Features

T. S. Eliot: A response to Kumar David’s “dislike”

Published

5 years ago

2021/01/17

by H. L. D. Mahindapala

I like reading Prof. Kumar David’s (KD) column in the Sunday Island, even though the contents lean heavily towards Marxist mantras which have passed its use-by-date long before the fall of the Berlin Wall. What grabbed my attention was the Jan. 3 column which was a foray into English literature. As a bibliophile I agree wholeheartedly with his love of classics and even with some of his likes and dislikes. For instance, one can’t expect everyone to enjoy James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, let alone read it. If I remember correct, Regi Siriwardena took great pride in reading it though Prof. E. F. C. Ludowyk, the Grand Master of English Lit at Peradeniya, did not like the text.

KD’s column indicates that he has very strong likes and dislikes, vibrating sometimes with visceral hate. He says he “loathes” the Bagavad Gita. A modest word like “dislike”, “disagree”, I can understand. But “loathe”? Isn’t that a bit too harsh a word for someone like KD? In any case, how can one “loathe” the Gita – one of the world’s greatest spiritual songs that debates the profound moral issue faced by man in the battlefield: to kill or not to kill. I can understand Prabhakaran loathing it. But KD??? Incredible!

The central issue in the Gita is to define the moral duty of man. Finding that, particularly in times of crises, causes mind-bending agonies. It is the same question posed by Shakespeare in Hamlet : to be or not to be. Arjuna and Hamlet are both morally disturbed individuals standing confused in the middle of a rotten state, not knowing what form their action should take to meet the challenges facing them. Arjuna agonizing over the duty facing him – the duty of killing – asks Krishna how can he kill his kith and kin. Hamlet too is agonizing over a similar issue. He has to clean up the rotten, the incestuous, the chaotic state which means eliminating his kith and kin in power, with killing if necessary. It is a duty cast upon him by his father’s ghost who seeks revenge. He is tortured and paralyzed by his own doubts and questions. Should he allow the rotten status quo to continue, or should he take up the sword and go into action wherever it may lead? What is his moral duty? That is the question.

KD, however, does not give any reason for loathing the Gita. It sounded somewhat like a personal reaction as if he was a Jew reacting to the sight of a Muslim, or vice versa in the Middle East. If he doesn’t like the text, may I request him to read the introduction to the version edited by the Indian philosopher S. Radhakrishna, who was also the President of India later. He illuminates it with his brilliant intellect so lucidly that in the end you will remember his introduction better than the Gita. His thought-provoking insights are memorable. For instance, he surveys the religious field broadly and points out that neither Jesus nor Buddha gave answers to questions about some of the core issues that had baffled philosophers, religious leaders, scientists etc., down the ages. Buddha discouraged those who went in search of the origins and the ends of the universe or life. He dismissed them as irrelevant to the existential crises faced by man in his cycle in samsara. Jesus too, he points out, was silent when Pontius Pilate asked: What is truth? If KD doesn’t want to read the text I am sure he would enjoy Radhakrishna’s introduction.

Now I come to his literary criticism of T. S. Eliot. I concede that he is entitled to his tastes and I must respect his choices. But when he came to Eliot he went beyond expressing his “dislike.” He accused Eliot of being “pretentious”. It amounts to a literary criticism which means it is open for criticism. Here KD steps into an area which, I think, is not his domain. Neither in his personal life nor in writing the poetic masterpieces of the 20th century did Eliot show any signs of “pretentiousness.” He became a very fastidious Englishman, with a bowler hat and umbrella, after he abandoned the loud and brash American culture into which he was born. He was very Catholic in his literary tastes, though he did not go that far in his religion. He ended up in the Anglican High Church which was the nearest to the Catholic church.

I value Eliot as the most intellectual of all English poets. No other poet has gone down the path of giving the emotional equivalent of thought, of deep philosophical thought, as Eliot. He could fill hard, recondite thoughts with feelings and lead you to meaning and understanding his vision and his meditations. But I am getting far ahead of the issue at hand. I have to first deal with KD dismissing entire body of Eliot’s work as “pretentious”. He does this by taking the last words in Eliot’s Naming of a Cat, a poem that plays with words which eventually became a musical sensation after Andrew Lloyd Webber took those words and gave it a lyrical lift that entertained millions. But KD dismisses it somewhat superciliously in one line which goes like this : “I also dislike Eliot, who is pretentious: his “ineffable, effable, effanineffable, deep and inscrutable singular” game. Period.

