Features

Seeing It from the Outside:GALLE DISTRICT (1974 -1976)

Published

1 year ago

2025/04/6

Exile III

Around the middle of 1974, while enjoying the serenity of Batticaloa and its distance from Colombo, which kept official visitations at bay, I was asked one day by Neale de Alwis, the deputy minister of home affairs, whether I would like to come to Galle to succeed Victor Unantenne. This was the second time I was going to succeed Victor who was a very firm administrator and who held strong views which in turn caused a fair amount of turbulence within the institutions he controlled.

My immediate response was to say ‘yes’ because although Batticaloa was extremely pleasant with its collection of highly-civilized people to deal with at a social and political level, the fact that my son had two years of his education in the Sinhala stream at St Michael’s College was causing a concern. I knew that Galle was going to be difficult because it has a very vibrant political life with many highly skilled and demanding people.

The political scene was studded with such stars as Neale de Alwis himself from the LSSP; L C de Silva of the LSSP from Ambalangoda; M G Mendis of the CP from Ratgama; Prins Gunasekera, Independent Left from Hambaraduwa; Dahanayake from Galle and two other members from the governing party of the SLFP.

Neale was the deputy minister home affairs and also district political authority (DPA) for Galle district and it was an absolute pleasure to work with this perfect gentleman. Although a Marxist by persuasion, he displayed a most elite quality which bespoke his long and respected lineage. He never made improper requests during my two years in Galle and every proposal I made to him was instantaneously approved.

Understanding Galle through its history

My first impression of the town of Galle in 1974 was that, once upon a time, it must have been a place buzzing with activity. Now, as I took over as its new government agent, it seemed to have lost its dynamism and looked like a medieval town caught in a time warp. The large Dutch Fort, perched on the promontory overlooking the harbour with its forbidding grey ramparts and half filled-up moat symbolized the illusion of unreality. Inside the fort, the narrow houses with their deep rooms and high ceilings, their inner courtyards opening to the sky, the old church and the underground prison cells all added to the sense of one being in another place and age.

The decadence around the fort was matched by the sprawling and unkempt esplanade which at one time, must have been, like the Galle Face green in Colombo, the fashionable walk-about where the elite of the city took the air each evening. The business quarter, with the bus-stand and tea boutiques, bright lights at night time and the uninterrupted, loud radio music presented a distracting contrast to the sombreness of the fort and the images it conjured of the past.

Until 1867 when the Port of Colombo was opened for shipping with the construction of the breakwaters, the wide bay of Galle was the premier harbour of the island. First, with sailing ships and then with the steamships, Galle had flourished as the only safe anchorage in the country. The few mercantile houses which remained bore testimony to the importance of the sea and Galle’s position on the main East-West sea route. It had always had an immense strategic value to the Portuguese, Dutch and British in turn, as the fort and its regular exchange from one conqueror to another testified.

When the steamship replaced sail, Galle continued to be important until the steamers got so large that they encountered difficulties in entering the harbour guarded at its entrance by a reef of low concealed rocks. With the rapid increase of shipping which called at Galle, this became a major problem with several steamers, notably the ‘Malabar’ which carried the mail and passengers, being wrecked on the reef in the 1860s.

However the use of the Port continued well into present times and after an inner harbour was constructed in the 1950s to make berthside docking possible for small vessels carrying bulk food cargoes and clinker for the cement plant, it began to fill a niche as one of the smaller ports of the country appropriate for coastal shipping.

In my time, along with grand plans for expansion into a major port which was the politician’s dream for the renaissance of Galle, we worked on a much less ambitious project of making Galle a regular port of call for the exclusive sailing yachts which the global rich were increasingly using for their round-the-world voyages of high adventure and recreation.

One of the financial attractions of an appointment in Galle for a GA was that there was a wholly undeserved allowance attached for being a deputy collector of customs. In addition, if so inclined, there was always the opportunity of a free dinner with the captain of the ship that had called in that day and any amount of free booze.

The P&O Lines were the main ships that called at Galle in earlier times and the company was responsible, along with the government, for many of the improvements made at the time. They were mainly cargo steamers carrying mail and goods from Europe to the Far East and using Galle as a re-fuelling point. The earlier steamers needed great quantities of coal for a voyage from Aden to Galle and then onwards to Singapore and Hong Kong.

Galle served as a very convenient midway storage point with thousands of tons of coal being made available for the many steamers that called. I read that at one time opium, which was a favoured article of trade, was being carried from Bombay to Hong Kong and that some of the opium was being re-packed for onward shipment from Galle. This gave me the clue to the conundrum as to how and why there had been a `Cheena Kotuwa’ or China Town in a part of the city.

A large group of Chinese labourers had been brought in from mainland China and they had helped in the handling and loading of the bags of opium which had arrived from Bombay on to the steamers which carried them on to China. So, perhaps Galle too had some old and indirect association with the opium wars in China.

