Opinion

Revisiting Humanism in Education: Insights from Tagore – II

Published

2 years ago

2025/02/18

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Panduka Karunanayake

Professor in the Department of Clinical Medicine and former Director, Staff Development Centre,
University of Colombo

The 34th J.E. Jayasuriya Memorial Lecture

14 February 2025

SLFI Auditorium, Colombo

(Continued from 17 Feb.)

Tagore and humanism

Tagore was born to a wealthy Bengali family in British colonial India in the year 1861. This was a time of great social transformation in India, involving political, social, religious and literary movements. In his youth he saw the organisational structure that I described in its formative days, and immediately realised how it is unsuited for anything except the British colonial plans. In particular, he appreciated the strengths of traditional Indian education such as the gurukula, ashrama and tapovana systems, the value of the aesthetic sense to human growth and the role of the environment in our lives. He placed a huge importance on emotions and social values, and decried a materialistic or hedonistic approach to life. Always explaining his ideas through brilliant similes, he said: “The timber merchant may think that flowers and foliage are only frivolous decorations for a tree, but he will know to his cost that if these are eliminated, the timber follows them.”

But he also saw the value of the science and technology that the British were bringing in. He wasn’t a simplistic indigene fighting to chase the British out. He wanted to combine the good of both the old and the new, both India and the world. The best description that we can give of the man is call him a great harmoniser of ideas and an incorrigible optimist.

According to Subhransu Maitra, who is a well-known Indian intellectual who translates Bengali works into English, Tagore’s experimental journey on education lasted approximately fifty years, from the 1890s to the 1940s, and evolved through three phases. In the first phase, roughly from the 1890s to the 1910s, he thought of education as ‘freedom to learn,’ in contradistinction to the kind of straightjacketed rote-learning that British colonial education had introduced to India. He also fought for education in the mother tongue instead of English. This was the time Tagore set up the Brahmacharyashrama, a school for boys in Santiniketan. In the second phase, from the 1910s to the 1930s, he thought of education as ‘freedom from ignorance and want’ and as a powerful tool to emancipate humanity from poverty, superstition and suffering. This was the time when he set up the Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, his version of a university, as well as Sriniketan, his effort at rural upliftment. And in the third phase, from the 1930s until his death in 1941, which was the time when Visva-Bharati was flourishing, he thought of education as an internationalist, humanist project or ‘freedom from bondage’, in contradistinction to nationalism. I will follow Tagore’s journey in this sequence, and at each stage try to highlight the lessons his educational philosophy gives us today.

But in toto, I feel that the common thread that runs through this journey is his commitment to humanistic education – a term that actually became popular only after his death, following the work of educational psychologists such as Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers. So let me start by briefly explaining what humanistic education means.

Humanistic education is the application of the principles of humanism or humanistic philosophy to education. I am sure that many in this audience already know what humanism means, but bear with me when I try to explain it. I want to highlight the fact that humanism is not the same as some concepts with which it is often conflated – such as humanitarianism or humaneness or the humanities. In essence, humanism believes in the primacy of human agency, or the belief that humans are in charge of their own destinies; it is an Enlightenment idea that took agency away from divinity and placed it in the hands of the human being. (But of course, it is also very much part of some ancient philosophies.) But it identifies this agency as a responsibility both to oneself and one’s society, rather than as a libertarian licence. The ideal of humanism is human flourishing – not hedonism, nor any goal in the afterlife.

In humanism, human beings are considered independent, inherently good and capable of positive growth. One might look at these assumptions somewhat cynically – but it is hard to deny these qualities to a newborn child who has arrived on this world in all its innocence. As Tagore once famously said, “Every child comes with the message that God is not yet discouraged of man.”

As Ratna Navaratnam (1958) wrote in New Frontiers in East-West Philosophies of Education:

“Humanism takes as its dominant pattern the progress of the individual from helpless infancy to self-governing maturity…The child is put at the centre of the picture and the educator judges the truth of any theory and the success of any system, by the contribution it makes to the transformation of creative childhood into creative manhood.”

In humanistic education, several features can be identified:

* The student is given a free choice to decide what to study, how and for how long, within reason. As a result, the motivation to learn is intrinsic, rather than extrinsic goals such as exams, grades or certificates.

* The educational experience is left open, exploratory and self-driven. There is little or no emphasis on a curriculum, syllabus or what we today call ‘intended learning outcomes’.

* The setting for learning is safe. What the teacher does is provide the student with the resources to quench curiosity and play a supportive and facilitatory role, as a resource person and guide. There is no coercion, judgement, criticism or corporeal punishment.

* The learning environment focuses on both cognitive and emotional aspects of the learning experience; in other words, both ‘knowing’ and ‘feeling’ are considered valid and important to the learning process.

* And finally, at least a significant portion of the learning time is spent in contact with nature and the environment, rather than inside a classroom.

With that background, let me now turn to the three phases in Tagore’s journey in education.

Phase 1: ‘Freedom to learn’

Tagore was urged to experiment with education because he saw the unsatisfactory nature of schools, which he described as “…educational factories, lifeless, colourless, dissociated from the context of the universe, within bare white walls, staring like eyeballs of the dead…It provided information and knowledge for the intellectual growth and it neglected the aspects of human growth.”

