Features

So long , Kalang

Published

3 years ago

2023/04/7

By Uditha Devapriya

It is perhaps ironic that Amarasiri Kalansuriya joined the Second Volunteer Battalion of the Sinha Regiment the year he turned 18. Ironic, because it was this Battalion that the then government deployed against the JVP insurrectionists in 1971. Ironic, because Kalansuriya, who died last week aged 82, epitomised in film after film the anxieties and frustrations of the generation from whose ranks those insurrectionists sprang. Yet for what it was worth, his military stint was short-lived: once he left it, he found himself engaging in one job after another, trying to make ends meet. These experiences tempered him, humbled him, formed him, and brought him closer to those felt hard done by the establishment.

Kalansuriya was truly the last of his generation. All his peers, including Wimal Kumara da Costa, Daya Tennakoon, Somasiri Dehipitiya, Dharmasena Pathiraja, and the great Vijaya Kumaratunga, have long gone. His passing, in that sense, signifies a transition in much the same way that Sumitra Peries’s passing did two months ago. To those of us who knew him and cherished his performances, he was always Kalang. Indeed, at a certain point it seemed as though his life and his acting were fused in one, as though the one was inseparable from the other. In the end this became his signature, his overriding identity.

His breakthrough performance was in Dharmasena Pathiraja’s Ahas Gawwa, in 1974. There he played an aimless drifter, one of the hundreds of thousands of unemployed youths who seemed to have no hope, no sense of direction, no real purpose, who dotted our country’s social landscape no matter where they were. Early on in the film, a friend of Kalansuriya’s character, played by Wimal Kumara da Costa, reads the government gazette in search of a vacancy.

He does so after congratulating another friend, played by Wickrema Bogoda, who has just found a job. Though the job is modest – it’s a security guard’s post, presumably at a government institution – the friend’s sense of elation at getting it makes us realise that this was an era when getting a job was considered infinitely preferable to having none. It was essentially an era that Kalansuriya found himself part of, an era which bore within it its own contradictions and tensions – an era which he eventually distilled.

Writing on Vijaya Kumaratunga after his assassination, “Jayadeva” quoted Marilyn Monroe: “The people made me a star – no studio, no person, but the people did.” If this was true of Vijaya, it was no less true of Kalansuriya. Kalang’s conception of the hero differed from the heroic type that had been immortalised by Gamini Fonseka. Kalang did not exude Gamini’s heroic stature. In Apeksha, the film which cast him into the sort of stardom that Pathiraja’s film did not, he is hardly a hero. Shy, effusive, and reluctant to talk, he has to be pushed into asking Malini Fonseka out. When the two of them do fall for each other, they must confront their class differences. For a while, Kalang manages to get into the good books of her father, played by Felix Premawardhana, by passing himself as her rich boyfriend. Eventually though, when his identity is revealed, her father has him ejected from their house.

Almost 15 years before Apeksha, Gamini played this kind of lover in Getawarayo. But there was only one Getawarayo in Gamini’s entire career. In every other film he was in, where he had to confront class differences, he always resorted to the easy way out. In Sahanaya, for instance, he plays a poor artist who makes his living painting portraits of the rich. When a rich heiress played by Malini Fonseka discovers that he has secretly painted her because he is so smitten with her, she strikes him. Later, feeling sorry for him, Malini invites him to her house. There the two of them talk with one another and discover their love for each other. Just as they are about to take off, though, the girl’s father, played by Mark Samaranayake, discovers them. This forces the girl to elope with him, and for the rest of the film, through a maze of songs, dances, and fights, they stick with, and by, each other.

If in the 1960s and 1970s Sinhala film directors resorted to that formula with despairing frequency, in the late 1970s a new generation of directors sought to challenge it. In 1979 Vasantha Obeyesekere fired the first salvo with Palagetiyo, the film which cemented his reputation as a radical, avant-garde artist. Much earlier, H. D. Premaratne blurred the line between artistic or “serious” and commercial or “mainstream” film by blending elements of both, a feat that challenged the codes of the mainstream Sinhala film.