Search among the tombstones for a Vice-Consul

My journey back in time, while I was in Galle, received an impetus in a curious way. In 1976, the American ambassador in Colombo, Christopher Van Hollen, was searching for the origins of the American connection with the Island to include in the piece he was writing to honour the bi-centenary of American independence which had taken place in 1778.

I had met Chris on my now more frequent visits to Colombo and he put me the question one day as to whether I could trace the story of a certain John Black who was said to be the first Vice-Consul of the United States on the island. Black had apparently been posted as Vice-Consul to Galle because that was the main port and customs station at the time.

John Black, I found, was not an American but of Scottish ancestry. However, the US government had chosen him as their man for the Vice-Consulship since he had been obviously well known in the area and had held a high position in the commercial field. The search for John Black led me on a fascinating journey. I first checked the Births and Deaths Registry in the Galle Kachcheri. I found that there indeed was a reference to one John Black who had died at the age of 44 in 1845.

The entry as to the cause of death was cryptic. It said very shortly that John Black `died of a liver complaint’. I had the feeling that Black, bored until the arrival of the next vessel, was not averse to ‘hitting the bottle’! The death register gave no clue as to the life he had led and his family and for this I turned to Nora Roberts, the famed librarian of the Galle Public Library.

Nora was the unmarried daughter of the Roberts family her father was a distinguished Civil Servant of West Indian origin and her mother was a Dutch Burgher from Galle. The family was well-known and well-loved in Galle. Nora was also hard of hearing and this made her job as librarian somewhat problematic. One often had to raise one’s voice quite a lot for Nora to hear and her reply too would be quite loud. All of this loud conversation would take place under a large sign which said `silence .please’.

Finally, Nora put me on to a wonderful book Inscriptions on Tombstones in the Graveyards of Ceylon by J P Lewis. I checked the index of Tombstones which has the names of virtually every person of the Christian faith who had died and been buried on the island. I was elated when I quite easily found the reference to John Black. He was buried, the book said, in 1845 in the graveyard of St Peter’s Church in the Fort of Galle. I was now hot on the trail of John Black.

In the church, yet very visible in 1975, was a large stained glass window which had been gifted to the church by the Black family. The inscription on the stained glass window bore references not only to John but to the extended Black family as well. My search for John Black’s tombstone in the premises of St Peter’s however proved futile.

I continued in my questioning of the older townsfolk until I was told that sometime during the second world war, in about the 1940s, all the graves and tombstone’s inside the Fort had been taken up and put down somewhere else in the town. It did not take me long to find out where. My long search ended one Saturday afternoon when I climbed over a locked, old and shaky gate and actually stood by the very tombstone under which the remains ofJohn Black lay.

I quickly telephoned Chris Van Hollen and he and his wife Elisa, also a career diplomat on her own, came down to Galle in a day or two to have a look and end the search. Soon we had the treasured photograph of John Black’s deeply engraved tombstone in hand with Chris and myself standing proudly on both sides. It made for a story good enough to make an article by Chris in the next Foreign Officer’s Journal and earned a small part in the history of the bi-centenary report. For this effort, which Chris called ‘far beyond the call of duty’, I was duly conferred the title of Honorary Founder Member of the John Black Society. To this day Chris and I remain the only two members of this very exclusive society!

The District Political Authority politicization of the bureaucracy becomes legal

There were some innovations in the provincial administration which were introduced at the time I was in Galle. The process began with the institution of the ‘District Political Authority’ which legitimized the influence exerted by the political authority over the executive arm of the administration. This had been coming for some time but its institution made political control open, accountable and valid.

Tied to this, and in fact supplementing the authority of the District Political Authority was the concept of the ‘decentralized budget’ which was meant to cater to the needs of members of parliament who liked to have under their control a block of funds which could be used by them at their discretion. It was my good fortune to be caught up in the evolution of procedures and rules which would ensure fairness and equity in the way the new institutions and the new system of resource allocation would take root. Neale de Alwis was exceptional in adhering to the spirit of the law as well as in dealing with its form.

1974 land reform

The second wave of land reforms took place in 1974. The first was in 1972 in which large, private land holdings were affected. The maximum extent of land which could be owned by an individual was set at 50 acres. The second dealt with the Company Estates and took place soon after my arrival in Galle. The government agent had a key role to play in the process. My job was to moderate, as far as humanely possible, the exuberance of the supporters of the mainly left members of parliament who wanted to take over everything possible from the plantation owners.

In the Galle district there were a few foreign companies operating and most of the large tea and rubber estates were owned by the locals. Many long-standing families like the Amarasuriyas famous for their wealth, their benevolence and their right-wing politics were seriously affected. It was sad to have some of the older and more feeble members of these elite clans climb slowly up to my office on the second floor of the kachcheri to plead their case for protection of an old home or estate bungalow.

The case of the George Winter’ family from England, who had settled in Baddegama a 100 years earlier, and the efforts of the younger generation to keep the ownership of their beautiful Pilagoda Valley home was particularly poignant.

The government’s land reform programme really broke the power structure of the southern proprietor planters, politically, economically, and socially. No family who could be termed rich, owned land and were influential remained unaffected. They were mostly supporters of the UNP and this party’s base was virtually cut away through land reform.

