Portrayal of childhood in Sri Lanka

Reviewed by Ranga CHANDRARATHNE

Childhood experiences are vivid and diverse from land to land and from diverse cultures. Childhood spent in highly urbanized environment particularly in congested cities and suburbs is quite different to that spent in far away hamlets.

It is this unique element of authenticity which makes 'Tales from Tree House' by Sakuntala Sachithanandan, a true portrayal of childhood in Sri Lanka. The stories in the collection appeared in a national newspaper. The stories are from a diary of Deepaka, a child who called his diary 'Dear Diary' which is supposed to be hidden in a tree house built on a huge Mara tree.

In the first diary entry, the child describes the Mara tree where the 'Dear Diary' is hidden: 'you know Diary, this Mara tree has a wonderfully peculiar history of sorts! It has many fat trunks like an elephant's legs springing up from a huge horizontal trunk. Well, long Before we built Our house, this whole land was used by Aunty Rani and Uncle Sunda.' One fine day a pulung tree which had been rotting inside, fell down...' It is obvious the narrator of the stories.

Deepaka represents a generation of children who grew and walked into their adulthood in vast rural hinterland of Sri Lanka. Their childhood is different to that of children who grow up in metropolis Colombo or suburbs. The life and childhood of Deepaka which he recalls to 'Dear Diary' evolved against the backdrop of calm and quiet life of agricultural Sri Lanka. Although the diary entries are somewhat similar to Anne Frank's Diary, except using dairy entry as a narrative devise, 'Tales from the Tree House' is an authentic account of childhood in Sri Lanka.

One of the significant features of the book is author's ability to devise a diction which is very much English yet capable of conveying childhood experiences in Sri Lankan in that milieu. Among other things, it seems that the author has understood the fine art of storytelling as stories grip the attention of the reader from beginning to the end. Authenticity of voice is felt throughout the book.

Deepak's diary entries recount the childhood adventures and the real-life characters, some of whom are members of Sri Lankan extended family and others are personalities associated with Deepak's childhood and of course, his peers.

One of the interesting stories is where Deepaka and his friends impersonate blinds and collect proceeds in the village 'Pola' or a weekly fair. Apart from the story, the author has also depicted vividly the festive atmosphere in the village weekly fair.

The story 'Thunthota Oya and More' is not only an interesting one where the children play in a tributary of a river but it also provides the reader with fascinating account of the village environment.

'We were dreamily floating looking up at the blue bowl of the sky. Parrots and mynahs wheeled across the fleecy clouds GLOP, GLOP, GLUG-GLUG! Our hands and feet paddled in the cold water of Thunthota Oya! The closest we'd ever got to Heaven, decided Ashan and I enthusiastically. Nimal, Iresh and Rohana, Mudiyanse's little son, faithfully agreed.

Cool and green and fluttery Kumbuk and Mara trees and enormous bamboo bushes arched over the river. This was our driver Mudiyanse's village of Thunthota and we'd been invited to spend the day.

A swim suit for Akki had been ruled out (despite much grumbling and sulking on Akki's part) as Ammi and Appa decided it would offend the sensibilities of the village folk of Thunthota. So there she was, cavorting in the river, in a cloth like any village damsel.

The story is about the upper middle class family from Colombo spending the day in the village of Thunthota. The author describes the atmosphere of the river and the cool and the green canopy provided by Kumbuk and Mara trees. Though unwittingly, the author has highlighted the conservative culture in the village with its ingrained prejudice towards women. Though the swim suit is ideal for swimming, the parents do not allow the girl to wear a swim suit which is deemed as culturally inappropriate to village. Apart from the sheer authenticity of the stories, 'Tales from the Tree House' is marked for its lucid and down-to-earth language and the vivid realisation of the village life in Sri Lanka. Though it is highly doubtful whether we still have such villages and if even the children in the village, could enjoy such a lovely childhood amidst of flourishing nature. In a way, two book portrays the childhood of a bygone era like the one which great Sinhala author Martin Wickremasinghe portrayed in 'Madol Doova'. Life of today's children is very busy revolving among numerous tuition classes, classes for dancing, music and swimming and a heap of home work. Regrettably, we doubt whether today's children enjoy such a vibrant childhood.

At a time, when bed-time story telling has relegated to the past, the book offers a collection of stories for children with distinctly Sri Lankan flavour.

Since the childhood experiences and the adventures are genuinely Sri Lankan, the book would be a good start for inculcating reading habit in children.

Noble thoughts to guide human life

Reviewed by Chelvatamby Maniccavasagar

Thirukkural is a poetic composition of great antiquity in the Tamil literature. Many great minds have shed their powerful, radiant light on this gem and justly famous classics of Tamil literature.

