet’s top newsmakers. He is the public face of this entirely web-based, volunteer driven effort to end secrecy in governments and corporations. Whistle-blowing is as old as the media; what WikiLeaks has done is to provide a digital platform where public-spirited individuals can ‘leak’ secrets safely and anonymously.

We might argue about their modus operandi, but WikiLeaks must be doing a few things right to have rattled many centres of power around the world! The more he is demonised as a criminal or terrorist, the more Assange is attracting the sympathy of millions of ordinary people (not to mention some intellectual and legal heavyweights).

I wonder how you might have reacted to this whole WikiLeaks issue. You cheered every time ICTs enabled the free flow of information and empowered defenders of human rights and democracy, for example, when the Iron Curtain crumbled and the Berlin Wall fell, or when mobile phones rallied around millions of Filipinos for ‘people power’. You were openly gleeful when government censors were undermined first by the comsats and then by the web. (They have since struck back, albeit clumsily.)

Well, you did warn the world’s governments about the coming Age of Transparency. Speaking at the UN headquarters during the World Telecommunications Year 1983, you quoted an unnamed statesman as saying “A free press can give you hell, but it can save your skin”. Our usually reliable friend Google can’t help me on this, but I vaguely remember you saying that it was uttered by Charles De Gaulle.

Your advice at the UN also contained these words: “Exposures of political scandals or political abuses…can be painful but also very valuable. Many a ruler might still be in power today, or even alive, had he known what was really happening in his own country…”

So is Julian Assange simply continuing, in his own style, what people like Sir Tim-Berners Lee (who invented the World Wide Web) and you set in motion in the last century? And isn’t it highly ironic that this latest info-tsunami hits the US government under the watch of a President who himself rode the new media wave to the White House just two years ago?

President Obama must wonder whether the marvels of social media tools are better suited for campaigning than for actual governing. His Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, hasn’t shown much understanding of the new media realities when reacting to WikiLeaks’ dumping thousands of classified diplomatic cables. She apparently doesn’t mean to practise the principles of internet freedom so loftily preached to foreign countries and governments.

Cablegate is only the latest reminder that we are living in a world where few, if any, secrets can be guarded. Governments have long argued they had a right to track and probe the private lives of us citizens, apparently for our own good. Now, a few geeks have turned the tables…

Welcome to the Global Glasshouse!

Surely, there must be at least a few Digital Natives at the State Department to advise their bosses that the Age of Transparency is now unstoppable? And was there no Arthur Clarke fan to remind the mandarins of diplomacy of your time-honoured advice when confronted with new ICTs: ‘Exploit the inevitable’?

Shooting the messenger never worked in the world of old media (even though exposed parties in our part of world keep trying!). With the new media, such action is worse than ineffective — in the WikiLeaks case, it has turned the former computer hacker into an overnight global hero.

These are the times, Sir Arthur, when we want to repeat your celebrated question (asked in relation to the US space program): Is there intelligent life in Washington?

Surviving info deluge

There are many other lessons we can learn from WikiLeaks. For instance: just how can anyone cope with so many secrets disclosed at once?

WikiLeaks is not a bunch of geeks going it alone. Its strength is in working with some reputed media outlets to make sense of the flood of secretive information. Journalists are trained to ‘connect the dots’, and fast. But can anyone process so much new information unleashed by WikiLeaks?

Again, we find you’ve anticipated this many years ago. A thoughtful essay you wrote for Index on Censorship in November 1993 ended with these words:  “The real challenge now facing us through the Internet and World Wide Web is not quality but sheer quantity. How will we find anything — and not merely our favourite porn — in the overwhelming cyber-babble of billions of humans and trillions of computers, all chattering simultaneously? I don’t know the answer: and I have a horrible feeling that there may not be one.”

Your caution was made when less than 20 million people worldwide had Internet connectivity. A decade later, on the eve of the first World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in December 2003, you told me in an interview that ‘humanity will survive the information deluge’. By that time, the world’s online population had grown to 700 million.

You were not only being characteristically optimistic, but reminded us that we’d been at such crossroads before: “There are many who are genuinely alarmed by the immense amount of information available to us through the Internet, television and other media. To them, I can offer little consolation other than to suggest that they put themselves in the place of their ancestors at the time the printing press was invented. ‘My God,’ they cried, ‘now there could be as many as a thousand books. How will we ever read them all?’”

In that interview, you cited discernment as an essential survival skill in the Information Society. Well, the knee-jerk reaction to WikiLeaks has once again shown how that is still in short supply…

Tomorrow’s News?

So if Murdoch was yesterday’s news and Assange is today’s, who might be creating tomorrow’s news — and indeed, shaping tomorrow’s world? This is where we most miss your informed and pragmatic guidance. You used to be our reliable and amiable tour guide to the future.

We can, of course, continue to explore your literary and scientific output in search of possible answers. Two concepts that always interested you were the Global Brain and Global Family.

In your later years, you were intrigued by the phenomenal rise of search engines. As you wrote in 2005: “If comsats are an integral part of the nervous system of humankind, Google must provide part of its brain. Of course, it’s still in early stages of evolution under the watchful eye of its founders. But the future can hold any number of different scenarios.”

Since then, Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page have continued their quest for online domination. Occasionally, they face spirited challenges from other geeks, notably Apple’s Steve Jobs. You would have applauded Google’s belated decision earlier this year not to put up with mainland China’s internet censorship laws and regulations.

I’m not so sure what you might have made of this thing called Facebook. With more than 500 million active members, the social networking website is the largest of its kind (well ahead of its nearest rival Myspace, owned by your friend Rupert).

Going by the sheer numbers, Facebook is behind only China and India in population terms. But those who compare it to a major league country don’t imagine far enough — it’s really becoming another planet…

While Facebook’s high numbers are impressive, not everyone is convinced of its usefulness and good intentions. Can we trust so much power in the hands of a few very bright (and by now, very rich) twentysomethings? How exactly is Facebook going to safeguard our privacy when we (wittingly or unwittingly) reveal so much of our lives in there?

I raise these concerns not only as a long-time ICT-watcher, but also as the father of a teenager who is an avid Facebooker. I once called Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg a ‘Digital Pied Piper’: might we someday see Hamelin the sequel? (Stop Press: As I was finishing this letter came the news that he is TIME’s Person of the Year 2010.)

But what’s the alternative? Those of us old enough to remember another way of communicating might romanticise about that time past. But do I really want to go back snailmail or fax? Thanks, but no thanks.

It’s not the smart machines and networks we have built, but our intentions and actions that determine what happens next. Again, Sir Arthur, you foresaw us reaching this point and pausing to weigh our options.

You wrote in 1999: “Virtually everything we wish to do in the field of communications is now technologically possible. The only limitations are financial, legal or political. In time, I am sure, most of these will also disappear — leaving us with only limitations imposed by our own morality.”

We need not fear Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg or the Google duo — they are merely the ‘midwives’ of the Information Society whose birth cries are now receding into the past. As we discover the enormous powers we have bestowed upon ourselves through ICTs, there is somebody else we need to come to terms with.

It’s the man or woman in the mirror.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene worked with Sir Arthur Clarke as a research assistant, and in later years as co-author and media coordinator. He blogs on media, society and development issues at http://movingimages.wordpress.com

• ICTs, science fiction and disasters: A conversation with Nalaka Gunawardene
• WikiLeaks, Swiss Banks and Alien invasions
• Julian Assange’s turn for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011
• Groundviews on Twitter and Facebook
• Tamilnet banned? – How to continue to access the site from Sri Lanka

Review of Wimalege Colama (Wimale’s Column), a collection of satirical columns by Wimalanath Weeraratne
Sinhala; 232 pp; Author publication; September 2010

Political satire is nothing new: it has been around for as long as organised government trying to keep the wielders of power in check. Over the centuries, it has manifested in many oral, literary or theatrical traditions, some of it more enduring — such as Gulliver’s Travels and Animal Farm. And for over a century, political cartoonists have also been doing it with such brilliant economy of words. Together, these two groups probably inspire more nightmares in tyrants than anyone or anything else.

Today, political satire has also emerged as a genre on the airwaves and in cyberspace, and partly compensates for the worldwide decline in serious and investigative journalism. Many mainstream media outlets have become too submissive and subservient to political and corporate powers. Those who still have the guts often lack the resources and staff to pursue good journalism.

If Nature abhors a vacuum, so does human society — and both conjure ways of quickly filling it up. Into this ‘journalism void’ have stepped two very different groups of people: citizen journalists, who take advantage of the new information and communications technologies (ICTs), and political satirists who revive the ancient arts of caricaturisation and ego-blasting.

Both came from the periphery and challenged the status quo. And their rise in numbers and influence has not been universally hailed. Old school media professors just don’t understand (or can’t believe!) how anyone could produce good journalism without professional training, official accreditation or payment. And there still are purists who complain that political satirists blur the traditional demarcations between news, commentary and entertainment.

