Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’

A note on a father

It was one of those phone calls that one would always remember, the shock it generates pervades all through a lifetime. On Monday 17 August 2009, I received a phone call from my mother, a teacher at Gateway International School, Kandy. In a deeply tormented but extremely strong, poised tone, and keeping her calm to the fullest, she said to me that at around 6.30 pm Sri Lankan time that day, my father, aged sixty-nine, passed away in a hospital in Kandy. She was there until the last minute, and saw him release his last breath, after thirty-three years of marriage. A senior manager at the Bank of Ceylon, my father retired from BoC almost ten years ago. He was one of the kindest and most good-hearted individuals I have ever met, and will ever meet. Hailing from a rural household in the mountains of central Sri Lanka, he was a man who made his way to the island’s national…

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  • 19 Mar, 2009
  • 20 Comments
  • Colombo,
    Uncategorized

Imagine and innovate to honour Sir Arthur C Clarke!

Sir Arthur C Clarke on Hikkaduwa beach, photo by Rohan de Silva Sir Arthur Clarke’s first death anniversary falls on 19 March 2009 Sir Arthur’s 90th birthday reflections (effectively his public goodbye) is available online at:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qLdeEjdbWE&feature=channel_page During his illustrious career spanning over 60 years, Sir Arthur C Clarke received a large number of honours, awards and accolades from scientific, academic and literary bodies worldwide. At one time or another, he won all the top science fiction literary awards. He received honorary doctorates from universities in the east and west. In 1998, Queen Elizabeth II knighted him for his ‘services to literature’. In his adopted homeland of Sri Lanka, where he lived 52 of his 90 years, he received both the highest presidential honour for science (Vidya Jyothi, 1986) and the highest civilian honour (Lankabhimanya, 2005). The current government marked his 90th birthday with a presidential ceremony graced by visiting astronauts and dignitaries from several space-faring nations. At the time of…

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Old Truths and Old Men

Stupid Old Men I don’t want to end up being a stupid old man Just look at what they have done to our world in vain What’s the big deal in going to the moon As he yet settles score by inflicting pain War on terror, crusade or witch hunts Stupid old men run scared to ruin Peace on earth has little chance to shine I wonder whether it’s the testosterone drain that give men the jitters when age is on the gain I need to wise up and control this mind game Or else I will end up a stupid old man Dig not my heals in the old men’s club When science of Descartes takes the quantum leap Calling it mumbo jumbo quackery they oppress The new magic of now you see and now you don’t Prophesies are fulfilled with the power of belief Believe love and happiness, we get well Believe hate and sadness, we get sick…

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  • 19 Apr, 2008
  • 1 Comment
  • Uncategorized

Anti-competitive Activities, the source of rice crisis

Rice, which is the staple food in Sri Lanka, has become the subject of a national issue today. Government appears to being in the dark as to how to tackle issues confronting rice in the context of a market economy. As it is well known, since independence, many successive governments through various public spending programmes, supported by foreign aid, developed the rice production sector with a vehement dedication with the aim of making Sri Lanka a rice self-sufficient country. However, neither producers nor consumers of rice appeared to have benefited to the best satisfaction due to various reasons. There is a large number of small-sized rice producers scattered around the country. The smallness of their unit of operation precludes the fact that any single producer does not have the power to influence the outcomes of the rice market. On the other hand, the large number of rice consumers also does not individually have the power to influence the market outcomes….

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Groundviews back online, with new features and enhanced for mobile phones

Groundviews is fully back online after an upgrade of its back-end content management system to the latest version of WordPress. While the site looks and feels the same, improvements under the hood make it more secure, responsive and easier to use. There are also several significant new features to the site: You now no longer have to register to write a comment. A combination of Akismet and the WP Captcha Free plug-in ensures that bots are kept at bay and legitimate comments make it through. I can attest that the combination has dramatically reduced comment spam. Still not 100% fool proof though – so if there’s a comment that doesn’t appear after 24 hours that you think is in line with the submission guidelines, holler and I’ll see if I can dig it out.   Another new feature is the list of posts under each article that alerts readers to content similar to that which they were reading. This allows…

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Scheduled downtime for Groundviews