Let me quote Tagore at length:

“The way we understand it, the word school means an education factory or mill of which the schoolmaster is a part. The bell goes off at half past ten and the mill begins to work. As the mill starts, the master also keeps spouting off. The mill closes at four o’clock. The master too, stops spouting and the students return home, their heads stuffed with factory-made lessons. Later, at the time of examinations, these lessons are evaluated and stamped.

“The advantage of factory production is that the products are exactly made to a standard and the products of different factories differ but little from one another. So, it is easy to grade them. But individuals differ a great deal from one another. Even an individual may not be the same from one day to the next.

“Even so, a man cannot get from machines what he gets from another man. A machine produces, it can’t give. It can supply oil, but it can’t light a lamp.”

Tagore’s journey was dedicated to find a suitable alternative to such factory-style education

You can see that he disliked uniformity and intellectual dominance in education, and he preferred freedom to do, experience, feel and learn. This is especially noteworthy today, because educational psychologists have since found the importance of the affective domain for learning: the so-called cognitive-emotional model of learning.

Importantly, the reason he liked a more active style of learning is not merely because it is better for assimilation or long-term memory – as we are accustomed to think today – but because it promoted the growth of individual talents and tastes and imparted a communitarian rather than an individualistic outlook to life.

He also preferred a more idyllic, rural setting to educate children, because he felt that cities and towns rob the students of their bonding with nature, which was necessary for the growing mind to grow freely, wholistically and strongly. This also included creating opportunities for social contact with the rural folk, and trying to help the villagers at least in small ways. So he was especially keen that school and society were welded together. That was his way of teaching two things: first, communication skills, and second, a sense of social service. It would be interesting to compare this to a similar local experiment: Dr C.W.W. Kannangara’s Handessa rural education scheme. (For an excellent account, see Gunasekara [2013].)

To Tagore, the school-society link was also necessary to impart moral virtues: “It is utterly futile to expect that the preaching of a few textbook precepts…at school will set right everything when countless varieties of dishonesty and perversity are destroying decency and taste every moment in today’s artificial life. This only results in different kinds of hypocrisy and insolent flippancy in the name of morality…”

All around us today, we can see how textbook-based teaching of virtues has led to hypocrisy among those who do wrong with impunity, flippancy among those who allow wrong to happen as if it is the norm, and cynicism among those who try to reconcile what they see with what they were taught in classrooms.

I am sure you will appreciate that some of Tagore’s humanistic ideas are being put into practice in pre-school and primary education even today, for instance following the teachings of Maria Montessori. In Sri Lanka, however, because of the bottleneck effect of exams, they are being throttled by the competitiveness and the rush to obtain certificates. This has enormous implications to our own education system. What Tagore taught us – by not judging learning through exams – is that if we had exams, much of what we expect students to learn would be ignored because they are not specifically assessed in the exams. The reason we want exams is because we want to compare student with student. But how can we compare student with student if each student is a unique person? What do we value greater: the comparison or the uniqueness? We must be careful when answering this question, because often it turns out that our answer is actually not that of the educationist but that of the industrialist, and not that of our society’s but that of the countries in the core of knowledge production.

Phase 2: ‘Freedom from ignorance and want’

This is perhaps the phase of his work that is hardest to pin down to a few fundamentals. But I will try.

To me, it appears that his first lesson is to tailor education to our own needs, rather than to import and transplant an educational system from elsewhere. (Tagore himself was, of course, warning about the dangers of blindly following the British system.) This is an excellent testament for what we today call contextual knowledge or conditional knowledge.

Looking around, I cannot help feel that this is such an important lesson for us too. I wish that as educationists we paid more attention to this. We cannot do so if we merely ask our teachers to do what international experts advise. We must study our own society, our own past practices and experiments, how they have succeeded or failed and why, what would work for us now and so on. Tagore said:

“Only when we are able to channel the current of education in our country through the numerous experiments of numerous teachers, it will become a natural thing of the country. Only then will we come across real teachers here and there, now and then. Only then a tradition, a succession of teachers will naturally follow. We cannot invent a particular educational system by labelling it as ‘national’. We can call ‘national’ only education of that kind which is being conducted in a variety of ways through a variety of endeavours by a variety of our countrymen…When a particular education system seeks to fasten a static ideal on to the country, we cannot call it ‘national’. It is communal and therefore, fatal to the country.”

To me, such a uniform education system is worse than communal – at best it would facilitate pedantry, at worst it could even facilitate totalitarianism and fascism.

Importantly, Tagore was keen to point out that when times change, the same energy needs to be spent on amending our systems and practices. In one speech he used a beautiful simile: he likened time to a river, and said that people who don’t change with changing times are like the people who would not change the position of the ferry even after the river has changed its position. He asked, How can they cross the river from the old ferry? This would be great advice for a country that still runs its educational system dictated to by policies that are over eighty years old.