But in these topsy-turvy times, can we afford to insist on such all-or-nothing positions? If the mainstream news organisations don’t live up to our high expectations of news reporting and commentary, we should be grateful that some satirists and comedians are increasingly doing that job — and reasonably well, too. I would any day prefer a satirist taking on serious topics than a news anchor or reporter trying a comedian act.

Other media watchers and researchers share this view. A recent book, titled Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era (co-edited by Jonathan Gray, Jeffrey Jones and Ethan Thompson; NYU Press; 2009) told us why we now have to take satire TV seriously — it has become the bearer of the democratic spirit for the post-broadcast age.

As the book’s introductory blurb noted, “Satirical TV has become mandatory viewing for citizens wishing to make sense of the bizarre contemporary state of political life. Shifts in industry economics and audience tastes have re-made television comedy, once considered a wasteland of escapist humour, into what is arguably the most popular source of political critique. From fake news and pundit shows to animated sitcoms and mash-up videos, satire has become an important avenue for processing politics in informative and entertaining ways, and satire TV is now its own thriving, viable television genre. Satire TV examines what happens when comedy becomes political, and politics become funny.”

In Sri Lanka, we haven’t yet reached such high levels of political satire on television. But our cartoonists have long perfected the art — to me, the finest current example is Camillus Perera, the creator of such inimitable characters like Siribiris and Gajaman. Over the years, we have also had talented and indomitable political satirists like Tarzie Vittachi (Fly-by-Night), Sirilal Kodikara (Ranchagoda Lamaya) and a few others occasionally brightening up our otherwise hard times.

Joining this long and colourful tradition is an unassuming and seemingly innocuous satirical column that started appearing in the Ravaya Sunday Sinhala newspaper in late 2008. Its author, Wimalanath Weeraratne (WW for short), is a journalist on its editorial staff. He has just collected the best of his columns published between November 2008 and August 2010. The book is called, simply, Wimalege Colama (Sinhala for Wimale’s Column).

This book belatedly assigns a name to the column that started without any fanfare and continues so to-date: it carries no branded name or graphical masthead. Unusually for such writing in today’s Sri Lanka, the writer signs it with his own full name.

But if the column comes with too little sizzle, it offers plenty of steak. Every week, it takes off from a current news event or topical issue, and then builds an entirely plausible scenario that is both hilarious and provides piercing social commentary. Every reader gets some instantaneous comic relief, but the real meanings and messages often sink in later. In that sense, this column is a akin to the street theatre performances created by the late Gamini Hattotuwegama — hilarious, highly nuanced and totally irreverent.

No Sacred Cows

WW doesn’t beat around the bush. There is no disguise in his stories’ setting or characters. They all happen in contemporary Sri Lanka, and not in some imaginary this-land or that-land as invoked by other, more cautious satirists. There is also no innuendo or other literary or dramatic ploys. The characters are all living and known persons, appearing under their own names. Call these the modern-day tales of intrigue from the King’s Palace.

The ‘cast’ is led by no less than the incumbent President, and includes his politically active brothers, prominent Cabinet Ministers, senior officials and political adversaries. The first lady and other members of the first family get honourable (and sometimes not-so-honourable) mentions. Guest appearances are made by leading film actors, authors, newspaper editors and other public figures. The Veddah chief, Uru Warige Wanniya, once featured prominently, as did the UN chief Ban Ki-Moon.

The only fictitious characters are the ferocious First Cat and the garrulous First Parrot. They both dabble in the affairs of the state, and presidential public relations when the President is occupied (or sleeping). On second thoughts, they are not so fictitious after all…

The storylines are both diverse and daring. Among my favourites is when the President suddenly, inexplicably, turns into a cockroach for 24 hours. The story, reminiscent of Frank Kafka’s famous story The Metamorphosis (1915), exposes the duplicity of the numerous sycophants surrounding the leader. Another interesting story chronicles what (probably) transpired when police criminal investigators arrested an astrologer who predicted ‘bad times’ for the President and his government. (How come the soothsayer didn’t foresee his own imminent arrest?)

One column, first published in late 2009 when tensions between the government and General Sarath Fonseka were rising, imagined the President inviting all the notable Saraths of the land to a big dinner party at the presidential abode, Temple Trees. The gathering leads to some hilarious exchanges.

We find WW’s metaphors and analogies so funny because they are so apt. He once likened the Cabinet of Ministers to a primary classroom where their teacher (President) struggles to keep them focused and productive. Using the format of ‘Are you smarter than a Fifth Grader’ TV game show, the writer plays on the known foibles and idiosyncrasies of key ministers.

Inspiration for the weekly column has come from a variety of sources. The period 2008 – 2010 has been particularly turbulent and eventful in Sri Lanka, providing our satirist ample choice of topics ranging from the last stages and end of the civil war and frequent elections to political gymnastics and trade union agitations. By far the biggest single source is the President himself — WW feasts on his public statements, frequent lunch/dinner hosting, foreign visits (to unusual destinations like Burma, Libya and Ukraine) and other proclivities.

Psycho analysts and social critics can have a field day discussing WW’s take on various individuals and social institutions. Well, at least he is an equal opportunity basher — there are no sacred cows in his parallel universe. He lampoons politicians of all hue and colour with equal gusto. He frequently takes on the leading artistes, intellectuals and businessmen. And when the need arises, he also doesn’t spare the men in khaki (military) and men in saffron (Buddhist monks), two social institutions that most media in Sri Lanka treat with deference.

Medium is the message

In today’s Sri Lanka — which some spoilsports among us worry is turning into a ‘guided democracy’ a la Malaysia — the WW column is perhaps the last one of its kind. But the fact that it still stands, and seemingly thrives, is by itself a cause for celebration.

Satire is a hard act at the best of times, and making fun of those wielding power can be especially hazardous when big egos are bruised or vested interests feel threatened. Very few of our satirists directly take on the incumbent head of state, whoever is holding office. Political cartoonists venture a bit further, but they too observe self-imposed limits. (A generation ago, cartoonists gleefully caricaturised the executive Prime Minister as a raging bull. Would anyone attempt that today?)

In the highly acquiescent media environment in today’s Sri Lanka, WW’s column could appear only in the Ravaya. It is an extraordinary publication that has, for nearly a quarter of a century, provided a platform for vibrant public discussion and debate on social and political issues. It does so while staying aloof of political party loyalties and tribal divisions. While it cannot compete directly (for circulation) with newspapers published by the state or press barons, this sober and serious broadsheet commands sufficient influence among a loyal and discerning readership.

Published by a company owned by journalists themselves, Ravaya is almost unique among Lankan newspapers for another reason: its columnists and other contributors are allowed to take positions that are radically different from those of its formidable editor, Victor Ivan. WW once tested the limits of this editorial freedom by working his own editor into one of his tales of intrigue – and it wasn’t very kind on the editor either. But to Victor Ivan’s credit, the column survived.

WW’s weekly output is being noted and admired by a growing number of readers and media watchers. For example, the column earned him the merit award (Sinhala) for the Columnist of the Year 2009 at the Journalism Awards for Excellence held in June 2010. But acclaim is a double-edged reward that sometimes stifles creativity. Let’s hope that WW’s writing would retain its sharp, piercing edge for years to come.

I also hope that no one will attempt to translate this column into English. WW writes in his own unique Sinhala style that is idiom-rich and vividly expressive. The prose alternates between colloquial and erudite, occasionally touching on the bawdy yet on the whole staying within the limits of decency. The medium is a good part of WW’s message, and that will surely be lost in translation.

Having read WW’s satire column almost from the beginning, I can’t quite decide whether WW is extremely courageous, or completely foolhardy, to take on these topics and characters week after week. Just how do WW and his publisher get away with this level of undisguised, unadulterated lampooning? (Conspiracy theorists, please help!)

There is no argument, however, that Wimalanath Weeraratne’s satire fulfils a deeply felt need in contemporary Sri Lanka for the media to check the various concentrations of power — in political, military, corporate and religious domains.

I have never met WW in person, but he brings to life a phenomenon that I first outlined on my blog in July 2009: “There is another dimension to satirising the news in immature democracies as well as in outright autocracies where media freedoms are suppressed or denied. When open dissent is akin to signing your own death warrant, and investigative journalists risk their lives on a daily basis, satire and comedy becomes an important, creative — and often the only — way to comment on matters of public interest. It’s how public-spirited journalists and their courageous publishers get around the draconian laws, stifling regulations and trigger-happy goon squads.”

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene has long been interested in the alchemy of humour as a political tool. He blogs on media, culture and society at http://movingimages.wordpress.com

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Sri Lanka 2048 panel on Living with Climate Change – Ray Wijewardene is second from right

[Authors note: Dr Philip Revatha (Ray) Wijewardene, who passed away on August 18 aged 86, spent a lifetime being unpigeonholeable – which won him many admirers and a few detractors. Despite being an accomplished engineer, aviator, inventor and Olympian, he chose to introduce himself as a farmer and mechanic ‘who still got his hands dirty’. Unpretentious and always enthusiastic, he was one man who somehow managed to have his head (literally) in the clouds and his feet firmly on the ground.

