Features

Sumithra ( 1935 – 2023 )

Published

3 years ago

2023/01/23

By Uditha Devapriya

My Lunches with Orson is the title of a collection of interviews that Henry Jaglom, a US avant-garde filmmaker, did with Orson Welles, over a period of two years (1983-1985). It is at once insightful, refreshing, provocative, and compelling, and it shows Welles at his best. At the time, Jaglom was around 10 years into his own career; he had tried his best to stage a comeback for Welles, and failed. The book reveals Jaglom’s admiration for Welles, and more than anything, the potential Welles possessed, which was in effect denied to him.

Re-reading Jaglom’s book, the other day, I suddenly remembered Sumitra Peries. Peries passed away last Thursday. That morning, I received a call from a friend of hers, telling me that she had been admitted to hospita, owing to a stomach ailment. An hour later, they announced her death. It was just too sudden, shocking, and saddening.

I sat down, pondering the many conversations we had shared at her place, processing the fact that there would be no sequel to them. I thought back on her career and her legacy. Put simply, it seemed as hard for me to see the full-stop in the mirror, as it would have been for Kusum, at the end of Gehenu Lamayi (1978), to see the question mark in hers.

“The end of an era,” a mentor of mine, a distant relative of hers, messaged from Toronto. A convenient cliché, but in this case, a most suitable summing up.

For Sumitra Peries was not just a symbol of some golden and bygone era. She was its last emissary, its last survivor, its last face. Her husband epitomised that period no less: his passing away, five years ago, signified the beginning of a transition. With Sumitra’s passing, that transition is now complete. The question is, what do we make of it?

Sumitra was not just a director, an editor, or an assistant, though she wore these titles in her life. She was also an indefatigable connoisseur and a gadfly, who happened to dislike the process of writing and speaking. She hardly wrote to the press and was reluctant to talk in front of a crowd. “I don’t want to,” she once told me. “I simply can’t get myself to do it,” she quipped on another occasion. As such, we lack the anthologies, the essays, the reviews, the reflections, which her husband had and got published in his lifetime.

In other words, we lack material for a memoir or a biography. This should force us to engage with her legacy, as one of our last great icons: those who hailed from the colonial period and saw through some of this country’s most pivotal social transformations.

Her life and career have been charted many times before, by many writers. By themselves, they constitute the stuff of films: hailing from a rural upper middle-class; born to a socialist and radical political heritage from her father’s and uncles’ side; displaying a rebellious streak as a teenager and a young adult; travelling solo to meet her brother in Malta, before even turning 21; and living on her own in Lausanne and Paris, before suddenly whisking herself off to Brixton, in London. In all this, she remained a woman ahead of her time, daring enough to explore her frontiers, but also pragmatic enough to know how far she could reach out, and when she had to retreat. Eventually, she returned to her place of birth and sought work as an editor, on her husband’s films, soon carving her own path.

In all this, Sumitra tends to be framed as Lester James Peries’s significant other: which she was, to a certain extent. Her work as editor on Lester’s films – on the best he ever made, from Gamperaliya (1963) to Golu Hadawatha (1969), as well as his masterpiece, Nidhanaya (1970) – helped her grasp an art form she had studied in England.

Yet such a reading of her life reduces her to a mere adjunct, an appendage whose only function was to sustain her husband’s work. To understand Sumitra’s contribution to the cinema, we thus need to go beyond this framing of her, and, instead, critically reflect on her relationship with Lester and the world he opened her up to. To do so, we need to invert the conventional reading of her: we need to chart the world she opened him up to.

Sumitra was linked through her husband to some of the most exciting strides in the arts and culture that were making themselves felt in post-independence Sri Lanka, and not only in film. Lester James Peries’s brother, Ivan (1921-1988), had been one of the leading figures of the ’43 Group, which challenged establishment circles and sought a modernist revolution in the arts. Born to largely middle-class and Westernised milieux, the ’43 Group laid the seeds of the cultural revolution that was to flow years later, after 1956. Not everyone in the Group shared the political convictions and the nationalist ideals that made 1956 possible. But even if they didn’t share them, they still considered them inevitable.