The next crucial lesson is his trust in science and technology – but only appropriate technology – as well as his disdain for outdated traditions, superstitions and rituals. In this sense, he was remarkably modern. He said:

“When in the East we were busy calling upon the ghostbuster in case of disease, the astrologer to placate hostile planets in case of trouble, worshiping the goddess Sitala to ward off smallpox and similar epidemics, and practising home-grown black magic to get rid of enemies, in the West a woman asked Voltaire: ‘I have heard one can kill whole flocks of sheep by chanting a mantra?’ Voltaire replied: ‘It can certainly be done, but an adequate supply of arsenic along with it is also required.’ It cannot be absolutely ruled out that a modicum of faith in magic and the supernatural still persists in isolated pockets in Europe, but a trust in the efficacy of arsenic in this connection is almost universal there. That is why they can kill us whenever they want to and we are liable to die even when we do not want to.”

Tagore was wise enough to note that the British colonial government was actually quite keen to deny Indians this gift of science and technology. He pointed out that the colonial colleges and universities actually functioned with many constraints and limitations imposed by the colonial government. One of the main hopes that Tagore had in establishing Visva-Bharati was overcoming this. He knew that foreigners, both western and eastern, yearn to come to India to learn about her strong and vibrant achievements in the humanities. He welcomed them. In return, he also created space for Indians to come there and learn what the West had to teach – which, of course, was mainly science. This was the confluence of East and West that Tagore envisaged for Visva-Bharati. And I think that one
of the reasons why Visva-Bharati failed later on was that after Independence, India had an alternative, perhaps better way to forge ahead with science, when Jawaharlal Nehru set up the Indian Institutes of Technology. But I wonder whether Tagore’s plan in combining the strength in our humanities with the strength in science and technology of other lands within our educational system could still serve us here.

Tagore also created Sriniketan and its Institute of Rural Reconstruction, a rural upliftment
programme using what would later come to be called ‘appropriate technology’. This was not a
blind exercise in importing European machines and gadgets like washing machines or floor polishers. Instead, it was an attempt to solve the problems faced by the rural folk by the use of scientific knowledge and appropriate technological tools. It included components such as rural education, village sanitation, roving dispensaries, anti-malaria and child welfare schemes, cooperative societies, scientific
agriculture, experimental farming, dairy farming, weaving, tannery, smithy, carpentry and other
projects. It was designed to promote selfconfidence and self-help and eliminate ignorance and superstition among the villagers. As Tagore described his educational mission:

“Our centre of culture should not only be the centre of intellectual life of India, but the centre of her economic life as well. It must cultivate land, breed cattle, to feed itself and its students; it
must produce all necessaries, devising the best means and using the best materials, calling science to its aid. Its very success would depend on the success of its industrial ventures carried out on the co-operative principle; which will unite the teachers and students in a living and active bond of necessity. This will also give us a practical, industrial training, whose motive is not profit.”

When the time came for Tagore to send his son Rathindranath for higher education, he sent him not to Oxford but to learn agricultural science at Illinois: “Indians should learn to become better farmers in Illinois than better ‘gentlemen’ in Oxford”. Similarly, he sent the children of his relatives and friends, including his son-in-law, to learn other skills, such as scientific dairykeeping, the cooperative movement and rural medical systems.

We can see that Tagore’s educational philosophy was not merely bookish but also practical, not merely ideological but also pragmatic, not merely effective but also of quality, and not merely focused on the individual but also on uplifting the community. We can see that it was not pedantic but contextual, not blind but appropriate, and not profit-oriented but promoting human flourishing.

(To be concluded)

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Opinion

Why Sri Lankan sports need science, sanity, and substance

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/9

Thilina Walpola

Beyond hype and headlines:

Media Sensationalism,Hyperbolic Language, and the Fragile Psychology of High-Performance Athletes – From the Cricket Pitch to the Javelin Runway

By a Sporty Enthusiast

When a nation’s heroes and heroines in sport step onto the intensely competitive national and international stage, they carry far more than their sporting attire, athletic gear, and personal ambitions. On their shoulders rests the weight of millions of hopes, hyper-fixated media coverage, and unprecedented national expectations. Yet in modern sport, the boundary between healthy national pride and destructive psychological pressure has become alarmingly thin.

High-performance athletes often operate on extremely fragile mental ground, are exposed to continuous public scrutiny, subject to unyielding media hype, and even volatile public commentary. In Sri Lanka, where sport, particularly cricket and track events, is practically elevated to the status of a national religion, this phenomenon has reached a critical juncture that demands urgent re-examination.

The rise and fall of national icons across various disciplines reveals a troubling cycle. When an athlete or a team achieves a sensational performance, the media creates a frenzy of adulation and then the public demands continuous perfection. Then, at the first sign of human vulnerability, accolades turn into brutal criticism.

To build a sustainable, world-class athletic culture in Sri Lanka, we must dismantle this toxic cycle. We must temper sensationalist reporting, eliminate violent and hyperbolic terminology from sports discourse, integrate professional Sports Medicine and Sports Psychology into athlete care, and recognise that failures are not national disgraces, but the indispensable stepping stones toward true athletic greatness.

