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| Sunday, 12 October 2003 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Whiz kid a winner with science fiction by Jayanthi Liyanage
Man is able to exercise omnipotence over his fellow creatures of the earth only by the fact that a 'drop in temperament' has frozen still their intellect. This alone holds back these creatures from gaining their true position in nature, who are "waiting, waiting, eager to be thawed out one day." If not for the fact that a meteorite had wiped the dinosaurs off the face of the earth, the Saurians would have reached an intellectual level rivalling that of the humans and would have governed the earth much more equitably than man who is avaricious, egotistic and blind to the suffering of his fellow creatures ... The Servants of the Empire in the extra-terrains, observing his mis-doings, set in motion the chain of events which would finally end his tyranny over the earth. The scientist, James, is surreptitiously chosen to unlock the secrets of the Galapagos crystal, which enables him to travel back and forth in time to the Dimension of Sancturay, unknown to his fellow beings, and change thought patterns and intelligence of Saurians, who would one day govern the New World. For his time machine, this sanctuary is just a hop beyond the Sinharaja Forest. So begins the astute plot which won the barely-nineteen Harsha Ruwan Wasalathanthri, the State Literary Award for the Best English Novel written by a local writer in 2002. The book titled "Dimensional Wonders - The Time Trek" succeeds in crossing the boundary of story-telling to a rather in-depth science fiction containing a very relevant social moral. He is today, perhaps, the only teenage science-fiction writer in the country. It is the third in a series of very readable seven novels he has completed on the theme, says this erudite youngster who passed out from Ananda College, Colombo, with excellent grades at A levels. He now aims at University entrance in Engineering or Information Technology, in which he can pursue the Maths he loves. His very first book, "Claws, the Jaguar," written at 12, won the State Literary Award for Best Juvenile Literature in 1999. The saga continued in "Onus to Preserve a Terrain" and his fourth book, "The Galactic Enforcers" still unprinted, states, "Mankind would learn from its mistakes and right its wrongs, and one day, develop a science to fulfil its ultimate mission of removing impurities from the human mind." Seven science fiction novels in six years, of which three are in print, and two won the highest State Literary Awards while still in teens. "Nobody can write science fiction unless he is a visionary of sorts. What is your vision?" I ask him. "I was outraged at what man was doing to his environment," begins Harsha. "But I must say that I wrote these books to entertain one person - myself. It's my fortune or misfortune that others have been entertained in the process." Conversing with Harsha, I am compelled to think that he is a prodigious reservoir of knowledge, refined through an excellent mastery of English, in discourse and penmanship. With him, I take a peep into Einstein's quantum theory, special theory of relativity, worm holes of the universe, mastery of acceleration and gravity in space travel, sensory deprivation in psychopathology and in his own words, "a dip of tentative toe in the quagmire of theology!" And he is already into his new novel, "Beyond the Human Soul", inspired by his readings into the workings of human mind and astral bodies. What I glimpse are the mental faculties of our new generation which should certainly augur well for the country. It is no wonder that all his books are foreworded by his mentor, Sir Arthur C. Clarke who has supported his application to become the only non-American among the "Science Fiction Writers of America." Harsha considers reading as brain fuel and all his fictional work is backed by facts weeded out from researching in books and the Discovery Channel. "Since his novels are in English we would like to send them to a foreign country but have not had the opportunity yet," says his father, B.A. Wasalathanthri who helped to produce the novelist by reading out an entire book to him each night! Harsha who was felicitated by his college for his feat returns the credit, saying, "I express my undying gratitude to my Principal, B.A. Abeyratne, my teachers, Sir Arthur and Nalaka Gunawardena for helping to build my literary career." His books produced as a result of grants provided to amateur writers by the National Library and Documentation Services Board, are already recommended reading at school libraries. ########### Surveying NGO territory NGOs in Sri Lanka. Past and Present Trends. by Udan Fernando Wasala Publications, 2003. Available at all book stores. Reviewed by Rev. Paul Caspersz SJ In less than a hundred eminently readable pages, all written with great clarity, Udan Fernando's book provides wide but concise coverage of an intriguing and expanding field. A Table on page 12 gives various estimates of the number of NGOs in Sri Lanka: they range from a low of 47 to a high of 50,000. It is a problem of definition or, as Fernando prefers, of nomenclature. What to call, or not to call, an NGO? A very small group of people who know one another meeting fairly regularly in an estate mandram or in a makeshift community hall in a village are probably NGOs. So probably is the Civil Rights Movement. Charles Abeysekera, then President of MIRJE, told me that he was not going to appear before the NGO Commission because MIRJE was not an NGO, but an "advocacy group". But then what of Alcoholics Anonymous? Does it not "advocate" abstention from all forms of the uplifting sprit? And traditional funeral societies? Will they too hitch on to the NGO wagon and proceed, sooner perhaps than later, to search for foreign donor funds? social landscape NGOs are