Features
JAYANTHA DHANAPALA (1938 – 2023)
by Tissa Jayatilaka
The splendid career and the many glittering prizes won by Jayantha Dhanapala is common knowledge and does not require reiteration here. Rather I wish to focus on the man himself in this tribute to an exceptional person whom I had the privilege of getting to know personally at the tail end of the 1980s – I had of course heard of Jayantha and his many accomplishments long before our first meeting. Having read a newspaper review of North-South Perspectives, an international affairs journal that I edited, which focused on the promotion of greater understanding between the ‘developed’ and the ‘developing’ world, Jayantha telephoned me to ask if we could meet. I readily agreed and thus began a friendship that lasted until his death a few days ago.
Although I had not known at the time of that first meeting of ours, I soon learnt that encouraging those of the younger generation to contribute their mite to the betterment of Sri Lanka and the world outside of her shores was a priority for Jayantha. In the process, he enabled those of us who came into contact with him to better ourselves in order to continue to give of our best. In his appreciation of Jayantha ‘s life and career, former diplomat A.L.A. Azeez (who joined the Sri Lanka foreign service in 1992) talks at length of the marvellous role of guide and mentor of younger colleagues, including himself, that Jayantha played throughout his days in the foreign service.
In the same spirit, after his retirement from the UN and upon his return to Sri Lanka, he served as a Trustee and member of the Board of Advisers of Sri Lanka Unites, mentoring a local youth movement dedicated to the transformation of Sri Lanka to a land free of religious and ethnic strife. He was involved from the inception in the establishment of the Friday Forum, an informal and self- financed group of older citizens dedicated to democracy, good governance, human rights and the rule of law.
Our friendship grew over the years, I happen to think, because we shared much in common. We both schooled and spent our formative years in Kandy– he at Trinity in the 1950s and I at Kingswood in the 1960s. Later he and I both entered the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya at different times, given that he was a decade older, where we both read for the Special Degree in English. His extra-curricular activities at Peradeniya, like mine, included sports– rugger in his case and cricket in mine– and theatre. We both took part in plays, held office and were participants in the diverse activities of the University Drama Society (DramSoc).
Jayantha and I shared a fondness for the spoken and written word and combined our resources in this area. We jointly edited A Garland for Ashley: Glimpses of a life celebrating the life of Ashley Halpe and His 50 Years of University Teaching (2008). He was instrumental in making me the editor of SIRIMAVO – Honouring the world’s first woman prime minister (2010) for which publication he wrote an excellent essay on The Foreign Policy of Sirimavo Bandaranaike. He contributed a chapter titled, A City Upon a Hill for Excursions and Explorations Cultural Encounters Between Sri Lanka and the United States that I put together in 2002. He reviewed Peradeniya: Memories of a University (1997) that I jointly edited with Silva.
Jayantha served as keynote speaker while I introduced the publication at the launch of the late Tissa Abeysekera’s collection of essays on culture and the arts titled, Roots, Reflections and Reminiscences (2007). A couple of years ago, Jayantha and I teamed up one more time to write an essay titled, A Study in ‘Creative Compassion’ for The Fourth Lion – Essays for Gopalkrishna GANDHI (2021) edited by Venu Madhav Govindu and Srinath Raghavan.
In the 1990s, when our friendship had matured to an extent that I could ask the Dhanapalas for a personal favour, I would on certain of my regular visits to the United States, stay with Maureen and Jayantha whenever they were free of pressing official commitments. I stayed with them in Washington while he was our ambassador (1995-1997) and later in New York when he was serving as Under-Secretary General for Disarmament Affairs (1998-2003). In New York, they would book tickets in advance for plays on Broadway to make my visits even more enjoyable. Their friendship and warm hospitality knew no bounds. I also recall a visit to the UN with my wife Lilani and our daughter Lara when Jayantha hosted us to lunch at a restaurant in the premises of the UN headquarters.
No account of Jayantha would be complete without a reference to the solid and sensitive supporting role played by Maureen in his life and career. She was a superb fellow-traveller who had known Jayantha from a very young age and were fellow undergraduates at Peradeniya as well. If marriages, as we are told, are indeed made in heaven, then theirs undoubtedly would be one of them. They were an extremely compatible and congenial pair to the very end. After their return to Sri Lanka, we had the opportunity to meet Jayantha and Maureen in more relaxed settings over food and drink, either at our home or theirs or in the homes of common friends.