Ray's multi-faceted career blended many disciplines and pursuits. At Cambridge University, he studied three branches of engineering -- aeronautical, mechanical and agricultural. He also earned a masters degree in business administration from the Harvard Business School, and later received honorary degrees from the UK and Sri Lanka. He was Chancellor of the Sri Lanka’s technological University of Moratuwa from 2002 to 2007, where he succeeded his long-time friend Arthur C Clarke. Ray was also an outstanding sportsman who represented his country in sailing: he competed in the Mexico Olympics in 1968, and won a Silver medal at the Asian Games in Bangkok in 1970.

As an aviator, he was licensed to fly fixed-wing aircraft, helicopters and autogyros. He also experimented with building and flying ultra-light aircraft and helicopters – a passion he was forced to abandon when private flying was restricted during the war.

He was fond of saying, "Agriculture is my bread and butter, while aviation is the jam on top of it”. As a world authority on tropical farming systems, Ray worked for many years in Malaysia for the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), and later with the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in Ibadan, Nigeria.

In the 1960s, as the designer and promoter of the world’s first two-wheeled (Land Master) tractor, Ray travelled all over Asia, Africa and Latin America working with tropical farmers. But years later, he questioned the wisdom of trying to mechanise tropical farming, and dedicated the rest of his life to researching and promoting ecologically sustainable agriculture. On his estate cum farm in in Sri Lanka’s North-western Province, he kept on experimenting with rain-fed farming, agroforestry and dendro power. He never retired.

In his spare time, Ray also worked with the research and policy communities. He held various appointments as Chairman of the Tea Research Board, head of the Inventors Commission and a member of several public sector bodies concerned with agriculture, science and technology. While he stayed clear of politics, he never hesitated to speak his mind – which sometimes landed him in controversy.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene first met Ray Wijewardene in the mid 1980s when he covered the latter’s work for the local and international media. Later, they collaborated in various science communication projects – the last was in mid 2008, when Nalaka interviewed Ray on climate change for the Sri Lanka 2048 TV debate series.

Nalaka did this wide-ranging interview with Ray in mid 1995, and a compact version appeared in Down to Earth, the science and environmental magazine published from New Delhi  (31 October 1995). However, the full exchange has never before been published. Releasing this text is Nalaka’s own tribute to Ray -- an imaginative and unorthodox thinker, life-longer experimenter and an outspoken public intellectual.]

###

Nalaka Gunawardene: A major thrust of the Green Revolution was promoting high yielding crop varieties and high external inputs. You’re questioning these now. Why?

Ray Wijewardene: All along in the Green Revolution, its promoters focused on maximizing yields through massive inputs. But they forgot that what the farmer wants is to maximize profits, not necessarily yields! During the past three decades, we have increasingly adopted high input technologies for agriculture, which naturally cost more. Increasing cost for the inputs and declining real prices (say, in terms of 1960 levels) for crops such as rice has resulted in a net decrease in the profit margins of farmers all over the tropics. Further, the heavy use of agricultural chemicals has resulted in serious environmental degradation.

So we lost on two fronts. There is now an increasing realization both among the farmers, and more slowly among the scientists and agricultural policy makers, that a return to some traditional systems practised in the past is the best option. Those systems had low external inputs, and optimum recycling of locally available inputs. We also need to optimize –- not maximize — the available land area for producing food and other crops for a rapidly increasing population.

Some argue that we can’t make agriculture sustainable and still hope to produce enough food for the growing human family. Do you agree?

As I said, the issue here is not one of mere yields, but improving the farmers’ overall profits. Sustainability is not a new concept in our agriculture. Our traditional farmers knew and practised it well. And as for back as 1936, our Department of Agriculture had outlined what sustainable productivity is in a publication called “Green Manuring”. Had we followed that course, instead of losing our heads in the euphoria of the Green Revolution during the 1960s and 1970s, we would surely not be facing the present dilemma of declining yields despite heavy inputs of agro-chemicals, particularly in crops such as tea.

You were a part of the new wave of agriculture in the 1960s, and helped mechanise farming through your two-wheeled tractor. But later you called it all a ‘big mistake’. Why?

Because we failed totally to ask ourselves a fundamental question: does the tractor mechanize agriculture or does it simply mechanize the buffalo? Ultimately, the tractor only mechanized the buffalo — and that too, not very well. It didn’t have the reproductive capability of the buffalo! Nor could it produce milk as the buffalo did, or fertilize our fields! So our initial attempt to introduce tractors was indeed a big mistake.

After a great deal of study, we realized a fundamental truth: the main, if not the whole, purpose of tillage in farming is to control weeds. The cost for (weed control by) tillage represents between 40 to 60 per cent of the total costs of agricultural productions. Tillage is not a healthy practice: it aggravates erosion, and is a major contributor to the serious loss of soil fertility. The loss of soil fertility is particularly serious in the tropics which have some of the poorest and most erodible soils on earth!

Ray Wijewardene on the set of Sri Lanka 2048, June 2008

Instead of tilling, what can be done to control weeds?

There are two main alternatives to tillage. The first is using herbicides, which usually creates further (and undesirable) dependence upon import of chemicals. It can also lead to environmental hazards.

The second method is using water for weed control, which is practised more widely that we realize. By far, the major use (over two thirds) of irrigation water in rice farming is for control of weeds in paddy fields! Some 20 tons of water are used to grow just one kilogramme of rice! The real costs of irrigated water, when added to the other (ever increasing) costs of inputs into rice production, invariably results in the costs of rice production far exceeding the price that a farmer receives for his crop!

Thus, we urgently need a ‘revolution’ in how weeds are controlled in tropical farming, with minimal reliance on imported inputs — or on expensive irrigated water. I spent many years studying the problem of how to control weeds naturally. And (I realized) looking into the tropical forests will ultimately give us the answer.

How is weed control an issue in the forest?

You don’t see any weed in a rainforest because firstly, it is shaded by the overhead canopy and secondly, the weeds are smothered by the leaf mulch. You realize that the fertility of the forest is enriched by the deep roots of the trees bringing up nutrients from manure reserves in the deeper soil levels, producing leaves and other parts of trees, which then fall on the top soil. This is how a forest system recycles fertility! This recycling of manure and fertility also controls weeds.

Ultimately, we come to realize that faming is all about managing weeds and managing fertility. These are the two key limiting factors. In the tropical forests, both these factors are beautifully managed by Nature itself. Trees are the essential link in this process — one that can determine whether a given land will be productive or marginal.

In addressing this problem of managing weeds and maintaining soil fertility under rain-fed conditions, we came across a technique which tries to mimic the forest. In the Philippines, it was called the Sloping Agricultural Land Technology (SALT) — now the name is being used universally. It helps us to bring perennial trees back into farming, as was done traditionally. In SALT, we basically generate large amounts of leaf mulch on the farm land by establishing contoured hedge-rows of suitable trees. Work at IITA and other institutions across the tropics and ground level experimentation in Asia and other tropical regions have helped develop SALT to an advanced state.

What are the main advantages of SALT?

Farming with SALT reduces the need for external inputs such as fertilizers and weed control chemicals. It also minimizes soil erosion. SALT has a particular application to the cultivation in the uplands. Upland farming normally starts with the clearing of trees — which immediately removes from the land the shade and leaf litter that smother weeds and also provide natural fertility. Such clearing also exposes the land to weather processes, leading to a rapid loss of top soil.

(In contrast) SALT helps by bringing nitrogen-fixing trees and shrubs back into their traditional role in the farming scene with their abundance of leaf-litter and mulch for restoring fertility and smothering weeds. What we are learning is how to do all this cultivation with minimal need for expensive tools and external fertilizers.

Are you fundamentally opposed to any use of external inputs in agriculture?

No, on the contrary! I believe we have to use some external inputs, but in an appropriate manner. I call it replenishing the land’s fertility. Especially where export crops are concerned, we have been extracting the fertility of our lands and sending it out (overseas). We need to put it back — or else we deplete our soils.

Sri Lanka doesn’t have extensive chemical deposits like India to produce all its own chemical replenishment. So we need to import some chemical fertilizers, but it must be used sparingly and alongside the natural ways of fertilizing the land. We need to pay more attention to aspects such as green manure, cow dung and earthworms – these are the real friends of farmers!

Our universities and research institutes have tended to ignore these aspects, largely because there are no powerful, western lobbies to promote their use. We have multinational companies supporting — directly or indirectly — the extensive use of chemical fertilizers. But who supports cow-dung? Who extols the virtues of the humble earthworm? For us in Asia, these elements are far more important. Indians have recognized this, but we still haven’t. As long as our agricultural scientists are trained in the western mould of high external input agriculture, this (mindset) won’t change. Cow-dung and earthworms won’t stand a chance – until some western academic suddenly “re-discovers” them…

Some activists have criticized you for working with tobacco companies to promote SALT in the hill country of Sri Lanka. What really happened?