now part of the social landscape in probably every country of the contemporary world. They come in all shapes and sizes. They may be classified into list with various acronyms, all ending, however, with the three magical signs, NGO. In alphabetical order, there are DENGOs or Development NGOs. If so, there should also be a-DENGOs, like Animal Protection Societies, without a development objective. There are Donor International NGOs, called DINGOs. There are also INGOs, or International NGOs, like Amnesty International. Most important in Sri Lanka are DONGOs, Doner NGOs, which form the subject matter of Fernando's book. At least one author speaks speak derisively of EN-GEE-OHs. The derision may only increase if to the list are added QUANGOs, quasi-NGOs which are one half NG and the other half G, as Janasaviya was. Worse still, there are GONGOs, Government NGOs which proceed blithely despite the contradiction of being governmental and non-governmental at the same time. If one speaks of country-specific NGOs, there are Afghan NGOs, or ANGOs. So may one soon speak of INDINGOs, or Indian NGOs, and SLANGOs, or Sri Lankan NGOs. Udan Fernando surmounts or bypasses the definitional impasse by saying that the term NGO "embraces a wide range of organizations from neighbourhood associations, pensioners clubs or temple development societies with a limited scope of interest and activity to those with a wider scope of interest and activism such as human rights bodies or economic development and environmental organizations and women's associations, with a concern for national issues" (p.3). [But why only national, and not also international? There is no one size that fits all, each NGO claims its own, has its own objectives, way of acting, more or less brilliant vision, statement of mission, its own influence on society outside and around it. How many are there in the world? No precise count has been, or can be made. But there are tens, maybe hundreds, even thousands, of thousands. The contemporary NGO in Sri Lanka and elsewhere has to be analyzed in its relation to three realities: State, Donor and Global Society. In Part III of his book Fernando takes up the State-NGO relationship in Sri Lanka, but descriptively and historically, not so much analytically. The NGO-Donor and NGO-Global Society relationships are taken up in the much shorter Part IV and cursorily elsewhere. The author's method remains descriptive, and only secondarily critically analytic. Donor donee relationship However, an examination of the Foreign Donor-Local Donee relationship is a subject of greater interest and importance. Fernando cites Nira Wickramasinghe as saying that over 65 per cent of the development NGOs in Sri Lanka were founded only after 1975. But how many were there in 1975 when the deluge began? And what caused the deluge? Was it the demand that created the supply of Donor funds or the supply that created the Donee demand? From the late 1960s, and certainly in the mid 1970s, International Donor NGOs began to forge links with local creative NGOs. There was an atmosphere of excitement, adventure and idealism in the link which in those early years was one of genuine partnership. Both Foreign Donor and Sri Lankan Donee acted on the presumption that both were aiming for a New Society of justice for all and hope for the poor. The Donor gave the funds, the Donee gave time, energy, social analysis and commitment. One of these Donors told the present commentator in 1980 or 1981: We give the funds, you give the work. Who are we to demand to know what you do with what we give? That was an extreme position which proved to be untenably idealistic as the years went by. But has the pendulum swung permanently to the other side? Is the relation of equal partnership yielding the right of way to the Donor-Donee relationship? The swing probably began with the Donors beginning to be dispensers of their Governments' aid funds. It required fresh impetus when the World Bank and its affiliates began to look to the NGO area for what they grandiosely called "partners in development" but who in reality were to be the hewers of wood and the drawers of water for international capital. The commentator remembers clearly how in the early 1980s one DINGO agonized over the receiving or the refusal of government aid funds. So intense, however, were the pressures of push and pull that it eventually capitulated. So today for many DINGOs (fortunately not for all) there is but little difference between the DINGO-DONGO and the Government-to-Government relationship: the same demand for professionalism in reporting and accounting, the same bureaucratic compulsions, the same distancing and detachment from the cries of the poor in order to maintain the executive control of the aid-giver over the aid-receiver. Among his Acknowledgements the author says that he has "always been challenged by Lalith Abeysinghe's views of NGOs". Since in the text Udan Fernando does not reveal what these challenging views are, the commentator called for Abeysinghe's Master's dissertation in Manchester in order to discover what these views are. Abeysinghe makes a distinction between People's Organisations or POs and Non-governmental Organisations or NGOs. They are cousins, but never so different one from the other! Abeysinghe speaks of the emergence of POs as being due to two situations: first, when the People respond to the dominant model of development, centred around money, and ever more money, by rejecting it, because it leads not to development but to maldevelopment and to the continuation of underdevelopment; second, when the People boldly face the question. If not the dominant model, then what? They are not obliged to answer. No one asks, what is the alternative to a cancer in the prostate or to TB in the lungs, nor even to a common cold? The important thing is to get rid of the evil and then make the best of what comes after. Socio-economics, like