Lilani and I went up to Kandy to spend a long- promised weekend with our senior colleagues and intimate friends Gananath and Ranjini Obeyesekere at April’s end. Knowing of our strong desire to meet Jayantha and Maureen during our visit and, as all of us were close mutual friends, our kind and thoughtful hosts invited the Dhanapalas to lunch at their lovely home. It was when we sat to lunch that it struck me that all six of us around the table, belonging to different eras, had been through the Department of English and read for the Special Degree in English at the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya which later became the University of Peradeniya. Little did we know that one of us would be gone in less than a month and not be around for another meeting over lunch! Impermanence is all.
My one time teacher (he taught Lilani too, in later years), senior colleague in Peradeniya’s Department of English and close friend, Professor Thiru Kandiah, and his wife Indranee, have shared a friendship of much longer standing with the Dhanapalas. Thiru was a year senior to Jayantha at Peradeniya while Indranee and Maureen who had been schoolmates and close friends at Girl’s High School, Kandy, resumed their friendship at a later date at Peradeniya. Their fathers had been members of the Trinity College staff, very close friends and neighbours. Trinity’s Lemuel House was founded when Jayantha was a student at the school with Indranee’s father, the illustrious teacher and Head Master Mr. R.L Kannangara in charge. Jayantha was one of the most outstanding of Lemuel and Indranee’s father soon came to respect and, also like him very much.
The Kandiahs now live in Perth, Australia and realising that they may be unaware of Jayantha’s passing, I wrote to inform them of the sad event. Soon there was a rapid exchange of emails amongst us and I found myself in total agreement with their assessment of the Dhanapalas.
Here is Thiru on Jayantha:
Jayantha was held in especially high esteem and regard by absolutely everybody. This was not least for the obvious brilliance of his mind. But closely allied with that, there was in addition this very distinctive way in which he tended to come across to people in his interactions with them- as of his very nature a signally intellectual sort of person: always impeccably reasoned, and very definitely and firmly so, if in an unostentatious and quietly unassertive, also exemplarily courteous, manner that lent him great dignity; with the unmistakable integrity of the positions he adopted on matters and what he stood for adding considerable power to the strikingly impressive impact he had on people.
Indranee’s pertinent observation is that Maureen is as good natured as she is beautiful and gentle and that the school, “could not have found a better head prefect than her”. She goes on to say that Maureen’s father was a very caring and helpful person and her mother, a gentle and gracious lady. These are sentiments that deserve to be widely shared and hence my doing so.
All in all, Jayantha Dhanapala was a formidable personality, though, never aggressive or unapproachable. He was friendly and unfailingly courteous at all times. I wish to end this tribute with another most appropriate quote from Thiru Kandiah:
Much will, I am sure, be said and written of Jayantha at this time of his leaving us. But the man we were fortunate know and whom we had such affection and respect for will remain in our hearts and minds as long as we are around.
by Kaushalya Perera
Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).
How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities
Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).
* Lecturer (Probationary)
– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.
* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.
* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.
State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.
Problem type 1
– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria
Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.
This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!
Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education
A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.
Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.
At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.
Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.
The problem is clear but what about a solution?
Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:
* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.
* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.
* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.
Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.
(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)
This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.
Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.
Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.
The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.
The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication
Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.
Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.
The musicians, who make up Talento, are:
Prabuddha Geetharuchi:
Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist
Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento
(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.
Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):
A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.
Chandana Perera (Drummer):
His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.
Harsha Soysa:
(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band
Udara Jayakody:
(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.
Aruna Madushanka:
(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.
Prashan Pramuditha:
(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..
The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’
In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!
‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.
This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.
It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.
Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.
Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:
Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial
TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic
Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers
YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins
Socialist Alliance expresses concern over GoSL’s growing military ties with US
FSP proposes self-governing regions, bicameral legislature to address national issue
GMOA decides to intensify its trade union struggle
SLMC condoles the passing of Khamenei, urges restraint and condemn GoSL stance
Hoarders run riot; govt. all at sea
Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?
‘Dates have the highest sugar content to fight Coronavirus’
Sunday Island 27 December – Headlines
#SundayIsland 17th December – Headlines
Sunday Island – 28th March
Sunday Island Headlines – 21 March
Sunday Island – 21st February – Headlines
-
Opinion4 days agoJamming and re-setting the world: What is the role of Donald Trump?
-
Features4 days agoAn innocent bystander or a passive onlooker?
-
Features6 days agoBuilding on Sand: The Indian market trap
-
Features5 days agoRatmalana Airport: The Truth, The Whole Truth, And Nothing But The Truth
-
Opinion6 days agoFuture must be won
-
Business6 days agoDialog partners with Xiaomi to introduce Redmi Note 15 5G Series in Sri Lanka
-
Business5 days agoIRCSL transforms Sri Lanka’s insurance industry with first-ever Centralized Insurance Data Repository
-
Opinion1 day agoSri Lanka – world’s worst facilities for cricket fans