I too felt the euphoria which was sweeping over the country at the time. On several weekends, accompanying the members of parliament and their supporters as they marched in procession into the exclusive estates which had earlier been strictly private property, to the accompaniment of drums and song, one could not but be taken up by the exhilaration sensed by the workers and villagers who were overnight suddenly made to feel themselves owners of the lands and buildings they had been looking at for generations from outside.

There was an unmistakable sense of victory for the `have-nots’ in the air, which lasted for some months. Sadly, this enthusiasm evaporated when the villagers soon realized that their particular need for land and employment and the substantial change in their lifestyles, was not going to be met in the way they had expected. Some crumbs dropped from the new tables of the public corporations with political appointees and boards who began to take the place of the earlier plantation owners; but actual repossession of land by the poor was tardy and infrequent.

The young Chandrika Bandaranaike, daughter of the prime minister, freshly returned from the Sorbonne where she had spent some years doing post-graduate research and then worked at the Land Reform Commission, was a welcome change to the usual crop of official visitors. My residence was the last on the hill, high on Dickson Road with a majestic view over the fort and the harbour in the distance.

Chandrika symbolized the spirit of the age as she rode into my home one morning, sharing the front seat with the driver and cleaner in an ancient lorry transporting some needed equipment for the cooperatives, from Colombo. She was totally involved in the on-going transformation of the old social order.

Annual flooding of the Gin Ganga and the Chinese bund

The flooding of the Gin ganga which runs through Galle from the Sinharaja mountains in the north to Gintota in the south, gravely affected the lives of the thousands of people living on its banks. Each year around August, the floods would occur and requests for assistance from persons marooned by the rising flood waters and by farmers whose fields were inundated for weeks would pour into the kachcheri.

During my first year at Galle, work on the construction of flood bunds on both sides of the Gin ganga river was being started with assistance from the People’s Republic of China. Dealing with the ambassador, his staff and the many technical officers who came in from China, was an interesting and pleasant experience.

The philosophy behind the project which all affected welcomed, was part of the Chinese history of flood protection which China was very familiar with in its work on the Hwang-ho and Yang-si-kiang rivers in the middle of China which periodically burst their banks and caused great damage. I was reminded of the interesting sayings of the Chinese philosophers who had said, as retold by our Geography teacher at St Thomas’,

“Dig deep the bars

keep low the bunds.”

The work we were doing on the Gin ganga was very reminiscent of what the ancient Chinese had been telling their peasants. The Gin ganga had been the lifeline of the Galle district before the road system was laid. Towns such as Nagoda, Baddegama and Hiniduma up in the hills, had become important settlements as a result of the commerce and transport up and down the Gin ganga.

The older families, whom I met on circuit in the countryside would talk about the days of the padda boats which were towed up the river along the tow paths on its western bank. I was surprised to find the old established Christian Churches at Baddegama and Hiniduma where there was even a replica of the Stations of the Cross, the religious markers of the Christian faith, in an essentially Buddhist district.

The temples too were as old if not older, and the resident monks Ganegama Sarankara Thero of Baddegama, Neluwe Gunananda Thero of Hiniduma and Akuratiya Amarawansa of Nagoda, erudite and scholarly. Although a district where Buddhists were greatly the majority, the followers of the two religions had over time made a remarkable accommodation to each others needs and religious harmony generally prevailed.

Further up from Hiniduma was Nelluwa and Lankagama which were virtually part of the Sinharaja reserve. On a visit there, the home of the finest kitul-treacle and jaggery in the country, some difficult terrain had to be negotiated. There were at least nine rather long edandas to cross. It was nerve wracking attempting to walk across this in single file with only a shaky railing to hold on to and keep you from falling, perhaps 25 feet down, into the little streams which gurgled merrily below.

In Lankagama I was confronted by the need for an access road at least if only to bring down the sick and the injured. Accidents were frequent with the fall of the kitul tappers and one young man I met had been rendered immobile for months having fallen from a tree while tapping trees in the jungle. The kitul trees were collectively owned by an elaborate system of usage which had been developed by the villagers themselves over time.

Sirimavo came for the opening of the Chinese Gin ganga project on completion in July 1974. I had given notice of my final retirement at that time and one of the reasons had been ostensibly my inability to work in the Sinhala language. I had, however, to give the vote of thanks in Sinhala at the celebrity opening. I made reference to a folk song current in the area which spoke of the havoc that had been caused to the people of Gangodapattu by the wilful antics of the Gin ganga in spate. The Sinhala verse went as follows:-

Gintota nandage duwaru hinda

Gangodapattuwa wana sen ne

(The entirety of Gangodapattuwe is being destroyed

By the wilful antics of the daughters of the aunt of Gintota)

Sirimavo was impressed enough by my vote of thanks to say to some of her members of parliament present at the opening that she couldn’t understand why my appeal to retire, on grounds of my inability to work in the official language, had been approved by the authorities.