The Double-Edged Sword of Media Hype: Lessons from Sri Lankan Cricket

There is perhaps no clearer illustration of the volatile relationship between media hype and performance pressure than the experiences of the Sri Lankan Men’s and Women’s National Cricket Teams. For decades, cricket has been the epicentre of Sri Lankan sporting identity. However, the relentless media spotlight on these teams has created a high-pressure crucible-type environment where players are subjected to extreme emotional swings. A victory is met with extravagant headlines, parades, and declarations of undisputed dominance; conversely, a defeat triggers public inquests, powerful vitriolic criticism, and extremely harsh media condemnations. Add to this challenge the ubiquitous social media, which can be totally heartless, and the picture becomes even more gloomy and even more powerfully destructive.

This culture of extreme publicity and hype places an unbearable burden on both veteran players and young talents entering the national sports system. When a young batter or bowler scores a brilliant century or takes a match-winning haul, he or she is instantly anointed as the next national saviour. Yet, cricket is inherently a game of fine margins and unpredictable conditions. When form inevitably fluctuates, as it does for even the greatest legends of the game, the very media outlets that elevated these athletes to deity status often lead the charge in pulling them down.

Our Women’s Cricket Team, which has made remarkable strides on the global stage in recent years through sheer grit and resilience, now faces a similar peril. As their profile rises and international victories mount, the general public’s attention on them has intensified. While recognition and equitable coverage are vital and long overdue, the accompanying hyper-fixation risks creating the same pressure-cooker environment that has long plagued the men’s game.

A case in point is the banner headline on the Sports Page of a national daily (Not The Island Newspaper) published on the morning of 22^nd September 2026, when the Sri Lanka-India Final of the Asia Cup T20 was to be played in Japan. The two teams had met less than 10 days ago in the Asia Cup Final in Dubai, and India won it easily. For the T20 Final on the 22^nd of September, too, we were meeting a very strong Indian team performing superbly well. To make matters worse, two of our really good players were sidelined with injuries. The banner headline of the newspaper alluded to above, screamed on the 2^nd of September 2026, “History to repeat or rewrite today in Japan.” The mental pressure that would have been inflicted by that headline on our team is indescribable. A much more encouraging line would have been “Go for it, Girls: We believe in you.” India became the champions with a stellar performance by midday in Sri Lankan time. The very same newspaper, in its sports page on the very next day, reported in banner headlines that Sri Lanka was “thrashed” by India. I do hope the readers would understand what I am pointing to. Our girls would have been heartbroken at the loss to India, and the newspaper goes and rubs salt into the wound.

When media narrative shifts from constructiveness to hysteria, athletes begin playing and trying to perform out of fear: the fear of failure, fear of public humiliation, and fear of media backlash. Playing out of fear is the absolute antithesis of elite athletic performance. When a narrative shifts from constructive analysis to sensational hysteria, athletes stop playing to win and start competing out of fear. Fear is the ultimate enemy of elite performance.

Sensationalism and the Language of Excess: Unpacking Sports Terminology

A central contributor to this unhealthy atmosphere is the vocabulary employed by sports journalists, commentators, and headline writers. In the competitive race for clicks, clichés, television ratings, and newspaper sales, sports reporting has increasingly adopted violent, destructive, and aggressive language. Headlines routinely declare that one team has “thrashed,” “annihilated,” “demolished,” or “overwhelmed” another. Such terminology is not only inappropriate for describing sporting contests, but it is also fundamentally intellectually dishonest and psychologically damaging. It must be pointed out that the very same team or the player who was at the receiving end of such vitriolic comments may turn around and produce a scintillating and victorious performance in the very near future. The fundamental truth of athletic competition is that those who “thrash” an opponent today may well find themselves on the receiving end of a bitter defeat tomorrow. High-performance sport is fluid; conditions change, opponents adapt, and physical capacity fluctuates, a set of variables that ultimately determine the outcome.

When headlines use words like “annihilated,” they inflict deep psychological wounds on losing teams and losing players, only to instil an unwarranted sense of invincibility in winners. For the defeated athlete, reading that they were “demolished” deepens feelings of shame and embarrassment, making psychological recovery infinitely more difficult. For the victor, hyperbolic praise creates an unsustainable baseline of expectation that makes subsequent performance drop-offs feel catastrophic. Responsible sports journalism requires precision, respect, and restraint. Describing a match through technical accuracy, focusing on tactical execution, physical endurance, and strategic decisions, elevates the reader’s understanding without degrading the dignity of the competitors.

Sports are meant to celebrate human physical excellence, discipline, tactical skill, and camaraderie. Describing a match with terms borrowed from warfare reduces a nuanced athletic competition to a spectacle of subjugation. Furthermore, this language fails to account for the cyclical nature of elite sport.

Protecting Our Gems: The Case of Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage

This tendency toward excessive hype is currently playing out in real time with Sri Lanka’s latest athletic sensation, Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage. As a champion javelin thrower, Pathirage has demonstrated world-class technique, phenomenal physical power, and an extraordinary capacity for international competition. He represents a really magnificent gem in the future of Sri Lankan athletics, possessing the talent and discipline required to compete at the absolute highest levels of track and field.