nature, abhors a vacuum, so what will follow the rejection, as surely as night follows day, is a model of development where the centre is the human being-in-community. Once this happens, money goes to where it should always remain - the servant, not the master, of the human community. The precise form that this post-rejection development will take will depend on the creativity of each people and each nation. It is quite the contrary in the dominant model. There the form is uniform: field games like soccer and cricket played no longer for love of the game but for money, suspicious food made tasty by mono sodium glutamate, colas of various kinds, kentucky fried chicken as if it is superior to a good old Negombo roast, superb intercity highways, but gravel roads or no roads in the villages, supermarkets and departmental stores displacing the old familiar corner grocery shop. Development model It is no longer a secret kept under wraps that in the dominant model of "development", the State is downgraded in order to upgrade the Private Sector. The Private Sector, not the State, is the engine of development. Hence is there a real danger that the NGOs, even those which began with the socialist vision of the New Society, will be co-opted into the capitalist Private Sector. They will become the willing appendages of international capitalism and, at best, ladles in the soup kitchens of "safety nets" and "poverty reduction" programmes which are the disposal chambers of the night soil of capitalism. Udan Fernando ends with two pages on "Future Direction - Need for Fresh Thinking". His book raises hopes that Fernando, following the lead given to him by Abeysinghe, will move in this new direction to produce the necessary sequel to his first very laudable book. ################ A tale that spans three generations The Legacy by Hema Ramakrishna A Vijitha Yapa Publication Printed by Piyasiri Printing Systems, Nugegoda Reviewed by Padma Edirisinghe
A statement much closer to the truth is that English being the conqueror's language, the more affluent of the subjugated races saw to it that their offspring got hold of this "kaduwa" for better economic and social prospects. Hence though free education and all that brought this language within reach of the average person eventually (the impoverished group again totally left out), Saroja and Rajamma, the two main characters in "The legacy, spent their childhood in a period when this language was really the patrimony of the upper class and upper middle class of countries like India and Sri Lanka. And some of them became so proficient in it that they began to bare their innermost secrets and even their souls via this alien language, now almost become their own. A blurb on "The legacy" describes the book "as a work of non-fiction, part autobiography, part memoir, an amalgam of two different texts". Hence the facts given in this book can be regarded as authentic and true facts. The author's family is a typical Indian family of affluence steeped in indigenous mores and traditions but Hema's mother leaves the all-important letter on Saroja's life (1922 - 1943), a part of the legacy, written in English, a letter actually re-produced in the book. The author herself is a strange product of the symbiosis of the East and West, born and bred in South India, currently spending her time among the cities of Colombo where her husband works, Bangalore, her home town and a US city where her children reside. Convent educated (at St. Agnes' Convent) and steeped in English literature and ending with an English Honours degree, yet the missionary education and the familiarity with the doyens of English literature (whose poetical works come into her mind whenever a catastrophe occurs) have failed to infiltrate into her inner self and it is finally the thought patterns and beliefs of the Eastern philosophical thinking permeated by Hinduism and Buddhism that rule her mind. On the Howrah - Madras (Chennai) mail she ruminates thus, "And all the while memory, unknown to us, was busy transcribing her records in the hidden grooves of our brains. Records not only of the current journey, but also of previous ones, earlier ones, made on foot or in palanquins, or on horseback or by boat ! In her times, in other lives with other people for there they stood bearing another name, wearing another face". The never ending Samsaric cycle with its woes and traumas, the theory of re-incarnating - they gush through the ruminations. In fact the story itself is meant to be a story of re-birth, but this tale almost gets marginalized in broader tale of a daughter's affection and adulation of her mother, Saroja by name and certainly a remarkable character who is mostly responsible for moulding the daughter's character. Saroja's elder sister is Rajamma, who it can be inferred is re-born as the author. The cruel system that existed in India once where girls as young as 14 were married off to partners they did not care for, the traumas they suffer at the hands of the new family, the overbearing influence exerted by members of the extended family - these facets peep through the entangled web of a bewildering array of events. But the author does not pronounce them blatantly evil, perhaps taking them in their stride as cameos in a pattern of evolution from primordial days to the modern enlightened days. What is this legacy ? What is the legacy bequeathed to Hema ? In fact there seem to be many legacies including an unseen legacy, bequeathed by fate, bestowed by heredity, arteriosclerosis, compounded by cholesterol ! The letter handed by Saroja to her daughter too is an all important legacy. The colonial legacy, another. "The legacy" is a story that cuts via three generations. In the midst of the narration of a gamut of family catastrophes and calamities at times given in morbid and almost nauseating detail, the Indian author does not forget to do her national duty by India too