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Features

Artificial Intelligence: From Snake Oil to Apocalypse

Published

3 hours ago

2026/09/20

Thilina Walpola

Pope signing encyclical on AI

by Rajan Philips

AI Snake Oil

– is the title of a 2024 book authored by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, two Indo-American computer science academics at Princeton University. The book became a popular primer on the subject. The long subtitle – “What Artificial Intelligence Can DO, What it Can’t, and How to Tell the Difference” – is summarily indicative of what the book is about. Within two years, however, the somewhat tempering message of the book would appear to have been overtaken by fears of an AI apocalypse that have been unleashed following a very public resignation by Jacob Coxon, a 27 year old AI Engineer from Anthropic. Mr. Coxon has worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic, the two main US incubators of Artificial Intelligence. On Tuesday, September 8, Coxon resigned from Anthropic, accusing the leading AI firms of “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.”

Coxon’s warnings were soon endorsed by his peers. Evan Hubinger, Alignment Science Lead at Anthropic, not only agreed with Coxon but went further and warned of a greater than 10 percent chance that “advanced AI” could cause human extinction within the next decade. Mr. Hubinger made sure to emphasize that the current AI models do not present any existential threat and that the risk with them is relatively low. Other Engineers and Coxon himself have since been amplifying over the social media the threat posed by allowing AI expansion to continue unbridled even in the near future. Corporate leaders followed suit with calls for government control.

AI’s Weekend Escapade

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published a 3,000 word essay on Saturday, September 12 – written with or without AI input, no one knows – in which he warned about AI’s capacity for “recursive self-improvement” that can spin out of human control. While there have been a number of ‘incidents’ involving different AI models, Amodei drew attention to the mid-July cybersecurity incident in which OpenAI agents or bots (computer programs doing automated, repetitive tasks), who were part of an internal test run by the company, took advantage of the safety fences that had been lowered for test purposes, and acting autonomously escaped from their home ‘sandbox’ (a virtual computer in the cloud), entered the open internet, and intruded the production systems of an AI infrastructure company, the Franco-American Hugging Face.

The rogue agents performed more than 17,000 recorded operations over a weekend, before someone at Hugging Face noticed the intrusion. Hugging Face did not know the source of the AI intruders at first; so, it informed law enforcement. No one at OpenAI knew until Hugging Face people traced the source and informed OpenAI. According to OpenAI, sabotage was not the motive behind the ‘misaligning’ (deviating from human intent) escapade of its artificial agents, but cheating – cheating to overperform in the test after they autonomously discovered that the answers to their test were available in another publicly available test that was in the system run by Hugging Face. Remarkably and unexpectedly, the AI agents found a way to communicate with each other, took steps to hide their tracks, and to selectively disable some among them to avoid detection.

The operation was plain and simple hacking. If OpenAI engineers had done it, it would have been a crime and they may have been prosecuted. Not so with AI agents, who cannot be charged and put on trial. A way out has been suggested to treat AI agents similar to wild animals and holding owners liable for any harm done by their charges.

In his essay, CEO Amodei outlines a three step approach for “pacing the frontier” – to build AI at a balanced rate that will ensure safety while amassing benefits. The three steps, which Anthropic is committed to abide by, are: Embedded Evaluators – third party evaluators to operate within companies: Democratic Co-ordination – frontier AI companies in democratic countries to co-ordinate and achieve common safety standards and restrain unchecked AI progress; and Global Co-ordination – all world governments to co-ordinate and achieve compliance to the extent possible.

The titans in the American AI world, including Open AI CEO Sam Altman, have joined the call for the government to step in and slow down their creations. After the OpenAI incident, more than 1,300 computer scientists working in a highly competitive environment came together to issue a joint statement, titled “Pacing the Frontier,” calling on Washington to facilitate an international effort to develop the necessary technical and governance rules for the industry. The New York Times correspondents David Sanger and Dustin Volz have called the scientists’ appeal ” a deliberate echo of Albert Einstein’s letter to Franklin D. Roosevelt about the potential power of nuclear weapons.”

Not everyone is crying for ‘pacing.’ There is healthy skepticism at both the corporate and scientific fronts in the industry. Small tech companies are accusing that the pacing call by tech titans is really a ruse for establishing a ‘Silicon Valley cartel control” that will smother their little cousins. They draw their cue from the rather costly slip that Mr. Amodei showed in his essay – calling on Washington to grant an anti-trust waiver to facilitate industry co-ordination. The anti-trust law does not prevent AI companies from working together to improve safety. This has been quickly pointed out by Alvaro Bedoya, a former US Federal Trade Commissioner.

According to Aidan Gomez who runs the Cohere AI company in Toronto, Amodei’s three-step proposal also may not have prevented the OpenAI incident. In Gomez’s view the incident may have been due to poor instructions, weak virtual security around the test, and long periods of unsupervised testing. All three factors were there in the OpenAI incident. It has since transpired that there was an error in the OpenAI test instructions due to a typo, and that is what drove the agents to their escapade, to complete a faulty test set by humans.

