Features

Susili Wilson (1928-2025): A woman of Stature, Strength and Purpose

Published

5 months ago

2025/10/26

Suseelavathy (Susili) Wilson, formerly of the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya, Sri Lanka, and later the University of New Brunswick, Fredericton, Canada, passed away on October 8, 2025, in Toronto, Canada. She was 97 years old. Born in Thellipalai, on June 2, 1928, she was the oldest child and only daughter of Samuel James Velupillai and Emily Grace Chelvanayakam. Her father, SJV Chelvanayakam Q.C., became the accredited Tamil political leader in 1956, and the following year entered into a historic agreement with the country’s Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike – the celebrated B-C Pact that enshrined the Sri Lankan government’s agreement on the minimum demands of the Tamils.

Her maternal grandfather was Maniagar RR Bar Kumarakulasinghe of Thellipalai, the village at the heart of Jaffna to which both Chelvanayakam and the Kumarakulasinghes traced their Tamil Christian roots. The latter were also well known in Sri Lanka for their accomplishments in the learned professions of law and medicine during the 1950s and 1960s. Chelvanayakams had four sons after their daughter, each one of whom went onto achieve excellence in different fields: Manoharan in Physics, the late Vaseeharan in Mathematics, Raveendran in Finance and Accounting, and Chandrahasan in Law, Politics and Human Rights.

Susili herself was an accomplished student at Bishop’s College in Colombo, where she won the prize for the best SSC results in 1945, before moving on to university and a life of scholarship as a librarian. It was at the University of Ceylon, Colombo, that she met her future husband, Alfred Jeyaratnam Wilson. They both graduated in Economics which then included Political Science as a sub-discipline. Wilson went on to specialize in political science, after a brief stint as a leader writer for the Ceylon Daily News, while Susili took to library science.

After post-graduate studies in England, the Wilsons joined the University of Ceylon at its new Peradeniya campus, he as Lecturer in Government in the Department of Economics and she as a Librarian at the University Library. Still in their twenties, the Wilsons were academic celebrities even as they began their career at Peradeniya just as they would be while leaving Peradeniya for Canada as highly accomplished scholars 20 years later. AJ Wilson was a household name for Arts Faculty students because of his nationally popular textbook on Civics and Government, and he was married to SJV Chelvanayakam’s daughter. They were tumultuous times in Sri Lankan politics, and the political aura around the Wilsons was inevitable even in the rarefied university setting at Peradeniya.

A Witness to History

As a young woman and Chelvanyakam’s oldest child, Susili was acquainted with her father’s highly successful legal career and his reluctant entry into the vortex of Tamil politics. Chelvanayakam was one of the finest legal minds of his generation and a contemporary and close friend of forensic stalwarts like HV Perera Q.C., and retired Chief Justice Sir Edward Jayatilleke Q.C. They were frequent visitors to Chelvanayakam’s Colpetty residence at Alfred House Gardens. They were both there in the afternoon of 26 July 1957, the day the B-C Pact was signed, for a friendly postmortem.

It is well known that Chelvanayakam went into politics rather reluctantly, if not accidentally. He had been persuaded by then Tamil leader GG Ponnambalam Q.C., a dazzling orator and Criminal Lawyer, to join the Tamil Congress the Party that Ponnambalam led, and to contest the Kankesanthurai seat for the island’s first parliamentary election in 1947. That was Chelvanayakam’s first and successful election campaign, and as a 19-year old Susili joined her mother in helping with the campaign in Kankesanthurai that included their natal Thellipalai.

She was involved in all of her father’s campaigns that followed: the 1952 campaign that saw his only electoral defeat; the historic 1956 election in which Chelvanayakam’s Federal Part swept the northern and eastern provinces; two elections in 1960, one in 1965, and his last general election campaign in 1970. She was in Canada in 1975, when Chelvanayakam resigned from parliament in 1973, in protest against the 1972 Republican Constitution, forced a by-election in Kankesanthurai to demonstrate Tamils’ opposition to the new constitution, and resoundingly defeated the government’s Tamil candidate.

The stirrings that led to the emergence of Chelvanayakam as the pre-eminent Tamil leader were the disagreements between Ponnambalam and Chelvanayakam over Ponnambalam’s decision to join the United National Party government of DS Senanayake and his cabinet of ministers within an year after the 1947 election. Chelvanayakam opposed Ponnambalam’s decision as a betrayal of the undertaking he gave to the Tamil people as the leader of the Tamil Congress. Chelvanayakam broke away from the Tamil Congress and founded the Ilankai Thamil Arasu Kaddchchi, the Federal Party, even as Ponnambalam joined the government and became a Minister.

The Ponnambalam-Chelvanayakam schism has been political staple for more than a generation of Tamils stoned on politics. But Susili Wilson is the only person I have come to know, who had been at the best vantage point to observe, even if without formal participation, the inter-personal dynamic between two men whose decisions would be of utmost consequence for Tamil politics, if not for Sri Lankan politics itself. She would good humouredly contrast Ponnambalam’s flamboyance and flights of fancy with her father’s softspoken steadfastness. They were contrasting qualities of two contending leaders who resonated differently with the Tamil people as they chose to favour one over the other.