I couldn’t care less what people do with tobacco — I don’t support smoking. But that’s not the issue here. The tobacco companies offer a very good deal to the farmer. My interest is in improving the farmer’s lot. Here’s my challenge to our critics and cynics: ‘If you don’t want farmers to grow tobacco, please come up with equally attractive packages of extension and marketing for farmers’!

I have been working not only with tobacco companies, but also with tea companies, in Sri Lanka’s hill country. I’ve been trying to get them interested in practising SALT. Earlier, the cultivation of both tobacco and tea has led to massive soil erosion. This is largely because of the misplaced belief that the land should be fully cleared of weeds before growing these cash crops. This is an imported, temperate-farming concept. What we have tried to show these farmers and plantation companies is that much more organic material must be put into farming. Sri Lanka’s tea yields have been declining, and our productivity is going to be a appallingly low unless and until we can recycle more organic matter in these crop lands. It has taken us more than a century to realize that chemical fertilizers will produce little effect without the organic matter.

I work with tobacco and tea companies also because they have good extension systems to reach out to the farmers and to share new information and techniques with them. The tobacco company did a first class job in promoting SALT because their extension staff got the message and spread it effectively.

Ray Wijewardene on the set of Sri Lanka 2048 show – June 2008

What about introducing SALT also to the subsistence farmers who engage in shifting cultivation?

I am encouraged by the fact that more and more farmers who engage in rain-fed farming realize the importance of covering the bare soil with mulch: they are gradually reverting to these techniques. They have seen these techniques used on bigger farms as well as in tea and tobacco plantations. It would have been ideal if there was a system to tell more farmers about the virtues of these methods.

But our great tragedy is that the Department of Agriculture fails to see the value of SALT. The country’s agricultural authorities have been ‘brainwashed’ totally by the “open field” concepts of temperate faming that they want more time to “research” the desirability of SALT before giving it their stamp of approval. While realizing the benefits of SALT, the inertia of the system prevents them from fully endorsing it…

It sounds like our Department of Agriculture is the biggest impediment to achieving sustainable agriculture?

So far, yes! As I have said, they are still following outmoded western methods which even the west is now questioning! The other problem is the huge gap between research and effective extension to the farmer. I whole-heartedly agree with the senior officer of the Department of Agriculture who said, in a rare moment of candour: “Fifty years of the DoA has been a total failure….Still, 90 per cent of our farmers are recipients of poverty alleviation subsidies.”

Why do you advocate growing multi-purpose trees instead of short term crops?

For two good reasons. One is that in the tropical counties, climatic conditions are more suitable for perennial tree crops than short-term crops. A major constraint in tropical agriculture is the insufficiency of sunshine. This may sound contradictory, but on the whole, we in the tropics don’t get very long hours of daylight, and on top of that, we also experience frequent cloud cover. This can affect short-term crops. But trees don’t rely on a single growing season; they benefit from the tropical sun that shines throughout the year. Tree crops are thus the natural vegetation and source of food for the tropics.

We have to question whether we practise correct type of agriculture. Many forms of “bare-soil” agriculture, as practised in countries with a temperate vegetation and climate, have been blindly adopted in the tropics. Even rice is a temperate crop, although it has adapted well to the swampy valleys where water serves ideally to control weeds. But using water for this purpose on large irrigation schemes is not very cost effective. As I said earlier, some 20 tons of water are used to grow one kilogram of rice: three fourths of this water goes into managing weeds. The rest is adequate for the physiological needs of the rice plant. Water is rapidly becoming the most expensive herbicide in the world — and freshwater is increasingly scarce!

Sri Lanka’s soil and climate — as elsewhere in the humid tropics — clearly favour the growing of more tree crops. Archaeological research reveals that ancient Lankans had more tree crops in their diet, and were less dependent on grain crops including rice. During the Second World War, when the rice supplies from the East were interrupted, I remember how our people reverted to eating more yams, manioc (cassava), coconut, breadfruit, bananas, jak fruit, and a whole range of other tree crops to supplement local rice production and maintain a healthy diet.

As a rice farmer myself, I whole-heartedly support the growing of rice and am proud of the yields achieved under difficult circumstances in our valleys and lowlands. But let’s optimize the uplands with tree crops.

You’ve also been experimenting with agroforestry. What exactly is agroforestry, and how can it help our farmers?

Agroforestry is a term used to describe a wide range of agricultural practices which combine both short term crops with long-term, larger trees in the same agricultural land, at the same time. Tropical farmers have long raised food crops and trees/shrubs, and sometimes animals, in an integrated and sustainable manner. So it’s nothing new.

However, such integrated land use systems, which require less external inputs, have until recently been ignored by agricultural and  forestry researchers due to a tragic decision several decades ago to separate the  departments and ministries concerned with agriculture (for food) and forestry (for timber)! That the two are intrinsically liked was not realised nor appreciated.

It’s only in the last decade that specialists have rediscovered the integration of crops, animals and tree production in “agroforestry”. A much overlooked fact is that deeper-rooted trees bring nutrients up from lower soil levels and deposit it on the soil surface as leaf mulch. On this, a wide range of food crops can be grown.

In your view, what’s the biggest single problem facing tropical agriculture?

The two biggest problems facing farmers throughout the world are the loss of soil fertility and control of weeds. Every year, a large extent of agricultural land is rendered unproductive due to soil erosion in the catchment areas in Sri Lanka’s central hill country. The susceptible ecosystem (steep slopes, high rainfall) is damaged by inappropriate land use and cultivation practices. One millimetre of top soil lost is 13 tons of total soil loss per hectare.

In some areas in Sri Lanka’s hill country, more than a centimetre of soil has been lost in a year, so the loss is often over 100 tons per hectare! Such erosion leads to a rapid loss of soil fertility, and can seriously affect the catchment of several key rivers that originate from the hill country. Already, the Mahaweli River‘s reservoirs and irrigation systems have begun to show the impact of sedimentation. So it’s a double jeopardy: threatening both land and waterways, particularly irrigation systems.

One thing is clear: tropical soils should never be left exposed. A rice field covered with water is fine. Similarly, uplands covered with mulch are also acceptable. But bare soil – absolutely no! That will soon lead to erosion and loss of fertility.

Some blame shifting (‘chena’) cultivation for much of this soil erosion and land degradation. But you’ve disagreed. Why?

Rain-fed shifting cultivation is practised widely in Sri Lanka and all over the tropics. Shifting cultivation (called chena cultivation in Sri Lanka) is the earliest and most wide-spread form of agroforestry in the tropics. It was a land use system in which the branches of forest trees were lopped and crops are cultivated alongside those trees. The deep rooting trees were left intact on these lands to provide shade — and to bring up soil nutrients. After cultivating on that land for a few seasons, the land was left for the regeneration of the foliage (this was called the ‘fallow period’).

The good chena farmer only lopped the branches to let sunlight through. He didn’t fully clear the forest. Sometimes the lopped branches were burned very slightly to prepare the ground for cultivation, but farmers did NOT set fire to whole forest areas. It was nothing like the burns encouraged by the World Bank sponsored projects with huge machinery and massive, destructive opening up of forest lands.

It’s only in recent decades that the traditional shifting cultivation practice has become totally “vulgarized” and farmers have started clearing whole forests for cultivation. It has been influenced by western (temperate) farming approach where they have vast areas of open farm lands. However, as available land diminished, the fallow periods become shorter and shorter, so there was less time for abandoned lands to regenerate naturally. During the last few decades, the fallow period had come down from over 10 years to less than three years.

The earlier, correct form of shifting cultivation was practised by farmers all over the  tropics for hundreds of years without serious damage to land or soil fertility. Armchair critics are quick to blame chena for causing soil erosion and deforestation. But when correctly done with adequate fallow periods, it is one of the best methods to raise crops using only rain water, in areas where irrigated water is either not available or is simply too expensive.

So banning chena cultivation – as some critics advocate – isn’t the solution?

No, chena cultivation cannot be eliminated or regulated by mere laws or through harsh penalties. Chena provides a good part of Sri Lanka’s subsidiary food crops, and it forms the only source of income — particularly during a year of low rainfall — to the poorest segments of rural society. So it’s likely to continue, no matter what the critics say or do.

It has always been a challenge to agricultural scientists and development planners to devise and promote viable alternatives to chena cultivation — or at least to find ways of making it sustainable. One way forward is to promote the use of fast growing trees which will help recycle soil fertility faster, so that the farmer can return to the same plot of land after shorter fallow periods. This is the principle behind SALT and “alley cropping”. Many much fast growing trees have been identified and are now being popularized.

Will the small tropical farmers always be prisoners of local and global market forces?

In fact, their problem is that market forces are not allowed to operate freely! Governments both in the North (developed world) and in the South (developing world) are interfering with market forces in ways that marginalize the small tropical farmer.

At the international level, prices are kept artificially low by Northern governments offering huge farm subsidies to their own farmers, and then flooding the markets with cheap produce, which undercuts our farmers. Apart from subsidies, the North can afford to keep prices low also because of the vastness of agricultural enterprises (i.e. economies of scale). Our small farmers naturally incur higher unit costs.