Predictably, the media machine has begun to spin rather spectacularly around him. Rumesh has quickly become the new darling of national sports pages and television sports segments. While celebrating his achievements is entirely and utterly justified, there is an urgent need to caution against making an overwhelming “song and dance” around his every movement. Converting an intensely promising young athlete into an overnight national messiah places an unnecessary psychological burden on his shoulders just as he enters the most delicate phase of his elite career development.

Javelin throwing, like all technical field events, requires precise biomechanics, intense nervous system focus, and long-term physical conditioning. It is a discipline where fractions of a second in release timing can mean the difference between a podium finish and a modest throw. What Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage needs right now is not relentless media circuses, commercial distractions, and lofty public demands for instant Olympic medals. Instead, he requires a quiet, structured, and fully funded support ecosystem that allows him to train without distraction, refine his technique under intense specialised guidance, and build physical and mental resilience over time.

The Imperative of Science: Sports Physicians and Sports Psychologists

If we are to be serious about sustaining elite athletic performance and protecting the well-being of our athletes, Sri Lanka must modernise its sporting infrastructure by prioritising two essential fields: Sports Medicine and Sports Psychology. Historically, sports administration in developing nations has treated these disciplines as secondary luxuries rather than non-negotiable fundamentals. This outdated perspective must change.

A qualified Sports Physician is far more than a medical doctor who treats injuries after they occur. They are medically trained experts in exercise physiology, injury prevention, biomechanics, recovery science, and clinical nutrition. They are most definitely not Glorified Physiotherapists, although physiotherapy is an essential component of an athletic training programme. Elite modern sports demand that the human body to perform at its absolute physical limit. Without dedicated and extensively trained Medical Sports Physicians managing physical workloads, monitoring overtraining syndromes, and designing individual recovery protocols, athletes are exposed even to career-ending injuries and physical burnout. Treating an international athlete’s body without specialised medical oversight is akin to driving a Formula 1 car without a team of extremely competent mechanical engineers.

Equally critical, and often even more neglected, is the role of the qualified Sports Psychologist. The mental strain under which international athletes operate is absolutely immense. They have to cope with performance anxiety, fear of failure, recovery from traumatic injury, public criticism, media pressure, and the personal sacrifices required by elite training schedules. A qualified Sports Psychologist works proactively with athletes to build cognitive resilience, develop emotional regulation techniques, enhance focus under pressure, and construct healthy self-identities independent of competitive outcomes.

Mental toughness is not an innate trait that an athlete either possesses or lacks; it is a psychological skill set that must be systematically as well as studiously developed, trained, maintained, and nurtured. Expecting athletes to endure immense public pressure through sheer willpower alone is naive and negligent. Integrating specially trained mental health professionals into every national squad is an essential duty of care that national sporting bodies owe to their performers. Mental toughness is a trainable science, not an innate miracle.

Redefining Failure: The True Path to Greatness

To foster a healthier sporting culture, society as a whole must undergo a fundamental shift in how it views athletic failure. In Sri Lankan sports culture, failure is too frequently treated as an unforgivable defect or a national disgrace. In reality, failure is an indispensable structural element of true athletic excellence. The much-bandied adage that “failures are the pillars of success” is not merely a cliché; it is a proven historical reality observed in every legendary sporting career.

Consider the career of Usain Bolt, universally acknowledged as the greatest sprinter in human history. To the casual observer, Bolt’s career appears to be an uninterrupted chain of golden glory. However, the path to his transcendent dominance was paved with repeated setbacks, physical injuries, and international defeats. Before he ever won his first Olympic Gold medal in Beijing in 2008, Bolt suffered around 13 high-profile losses in international events. Early in his career, at the 2004 Athens Olympics, a young Bolt was eliminated in the very first round of the 200-metre sprint event due to a hamstring injury. He faced severe criticism from domestic fans and media who questioned his big-stage composure.

Had Usain Bolt broken under the weight of those early failures and the accompanying media criticism, world sport would have been deprived of one of its greatest icons. Instead, supported by a structured coaching system, medical care, and psychological fortitude, Bolt used those 13 international defeats as diagnostic tools. He analysed his technique, improved his physical strength, refined his mental preparation, and eventually emerged to secure 8 Olympic Gold medals and establish 3 World Records that still stand untouched today. Failure was not the opposite of Bolt’s success; it was the raw material from which his success was forged and the golden thread that was used to weave an amazing tapestry of an unmatched sporting career.

Rewards, Support, and the Way Forward

None of this suggests that athletic success should go unrecognised. That is as far away as one could get from it. When our sportspersons achieve spectacular victories on the continental or global stage, rewarding them with financial security, national honours, and public recognition is entirely fitting and absolutely necessary. Rewards provide tangible validation for years of unseen sacrifice and inspire the next generation of youth to pursue athletic excellence.

However, rewards must be accompanied by sustainable structural support. Financial compensation after a medal win cannot compensate for a lack of professional coaching, inadequate medical infrastructure, or absent psychological support during the years leading up to that victory. We must invest in the process, not merely celebrate the result. As that great actor Tom Cruise once said, “Success is rarely achieved overnight. Behind every achievement are years of dedication, persistence, setbacks, and continuous learning. People celebrate the final result, but they may not always see the effort, sacrifices and determination that made it all possible.”