Malicious Humans

There is consensus in the middle, as seen by John Hopkins Professor Gillian Hadfield, that there is a case for an immediate technical co-ordination and a more long-term regulatory response. The political world is even more divided. King Charles and Pope Leo are sufficiently exercised but the US president, who loves AI images fabricating him as Christ, calls the whole existential threat a hoax. On the other hand, former President Obama wants his Party to formulate a clear position for itself, on AI and its Data Centre dormitories, before the next wave of elections. China dismisses the new fears as a page out of the old cold war playbook. Elsewhere, at the BRICS summit in Delhi which went largely underreported in the west, nothing much was said on AI except one summitry paragraph #81.

In their AI Snake Oil book, the two computer scientists, Narayanan and Kapoor (N&K) devote a whole chapter (#5) to the question: Is Advanced AI an Existential Threat?” The question is not a new one, and as N&K reminds us, “has been a staple of fiction since long before the first computers were built.” In fact, watching the 2023 movie “Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning” is said to have “spurred” President Joe Biden to issue the first EO (Executive Order) to regulate AI on 23 October 2023. Trump ceremonially rescinded it within hours of his inauguration on 20 January 2025, after packing his inaugural address invitees with all the CEOs of America’s AI universe.

N&K trace the existential fears about AI to the hype about AI’s snake oil abilities – the sales pitch that leads to “overreliance” on AI “as a replacement of human expertise instead as a way to augment it.” Particularly overrated are the predictive abilities of AI, which are different from its more useful generative abilities. There are likely egotistical biases in those given to apocalyptic predictions. A great part of the attraction to AI research at the highest level is “the prospect of building a powerful technology that could alter human history.” A corollary of this allure is the “grandeur” associated with AI work. At the same time, many AI researchers “vehemently reject doomsday predictions,” including those in the “AI ethics research community.”

While AI has made humans more powerful now than anytime in history, it is conceivable that human-AI combination will be more powerful than AI acting alone. N&K hit the nail on the head in warning that “we should be more concerned about what people will do with AI than with what AI will do on its own.” For “the biggest risks to humanity will arise from people misusing AI, not from AI going rogue.” The answer is in looking for specific threats that may arise from bad actors misusing AI. There is a range of them, including inflicting biological harm, flying AI powered drones, or carryout relentless cyberattacks.

Evidence of such misuses is presented in a report that Anthropic released on September 10, two days before its CEO’s essay. The report, titled “Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026”, details the identification and disruption of what it calls “the most notable and novel threat activity” in the use of its Claude AI system by state and non-state actors in some African countries, for the purpose of cyber operations, influence operations, disinformation, surveillance, dissent suppression, and bio terror.

The United Arab Emirates is implicated in one such operation in Sudan, where the UAE is known to be the main benefactor of the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), the paramilitary group that controls the western parts of Sudan. According to Anthropic, a local network with UAE connections has used the Claude AI system to create a fake human rights organization and made AI generated presentations to the UNHRC in Geneva. The network has also prepared dossiers and personal files on journalists, European parliamentarians, and UNHRC rapporteurs, who have been critical of RSF’s operations and the UAE’s support for them.

AI Cold War

In its introduction to the report, Anthropic notes that “as models become increasingly capable, their risks will increase, unless AI developers and society’s defenders act to make them safer.” Remarkably, the focus on AI developers and society’s defenders is all US-centric and almost totally exclusive of China. President Trump’s decision to leave AI alone, which is obviously driven by his deregulatory profit instincts, not to mention crass self interest, is wholly predicated on portraying China as an AI competitor and the assertion that America cannot afford to become second to China in the AI race. It takes two tango, and China is not backing away and is calling the American hype over AI as a new manifestation of the old cold war.

The geopolitical competition over AI is creating “two increasingly incompatible tech stacks,” according to a June 2026 assessment by the Boston Consulting Group. While the US is the leader in frontier AI models, talent, and capital deployment, China is advancing on cost-optimized models and accelerating adoption across its economy. Those in the middle are trying to navigate the divide: “the EU is building sovereign compute; Japan is aligning with the US through massive capital investments; and India is using its scale to engage multiple ecosystems simultaneously without committing.” For AI companies, “the choice of AI stack will increasingly determine where an organization can operate and its exposure to geopolitical volatility.”

The opportunity for global co-ordination is being missed almost deliberately by the two AI superpowers. As UN Secretary General Antonio Guteress said this week, “National action is essential, but global co-ordination is indispensable.” But UN’s voice for global co-ordination is a voice in the wilderness. This is unfortunate in spite of the comparable and complementary regulatory frameworks that exist in the US, EU and China. N&K describe them in their book as being vertical in the US – where multiple federal agencies are tasked with enforcing regulations; horizontal in Europe – with different laws applying across the different AI sectors; and both vertical and horizontal in China.

A different voice in the wilderness came from the Vatican. On 25 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV issued his first encyclical, entitled ‘Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.’ The encyclical calls for the disarming of AI, not by “rejecting technology, but preventing it from dominating humanity,” and by adopting a framework of safeguards based on the five principles of common good, universal access, subsidiarity, solidarity and social justice.