The subsidized foods, imported from the North, freely enter our markets and pose increasing market competition, e.g. wheat and milk from subsidized farms in the US, Europe and Australia. The Americans’ PL 480 (Public Law 480), which annually provides large quantities of wheat to the developing countries at comparatively low prices, is one of the biggest enemies of our farmers, who are squeezed between diminishing real prices for their produce and the increasing costs of production.

Interestingly, the small farmers in Japan, Taiwan and Korea are paid four to five times the price per kilo of paddy paid to the farmers in Sri Lanka. The Japanese authorities well appreciate that the so-called “world price” for rice is based on production from the very large farms of the US which benefit from the economies of scale, and with proximate low cost access to the inputs and facilities for higher yields.  There is no way the much smaller-scale Japanese farmers could produce rice at comparable prices.

What about our farmers and the local market?

It’s the same with the small farmers is Sri Lanka and in most other countries of Asia. A good stating point would be to offer our farmers realistic prices for their produce.

Unfortunately, our politicians just love to subsidize the city consumer upon the sweat of the village farmer. If higher prices are paid to the farmer, it will gradually lead to enhanced rural prosperity, which in turn will lead to a whole chain of events – for example, reversing migration to the already congested cities. It makes sense in every way to offer a realistic price to the farmer. But it doesn’t happen!

Finally, you have long been critical of international development aid. Why?

I believe development aid is a part of “neocolonialism” — a conspiracy of sort that keeps developing counties bound to inappropriate development models and ill-fitting technologies. It is our short-sighted politicians who mortgage the future of our entire nations to the west.

I remember Martin Luther King, Jr., once said to his people: “You buy what you want, yet you beg for what you need”. This is exactly what our politicians are doing in relation to development aid.

I, for one, would prefer to see all development aid to the global South stop. Then we’ll learn to stand on our own feet — or we’ll perish. That could be the best thing that can happen to Sri Lanka, and we will surely learn the meaning of “independence” as “non-dependence”. And I’m confident: we shall not perish!

[Note: The interview has been reproduced without further editing or updating.]

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Today, most members of the Earth’s dominant species – the nearly 7 billion humans – will be preoccupied with 22 able-bodied men chasing a little hollow sphere. It’s only a game, really, but what a game: the whole world holds its breath as the ‘titans of kick’ clash in the FIFA World Cup Final.

Played across 10 venues in South Africa, this was much more than a sporting tournament. It’s the ultimate celebration of the world’s most popular sport, held once every four years. More popular than the Olympics, it demonstrates the sheer power of sports and media to bring together – momentarily, at least – the usually fragmented and squabbling humanity.

Indeed, the exuberant and vuvuzela-blaring spectators flocking to South African stadiums make up only a small part of the global audience following these games. Far more are following it on big or small screens all over the world. When a game is underway, it’s not just the fans of two participating nations who cheer or despair. For 90 scintillating minutes, human divisions like race, skin colour and literacy are blurred and forgotten.

At that moment, we are all citizens of Planet Football.

To be honest, I’m not an ardent football fan. But I’ve gladly allowed myself to be caught up in the current frenzy. I just love to watch people who watch the game…

On June 24 evening, standing at a street-side pub in the charming little Swiss town of Nyon, on the bank of Lake Geneva, I watched Japan play Denmark. The small crowd around the large flat-screen TV was like a miniature global family. It included Europeans, some bemused American and Chinese tourists, and a solitary Japanese. Evening light was still fading in Europe when Japan won 3-1 to enter the final 16. Seven hours ahead in time, and well past their midnight, the land of the rising sun erupted in jubilation. Distances and time zones didn’t matter.

Such scenes were being repeated as various teams advanced or dropped out in the tournament. This sporting event is tipped to be the most-watched television event in history. Hundreds of broadcasters are transmitting the World Cup to a cumulative TV audience that FIFA estimates to reach more than 26 billion people. Some TV channels offer high definition (HD) or 3-D quality images to enhance the mass viewing experience.

‘Live’ from the Earth

The operative word here is ‘live’ – kick by kick, goal by goal, as it happens. Arthur C Clarke, who in 1945 first envisaged the use of geostationary satellites for global broadcasting, once suggested a neat phrase to sum up this remarkable phenomenon: How the World was One.

For the past month, the winning formula for unifying the Global Family seemed to be: international football + live broadcasts + live coverage via the web and mobile phones.

And it’s by no means a passive family of couch potatoes. Media and telecom companies have launched mobile applications, most of which offer live scores, news updates or interactive features. Some integrated with social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter. As Associated Press reported when the tournament kicked off: “With games airing live on cell phones and computers, the World Cup will get more online coverage than any major sporting event yet”.

Online or offline, the result is the same: people from all walks of life are endlessly debating individual games and speculating on the eventual outcomes. How refreshing it is that, for once, we are arguing about a game, and not politics, economics or religion.

If only we could continue to live on Planet Football…

These myriad conversations were unfolding to the upbeat tune of the FIFA World Cup Anthem, “Wavin’ Flag” (The Celebration Mix). Sung by Somali-Canadian artist K’naan, it might as well be our planetary anthem — an idea that some social activists and artistes have dreamed about for decades.

And what better place can anchor this phenomenon than South Africa, the Rainbow Nation?

Mandela Magic

They’ve been here before. Fifteen years ago, the country hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Shortly after his election in 1994, President Nelson Mandela realized how his nation was still racially and economically divided in the wake of apartheid. Running up to the championship, he hatched a little plan with the captain of South Africa’s rugby team. The game became more than a game (it always does!). The nation with 11 official languages and many dialects was soon speaking the universal language of sport.

This intriguing story is recounted in Clint Eastwood’s remarkable 2009 film Invictus, starring Morgan Freeman as Mandela. It’s also a strong reminder of the power of live television. That’s what an astute Mandela harnessed to bring all South Africans under the new flag of his resurgent nation.

He didn’t issue any decrees to the country’s pluralistic media. There were no lofty speeches, slogans or ‘infomercials’ extolling the virtues of national unity. Instead, Mandela reached out to the Rugby team, and let real life images do the talking. Images showing blacks, whites and others across the vast country cheering a (mostly white and initially unpopular) South African team were poignant — and wholly effective. (Leaders of other post-conflict nations, please note.)

The football and TV screen both have an addictive effect over our minds. Add live broadcasts to the mix, and that power is suddenly multiplied. The world football federation FIFA, with its 208 member associations, is probably more influential — and certainly better known — than the United Nations, with its 192 member states. The difference is in media outreach. It signifies the rise of soft power in our always-connected information society.

On second thoughts, those invading aliens don’t need to worry too much about the Earth’s political leaders or their armies. Without firing a single shot, the globalised media have quietly taken over our Global Village — and now it’s too late to resist! We can argue on its merits and demerits, but the facts are indisputable.

If the ETs want to meet the real sources of global power, they must look for the Emperors of Eyeballs, and wizards of web and mobile. Whoever wins on July 11, these are the guys who will be laughing all the way to their banks.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene blogs on media, culture and development at http://movingimages.wordpress.com.  Suspicions of him being an alien spy have never been proven.

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Being younger, eager and more idealistic, I asked the Pakistani space chiefs if the ‘New Moon’ would also usher in a new era of information disclosure for the hitherto secretive space programme. Pakistan had recently returned to civilian rule after many years of dictatorship, and Benazir Bhutto was Prime Minister (in her first term). The political mood was generally upbeat.

My question only elicited enigmatic smiles. I later found out — from Pakistani journalists and independent scientists — that they weren’t allowed to ask critical questions about the country’s nuclear or space programmes. Or they could ask any questions, but no answers would be forthcoming because that could affect ‘national security’.

The message was clear: democracy or not, some sacred cows always enjoy their privileged status! This has certainly been the case with both the space and nuclear programmes in India and Pakistan: they have been shielded from public and media scrutiny for decades.

For the past few months, it seemed as if we too were following this South Asian tradition. Plans to build Sri Lanka’s own satellites were announced and pursued with little information disclosure and no public debate. The government wanted to launch our very own ‘sacred cows’ into orbit. We the public were to just applaud on cue, and then cough up the money for it…

At least, that was the case until earlier this month. Suddenly, there seems to be a change of heart. In a interview on 6 June 2010 covering a range of issues, head of the Telecom Regulatory Commission (TRC) disclosed that the government was not going ahead with the much-hyped project. At least not in its originally announced form.

Anusha Pelpita, the TRC’s Director General, was quoted as saying: “To set up the satellite, there’s a cost of US$ 20 million. After sending it in orbit, it is US$ 160 to US$ 180 million per annum, which is not feasible.”

He added that the TRC will not proceed with Surrey Satellite Technology Ltd (SSTL), the British firm commissioned to help Sri Lanka to get ready for building and operating its own satellites. The TRC was not averse to launching a satellite per se, but they were ‘exploring other options such as hiring satellites’.