In her own right Susili Wilson was able to combine her knowledge of her father’s political life with her training and skills in the political and library sciences, to make a lasting archival contribution to her father’s legacy and to Tamil politics. What Prof. Wilson with her help began as an archival arrangement with Columbia University, New York, for preserving documents and papers of Chelvanayakam and Tamil politics, has since spawned similar arrangements at the University of Toronto, to include Professor Wilson’s papers as well, and to make them digitally accessible.

Thanks to the Wilsons, the Chelvanayakam era in Tamil politics almost from its very beginning had the rare benefit of receiving contemporaneous coverage in academic journals in the English speaking world. Even though it may largely have been a coincidence, it was also compensatory considering the paucity of official attention and priority given to Tamil questions in the national political discourse especially when they were articulated with constitutional propriety and with no hint of violence. The B-C Pact was a well intended exception but only to have its abrogation prove the general rule.

More importantly, AJ Wilson wrote extensively on Sri Lankan politics, perhaps more voluminously than anyone else yet, and his forays into Tamil politics were foursquare within an overall framework that was consistent in its objectivity, commitment to truth, and exceptional scholarship. It is not an exaggeration to say that whatever Professor Wilson wrote first passed muster with Mrs. Wilson who was his first reader, critic and lifelong sounding board.

From Peradeniya to Fredericton

Their time at Peradeniya, that was the latter part of 1950s and the 1960s, was also conducive to reaching excellence and maintaining high academic standards. Although they were still formative years for Peradeniya, they would also turn out to be Peradeniya’s golden years, especially for the Arts Faculty and its many disciplines. The Wilson’s were part of a growing universe of young scholars and their young families among whom serious scholarship easily overlapped with convivial socializing. Among their many friends at Peradeniya were Ian Goonetilleke and his wife Rosalyn. Ian was already a legend on campus as the Librarian of the University Library. His cultural curiosity and reach extended beyond the campus perimeter to include artists and intellectuals in the country. One of them was George Keyt, Sri Lanka’s storied painter. Like other friends of Ian, the Wilsons befriended Keyt and became collectors of his paintings.

Susili worked with Ian at the Library and may have had the chance to succeed him had the university at Peradeniya been able to keep its early promises. That was not to be and like many other academic families at Peradeniya before and after them, the Wilsons left Sri Lanka in 1973 with their young children, Malliha, Maithili and Kumanan to start a new chapter in the pastoral sweep of Fredericton in Canada.

They were already known among Commonwealth scholars in Canada, and had spent a year in Montreal when Professor Wilson was on sabbatical leave at McGill University. Wilson was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Political Science at the University of New Brunswick, Canada’s oldest university, for nearly 20 years. Mrs. Wilson joined the University Library and she was also active in the cultural activities of the small South Asian community in Fredericton.

Through the years they saw their children excel in studies and make their mark in their chosen fields: Malliha took to Law and became Assistant Deputy Attorney General in the Province of Ontario; Maithili was an Aeronautical Engineer and changed course to a career in Medicine as a Dermatologist; and Kumanan is a Medical Doctor and a distinguished specialist in internal medicine, digital health and public health policy.

After the Wilsons joined the University of New Brunswick, quite a few Sri Lankan students have done post-graduate studies at UNB, including three of Prof. Wilson’s former students at Peradeniya. “He observed ethnic parity,” Mrs. Wilson would say referring to his choice of students: a Sinhalese, Laksiri Fernando; a Tamil, the late Ambalavanar Sivarajah; and a Muslim, Rizwi Faizer (daughter of Dr. MCM Kaleel, well known Muslim political leader). Dr. Walter Perera of the Peradeniya University did his Masters and Doctorate in English at UNB.

I came to know Professor Wilson during my final year at the Peradeniya Engineering Faculty, in 1972, when I invited him to lead off the faculty’s annual Dean’s Day seminar on the new Republican Constitution, with Dr. Colvin R. de Silva, then Minister of Constitutional Affairs, as the featured speaker. I had also met him in the company of my uncle Rev. Thani Nayagam who was a good friend of the Wilsons. I met Mrs. Wilson and the children years later in Fredericton when my wife Amali was enrolled at UNB to do her MA in Anthropology. All of us who were in Fredericton at one time or another, are all grateful beneficiaries of the kindness, generosity and the hospitality of Mrs. Susili Wilson and Prof. AJ Wilson.

Prof. Wilson passed away early in 2000. Several years earlier, at the 1966 Kuala Lumpur Conference of the International Association of Tamil Research (IATR), with both SJV Chelvanayakam and GG Ponnambalam in attendance, Wilson presented a research paper on “The Contribution of some Leading Ceylon Tamils to the Constitutional and Political Development of Ceylon during the 19^th and 20^th centuries.” The death of Susili Wilson brings a distinguished closure to what was a distinguished chapter in the history of Tamil politics and constitutional development in Sri Lanka. To paraphrase St. Paul, she ran the good race, lived the good life, kept her promises, and has earned her rest. To her family and friends, and to her grandchildren, Melanie and Matthew, she leaves behind fond memories and rich legacies to cherish and to celebrate.

by Rajan Philips ✍️

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Features

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

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

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

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

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

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

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

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

Archimedes

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

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

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

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

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

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

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

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

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

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

Happy Pi Day!

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

by R N A de Silva

Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

3 days ago

2026/03/12

Sahan Weerasooriya

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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