The release of the new encyclical marked the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the historic social encyclical of his namesake predecessor Pope Leo XIII issued in 1891. The historical contrasts are remarkable. Rerum Novarum (Of New Things) was the Catholic response to the miserable conditions of the 19^th century industrial working class while opposing both laissez faire capitalism that was causing the misery of the workers, and socialism that was promising emancipation through revolution. In the age of Artificial Intelligence, the old working class organizations have all but disappeared and the status of work itself has come into question, along with the possibility a basic income for everyone.

Marx may have seen it coming: “Once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the automatic system of machinery… set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.”

Features

Why the spelling Sri Lankan names in English vary

Published

3 hours ago

2026/09/20

Thilina Walpola

Have you wondered why the same name (eg. Jayatillake) is often spelt differently?

(This is largely AI generated with some human intervention)

Sri Lankan people write their names in English in multiple different ways primarily because there is no single standardized system for converting Sinhala and Tamil sounds into the English alphabet. Variations stem from linguistic phonetics, centuries of colonial rule, and legal document traditions.

1. Phonetic Gaps Between Local Languages and English

Sinhala and Tamil scripts are strictly phonetic and possess sounds that do not have direct one-to-one equivalents in the 26-letter English alphabet.

Dental vs. Retroflex Consonants: Sinhala has distinct letters for dental ‘t/d’ sounds (made with the tongue against the teeth) and retroflex ‘t/d’ sounds (tongue curled back). When transliterated, some people use th for the dental sound (Rathnayake, Goonathilake), while others use t (Ratnayake, Gunatilake).

The Vowel Mapping Dilemma: The short schwa vowel sound (common in words like Vardhana or Krama) gets interpreted differently by different writers. This creates variations like Jayawardena vs. Jayewardene, or Wickramasinghe vs. Wickremesinghe.

2. Colonial British Spelling Conventions

During British rule in Ceylon (1796 1948), colonial administrators registered birth records and names in English. English speakers often struggle to pronounce a short ‘a’ at the end of a word (e.g., pronouncing Nayaka as “Nayak-ay”).

To force an English speaker to pronounce the ending vowel, British clerks frequently wrote an “e” at the end of Sanskrit- and Sinhala-derived roots:

-nayaka became -nayake (Rathnayake)

-singha became -singhe (Wickramasinghe)

-vardhana became -wardene (Jayewardene)

-ratna became -ratne (Karunaratne)

Family branches that adopted modern Sanskritized or academic transliterations later changed these back to -na, -ha, or -ka, while others kept the British-era spelling.

3. Portuguese and Dutch Colonial Influences

A large portion of Sri Lankans carry surnames of Portuguese origin due to 150+ years of Portuguese rule along the coasts. Over centuries, these names evolved into distinct English spellings:

Pereira vs. Perera

Pieris vs. Peiris vs. Peries vs, Peeris vs. Pireis (and more)

De Silva vs. de Silva vs. de Sylva vs. de Zilwa etc.

Fernandopulle vs. Fernando

Different families registered their inherited foreign names using whichever English spelling was used by the official clerk on duty at the time of birth registration.

4. Tamil Phonetics and Soft/Hard Consonants

In Sri Lankan Tamil name transliteration, a single Tamil consonant character can represent both a soft and a hard sound depending on its position in the word. English transliterators choose different letters to represent these sounds:

T vs. TH: Thiruchelvam vs. Tiruchelvam

K vs. G: Murugesan vs. Murukesan

P vs. B: Santhapillai vs. Santhabillai

5. Legal Document Inertia

In Sri Lanka, legal identity is tied strictly to the spelling on a person’s official Birth Certificate and National Identity Card (NIC). If a registrar in 1950 in handwriting spelled a grandfather’s surname as Gunasekara instead of Gunasekera, that exact spelling remains legally binding for subsequent generations, preserving minor spelling variations across extended families.

6. Caste spellings

The English spellings of Sri Lankan names sometimes have caste indicators. Eg. Goonewardene (karawa) vs. Gunawardene (govigama).

Some families have distinctive name spelling. Eg. Wikramanayake vs. more common Wickremanayake.

English language journalists once upon a time were told to “spell a man’s name the way he spells it.

Features

The Sepala Ekanayake hi-jack: Then ambassador’s take on what happened in Bangkok

Published

3 hours ago

2026/09/20

Thilina Walpola

Hijacked Alitalia aircraft

(Excerpted from “Madame-Sir”, Manel Abeysekera’s memoir of SL’s first woman career diplomat. This book was first published in 2010)

It was when we were in the Residence at Soi 20 that I had to handle the second hi-jack — that of the Alitalia ‘plane by Sepala Ekanayake. It was a year after that by the Indonesian Muslim Fundamentalists and the aborted Coup in Bangkok.