This is the first time in over 15 months that the high costs have been acknowledged. Mr Pelpita gets full credit for being candid and cautious – attributes his agency has not displayed so far in its pursuit of this high-cost, high-tech project. Let’s hope that he will also open up the issue for informed public discussion which has been lacking until now.

LEO and GEO

The satellite project was announced in February 2009 and appeared to gain momentum during the year. Going by official statements and media reports, the plan was to launch not one but two satellites.

The first, to be sent to Low-Earth Orbit (LEO), was an imaging satellite to keep a dedicated eye on our island and the seas around it. Moving somewhere between 160 and 2,000 km above the Earth, it was to help us in both good times (economic activity) and bad (disasters).

The LEO satellite was to be named after the late Sir Arthur C Clarke, the visionary writer who was the first to propose the idea of communications satellites (comsats) back in 1945. The geostationary orbit he calculated for such satellites – invaluable for today’s broadcast and telecom services – lies 36,000 km above the Earth, far higher than the LEOs. (The multibillion dollar comsat industry fondly calls it the ‘Clarke Orbit’. In 2000 Eutelsat, Europe’s leading satellite operator, named one of its comsats in Sir Arthur’s honour.)

Sir Arthur, with whom I worked for 21 years, had his own nickname for LEOs: Anti-Clarke Orbits! Indeed, it seemed a bit incongruous to name a LEO satellite after him. (Despite his well known ego, Sir Arthur never sought personal edifices in his memory. When a journalist once asked him about monuments, he said: “Go to any well-stocked library, and look around…”)

But the TRC decided — without asking the Clarke family or Estate — that the LEO shall be named after Arthur C Clarke. The regulator had its eyes set on the Clarke Orbit too: a second satellite was to be launched there a couple of years later, to be used for ‘broadcasting, communications and high speed Internet’. Its cost? An estimated US$ 100 million (about Rs. 11.3 billion).

Such high price tags never seemed to dampen the enthusiasm of the project’s chief promoter, former TRC chief Priyantha Kariyapperuma. In fact, he envisaged potential savings in the very project where his successor now sees none.

He argued that these satellites would ‘bring about a huge foreign exchange saving’ as Sri Lanka was currently dependent on satellites of other countries for broadcasting, telecommunications and ‘even defence-related information’. No specific figures were given.

Mr Kariyapperuma imagined more ambitious uses for the LEO satellite: “Our Exclusive Economic Zone will probably expand this year from 200 nautical miles to about 800 nautical miles. The most efficient and cost effective way to monitor such a large expanse of ocean will be to use the LEO satellite.”

Curiously enough, the satellite project was being pursued by the telecom regulator despite there being other state agencies mandated to promote various space technologies. These include the Survey Department and Meteorological Department – they have been using internationally sourced satellite imagery and data for decades. Our lives are better and safer for it.

Since that first announcement, the former TRC chief made various statements to the media at regular intervals. We heard, for example:

• Sri Lanka was to set up its own space agency for which a new law was being drawn up.
• The TRC signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) in November 2009 with SSTL of UK (this is what the new chief now wants to call off).
• TRC was being approached by American and Malaysian satellite operators keen on winning the lucrative contract.

Age of spin

This merry-go-round continued for a full year. The first signs of hesitation emerged in March 2010, when an unnamed TRC official told a journalist that the agency was ‘seriously rethinking’ the satellite project.

He/she was quoted as saying: “We have not decided to go ahead with the project until we figure out whether it’s worthwhile…at the moment we are assessing all options – whether we can lease an existing satellite or if we are to launch, repayment method and pay back period. We have to do this as this is all public funds.” (Emphasis mine.)

To be sure, the TRC is not the only state agency that over-promises and under-delivers. The ICT Agency is another shining example. Vanity and ego-massaging are to be expected in our media-saturated society, but it becomes a serious concern when spin replaces public discussion and debate on national decisions and investments.

We can only guess why the TRC suddenly had a change of mind about the satellite. Maybe its spin doctors will soon explain it away. That would be revealing, but not sufficient.

Meaningful debate can only happen with specific information. Until now, the TRC has not disclosed detailed plans or cost-benefit analyses about this mega project. If these exist, they are not in the public domain.

In this info-vacuum, concerned citizens could ask only top-level questions. As Dr Rohan Samarajiva, a former telecom regulator now heading the ICT policy research organization LIRNEasia urged in mid February 2009:  “Before large amounts of taxpayer money are committed to this project, it would be good to have a broad debate on the pros and cons. I have not been able to identify any pros, but that was not for the lack of trying.”

In his regular column, he also asked (referring to the planned geostationary satellite): “One wonders whether a LKR 11,500,000,000 (11.5 billion) satellite is the highest priority for this little island which seems to be doing pretty well in terms of TV, radio and telecommunications. Satellites are usually required by large continental or archipelagic countries like India and Indonesia.”

The public-funded regulator didn’t respond to these questions from the concerned public. Disappointingly, too, very few others joined the debate. Where are our public intellectuals hiding?

I claim no in-depth expertise in this subject. As a long-standing space enthusiast, I wasn’t convinced this orbital dream was worth its price. So I joined the online discussion, saying: “Building and launching satellites is an expensive business, and operating them once they are in orbit also requires high tech, high cost systems…The bigger issue is what value addition (beyond ego-boosting and chest-thumping) that our own satellite can offer that we cannot commercially buy in the highly competitive satellite services market.”

We were frustrated by the TRC’s complete silence. We were also astonished how the other relevant state agencies – as well as the Ministry of Science and Technology – kept mum when the telecom regulator was encroaching into their areas of expertise.

Charismatic Mega-science?

Astonished, but not really surprised. The silence fitted into a pattern that has been spreading in developing countries for a while. In the late 20th century, many such countries — including some barely able to provide basic needs to their people — started spending scarce public funds on uneconomical ventures such as national cars, national airlines and nuclear reactors. Building one’s own satellite, irrespective of economics, is a continuation of the same practice.

I have called these examples of ‘charismatic mega-science’: exorbitant high-tech ventures that governments love to impose on their people without any public debate. Meant to showcase technological accomplishment, such projects rarely build local capacity or address development priorities. Often they drain funds from health, education or scientific research. In strict cost-benefit terms, many such projects remain white elephants forever. Some are cloaked in secrecy –- real ‘sacred cows’ beyond any criticism or public accountability.

Independent academics, civil society activists and journalists questioning such mega-science projects risk being labelled ‘anti-national’ or ‘anti-development’. (I experienced this last year when I questioned the appalling track record of a government outfit named after Arthur C Clarke which has become a disgrace to the man’s memory. Some ‘reader comments’ sought to shoot the messenger while neatly side-stepping my substantive arguments.)

But let’s be optimistic. Now that the TRC has paused in its orbital adventure, there is yet a chance for good sense to prevail.

The satellite is not the only mega-science project being pursued in post-war Sri Lanka. In June 2009, the Ministry of Science and Technology directed the Atomic Energy Authority to set up a national committee to study technical and financial aspects of setting up a nuclear power plant. Some environmental activists have already expressed concern, highlighting safety and public health risks, high cost of construction and the unresolved problem of nuclear waste disposal. In September 2009, the renowned legal scholar Dr Christopher Weeramantry, former vice president of the International Court of Justice, called for adequate public debate before any final decisions are made.

That debate has also not taken place yet, and there have been surprisingly few voices speaking out. But as long as public funds and public safety are involved, charismatic mega-science projects must take the public into confidence.

Sacred cows – whether orbital or radioactive – can’t be allowed free range.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene worked with Sir Arthur Clarke as his research associate for over two decades. He blogs on media, culture and development at: http://movingimages.wordpress.com The views in this essay are entirely his own.

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The election campaigns for the past many weeks have seen the usual glut of rhetoric and promises. Our endlessly bickering political parties rarely agree on anything, so it’s refreshing to see a broad consensus on what this election is fundamentally about: future prosperity.

That’s no coincidence. This is the first time we elect our law makers since the long drawn and brutal civil war ended in May 2009. We have been looking back – or nervously looking around — for much of the past three decades. It’s about time we finally looked forward.

How we wish Sir Arthur C Clarke was still with us at this crucial juncture in our history! For half a century up to his death in March 2008, the author, explorer and visionary was Sri Lanka’s amiable ‘tour guide’ to that ‘Undiscovered Country’ called the Future.

Whoever wins this week’s election, shaping a better future will need clarity of purpose, hard work and persistence. Those looking for long term vision can start with the substantial volume of essays, interviews and speeches that Clarke has left behind. These form a veritable treasure trove of practical and pragmatic advice from the man who, during his illustrious career, commanded respect in both the White House and the Kremlin — as well as in Hollywood, Silicon Valley and other global centres of hard or soft power.

Clarke often said that there was an infinite array of possible futures: our actions (and inaction) determine which one becomes real. We create our own futures through our choices at individual, family and national levels.

“Despite all claims to the contrary, no one can predict the future,” he used to say. “I have always resisted all attempts to label me a ‘prophet.’ I prefer the term ‘extrapolator’.”