For national heroes like Rumesh Tharanga Pathirage, our cricket teams, and emerging athletes across all sporting disciplines, the message must be crystal clear: the nation stands behind you not because you are invincible, but because you represent the best of our national effort. The media must commit towards balanced, constructive, and dignified reporting, abandoning violent headlines and hyperbolic worship. Sporting administrators, in addition to everything else they are supposed to do, must invest in qualified Sports Physicians and Sports Psychologists as mandatory pillars of athlete development. As fans, we must learn to celebrate victories with humility, accept defeats with empathy, and understand that every great champion must first master the art of standing up after a fall before he or she can soar to even greater heights.

Opinion

R. S. (Siri) Palihawadana

Published

2 days ago

2026/10/9

Thilina Walpola

Appreciation

R. S. (Siri) Palihawadana received his early education at the school now known as Malimbada North Maha Vidyalaya. The school was founded by Siri’s father, D. C. Palihawadana, on a plot of land donated by him, and Siri was the first student entered in its student register.

Siri entered Kotte Ananda Shasthralaya in 1940 and continued his education there until 1949. In 1950, he entered Ananda College, Colombo, to sit the Advanced Level examination. He later obtained an Honours Degree in Economics from the University of London.

During his distinguished career, he served as Chief Accountant and Business Manager of the Ceylon Plywood Corporation, Director of Investments at the Greater Colombo Economic Commission (now the Board of Investment of Sri Lanka), Deputy Executive Director of the Sri Lanka Centre for Business Development, Consultant to the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Finland, and Director of a professional services and consultancy firm.

On days when Siri had to work until very late at the Greater Colombo Economic Commission, his driver would drop him home in his official car. Siri would then get into his own car and drive the driver all the way back to his home in Homagama, even in the dead of night. Such was his sense of responsibility and integrity. On these occasions, Dr. Adikaram would ask me to accompany Siri, in case of an emergency such as a flat tyre.

It is said that to be universally interesting, one has to be universally interested. Siri was just such a person. He was an award-winning orchid grower and a key member of the well-known cooperative orchid nursery and florist, Lakmalsala. He had a deep interest in organic farming and freely shared his knowledge and advice with many budding organic farmers.

Siri was also an enthusiastic photographer during the era of black-and-white film photography and had his own darkroom where he developed his photographs. He took a keen interest in the socio-economic developments taking place in Sri Lanka and served as the Honorary Treasurer of the Dr. E. W. Adikaram Foundation. I also had many illuminating discussions with Siri on the teachings of J. Krishnamurti.

From 1945 to 1975, Siri Palihawadana lived in the house on Pagoda Road, where Dr. E. W. Adikaram also resided. In 1975, a large jak tree fell onto the house, rendering it unfit for further occupation.

Siri subsequently built a new house on Mirihana Road in the remarkably short period of about four months and moved there with Dr. Adikaram. Until the new house was completed, Dr. Adikaram and the Palihawadana family stayed at the residence of Professor Mahinda Palihawadana on Pamunuwa Road, Maharagama.

Dr. Adikaram lived in Siri Palihawadana’s Mirihana Road home from 1975 until his death in 1985. Siri and his wife, Lakshmi, cared for Dr. Adikaram with great love, affection and devotion, treating him with the same respect and care they would have given to their own father.

Siri Palihawadana will be remembered not only for his distinguished professional career, but also for his integrity, generosity, wide-ranging interests and deep concern for the welfare of others.

Ravi Palihawadana

Opinion

The prelate who walked the talk

Published

3 days ago

2026/10/8

Sahan Weerasooriya

A monk’s four days in Jaffna, another monk’s restored prison term, and a party visit to Delhi are one argument: trust follows conduct, and the North will not be healed by a file.

By Mahil Dole

Senior Superintendent of Police (Retd.)

The sea, the monk writes, brings us all sorts of things. One slipper arrived five days after the other, and he was wearing the pair. It is a small opening for a large account, and it is the right one. What Ven. Dhammananda Thero brought back from four days at Thapovanam, an ashram beside a lagoon in Allaippiddi, is not a matched set of slogans. It is two things that arrived separately and only make sense together: an extraordinary welcome, and a street that would not smile.

I write this as a Muslim, and I write it as a citizen. I served this country in law enforcement and in intelligence, with the duty of keeping the peace, the security and the sovereignty of the republic. For service in the operational districts I was awarded the Purna Bhumi Padakkama. I do not mention the medal to decorate a paragraph. I mention it so that what follows is not mistaken for a petition from outside the state. The North and East are not a foreign file to me. They are districts in which I served, and people among whom the peace of this country is either kept or lost.

I know the difference between a communiqué and a witness. The piece published by the Walpola Rahula Institute on 20 September 2026 is a witness. From dawn on 22 August until the night of 25 August, a Buddhist monk stayed with Professor Daya Somasundaram, formerly Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Jaffna, in a fishing village the war emptied more than once. He peeled onions. He sat mindfulness with Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim medical students. He chanted the Karaniya Metta Sutta while a former combatant’s lotus seeds went into a pond. On the last day, at Tellippalai, he met faces of unease, dislike and rejection, and was told why. That sequence is what we need today. Not another resolution. The action, and the moral sense, of the prelate.