Here Eliot is deliberately playing with words. There is no pretentiousness here. Besides, what was the necessity for a Nobel Laureate to be pretentious? Whom was he going to impress? He wrote like all great writers to give meaning to lives. Eliot was not the kind of poet who would use words to be “pretentious”. Eliot played with these words as if he was playing with a kitten: lightly, gently, fondly and delicately. To get a feel of the words let’s view the full poem before going any further. Here it is:

The Naming Of Cats by T. S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is difficult matter,It isn’t just one of your holiday games;You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatterWhen I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily,Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey–All of them sensible everyday names.There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter–But all of them sensible everyday names.But I tell you, a cat needs a name that’s particular,A name that’s peculiar, and more dignified,Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-Names that never belong to more than one cat.But above and beyond there’s still one name left over,And that is the name that you never will guess;The name that no human research can discover–But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.When you notice a cat in profound meditation,The reason, I tell you, is always the same:His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplationOf the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:His ineffable effableEffanineffableDeep and inscrutable singular Name.

Cat lovers (I’m one of them) can relate to the “cat in profound meditation” and that

“His mind is engaged in rapt contemplation

Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:

His ineffable effable

Effanineffable

Deep and inscrutable singular Name.”

In all seriousness, I tried my best to understand how KD could view Eliot as being “pretentious” purely on his aversion to the last lines. I was eager to understand his thinking, First thing that struck me was that it is unfair to judge anyone on a few lines excluding the corpus of Eliot’s writings. Perhaps, he could explain it in his response. Though I tried from various angles I failed to see any “pretentiousness” in these playful lines. “The staccato beat of the names – e.g., Plato, Admetus, Electra – alone suggests the whimsicality of the poem. The musicality in the syllabic rhythms was captured in several dramatic and cinematic versions, starting from Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1981. It was not meant to be serious poem like The Waste Land where he took the stentorian tone. In it he was looking down upon humanity and asking:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow out of this stony rubbish?

What he saw from his Olympian heights was

“A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And dry stone no sound of water.”

He was the Dante of the 20th century guiding humanity through the modern purgatory. He was dissecting their souls and exposing the diseased, worm-eaten core. To him the 20th century was the arid waste land. Even the grim scene he paints of the modern metropolis is awesome.

Unreal City,

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many

A version of these lines is found in Dante’s text. Eliot borrowed it and made it is his own.

It is clear that in this poem he is using words playfully, as if he was playing with a cat. Those who saw the adaptation in the movie CATS will realize how the rhythmic words tripped off the tongues fluidly. The words were chosen to play around with sound. Eliot was toying with each word and name of cats. Eliot touched a chord in me when he spoke of the “cat’s meditative” thoughts. I have been fascinated by the mysterious, meditative moods of cats. They are such soothing, calming, relaxing pets to have around. When they leap like a feather into bed and sleep, snoring, next to you the whole world seems to be at rest. The soothing sound of peace comes down with each gentle snore. My wife and I still cry for “Bubby” (I wonder what Eliot would think of that name?) we lost in Melbourne a few years ago. Parting was so unbearable that I am determined never to adopt a cat ever.

I think I’ve said enough about Eliot and cats. I shall now await KD’s response to understand why Eliot is “pretentious” according to him.

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Features

Fractious West facing a more solidified Eastern opposition

Published

7 hours ago

2026/04/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

An Iranian attack on a neighbouring Gulf state. Image courtesy BBC.

Going forward, it is hoped that a reported ceasefire agreement between the US and Iran would provide a basis for a degree of stability in the Middle East and pave the way for substantive peace talks between the powers concerned. The world is compelled to fall back on hope because there is never knowing when President Donald Trump would change his mind and plans on matters of the first importance. So erratic has he been.

Yet, confusion abounds on who has agreed to what. The US President is on record that a number of conditions put forward by him to Iran to deescalate tensions have been accepted by the latter, whereas Iran is yet to state unambiguously that this is so. For instance, the US side claims that Iran has come clear on the point that it would not work towards acquiring a nuclear weapons capability, but there is no official confirmation by Iran that this is so. The same goes for the rest of the conditions.

Accordingly, the peace process between the US and Iran, if such a thing solidly exists, could be said to be mired in uncertainty. Nevertheless, the wider publics of the world are bound to welcome the prospects of some sort of ceasing of hostilities because it would have the effect of improving their economic and material well being which is today under a cloud.

However, questions of the first magnitude would continue to bedevil international politics and provide the breeding ground for continued tensions between East and West. Iran-US hostilities helped highlight some of these divisive issues and a deescalation of these tensions would not inevitably translate into even a temporary resolution of these questions. The world community would have no choice but to take them up and work towards comprehending them better and managing them more effectively.