Groundviews will be down tomorrow, 10th April, for a scheduled upgrade. The site should be up and running as normal by 11th April the latest, but we don’t really expect it to be inaccessible for anything more than a few hours at most. For the geeks out there, we are upgrading our back-end content management system to the latest version of WordPress (2.5), which strengthens security and adds some neat features to help authors publish their content more easily. We’ve also disabled site registration – we hope temporarily. An unusual amount of bot accounts terminating with mail.ru or ukr.net (with IP’s unsurprisingly terminating in Russia) flooded the site recently and with a resulting increase in comment spam that became tedious to manage. Until we figure out a solution to keep world exclusive Britney Spears without underwear videos, cheap Viagra ads and graphic descriptions of trophy wives from Moscow away from the site, registrations will be halted. Even without site registration,…

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Some rudimentary thoughts on Arthur C. Clarke’s funeral

There may have been some two to three hundred mourners at his funeral. Most of them seemed to have been his close acquaintances or those known to him at least remotely. I don’t know how many scientists or science fiction writers were there to represent the field of Clarke’s scribe. From Sinhala art field there were two, namely Ajith Thilakasena and Sugath Watagadhara, and one politician, Prof. Thissa Vitharana. From the Buddhist clergy, 19 monks appeared remarkably lacking any public figures among them. They had come uninvited and on their own, not to hold any religious ceremony but to pay their last sincere respects to a great rationalist. No rituals and no eulogies. The funeral lasted barely 15 minutes with the body brought at 3.45 being buried at 4.00 pm. I consider this humble nature of his funeral as a sign of a great farewell, not letting those pompous meaningless rituals deemed fit only for corrupt politicians’ funerals, hamper the…

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A Punchi Problem

Dr. Rohan Edirisinghe, in a recent paper he compiled quoted G.K. Chesterton in ‘The Point of a Pin’ – it isn’t that they don’t see the solution, it’s that they can’t see the problem. This line echoed in my head for all the nights that I sat on stage observing the audience during Ruwanthie De Chickera’s ‘Forum at the Punchi’ last week. For the unitiated forum theatre is a dramatic genre which compels the audience to involve themselves in the action on stage, suggesting methods in which the plot and characters can develop. Ideally, the play begins with what is known as a ‘stem’ scene, which leads the characters upto a point of crisis, which the audience is then presented with. This is the crisis that audiences will attempt – through the subsequent scenes – to understand and resolve. The characters that act out their parts will take the audience suggestions within the parameters of their characters and no dues…

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Royal Thomian revisited

The Royal – Thomian is primarily about boys (including those disguised as older and wiser men). The general melee of a Royal – Thomian in our day would guarantee two things. More booze. More chaos. More riotous dancing. And then more booze. So I lied, that’s more than two – but in those days, we never kept count of anything during the Big Match. With fists flying at no one and everyone, the pitch was not the only place to crack balls. There were fights over girlfriends. There were fights over the last dregs of coconut nectar. There were fights over lyrics, deemed heretical by those who sang no better and on no less heretical topics. There were, however, never fights over religion or ethnicity. These mattered little, and the only boundaries that matters were those that raised the score. And while there were fights over territory, these were not linked to traditional homelands. Read A Royal Thomian family for…

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A Day at the Cricket

By Mark Gereis True sub-continental cricket is a freak phenomenon that hits Australia’s shores once every two or three years. I deliberately use the word ‘freak’ because I can’t explain it – in truth, I don’t think anybody is able to explain it. A certain magic permeates the atmosphere as we crowd the family television set in the company of friends and family. We hang-off each delivery that Muttiah runs into bowl; each six that Sanna sends crashing into the fans; every word uttered by our adopted uncle – Tony Greig. Watching cricket is very much a mutual experience. Half of the atmosphere is created by those waiting in eager anticipation of another of Sanga’s centuries. “Aiyoooooo…” is as close to an expletive that you will get during the course of a match. This is often accompanied by quick-witted humour; then a sudden outburst of laughter. Only the little ones fail to grasp the irony of the situation. Their little…

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  • 7 Aug, 2007
  • 0 Comment
  • Uncategorized

New email subscription service and Facebook integration

Groundviews is pleased to announce a new email subscription service (powered by RSSFwd) that enables you to conveniently receive all new content posted on the site in your Inbox. The new service significantly improves upon the one currently in operation and is less of a hassle to sign up with and manage. All existing subscribers to Groundviews are strongly advised to switch to the new service and discontinue the old. You can sign up on the homepage or by entering your email here. All articles on Groundviews can now be shared on Facebook, the social networking site that’s rapidly growing in popularity in Sri Lanka and around the world. Once you’ve opened your Facebook account, sharing an article is as simple as clicking on the “Share this article on Facebook” link at the end of every article (see image above). Repost This Article

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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