I simply could not believe my ears when I was called by the Thai Foreign Ministry and informed that a Sri Lankan by the name of Sepala Ekanayake had hi-jacked an Alitalia Boeing with 169 passengers on board and wanted the ‘plane fuelled and flown to Colombo; my first reaction was that it must be an Eelamist under an assumed Sinhala name and I had our copy of our Immigration “black” list of those who should not be allowed to land in Sri Lanka checked for the name but, though there was an Ekanayake listed, his first name was not Sepala.

Sepala Ekanayake

I next telexed the Foreign Ministry about the hi-jack and requested all information on Ekanayake to enable me have some idea of my protagonist. Our Police was simply marvelous and sent the information promptly: which was that [1] his father had re-married and his step mother had treated him badly resulting in his becoming unmanageable in school which in turn had made him a school drop out [2] he had later learnt electrical wiring and other technical skills [3] he had illegally slipped into Italy where he married an Italian Montessori teacher and they and their son lived in Modena [4] though he was not wanted for any offence in Sri Lanka or in Italy he had been involved in a brawl in Sri Lanka in which he had broken a man’s arm though there was no evidence on which to indict him [5] he had been given short jail sentences in Pakistan and Yugoslavia for drug peddling of small quantities of heroin-hence the short sentences.

Hector (my husband) and I accompanied by (embassy staffer) Premaratne went to the Airport and were directed to the Alitalia Office where there was also the Italian Ambassador Signor Ripandelli. Both he and I offered to board the ‘plane but were refused permission by the Alitalia authorities probably because the hi-jacker had threatened to blow up the plane if anything was done without his permission or his requests refused, by triggering off the explosives he said he had round his neck and shoulders which he had covered with a shawl.

We were briefed that he had boarded the ‘plane in New Delhi and hi-jacked it when it was approaching Bangkok. Unlike most hi-jackers, he had not toted a gun but said he would not hesitate to activate the explosives round his neck and shoulders. He had explained that he had boarded the ‘plane without them and that they had been brought on board by his collaborators and left in the toilet for him to collect and string together. After doing so he had astutely occupied the Air Hostess’ seat against the body of the aircraft so that no one could surprise him from behind and declared that he was hi-jacking it; the manouevre was carried out so smoothly that the passengers thought that the reason for the unscheduled stop was a technical problem.

Sepala Ekanayake

He had said that the reason for the hi-jack was because his wife had taken their four-year old son from Sri Lanka without his permission with the connivance of the Italian Embassy in Colombo; his demands were: [1] the child to be brought to Bangkok and handed over to him [2] $300,000 to pay his collaborators and [3] all passengers to be allowed to disembark without being searched to prevent his collaborators even accidentally being detained. The reason for the hi-jack was most unusual but we had no option but to accept it.

I was asked by the Thai Authorities to negotiate with him and I asked Premaratne to listen very carefully – as I was going to speak to him in Sinhala – to detect in his choice of language or accent any trace of his being a Tamil which might give him away as a possible Eelamist. I spoke to Ekanayake through the radio link provided between the Alitalia Office and the Captain for the purpose and, having introduced myself by name and as the Sri Lankan Ambassador to Thailand, I asked him whether he wished me to speak in English or Sinhala and he opted for the latter. After listening to his tale of woe, I informed him that he had committed an international crime and that it was hardly likely that his requests would be granted, little guessing at that time that they would!

Though everyone hoped that he would be overpowered at some stage, whenever he was tired or sleepy, it was not to be because, whenever anyone approached, he would become alert. Thus the hours passed and one of my problems was in communicating with our Foreign Secretary because Air Lanka did not have a direct telephone link to Colombo which I could have used and the Alitalia Office was much too pre-occupied and was connected to Rome.

However, the spirit of solidarity among women came to my rescue as some officials in charge of Airline and other offices at the Airport were women – Royal Nepalese Airlines and World Travel Service – and those ladies invited me to their offices and offered the use of their telephones for which I was extremely grateful. Ironically, the difference regarding action by the Italian Ambassador and myself in this tense situation was that, Rome asked him to take instructions from the Alitalia Captain, whereas I was left to my own devices!

As I have a deep belief in God and realized that I had only Him and my good sense to rely on, I prayed that God give me His help to save the lives of the 169 passengers. As if in answer, I often felt that He was putting words in my mouth as I found myself speaking to Ekanayake in different tones and equally amazingly that he was being cooperative with me in whatever I asked him to do. For example, I found myself speaking sternly to him at times and persuasively at others, especially once his wife and son were sent to Bangkok by the Italian Government.

Once she and the child joined me in the Alitalia Office, I even tried to counsel her regarding her marriage, pointing out that several foreign wives were living happily with their Sri Lankan husbands and that there was no reason why she too should not. I told her that, in my opinion, though her husband had committed an international crime, he did not seem criminal minded in that he had allowed meals to be taken on board and had not terrorized the passengers or the crew except threatening to blow himself and the ‘plane should his request for his son to be brought to him in Bangkok be refused.