For example, there are thorny questions arising from the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Essentially, this treaty bans the processing and use of nuclear weapons by states but some of the foremost powers are not signatories to it.

Moreover, the NPT does not provide for the destroying of nuclear arsenals by those signatory states which are already in possession of these WMDs. Consequently, there would be a glaring power imbalance between the latter nuclear-armed states and others which possess only conventional weapons.

Such a situation has grave implications for Iran’s security, for instance. The latter could argue, in view of the NPT restrictions, that the US poses a security threat to it but that it is debarred by the Treaty from developing a nuclear arms capability of its own to enable it to match the nuclear capability of the US. Moreover, its regional rival Israel is believed to possess a nuclear weapons capability.

Accordingly, a case could be made that the NPT is inherently unfair. The US would need to help resolve this vexatious matter going forward. But if it remains, US-Iran tensions would not prove easy to resolve. The same goes for Iran-Israeli tensions. Consequently, the Middle East would remain the proverbial ‘powder keg’.

Besides the above issues, the world has ample evidence that it could no longer speak in terms of a united NATO or West. Apparently, there could be no guarantee that US-NATO relations would remain untroubled in future, even if the current Iran-US standoff is peacefully resolved. US-NATO ties almost reached breaking point in the current crisis when the US President called on its NATO partners, particularly Britain, to help keep open the Hormuz Straits for easy navigation by commercial vessels, militarily, on seeing that such help was not forthcoming. Such questions are bound to remain sore points in intra-Western ties.

In other words, it would be imperative for the US’ NATO partners to help pull the US’ ‘chestnuts out of the fire’ going ahead. The question is, would NATO be willing to thus toe the US line even at the cost of its best interests.

For the West, these fractious issues are coming to the fore at a most unpropitious moment. The reality that could faze the West at present is the strong opposition shown to its efforts to bolster its power and influence by China and Russia. Right through the present crisis, the latter have stood by Iran, materially and morally. For instance, the most recent Security Council resolution spearheaded by the US which was strongly critical of Iran, was vetoed by China and Russia.

Accordingly, we have in the latter developments some marked polarities in international politics that could stand in the way of the West advancing its interests unchallenged. They point to progressively intensifying East-West tensions in international relations in the absence of consensuality.

It is only to be expected that given the substance of international politics that the West would be opposed by the East, read China and Russia, in any of the former’s efforts to advance its self interests unilaterally in ways that could be seen as illegitimate, but what is sorely needed at present is consensuality among the foremost powers if the world is to be ‘a less dangerous place to live in.’ Minus a focus on the latter, it would be a ‘no-win’ situation for all concerned.

It would be central to world stability for International Law to be upheld by all states and international actors. Military intervention by major powers in the internal affairs of other countries remains a principal cause of international mayhem. Both East and West are obliged to abide scrupulously with this principle.

From the latter viewpoint, not only did the West err in recent times, but the East did so as well. Iran, for instance, acted in gross violation of International Law when it attacked neighbouring Gulf states which are seen as US allies. Neither Iran nor the US-Israel combine have helped in advancing international law and order by thus taking the law into their own hands.

Unfortunately, the UN has been a passive spectator to these disruptive developments. It needs to play a more robust role in promoting world peace and in furthering consensual understanding among the principal powers in particular. The need is also urgent to advance UN reform and render the UN a vital instrument in furthering world peace. The East and West need to think alike and quickly on this urgent undertaking.

Features

Science-driven health policies key to tackling emerging challenges — UNFPA

Published

7 hours ago

2026/04/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

Dr. Dayanath Ranatunga

Marking World Health Day on April 7, health experts have called for a stronger commitment to science-based decision-making to address increasingly complex and evolving health challenges in Sri Lanka and beyond.

Dr. Dayanath Ranatunga, Assistant Representative of the United Nations Population Fund, stressed that health is no longer confined to hospitals or traditional medical systems, but is shaped by a broad spectrum of social, environmental, and technological factors.

“This year’s theme, ‘Together for Health. Stand with Science,’ reminds us that science is not only for laboratories or policymakers. It is a way of thinking and a tool that shapes everyday decisions,” he said.

Dr. Ranatunga noted that modern health challenges are increasingly interconnected, ranging from infectious diseases such as COVID-19 to climate-related risks, demographic shifts, and emerging forms of online violence.

He warned that maternal and newborn health continues to demand urgent attention despite progress. Globally, an estimated 260,000 women died from pregnancy and childbirth-related causes in 2023 alone—many of them preventable through timely, science-based interventions.