In its essence Thirukkural is a treatise par excellence on the art of living. Thiru Valluvar, the author diagnoses the intricacies of human nature with such penetrating insight perfect mastery and consummate skill absorbing the most subtle concepts of modern psychology, that one is left wondering at his sweep and depth.

His prescriptions, leavened by godliness, ethics, morality and humaneness are sagacious and practical to the core. They cut across castes, creeds, climes and ages and have a freshness which makes one feel as if they are meant for the present times.

The uniqueness of Thirukkural is that the noblest thoughts are expressed with master strokes of elegance and charm, imaginative splendour and poetical grandeur. Thiruvaluvar postulates a comprehensive code which would meet the realities of all major situations that life gives rise to.

Aspiring for a classless society is an ideal but the existence of the rich and the poor classes of men is a reality.

Further, Thiruvalluvar appeals to both of them to conduct themselves in a certain ethical way towards each other so that they lead a harmonious way of living. He exhorts the rich to give to the poor and mitigate the poor man's hunger and he also advises the wealthy to give alms to beggars without hiding and in the same breath asks the beggars not to feel angry when the rich man refuses to give.According to Thiruvalluvar, wealth is important for all of us and so he asks men to create wealth through righteous ways. In fact, man is not just an individual.

He is a social being - a citizen entitled to what we have resolved to secure in the preamble of our constitutions: Justice - social, economic and political, liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship, equality of status and of opportunity and to promote among them all, fraternity assuring the dignity of the individual.

The Thirukkural defines the pathways for man to tread to reach the human goals. Man is the architect of his own life and the life of the society.

He can create a heaven on earth as great men like Mahatma Gandhi attempted or degrade it into hell as Hitler did, bringing misery and suffering on a global scale. Indeed Thirukkural is a human document shining as a guideline to humanity to promote human happiness, harmony and peace.

Furthermore, the Thirukkural was written 2,000 years ago and it has been poetically acknowledged by Mahakavi Subramania Bharathy when he says that Tamil Nadu has attained glory by giving to the world the Thirukkural's author "Thiruvalluvar."

The Thirukkural contains three parts, dealing with three aspects of human pursuits; 'Aram,' 'porul' and 'inbam'. In fact, such a great literary work, the first among the Tamil classics was translated by several people into several languages. Suddhanandha Bharathi, V.V.S. Aiyer, K.M. Balasubramaniam, P.S. Sundaram and a host of others rendered Thirukkural into English.

Thus Thiruvalluvar has had so many translators but it cannot be said that he has found his completely satisfying English translator yet.Inspired by the ethical contents of Thirukkural, Eliathamby Sivayoganathan who is a graduate and a retired Deputy General Manager of a Government corporation has translated the Thirrukkural into English.

There have been different versions of the same text because every translator sets his own priority in translation. Rajaji's version concerns itself with Thiruvalluvar as a thinker and a teacher rather than Thimvalluvas as a poet. V.V.S. Aiyer brings out the vigour and wisdom of Thirukkural.

No translation seems to render justice to the merits of the original text since Thirukkural is truly an 'apple of gold in a network of silver.'

The preservation of meaning of the source text in the target language is an important aspect in translation. In fact, the translator must actualise the implicit sense, the denotator, connotative, intentional associative range of significations which are implicit in the original.

Thirukkural is thus a document of universal application.

The translator has struck a new path in studying and investigating the Thirukkural from a scientific angle. Hence, everyone should possess this Thirukkural wisdom (Thirukkural).

The Nature of Sri Lanka:

Meaningful and beautiful!

Reviewed by Gehan De Silva Wijeratne

The Nature of Sri Lanka,Nadaraja, L. (2008), the Nature of Sri Lanka. Wildlight (Pvt) Ltd., Colombo, 318 pages,

Starting from around the early 2000s, there has been a flowering of beautiful books on Sri Lankan wildlife. This followed a renaissance in bio-diversity research in the late 1980s led notably by Rohan Pethiyagoda and his team of researchers from the Wildlife Heritage Trust.

It is no accident that the flowering of wildlife books followed the renaissance in research and also the elevation of wildlife into the economic agenda from wildlife tourism. All of these books have contributed to a heightened awareness of Sri Lanka's bio-diversity and had varying impacts on wildlife photographers. Many Sri Lankan wildlife books pleasurably burden the shelves of my book cases. However, the nature of Sri Lanka is notable for having an immediate and dramatic impact on how I take photographs.

I had barely skimmed the pages of the book and a deep message had been imprinted in my mind. The need, to see the animal holistically in its environment and to return to some of the classical rules of composition. It is not that the books by other photographers did not seem to understand composition and a sense of place. They did. But the imagery which dominated those books (and I confess my own efforts as a nature photographer) were those of the 'frame filler'. To understand what I mean compare the opening images, such as the Scarlet Minivets in the rain or the closing images of the book, such as the eyes of a leopard peering through a bush, shown in black and white.