Sir Arthur Clarke – Feet on Lankan soil, gaze on the future…

Clarke was no armchair soothsayer — he had vivid imagination, but also knew the limits of crystal ball gazing. “What I have tried to do, at least in my non-fiction, is to outline possible ‘futures’ — at the same time pointing out that totally unexpected inventions or events can make any forecasts absurd after a very few years…”

While imagining scenarios for humanity’s evolution and place in the cosmos, Clarke took a special interest in Sri Lanka’s near-future prospects. For half a century, he remained a ‘critical cheer-leader’ for the island nation’s march to progress.

As he summed up in 2005, “During the time I lived here, I have seen my adopted homeland advance in various ways, but sometimes it has also taken wrong turns. If we have the humility to learn from past mistakes, the next half century can be far better than the last.”

This cartoon by W R Wijesoma appeared in ‘The Observer’ newspaper in late 1960s. It shows leading politicians of the day seeking Clarke’s predictions for their futures!

Managing Diversity

Clarke’s guidance for Sri Lanka’s future development touched on many aspects, such as improving the quality of education, expanding coverage of telecom services and diversifying the mix of energy sources. As a diver, he also advocated conserving the coastal and marine environments.

He placed much value on investing in people. Having achieved impressive feats in health and education, he said, Sri Lanka’s next step was “not so much to add years to life, but to add life to years“. Future economic growth would have meaning only if it was socially and environmentally sound — and if the benefits were shared more equitably, he said.

But Clarke’s vision for his island home stretched beyond simply raising the Gross National Product (GNP) or building infrastructure. Adept at relating the micro with macro, he foresaw emerging trends ahead of many. He also tried to prevent undesirable futures from happening.

For example, he watched with concern how Sri Lanka’s population more than doubled in two generations since independence. He was an unhappy witness to the once idyllic island being torn apart by ethnic strife and ultra-nationalism. Managing human numbers and human diversity was among the biggest challenges he identified for Sri Lanka in the 21st Century.

In the last two decades of his life, he repeatedly called for greater tolerance and harmony among the various ethnic and religious groups all of who call Sri Lanka their home. He cautioned: “We should not allow the primitive forces of territoriality and aggression to rule our minds and shape our actions. If we do, all our material progress and economic growth will amount to nothing.”

He chose strategic moments to renew his plea for a peaceful end to the Lankan war, such as the golden jubilee of political independence (1998) and the aftermath of the Asian tsunami (2004).

Clarke never gave up hope, even when conditions looked particularly bleak. In a short video message released in December 2007 to mark his 90th birthday, Clarke listed ‘lasting peace in Sri Lanka’ as one of his three last wishes in life. Alas, he never lived to see any of them come true.

Some of the best brains on the planet are currently working on his other two wishes — detecting signs of alien life, and developing clean energy sources. Meanwhile, we Lankans must now consolidate the hard-won peace while healing the wounds of war.

Clarke’s vision can still guide us in this daunting task. Here’s a typical gem: “I’m optimistic that the land that has shown tremendous resilience over the centuries, and practiced a rare type of tolerance, could still return to normalcy –- although we should ensure that grounds for conflict are eliminated forever.”

That’s easier said than done. But if Clarke were alive, he would tell us that the alternative is far worse. Voting for the Undiscovered Country is only the first step in a long journey.

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene worked with Sir Arthur Clarke for 21 years (1987 – 2008) as his research assistant, and blogs on media and society at: http://movingimages.wordpress.com

• Sir Arthur C Clarke: A life-long public intellectual
• Imagine and innovate to honour Sir Arthur C Clarke!
• ICTs, science fiction and disasters: A conversation with Nalaka Gunawardene
• A Tale of Three Telescopes and a Blind News Media
• Arthur C Clarke’s World of 2012: Insights from his Titanic Novel

Piyal Parakrama on Sri Lanka 2048 TV show

Piyal Parakrama’s smile was regular and genuine, but it could be also be a bit misleading. Those who engaged him found that there was a keen mind, passionate heart and a sharp (yet always courteous) tongue behind that disarming smile. Opponents dismissed him lightly at their peril.

In public and media debates, Piyal could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee. That flutter and buzz are now abruptly silenced with his sudden death on March 3 at age 49. Another public spirited player has left the stage all too soon.

Piyal combined the roles of environmentalist, educator, researcher and media personality. He wasn’t part of the Colombo elite dabbling in a bit of green activism (mostly concerning wildlife or garbage) in their spare time. Instead, he straddled the parallel worlds of grassroots reality and the often ephemeral preoccupations of Colombo.

Not many knew him in formal capacities as the Executive Director of the Centre for Environmental and Nature Studies, or as founder president of the Nature Conservation Group, or as a consultant to various state and academic institutions. Some might remember his work at the now-defunct Sri Lanka Environment Congress (SLEC) that networked the country’s green groups. These various labels and ‘hats’ don’t really matter when assessing his overall contribution to the conservation movement. Piyal Parakrama was his own distinctive brand — admired, trusted or feared by different sections of society.

Piyal had emerged as a prominent member of what the late Ajith Samaranayake called Sri Lanka’s post-1956 generation: Sinhala-educated, with a high degree of political consciousness and deeply immersed in the art and culture of their times. How tragic, then, that Piyal should depart hastily – just like Ajith himself did, three years ago – when the children of 1956 are consolidating themselves in our politics, arts and commerce.

Given our common interests in development issues and the media, Piyal and I moved in partly overlapping circles. Our paths crossed frequently, and we shared public platforms, newspaper space and broadcast airtime. We even worked together for a few months in the late 1990s at the Sri Lanka Environmental Television Project. His communications skills were invaluable in rendering a number of international environmental films into Sinhala. More than a dozen years later, some are still in circulation.

We didn’t always agree. Sometimes we argued furiously over issues that we both cared deeply about but analysed differently. I felt he was too idealistic in his visions of reviving natural resource management practices of the past. Everyone is entitled to their bit of romanticism, for sure, but when advocating policy reforms or behaviour change, we need to root our positions on more realistic ground.

L to R – Nalaka Gunawardene, Mark Harvey (Internews) & Piyal Parakrama in Nepal, Oct 1996

Biodiversity

For example, Piyal passionately believed that Sri Lanka must go back to being an agriculture-dominated economy. (In 2008, agriculture’s contribution to the national GDP was a mere 12.1 per cent.) But unlike those who look back at 25 centuries of history in wistful nostalgia and try to revive times irretrievably lost, he rationalised his position. In a media interview given days after Sri Lanka’s long-drawn civil war ended, he explained his vision based on a ‘natural resource account’ for the country: “This is just like running a private company where it operates within the available resources, unlike the government which lives beyond its means.”
In that same interview, he underlined the need to develop agriculture in the North which was once very productive and grew a fifth of Sri Lanka’s food. He added: “We need to promote agro-eco tourism. We need to promote a tourism that will not ruin the environment and take away the little resources we have.”

Piyal’s forte was biodiversity – the collective term for all plants, animals (wild and domesticated) and their various habitats from forests and mountains to the coasts and oceans. His interest and knowledge were nurtured first at the Young Zoologists Association – where he remained a volunteer for 30 years – and later at the Lumumba Friendship University in Russia, where he studied biology from 1983 to 1986.

During the past three decades, Piyal and fellow activists have taken up the formidable challenges of conserving Sri Lanka’s biodiversity, long under multiple pressures such as growing human numbers, rising human aspirations, and gaps in law enforcement. Adding to the sense of urgency was the 1999 designation of Sri Lanka as one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots, where high levels of endemic species (found nowhere else in the wild) were threatened with extinction. Public and media attention is disproportionately focused on a few charismatic mega-fauna like elephants and leopards; in reality, dozens of other animal and plant species are being edged out.

In search of viable solutions for entrenched conservation problems, Piyal collaborated with scientists, educators, journalists and grassroots activists. Some industrialists and investors hated his guts, but he was much sought after by schools, universities and community groups across the country. Concerned researchers and government officials sometimes gave him sensitive information which he could make public in ways they couldn’t.

Some eco-protests grew into sustained campaigns. Among them were the call to save the Buona-Vista reef at Rumassala and struggles against large scale sugarcane plantations in Bibile. A current campaign focuses on the Iran-funded Uma Oya multipurpose project, which involves damming a river for irrigation and power generation purposes.

While environmentalists ultimately haven’t block development projects, their agitations helped increase environmental and public health safeguards. Occasionally, projects were moved to less damaging locations – as happened in mid 2008, when Sri Lanka’s second international airport was moved away from Weerawila, next to the Bundala National Park.

Political flirtations

The hard truth, however, is that our green activists have lost more struggles than they have won since the economy was liberalized in 1977. They have not been able to stand up to the all-powerful executive presidency, ruling the country since 1978 — most of that time under Emergency regulations. In that period, we have had ‘green’ and ‘blue’ parties in office, sometimes in coalitions with the ‘reds’. But their environmental record is, at best, patchy. In many cases, local or foreign investors — acting with the backing of local politicians and officials — have bulldozed their way on promises of more jobs and incomes. Environmentalists have sometimes been maligned as anti-development or anti-people. In contemporary Sri Lanka, that’s just one step away from being labeled anti-national or anti-government.