Despite the enthusiasm of its founders, however, the ’43 Group was not without its flaws and limitations. “The verve and the enthusiasm of the forties,” Ian Goonetileke observed many decades later, “petered out, perhaps because they were insufficiently grounded in the bedrock of the cultural patterns of Sri Lanka.” Goonetileke noted the fatal paradox which underlay, and undergirded, Sri Lanka’s most promising avant-garde movement: its lack of familiarity with the very culture it sought inspiration from. “I wasn’t rooted in my culture,” Lester Peries once admitted to me. In part, this was due to their Westernised and Christian upbringing: “We were actively forbidden to look into or be interested in other cultures.” To be intrigued by the latter was to invite punishment: “Going to a Buddhist funeral was out of the question. You had to pay penance if you did such a thing.”

These limitations crippled most of the other members of the ’43 Group, and many of those who followed it as well. To be sure, Lester’s maiden work, Rekava (1956), significantly broke with all the conventions and formulae of the Sinhala film. However, we need to place such achievements in their context. In her biography of Sumitra Peries, Vilasnee Tampoe-Hautin puts it that “all Sinhala-speaking films were born in South India.” Born, bred, and buttered in the Madras studio, the Sinhala cinema, therefore, remained an enigmatic paradox. With his Westernised ethos, Lester may have found this state of affairs too infuriating to tolerate: as he was fond of saying, the Indian film was “neither Indian nor film.”

However, while challenging, what I like to term, the South Indian orientation of Sri Lankan films, Rekava was, in later years, castigated by those who felt that its view of peasant life, in a Sinhala village, was too artificial and too contrived. While Lester, and his cast and crew, had departed from the patterns of the conventional Sinhala film, many, if not most, of them were not grounded properly in the culture they sought to depict and exhibit in it. They wanted to be true to life, but their very backgrounds constrained them.

In other words, while they had ruptured the South Indian domination of Sri Lankan cinema, they were unable to bypass their personal limitations. This was as true of Rekava as it was of the’43 Group and of the cultural elites that had moulded it.

Much of this intelligentsia thus failed to make the proverbial leap. Many, like Lester’s own brother, emigrated to fairer climes; others, like Justin Deraniyagala, retreated to a world of their own. A few managed to question their intellectual inheritance and go beyond: among them, the most prominent would be George Keyt (1901-1993). In Keyt’s case, however, his childhood interest in Buddhism, and his marriage to a Sinhalese, and later an Indian Muslim, pushed him away from his Anglicised, middle-class background. I think that was the key to Keyt’s evolution: in effect, his marriage to those far more rooted in their society helped him defy his limitations. That proved to be no less useful to Lester. This is where we should place Sumitra and her contribution, to the cinema and to her husband’s work.

Hailing from a staunchly traditional, yet politically radical family, Sumitra represented, at every level, the antithesis of Lester’s upbringing. Speaking at a function, nearly 10 years ago, Sunil Ariyaratne rather flippantly outlined the differences: Catholic/Buddhist, city/village, conservative/socialist, UNP/LSSP. These contradictions did not split the two of them apart; rather, they brought them together and welded the one to the other.

Sumitra’s enduring contribution to her husband’s career, which critics, who perceive her as a mere appendage to his work fail, to note, was hence to turn him away from his inheritance and bring him closer to a culture he so desperately wished to depict. In doing so, I think she helped Lester transcend the limitations that the other members of the ’43 Group, to which he belonged by proxy, could not. Through that, the two of them managed to bring about the revolution of the arts that 1956 had so tantalisingly heralded.

There is certainly no doubt that Sumitra Peries will be missed. She did much more than what critics, and journalists, concede, and her contributions are vaster than we give her credit for. In the absence of any written, or even oral evidence, from her side, however, it behoves us to explore and assess what she did and put it to paper. I believe this is the task of the intrepid historian, critic, journalist, and biographer. Such an endeavour is urgently needed now, at a time when, quoting that Gramscian quip, the old world is dying and the new struggles to be born. Sumitra’s death symbolises a passing and a transition. One only hopes that we do not forget her legacy, and, more importantly, what we should do about it.

(The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com)

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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

3 days ago

2026/03/12

Sahan Weerasooriya

A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.