In the early 2000s, a new generation of wildlife photographers had begun to comb the wilds of Sri Lanka. They were a tech savvy breed. They carried laptops and their conversations were interspersed with gigs of storage, files sizes in mega pixels and above all the 'frame filler'. With long lenses (covered in camouflage or sleek black non reflective coatings) suspended on bean bags or Wimberly tripod heads, they looked like special forces units out on patrol. As mile after dusty mile was clocked, sightings of leopards and other animals were measured in terms of 'frame fillers'. If it was not a frame filling image, it did not count. A leopard sleeping on a waterhole embankment at a distance was not worth it and more than one photographer would drive off scornfully, confident in the knowledge he had already gardened a few Gigs of frame fillers in his compact flash cards.Species were photographed 'frame filling' almost to the equivalent of a taxonomist looking through a microscope. A bird or mammal once photographed with enough pixel detail to show each feather or hair of fur was deemed 'done' and safely ticked off the list. A few charismatic species such as the leopard could never be done because the thirst for more was unquenchable. The obsessive 'leopard hunters' lived hell on earth as the fire that burned within for a better leopard image could never be put out.

Luxshmanan Nadaraja's work is a refreshing reminder of basics. Seeing the natural world for its beauty and aesthetics. A communion with nature. A leopard is not a leopard until it is seen in the context of its habitat. Many of the wildlife books somehow had the overpowering presence of the photographer lingering in the consciousness of the reader.An image was something about the photographer's skill to get close, or so close and his or her array of technologically advanced, vibration reducing prism technology, apochromatic lenses, write speeds to the flash cards and so on.

Suddenly, we now have a book, where the world seems a calmer, quieter place, Technology has become irrelevant and the photographer has been banished and we are left to enjoy images where no one needs to get close. We see an Ashy Prinia singing in the reeds, like how we would see it. Elephants, even a group of them, are small, like we usually see them, dwarfed by the vastness of the wilderness.Although it is billed in a sense as Luxshmanan's book, I interpret it as joint effort with his wife Nelun Harasgama Nadaraja, the designer of the book. Nelun has designed many of the beautiful wildlife books which have come out recently. But here in this book there is a natural symbiosis, her creativity has found the raw material to layout a creation which is different from other books.

The quality and the sense of space in the images lend themselves to her characteristic bold use of white space. There are many double page panels like this. Other layouts may use the entire page but are not enslaved by 'frame filler' images which need the subject species to be all domineering. An oriental dwarf kingfisher is boldly laid across a double page spread (in of one the largest books of its genre) and is diminished in relative size but enhanced in impact by virtue of it being only a sixteenth of the space. The designer and the photographer both have an empathy for space which fuses well in this book.Perhaps I exaggerate a little. Not every image is about taking a step back and showing a living being in its environment. Luxshmanan has a fair number of images which are frame filling and some pages are seemingly busy with montages of rectangular cropped images, packed against each other.

Nevertheless the book is underlain by a confidence to step back give space. There is an over-riding theme to see the wilderness in its entire vastness and for it not to be measured by the sum of the individual animals which have to be captured in the 'frame filler'.Photography is always subjective and the choice of individual images are an emotional choice of the photographer or one that was needed for a particular topic. As a result every reader will have images they see as being a little weaker than others. But the book as a whole is wonderfully crafted and will influence the way others photograph and publish their work in the future.

Sri Lanka has been blessed with many wonderful books on wildlife in the last decade. I think this book more than any other, demonstrates the ability of its citizens to combine authorship, photography and design to produce books which are both meaningful and beautiful.

The reviewer Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne is a British Chartered Accountant and Banker turned wildlife celebrity. He is CEO of Jetwing Eco Holidays.

Book launch

From effectiveness to perfection

"Sarthakathvayen Paripoornathwayata 1" and "2" (From Effectiveness to Perfection 01 and 2) authored by Chandana Gunawardene will be launched at the Colombo Public Library Auditorium on December 27 at 9.00 a.m. Book 1 deals with the power of human mind while Book 2 lays the guidelines for a prosperous life. To coincide with the event a practical workshop on Training of Mind to accept challenges will also be held. Well-known Counsellor Chandana Gunawardene is also Managing Director of Centre for Operating of Mind and Self-Empowering Training.

'Veven Upanniya'
 

Siri Ediriweera's latest Sinhala novel, 'Veven Upanniya' will be launched at Dayawansa Jayakody Book Exhibition Hall, Ven. S. Mahinda Mawatha, Colombo 10 on December 22 at 10 am. 'Veven Upanniya' is a Dayawansa Jayakody publication.