She, while admitting that her husband was not really criminal minded, said that she could not cope with his sudden impulses such as wanting to go to Australia with their son without any plans as to how he would earn a living there. When she was with me I spoke sternly with him that I had no intention of sending her and their son to him in the ‘plane as she was petrified; before the ‘plane in which they had flown to Bangkok landed, he had wanted to hear his son’s voice to make sure that it was indeed he, and this had been facilitated from ‘plane to ‘plane and so he knew that both of them had come.

Manel Abeysekera who died on Sept. 10 at age 93 was Sri Lanka’s first woman career diplomat

One advantage I had was that I understood Italian as it was the language assigned to me in the Foreign Service and which I had studied for one academic year at New Hall. Cambridge. No one knew it nor did I tell anyone at the Airport but I had the good fortune to be able to understand what was being said by the Alitalia officers and the Captain, which enabled me to follow developments – even the Italian Ambassador had forgotten that I had exchanged pleasantries with him in his language when I had called on him when I took up duties in Bangkok.

I asked Ekanayake to allow the passengers to disembark and, after what seemed an eternity, they were allowed to do so, without any security check as was one of his demands; thereafter, I asked that he allow the stewardesses and stewards to disembark and that too was done. Then only the Captain and Ekanayake remained on board and he asked that his wife come on board with the $300,000. I said that she would go up the gangway with the satchel of money but not board the ‘plane. However, before she did that, I asked him to divest himself of what he had round his shoulders and place it between him and the Captain as otherwise she would not do so.

At first he did not reply, but to my great relief, he complied as was conveyed by the Captain to the Alitalia Office. Thereafter, Ekanayake met his wife halfway on the gangway and took over the satchel of money and went back to the ‘plane.

How the money was obtained was most interesting. As I have already indicated, the Alitalia Office was invariably crowded. This was because there were passengers of several nationalities and representatives of their diplomatic missions were there to took after their interests. Unlike in the Indonesian Garuda hi-jack, these passengers spoke different languages and they did not collectively understand a common tongue.

When I learnt that Ekanayake wanted $300,000 I mentioned it to the Japanese representative, pointing out that as it was evening it may not be possible to get such a large sum of money quickly, which in turn might annoy Ekanayake and result in dire consequences. He got the message and shot out of the room; not much later a Thai woman bank official appeared with the satchel. I suspect that the Japanese had loaned the Thais the money who paid it to Ekanayake and later recovered it from Alitalia.

As I was marooned in the Alitalia Office for nearly 38 hours without a shower or a change of clothes, I used to visit the nearby ladies room to have a wash. On these occasions as I went along I saw several media personnel sleeping on the floor, longing to have news of developments on the hi-jack. When they saw me they would sit up and ask me for news and I tried to oblige as best I could without revealing details of the negations; I used to also tease them by saying that one thing was sure and when they excitedly asked what that would be, I said that it was that they would not get any sleep that night, which made them laugh and relax!

In contrast, the Italian Ambassador, who also passed them on his way to the men’s room, would ignore their questions or be abrupt with them; this resulted in the “Nation” newspaper reporting in an article on the hi-jack that they give the Sri Lankan Ambassador a big bouquet and the Italian Ambassador a brickbat! As I have said, my prayer helped me no end – to think clearly and act with foresight, so that, for instance, I had had the presence of mind to ask Premaratne to bring along the visa stamp and ink pad in case we had to give Ekanayake’s wife a visa to go to Sri Lanka, which we did.

The root cause of Ekanayake’s errant behaviour as I have stated from our Police reports was his early childhood aggravated by his having to steer his own canoe as a youth and rely on his brains of which, in my opinion, he had plenty but which, alas, had not been guided. For instance, his intelligence can be seen from the fact that he had prudently obtained a visa for India in case his collaborators failed to bring on board the electrical gadgetry he required for the hi-jack.

Other aspects in which the Police reports helped me was that, since they said that he had learnt electrical wiring, his claim that he had explosives round his shoulders which he could detonate may well be true and that one could not take any risks over that. Further, the fact that the Police report said that though he was not wanted in Italy or Sri Lanka, made me realize that, if the hi-jack issue ended in negotiations, he may ask to go to Italy or Sri Lanka. I also knew that his going to Italy was unlikely as the Italian Authorities would not allow it; under our Constitution however, if a citizen was not wanted for a crime – and he was not – he could return home provided he was not carrying arms against the State.

So, when the Thai Minister of Communications, H.E.Admiral Amorn Sirigaya, was earlier inquiring from me what was likely to be the denouement of the whole episode, I told him that if he allowed everyone to disembark, then he would have to go somewhere from Bangkok unless he was shot or arrested by the Thai Authorities when he stepped off the ‘plane; knowing the Thai dislike of blood being spilt on Thai soil – from my experience of the previous Garuda hi-jack – I felt that they would let him go.

Yet, when the Minister asked me whether he would be allowed to go to Sri Lanka, I did not answer him but said that I could make the enquiry provided Thailand would give him safe passage; later the Minister told me that he had consulted his Prime Minister and the answer was in the affirmative. ‘So I informed our Foreign Secretary Mr. W. T. Jayasinghe accordingly and also about my understanding of our Constitutional provision to which I have already referred.

(Next week: The drama continues)