Piyal was astute enough to know the limits of knowledge-based advocacy and grassroots agitation in Sri Lanka. Maybe that’s why he also flirted with party politics. He was the founding president of the Green Party of Sri Lanka, a duly registered (even if little known) political party.

It was started to address systemic and structural reforms needed to place Sri Lanka on a more sustainable and equitable path of economic development. The founders wanted to promote concepts such as the ecological footprint and environmental justice. But in our tribal political culture, issue-based political advocacy can only go so far. I have no idea where the Green Party stands on key issues of the day, or whether it retains its original green character today.

While Piyal’s loyalty to the larger environmental or social causes was never in question, I sometimes wondered about the company he kept. A case in point was the Patriotic National Movement, a motley collection of Sinhala nationalists, west-bashers and conspiracy theorists. I’m not sure if that was due to simple pragmatism or deep conviction – we chose not to debate politics in our encounters.

One point where we had total agreement was on the power of mass media to inform and influence public opinion. He tapped every kind of mass media to reach as many people as possible in the shortest possible time. He was a regular contributor to newspapers and a popular guest on radio and TV talk shows.

He was also a trusted source of news and opinions for many journalists.

The last time we collaborated was in such a media venture. In mid 2008, Piyal joined an hour-long TV debate we produced as part of the Sri Lanka 2048 series. The show discussed the various choices and trade-offs that had to be made today to create a more sustainable Sri Lanka over the next 40 years. Piyal could speak authoritatively on several topics we covered in the 10-part series, but I invited him to the debate on managing freshwater. With his deep knowledge of traditional water and soil conservation systems, he was truly in his element there.

High and low shrill

I was always impressed (and even envious) of his command of Sinhala: his was a friendly style, informed and idiomatic without being excessively technocratic or legalistic. Piyal could deliver a coherent ‘sound bite’ to be used by a broadcast journalist, and also speak at length on the same topic. Not many activists or academics can manage this feat.

Another of his skills was what I call the variable shrill: ability to increase or tone down the amount of rhetoric to suit the occasion. Whenever he joined a public event or TV debate that I moderated, Piyal heeded my request for a low-shrill, high-substance contribution. (I’m all for plurality of views, but believe that rhetoric – like spices – is best taken in moderate quantities.)

Activism is not an easy path anywhere, anytime, and especially so in modern day Sri Lanka. All activists – whether working on democracy, governance, social justice or environment – are struggling to reorient themselves in the post-conflict, middle-income country they suddenly find themselves in. Their old rhetoric and strategies no longer seem to motivate the people or influence either the polity or policy. Many of them haven’t yet crossed the Other Digital Divide, and risk being left behind by the march of technology.

Don’t get me wrong. I salute every activist who comes forward to champion the public interest on behalf of a (mostly) passive and apathetic public. Most Lankans are either contented with the status quo, or just too preoccupied with their daily survival, to worry about the bigger picture. Activists work like the proverbial elves while the rest of us take it easy.

As indeed Piyal did, all his adult life, with few material rewards. He had no illusions about the hardships of his chosen career path. He also walked the talk, living frugally and treading very lightly on the earth. To his credit, he never abandoned the good struggle or sacrificed it all to become yet another presidential advisor…

Piyal heeded Anita Roddick’s advice to fellow activists worldwide: take it personally. Perhaps he took it too personally. Sitting next to Piyal’s silent body last week, his mother told me that he had no major worries or regrets in his life, and I want to believe her. But I also know there is little respite for those who care too deeply about the public commons and the common good.

We have been warned.

~

Science writer Nalaka Gunawardene dreams of becoming an activist one day, but for now, he remains a ‘critical cheer-leader’ of those who are more courageous. He blogs on media, society and development at http://movingimages.wordpress.com

• Is Sri Lanka’s Road to Rio +20 Paved with Lies?
• Humans vs. elephants: Sri Lanka’s tragic on-going conflict
• Falling from grace: On Sripathi’s demise and using terror against terror
• The Loss of Identity: Development and Agriculture
• Subsidizing Addiction?

As with all government hospitals, they first wanted to record the patient’s basic bio data. Fair enough. I provided the child’s name, age and street address. For some reason, the form also asked for the patient’s religion. Before I could say anything, the nurse in charge wrote ‘Buddhist’.

Now, this was both incorrect and highly presumptuous. But when I objected, it sparked off an argument. The formidable woman insisted that with a ‘good Sinhalese surname’ like ours, we simply had to be Buddhists!

When I said her assumption was wrong, she asked me with some disdain: are you then a Christian? No again. Now she was beginning to be get really irritated: who is this man who speaks fluent Sinhala, but is neither Buddhist nor Christian?

I was not about to declare in public a matter I consider to be intensely private: my religious faith. With the fellow public behind me becoming impatient, and the public servant in front of me taking a dogged stand, I retreated with a heavy heart. (I later paid a few thousand rupees for the same course of vaccines at a private clinic, where my religious faith or ethnicity was never questioned.)

Labelled
I thought this was an isolated incident, and didn’t think further. But a few months later, I ran into a similar situation at my area police station. I’d gone to make a formal complaint about a serious matter concerning personal safety, and once again, the process started with my bio data. When it came to fixing labels, the woman constable recording my statement categorised me as ‘Sinhala Buddhist’ — without even raising her head from the big book of complaints.

In case you are wondering, I bear absolutely no tell-tale signs of belonging any faith: I don’t wear a religious symbol as jewellery, or wrap pirith nool (pieces of thread blessed by monks) on my wrist. I carefully avoid sprinkling my everyday speech with any religious phrases. Even my occasional swearing is devoid of religious references.  (An observant friend once likened my colloquial speech to that of cartoon charter Tintin’s: no harsh swear words, and only secular references.)

Must biology be destiny in the 21st Century? Blind chance at birth placed me in a family of ethnic Sinhala parents who also happened to be Buddhists. But these cosmic accidents don’t make me a Buddhist any more than, say, I become a believing and practising Aquarian simply because I was born during the month of February. My brand loyalty to the randomly assigned religion and star sign are about the same: zero.

Just so that all my cards are on the table, let me add that I have not practised any religion or belonged to any faith (with their clear trappings of scripture, priests and places of worship) from my teen years.[1] That’s 30 years of firm uninterrupted secular humanism.

Indeed, ‘secular humanist’ is the only label I proudly wear in public and private. But in the Sinhala Buddhist Republic of Sri Lanka that my land of birth is now turning into, various public agencies find this ‘aberration’ either unsettling or unacceptable. My self-exclusion on matters of faith makes me an instant misfit in many state procedures. And yet, we are supposedly an open and democratic society…and in theory at least, not a religious state.

But that matters little in practice. For example, I recently gave evidence under oath in a court of law in a civil case. All along, my lawyer advised me to just ‘pretend’ to be a Buddhist for that occasion. Apparently the system can’t handle ‘spiritually neutral’ — my preferred (and very honest) answer when asked about my faith.

I don’t see how and why a citizen’s religious affiliation – or its complete absence – should matter in the least when dispensing vaccines or justice in the modern world. Isn’t this question itself a residual habit from colonial times that no longer serves any purpose? Actually, I find it worse than redundant; it’s plain insulting.

Religion is not the only private matter that our governments love to poke their clumsy and unwelcome noses into. Also falling into this category: everyone’s sanitary habits, and sexual relations between consenting adults.

No Entry
For sure, what private individuals do in the privacy of their homes can have some implications for the community, economy and even national statistics. The modern nation state is a composite of all its citizens. In today’s highly inter-dependent and interlinked world, no man or woman or nation can be an island.

Despite this, there are at least three aspects of modern living where choices must remain strictly and entirely personal: that concerns what we do in our bed rooms, wash rooms and (metaphorical) shrine rooms.

I, for one, will resist all arms of the state and government, as well as self-appointed guardians of our morals and values, from intruding into any of these hallowed spaces of my free will and choice.

Especially when it comes to matters of faith – or its complete avoidance – the Jackboot of government means absolutely nothing to what I think or how I choose.

Well, at least until the Thought Police arrives…

Explanation for non-Lankan readers:
The ethnic mix and religious mix in Sri Lanka don’t coincide, making it (at least for me!) a delightfully chaotic melting pot. While some Sinhalese are Buddhist and some Tamils are Hindu in their choice of faith, that is not to be assumed. Indeed, there are statistically significant numbers of both Sinhalese and Tamils who are Christians (of various denominations). While all our muslim friends are Islamic, there are also some ethnic Sinhalese and Tamils who have converted to Islam. So one has to be very careful in making generalisations, and it’s altogether better to avoid them….

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• Spirtuality, Religion and Human Conflict
• The ‘dobis’ in Colombo: Unseen people, used by most
• Bigoted monks and militant mobs: Is this Buddhism in Sri Lanka today?
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