“In countries like Sri Lanka, where fertility rates are declining and survival rates improving, every pregnancy carries greater significance—not just for families, but for the future of communities and economies,” he said.

The UNFPA official also highlighted the growing threat of Technology Facilitated Gender-Based Violence (TFGBV), including cyber harassment and online abuse, noting that these forms of violence can have deep psychological consequences despite lacking visible physical harm.

He emphasised the need for multidisciplinary, science-informed approaches that integrate mental health, digital safety, and survivor-centered care.

Turning to demographic trends, Dr. Ranatunga pointed out that increasing life expectancy is bringing new challenges, particularly the rise of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular illnesses, and cancers.

In Sri Lanka, nearly 13.9% of mothers develop diabetes during pregnancy, a trend attributed to obesity and unhealthy lifestyles, underscoring the urgent need for preventive healthcare strategies.

“Are we investing enough in prevention?” he asked, noting that early intervention and healthier lifestyles could significantly reduce long-term healthcare costs, especially in a country with a free public healthcare system.

He underscored the importance of data-driven policymaking, stating that scientific research and analytics enable governments to identify gaps, anticipate future needs, and allocate resources more effectively.

The UNFPA, he said, is already leveraging tools such as Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to improve access to maternal healthcare, including mapping travel times for pregnant women to reach health facilities.

Digital innovation is also transforming healthcare delivery, from telemedicine to real-time data systems, improving efficiency and ensuring continuity of care even during emergencies.

In Sri Lanka, partnerships between the government and development agencies are helping to modernise training institutions, including facilities in Batticaloa, equipping healthcare workers with both clinical and digital skills.

However, Dr. Ranatunga cautioned that technology alone is not a solution.

“It must be guided by evidence and grounded in equity,” he said, pointing out that women’s health remains significantly underfunded, with only about 7% of global healthcare research focusing on conditions specific to women.

He also drew attention to the growing health impacts of climate change, including extreme weather, food insecurity, and displacement, describing it as an emerging public health crisis.

“Health does not begin in hospitals. It is shaped by the environments we live in, the choices we make, and the systems we build,” he said.

Calling for renewed commitment, Dr. Ranatunga urged stakeholders to invest in prevention, embrace innovation, and ensure that science remains central to policy and practice.

“Science is not just about knowledge—it is about ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to live healthy, dignified lives, and that no one is left behind,” he added.

By Ifham Nizam

Features

Sharing the festive joy with ‘Awurudu Kaale’

Published

7 hours ago

2026/04/9

Sahan Weerasooriya

The visually impaired who make up Bright Light Band in Awurudu attire

Melantha Perera is well known as a very versatile musician.

He was involved with the band Mirage, as their keyboardist/vocalist, and was also seen in action with other outfits, as well, before embarking on a trip to Australia, as a solo artiste.

I now hear that he has plans to operate as a trio.

However, what has got many talking about Melantha, these days, is his awesome work with the visually impaired Bright Light Band.

They have worked out a special song for the Sinhala and Tamil New Year, aptly titled ‘Awurudu Kaale.’

Says Melantha: “This song has been created to celebrate the spirit of the Sinhala and Tamil New Year and to share the joy of the Awurudu season with all Sri Lankans”.

Yes, of course, Melantha composed the song, with the lyrics written collaboratively by Melantha, Badra, and the parents of the talented performers, whose creative input brought the song to life during moments of inspiration.

Melantha Perera: Awesome work with Bright Light Band

This meaningful collaboration reflects the strong community behind the Bright Light Band.

According to Melantha, accompaning the song is a vibrant video production that also features the involvement of the parents, highlighting unity, joy, and togetherness.

Beyond showcasing their musical talents, the visually impaired members of Bright Light Band deliver a powerful message, through this project, that their abilities extend beyond singing, as they also express themselves through movement and dance.

Melantha expressed his satisfaction with the outcome of the project and looks forward to sharing it with audiences across the country during this festive season.

He went on to say that Bright Light Band extends its sincere gratitude to Bcert Australia for their generous Mian sponsorship, the CEO of the company, Samath Fernando, for his continuous support in making such initiatives possible, and Rukshan Perera for his personal support and encouragement in bringing this project to completion.

The band also acknowledges Udara Fernando for his invaluable contribution, generously providing studio space and accommodating extended recording sessions to suit the children’s availability.

Appreciation is warmly extended to the parents, whose unwavering commitment from ensuring attendance at rehearsals to supporting the video production has been instrumental in the success of this project.

Through ‘Awurudu Kaale’, Bright Light Band hopes to spread festive cheer and inspire audiences, proving that passion and talent know no boundaries.