Features

CEYLON’S SOLITARY SILVER MEDAL

Published

4 years ago

2022/08/21

by ECB Wijeyasinghe

Thanks to a satellite in the firmament, the Moscow Olympiad is now viewed in armchair comfort even in the middle-class homes of Sri Lanka.There was a time when admirers of the culture and games of Ancient Greece had to be satisfied with taking Homer to bed and dreaming of Helen of Troy or Ulysses till the crack of dawn. T.V. and other Olympics have changed all that. Owing to their possession of an enormous vocabulary the Greeks had a word for everything and a name for every game under the sun.

In the field of athletics, however, they excelled to such an extent that it was the secret ambition of every young man to look like a Greek God. All the classical deities were supposed to be physically perfect with a chiselled grin or grizzled chin according to the specifications of the patrons of the Arts. When sculptors finished making a statue of one of the gods, everybody started admiring it. Ultimately they had to add a fig leaf, in order to prevent what is known as “as vaha” or “evil eye” from having a malefic influence on his work.

All the specimens of physical perfection that Ancient Greece nurtured were given an airing at the Olympic Games whose origins are lost in the mists of antiquity. But if Classical scholars like Ronnie Abayasekara and Lester Fonseka are to be believed, the first Olympiad was held in Athens in 776 BC and consisted of a race run over the length of the stadium.

After that it was held every four years until 393 AD according to the historians. The important thing is that the business of running with or without a torch was reckoned a man’s exclusive sport and here is something that the modern suffragette can take up with the ancient Greeks. Women were not allowed in the stadium either as competitors or spectators.

As the contestants had to concentrate 100 per cent on the events they were engaged in, they were not allowed the luxury of distractions. Hence, the Greeks in their wisdom, thought that females should remain at home while their husbands and brothers did the struggling to win the laurels.

PIONEER

Incidentally, the prize in the olden days was a branch of wild olive to adorn the brow. There were no medals. Even Nero, at a later date, had a try at acquiring some kind of laurel at the Olympic Games, though there were no items on the program suited to his own peculiar genius. Fiddling while a fire was on was not on the agenda.

I am somewhat allergic to dates but not to names, and all recorders of Olympiads will dip their flags and salute the memory of one man. He is Pierre de Coubertin, the gallant French nobleman who triumphed over every conceivable hurdle and breathed fresh life into the ashes of the Games that had lain dormant for nearly 1,500 years.

It happened in 1896. When the bugles blew in Athens once more to summon athletes from the four corners of the world to the stadium the dream of the idealistic French baron bore fruit. Since then almost every four years in different cities of the world the Olympic flag has flown, except during the time when the Great Wars were on. Then of course, runners were not heroes unless they ran in the right direction.

Without attempting to poach on the preserves of my esteemed friend M. M. Thawfeeq and the tribe of learned sports scribes of the calibre of Elmo Rodrigopulle, T. M. K. Samat, Lal Gunasekere, Rangi Akbar, Lawrence Machado and Vajira Goonewardene, I must be forgiven if I say that there are four years etched in the calendar of my Olympic memory.

MEMORIES

1924 in Paris belonged to Paavo Nurmi. The Flying Finn made dazzling runs in the 10,000 metres four years earlier and four years later, but in 1924 he was at the top of his form. In the course of six days he ran in seven long-distance races and breasted the tape ahead of his competitors in each of them. One afternoon in Paris he captured the 1,500 metres, followed just over an hour later by the 5,000 metres, in each case in new Olympic record times.

In the sizzling heat of this Parisian summer, Nurmi also won the 10,000 metres cross-country event, finishing nearly two minutes ahead of his fellow-Finn Ritola. In the course of his amazing career which spanned nearly a decade he won seven Olympic gold medals and three silvers. No man during this century has done more to put Finland on the map of the world.

1936 in Berlin will always belong to the black men. Jesse Owens, the shoe-shine boy from the cotton fields of America knocked the bottom out of the Nazi theory of racial supremacy, and gave Hitler a head-ache from which he never recovered. Owens won the 100 metres, 200 metres and Long Jump, setting up records every time. When he died last month experts described the great Negro as the Champion Athlete of the century.

1948 in Wembley was the year of the Dutch, while Emile Zatopek was the hero of Helsinki in 1952. Mrs. Fanny Blankers-Koen of the Netherlands was the outstanding personality in the London games in 1948, when for the first time a Dutch Burgher made Ceylon’s presence felt at an Olympiad in perhaps the most strenuous athletic event on the card.

The Dutch lady left her Anglo-Saxon sisters panting behind her in the 80 metres hurdles, the 100 metres and 200 metres. She also “anchored” the 400 metres relay team and gave the members of the local DBU the thrill of their lives because hitherto everybody thought the dames from Delft were built more for comfort than for speed.

Ceylon has good reason to remember 1948 and Wembley because at an age when most athletes hang up their spiked shoes and dream of the past, our own Duncan White built like a greyhound, secured a silver medal coming second only to the American world-beater, Roy Cochran, in the 400 metres hurdles.On that bright afternoon in the Wembley Stadium, Duncan White who 12 years earlier in 1936 was mainly responsible for winning the Tarbat Challenge Cup for his famous school, Trinity College, Kandy, went over the hurdles like a man possessed. He probably had the intuitive feeling that he was creating history, because his performance has not been surpassed by a local athlete. White was beaten by Cochran, but the stopwatches showed that both of them had broken the Olympic record.

It seems a pity that Duncan White, who brought so much glory to Ceylon, was compelled to seek fresh pastures far, far away from the land of his birth at a time when Sri Lanka needed men of his fibre and determination. There are some people who attribute Duncan White’s success to the inspiring presence of Willorage Hector Douglas Perera, an Uncle of Sri Lanka’s Air Force Chief, Harry Goonetilleke. My closest association with an Olympic personality was when I lived next door to the home of W. H. D. Perera at Chelsea Gardens in Kollupitiya.

MANAGER

Hector, as his friends called him was not an athlete but he had an arresting personality. Dark and handsome he had a flair for organization. He was, in many respects, said to be like Baron de Coubertin, the man who resuscitated the Olympic Games. As a young officer in the Port of Colombo he was one of the pioneers of the Carnival idea and his “Harbour Lights” netted a few lakhs for charity. Subsequently he went as the Manager of more than one Ceylon team to the Games.

W. H. D. Perera died about 14 years ago but his wife Maisie, is still an active office-bearer in the Women’s International Club while his daughter, Sondra Sriananda is a gifted pianist who can play Boogie-Woogie and Beethoven with equal ease.

Now that the Olympic Games are in full swing and those who put their cart before the horse are watching their TV sets with almost Spartan fortitude, it is nice to see the Lion Flag flying in the Moscow stadium though there may not be another Duncan White to bring a medal home.

(Excerpted from The Good At Their Best first published in 1980)

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Features

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

Published

1 day 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

1 day 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

2 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.