ie. by way of claiming our island for her country on historical grounds or on mythical grounds. Refer pages 42 - 43. "We have got used to their presence (the presence of soldiers in Colombo) and find it reassuring faced with the threat of terrorism that is a concomitant to daily life here, where the traditional greeting is still Ayubowan (Long life to you") That is tongue in cheek, (reviewer's observation) And she goes on, "This isle was once called Serendib, by traders from Arabia who came in their dhows - denoting serene waters and tranquil shores. But as anyone will tell you, the Serendib means no such thing, it is a corruption of the nomenclature that originally indicated "the land of the Cheras". A little bit of propaganda for her own part of India, the south Indian part, Hema Ramakrishna would have concluded would not create a surfeit of content. The English used, is mellifluous and flows on like the drip of nectar. Yet the contents recipe is a poignant mix of death and suffering the main springs of religious thought in Bharatha Desha and so Hema, the 58 year old writer comes back full circle to her own soil here. ############# Madonna's children by Timeri N. Murari Believe me, as a novelist, I am not writing this out of envy and jealousy. Writers do not harbour such mean emotions about other writers. Not if they can help it. Why shouldn't the pop diva Madonna write a children's book, be paid a fortune and have it sold in a hundred countries? Admittedly, I did not know she could write. But the world is meant to be full of the unexpected. Most singers can't write; they're expected to sing. A talented few may pen a few lines called lyrics but, for the most part, others write the words and singers read them as they sing. I knew Madonna could sing well although I am not the best judge as I've never bought any of her CDs. But she made her first fortune from this talent. I know she has acted in a few movies which, with some luck on my part, I have managed to avoid seeing. I've been told she does not do this very well which is why I haven't seen her name on the `Best Actress' list of any film festival or the Oscars. However, she does have an amazing talent for self-publicity that, despite my ducking and weaving, I have not been able to avoid. I do need to watch the television news and read the newspapers and she's somewhere there without fail. I know when she married there were more photographers at her `secret' wedding than flies around a wedding cake. And recently, she blazed across my sight lines by giving a mouth-to-mouth kiss to another pop diva Britney Spears (I think). This was done on stage in front of a `live' (as opposed to dead) audience and in front of the television cameras and the usual million photographers. Britney said she'd not been kissed for months. Hopefully, Madonna broke that jinx. But Madonna specialises in the outrageous for its own sake. Her book (I can't say `new' book as this is the first) is a work of fiction for children. It's called 'The English Rose' and I thought it was a very imaginative title, although I wondered why she didn't call it 'The American Rose'. Probably, the title will change when it is published in America as she's a very chameleon kind of character. Of course, she had a lot of television publicity on the book and BBC-TV interviewed her potential young readers. They had heard of Madonna but were not too confident they would buy her book. One child judiciously said she would see what it was like. Children cannot be conned all of the time, although we do try hard. I do wonder whether Madonna's the right person to write a novel for children? I know she is the mother of a four or five-year-old girl only because I read a sociologist's report on how the wealth of nouveau rich parents distort the reality of their children's lives. Madonna was quoted as one example. Her daughter has a wardrobe worth around Sterling Pounds 40,000 and this includes a child's mink coat. Among the child's dresses are the designer labels of Gucci, Versace, Donna Karen and other exclusive, and expensive, designers. The child must get a headache trying to figure out what to wear to school every morning. Another example was David Beckham's son. The boy not only goes to sleep with the soothing sounds of a Sterling Pounds 10,000 audio system in his bedroom but also a very expensive gadget that projects stars across his ceiling. I would only guess that Bill Gates' son would have a live orchestra playing Strauss' waltzes nightly and NASA beaming him a live feed of the universe from one of its satellites. The point the sociologist was also making was that the children of the rich and famous have little hope of leading normal lives. They will also never be able to equal the talents of their famous parents. Madonna's daughter will not perform as well as her and Beckham's son will not play football as well as him. However, this does apply to the children of the privileged everywhere, whether in America, Europe or even India. They have lost their childhood as they have long been seduced by our consumer societies. They are the targets of hype and marketing as they have the purchasing power, through their parents, to buy computers, books, movie tickets, designer labels. They have become sophisticated too quickly, and now have little chance of enjoying a long summer of innocence. They're all Madonna's children. The Hindu |
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| Editorial | Security Produced by Lake House |
State Literary Award winner Harsha Wasalathanthri's application to join
'science fiction writers of America' is supported by his mentor Sir Arthur
C. Clarke. If it is accepted he will be the only non-american among them.
Among many exaggerations universally spread is the claim that English
is the lingua franca of the world. An exaggeration of lesser dimensions is
that it ended up becoming the lingua franca of the vast Britannic empire.