With his first three films – Sikuruliya, Apeksha, and Parithyagaya – Premaratne depicted a society on the cusp of a pivotal and unprecedented transformation. By casting Kalansuriya as the lead in two of them – Apeksha and Parithyagaya – he made him a leading face of that socie. In Apeksha particularly, with its medley of Clarence Wijewardena songs, Kalansuriya retained something of the heroic stature which these works demanded of him. At the same time, he remained the relentless radical, the outsider trying to get in.

Thus, while pushing himself to the forefront of the Sinhala cinema’s second wave – a wave led by the likes of Pathiraja and Obeyesekere – Kalansuriya did not repress his good looks, his bravado charm, his careless streak. This was true of Vijaya too. It helped both cement their careers: had they retreated to the radical iconoclasm of their directors, the two of them would have been dismissed as freaks. But they refused to do so, and in refusing to do so they remained attached to their people: to quote “Jayadeva”, they did what they could to prevent “the erection of walls” between themselves and the public.

For his part, then, Kalansuriya remained an unabashed populist – though not to the same extent as Vijaya – because it was the only way he could be with his audiences. Moreover, by now Gamini Fonseka had reached the zenith of his career, and was dabbling in conservative politics. Vijaya and Kalang remained defiantly detached from all that.

It would of course be wrong to pigeonhole Kalang into a particular political affiliation. Yet like Vijaya, he came from a Sinhala educated background. Kalang was not pushed into Left politics as a child or even a teenager: in this he differed from the earlier generation of artistes and intellectuals, who had absorbed Marxist politics at school or university. To quote Regi Siriwardena, that disability helped him imbibe “that humanism, generosity and compassion which are the better part of the Sinhala tradition”, qualities which would be submerged by the tide of chauvinism and political authoritarianism. Kalang’s circumstances on this front differed only slightly from Vijaya’s: unlike the latter, who had the benefit of an education at an elite Colombo school, he jumped from one establishment to another, eventually settling at Dharmaraja College Kandy. There he excelled at sports, including boxing, activities which toughened him: in Lester Peries’s Akkara Paha, as Douglas Ranasinghe’s sidekick, he has his first encounter with the protagonist while playing soccer on the schoolground.

From being Ranasinghe’s sidekick, Kalang gravitated to Vijaya. In Sugathapala Senarath Yapa’s Hanthane Kathawa, he distinguishes himself somewhat as a sympathetic friend of the protagonist, played by Tony Ranasinghe. Ranasinghe hailed from an earlier generation, and in Yapa’s film he feels constantly threatened by Vijaya, who seeks the attention of the girl he happens to be hankering after. As his friend, Kalang tries to resolve these tensions, but in the end has no choice but to leave Ranasinghe to fend for himself. Perhaps one of the most underrated Sinhala films ever made, Hanthane Kathawa gives us a glimpse of university life that would be upturned and uprooted in the 1970s. It was in that decade that Kalansuriya underwent an apotheosis of sorts. As he did so, he found common ground with Vijaya in two landmarks: Ahas Gawwa and Bambaru Avith, both directed by Pathiraja.

It is difficult to say what Vijaya would have transformed or evolved into had he survived his assassination. In Kalansuriya’s case, the vibrant career he carried forward in the 1970s and the early 1980s flickered and dimmed: from averaging two films a year in the late 1970s, he slumped to a film a year, two years, and then three, before letting go completely. This is not to say he retired completely from acting: he did make the occasional appearance, in the occasional film or television serial. Yet these were mere replicas of the roles he had played at his peak. Perhaps that was his way of defying the passing of an era, an era he had been a leading face of. Whatever the reason may be, of course, there is no doubt that his death symbolises that passing, that transition, in a way his retirement could not. What makes his more poignant and regrettable is the simple, undeniable fact that he was not just the last of his kind or generation, but also, at one level, the last of us.

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

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

6 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

6 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

6 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.