What he showcased was not Buddhism as a heritage claim. It was Buddha Dhamma as conduct, and ahimsa as a method rather than a motto. He left Wellawatte late on 21 August, reached Jaffna at dawn, and was taken by Mariyadas of Batticaloa, who speaks Sinhala, through Mandaitivu and Kayts. The man who opened the gate, bare-chested, in a short sarong, about seventy-five, was the professor. He sleeps on a concrete terrace under a palmyrah slope too small for a night of rain, eats one meal a day, wakes to yoga, and swims in the lagoon for about two hours each afternoon. None of this is theatre. It is the opposite of possession.

Policy makers should not skip what the place actually does. Allaippiddi was forced out more than once. Many lived in the Vanni before they returned. Almost all the men, the monk was told, are heavily addicted to alcohol. Crystal methamphetamine, the drug our streets call ice, is widespread. Domestic violence is extremely high. Some children do not sleep at home. They go to their grandparents to escape the fighting. Surroundings of that kind teach a child that drunkenness is normal, and that a man who does not beat his wife is weak. In the holidays the children come to Thapovanam for drama, dance, music, drawing, karate, swimming and sand sculpture. The characters are animals. The stories are the real problems of the families. Nothing is aimed at an examination. Each child is fed. On 22 August about fifty came. The monk joined the kitchen and chopped some forty onions for a tomato sambol, beside Mariyadas, his wife Tamil Selvi of Mannar, and women of the village. Selvi’s father supported a separate state, and began each child’s name with the word Tamil. On the evening of 25 August, she still knelt, and so did her husband. No communiqué I have sat through has produced a moment of that weight.

A second classroom answers who a Sri Lankan is more honestly than any clause we have drafted. Dr S. Sivadas, once Somasundaram’s student and now a consultant psychiatrist at Jaffna Teaching Hospital, brought medical students to the ashram — Sinhala, Tamil and Muslim, curious about mindfulness. The next day, at the hospital, the monk guided twenty minutes of anapanasati for first-year students of all three communities. They issued no statement. They breathed in the same room. That is a wider definition than the one announced from Colombo: not a bloodline, not a language, not a monument on a contested coast, but a person willing to sit with the other long enough to become real.

The lotus planting carries the lesson onto scorched ground. The seeds were brought by a former combatant living with post-traumatic stress, who on some nights wakes on the battlefield again. From the bank the monk recited the Karaniya Metta Sutta. He adds what commemorations omit. Former soldiers carry the same nights, known mostly to their families. Ahimsa that cannot see both is not ahimsa.

Then Tellippalai, and the account refuses to flatter us. The town lies about fifteen kilometres from Jaffna, on the road to Kankesanthurai. At midday on 25 August the monk went alone to meet a group of the Chelvanayakam Memorial Trust. At the junction the faces showed unease, dislike and rejection. Not a single smile. Inside, they did not console him. After he left, they said, they too would have to answer the questions people asked. The reason they named was Tissa Raja Maha Vihara, about four kilometres away. Because of that temple, people there have come to see Buddhist monks as persons who arrive to seize land. His sentence belongs in every secretariat and every chapter house. What a terrible misfortune. He asks that it be read by the officers who built the temple, by the monks who live there, and by the lay devotees who travel from Colombo for sil on poya days. The more we try to possess, the more we lose. When we let go, a whole world becomes ours.

The same weeks have given us the opposite conduct, and the country should be made to look at both robes together. Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero was sentenced in 2018 to an effective six years for contempt of court, over his conduct at the Homagama Magistrate’s Court in 2016 during proceedings on the disappearance of Prageeth Ekneligoda. In May 2019 a presidential pardon released him. On 10 September 2026 the Supreme Court held that pardon unlawful. He did not appear when called on 29 September. An open warrant and a travel ban followed. Police arrested him on 3 October at an aranya in Thiniyawala, Kalutara. Today, 5 October, the Court of Appeal ordered the remaining period of that sentence enforced. A separate warrant had already been issued after he failed to appear in a case concerning an alleged statement insulting Islam.

I am not interested in a further quarrel with the man. I am interested in the robe. The Buddha’s instruction on who may wear it is not obscure. The robe is for a life of restraint, of truthfulness, of harmlessness, and of respect for the discipline that keeps a community from fear. It is not a costume in which to storm a courthouse, to be pardoned out of a sentence, and then to stay away when the highest court restores the sentence. Dhammananda Thero took the night bus to Jaffna, chopped onions, chanted metta over a former fighter’s seeds, and wrote down the street that would not smile. Gnanasara Thero’s recent path was the avoidance of a warrant. One conduct leads human beings towards a peaceful path. The other teaches every community, mine included, to distrust the cloth. Religious leaders who still share a platform with that second example should ask which of the two they are prepared to defend.

This contrast is not a private matter for the Sangha. It lands in the same week in which the North has again become a diplomatic file. Tilvin Silva, general secretary of the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna and a powerful figure in the ruling National People’s Power, has just concluded a five-day visit to India, from 27 September to 1 October, at the invitation of the Bharatiya Janata Party under its Know BJP programme. He met senior party figures, among them B. L. Santhosh and the BJP’s national president, and on the last morning he met External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, who described India as a trusted partner in Sri Lanka’s progress. The shift is real. The JVP was for years sharply critical of India’s stance on devolution. In 2008 Vijitha Herath, now our foreign minister, called Indian ideas on devolution an indirect support to the LTTE ideology, and said no country had a right to interfere in our problem. New Delhi is now courting the party it once found obstructive.

The hope in Delhi, as set out by those watching the visit, is that JVP leaders can be brought to see devolution not as a stepping stone to separation but as a counter to it, and as necessary to the economic progress of the Northern and Eastern provinces. India has pressed for early Provincial Council elections and for the constitutional provisions that meet Tamil aspirations to be made real. Its interest in the North is not sentimental.

It is geopolitical and practical: connectivity, projects such as the Jaffna airport expansion, a shipping link towards Kankesanthurai, and a stable Tamil-majority littoral that does not become anyone else’s lever. That interest is legitimate for a neighbour. It is not a substitute for our own policy.

The stance of our government is the unfinished half of this story. The party that once treated Indian devolution as a foreign design is now the dominant partner in office, and its general secretary has gone to Delhi as a guest of the ruling party there. Cordiality is not a policy.

Colombo has yet to say, in language a villager in Allaippiddi or Tellippalai can test, whether the North and East are to be governed as equal parts of the republic, with elections and a share of development, or managed as a sensitive file between two capitals. Devolution sold only as an answer to separatism will be heard, in the North, as a security device. Devolution refused because a foreign capital favours it will be heard, in Delhi and in Jaffna, as the old refusal. Neither reading builds the confidence the monk found only when he arrived without a claim.

I say this as an officer who spent his service against separatism in arms, and who does not confuse a provincial council with a separate state. The armed challenge to the sovereignty of this country was defeated. What was not defeated was the inference a street draws from conduct. Tellippalai did not close its face because a constitution was incomplete. It closed its face because a temple was read as seizure. Allaippiddi did not open its kitchen because a delegation had been to Delhi. It opened its kitchen because a monk chopped onions and left. India’s diplomatic approach can support ports, power and elections. It cannot supply the trust. That remains a Sri Lankan task, and it will not be performed by a government that is eloquent in New Delhi and silent on the robe that frightens its own citizens.

The eye-opener is therefore for more than one audience. It is for the Buddhist clergy and laity, who have been shown two paths in the same season and must choose which one the robe will mean. It is for the imam, the priest and the Hindu leader who still announce coexistence and rarely cross the village they have stereotyped. It is for a government that can sit with Jaishankar and has not yet sat, in policy, with the meaning of Tellippalai. And it is for Delhi, which is entitled to its interests and not entitled to mistake a party visit for the healing of a province. Trust is an inference from conduct. People who never enter the room can revoke it.

What is required is a team, in little steps, not a new ministry and not a new patron. Somasundaram has made that team for years. Dr Sivadas carried it into a hospital classroom. Mariyadas and Selvi carried it onto a doorstep. A Muslim leader can take students and stay long enough to work. Trustees of a contested site can say plainly what is worshipped and what is not being taken. A government can enforce a court order without selectivity, and can say what it will and will not devolve without waiting to be asked in Delhi. None of this is a giant leap. Giant leaps here have never been legislated. They are the late result of people who refused, in small rooms, to behave as the stereotype predicted.

The hope is real, and conditional. A lotus pond does not cancel a war, and one cold junction is not the North. The space remains large. It closes where we possess, where a robe is worn against the discipline of the robe, and where the North is discussed over our heads. It opens where someone arrives without a claim. Who a Sri Lankan is will not be settled by a gazette, or by a photograph in New Delhi. It will be settled by whether the next visitor to Tellippalai meets a question or a closed face. Little steps of that nature make the leaps of tomorrow. When we let go, a whole world becomes ours. It was true on a pond bank in Allaippiddi. It remains the only terms on which this island will hold.

( This analysis is offered in the interest of national security, institutional reform, and public safety)

Notes

Dhammananda Thero. (2026, September 20). A lotus pond on scorched earth: A few days of healing at Thapovanam. Walpola Rahula Institute.

Court of Appeal order of 5 October 2026 enforcing the remainder of the sentence on Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thero, following the Supreme Court ruling of 10 September 2026 that the pardon of 23 May 2019 was unlawful. Arrest reported on 3 October 2026 at Thiniyawala, Kalutara.

Tilvin Silva led a JVP delegation to India from 27 September to 1 October 2026 at the BJP’s invitation under the Know BJP programme, and met External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar on 1 October. The reading of New Delhi’s hope on devolution follows M. R. Narayan Swamy, “Why India is wooing Sri Lanka’s JVP,” Rediff, 5 October 2026.

The Purna Bhumi Padakkama was awarded to police and service personnel for qualifying service in designated operational districts between 1977 and 2010.

The writer is a retired Senior Superintendent of Police, former head of the counter terrorism desk at the state intelligence service, a former member of the Sri Lanka Wakfs Board, and the author of Security Beyond Enforcement: Practical Approaches for a Safer Nation (2026).