Features

THE ROAD TO GAZA – I

Published

5 months ago

2025/10/7

Sahan Weerasooriya

Gaza

On October 7^th it will be two years since the commencement of the Gaza War

The World After Gaza by
Pankkaj Mishra (Fern Press, London) 2025

Pankkaj Mishra FRSL has authored Age of Anger and From the Ruins of Empire and writes political and literary essays in The Guardian, the London Review of Books and The New Yorker.

“We too are so dazzled by power and money that we forget the fragility of our existence; we forget that we are all in the Ghetto, that the Ghetto is fenced in, that outside the fence are the Lords of Death, and a little way off the train is waiting,” Primo Levi Jewish Italian partisan, Holocaust survivor and writer.

The prologue to this book deals with the death of the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. The Ghetto was progressively depleted as the inhabitants were being shipped to extermination camps. Finally in April 1943 a couple of hundred young Polish Jews grabbed whatever arms and weapons they could lay their hands on and took on the Nazis.

“After a few desperate weeks” explains Pankkaj Mishra, “the resisters were overwhelmed. Most of them killed. Some still alive on the last day committed suicide in the command bunker. As the Nazis pumped gas into it a few managed to escape through sewer pipes. German soldiers then burnt the Ghetto, block by block, using flame throwers to smoke out the survivors. The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz recalls hearing screams from the Ghetto: They were the screams of people being murdered.

“Living in Berkley California while the US military bombed and killed hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese, an atrocity he compared to the crimes of Hitler and Stalin, Milosz again knew shameful complicity in extreme barbarity: ‘If we are capable of compassion and at the same time are powerless,’ he wrote, ‘then we live in a state of desperate exasperation.’”

Mishra

Mishra goes on to explain that several generations of Jews were scarred by the Shoah (the Hebrew term for the Holocaust, the genocide of European Jews by Nazi Germany) and to them the unexpected attack on 7 October 2023 in Gaza by Hamas reinforced the spectre of the Holocaust. But he also grapples with the paradox of post-October Seventh.

In Gaza it is the Palestinians: Muslims, Christians and Agnostics who in the words of Irishman Blinne Ni Ghralaigh representing South Africa, would tell the International Court of Justice in The Hague, were “broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate hope that the world might do something!”

Long before the Shoah the Germans had participated in ‘crushing the Yellow Peril’ during the 1899-1901 Boxer Rebellion. Under General Lothar von Trotha, the Imperial German Army had been used first against Chinese. And in 1904 in Namibia (then German South-West Africa), once again under von Trotha they murdered sixty-five thousand Herero out of a population of about eighty thousand. This was followed in 1905-07 in German East Africa (now Tanzania) where a rebellion by the Africans resulted in eighty thousand deaths, many executed by machine gun fire while two hundred thousand perished in the resulting famine.

The Allied Powers did not go to war against the Axis Powers in September 1939 to liberate the European Jews who were persecuted and finally sent to their deaths in gas chambers at the concentration camps. Anti-Semitism as state policy began much earlier in 1933 when the Nazi Party was elected to office in Germany and then spread across Europe. Hence throughout that period Jews were trying to escape their countries of origin in Continental Europe. “But neither the American State Department nor the British Foreign Office wished to rescue them (instead they) worked to avoid a situation in which Germany and its allies would force out tens of thousands of Jews into Allied hands.”

Kristallnacht

On the night of 9 November 1938 known as Kristallnacht, at the behest of the Nazi Party, across Germany and Austria, Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were systematically attacked and Jews killed. In the wake of Kristallnacht then British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in a letter to his sister wrote that “no doubt Jews aren’t a lovable people; I don’t care about them myself, but that is not sufficient to explain the Pogrom.” The London Observer meanwhile cautioned: If a further accretion of say hundred thousand Jewish refugees come into the country, how could the danger be averted of an anti-Jewish feeling here? In 1940 “British authorities in Palestine deported fifteen hundred Jews, half of them women and children, to Mauritius.” Jewish immigration to the US had already been limited in 1924, but even as late as 1939 Charles Lindbergh thought “there are too many in places like New York already.”

Immortalised in the 1976 motion picture Voyage of the Damned, is the tragic true story of how in May 1939 nine hundred mostly Jewish refugees from Germany attempt to flee to Cuba, the USA or Canada. But none of these countries would accept the refugees and the ship returned with all its passengers to Europe where many of the Jews would end in death camps.

But the plight of the Jews only got worse. “White supremacists in the US State Department ensured as David Wyman records in The Abandonment of the Jews (1984) that “only 21,000 refugees were allowed to enter the US during the years it was at war (with Germany) only ten percent of the number who could have been legally admitted under immigration quotas.”

In a 1941 letter to an American friend who personally knew President Roosevelt, Otto Frank father of Anne explained “the US is the only country we can go to.” Hiram Bingham a US diplomat in Marseilles managed in the late 1930s to get Hannah Arndt and other Jewish intellectuals out of France before he was forced to resign by his State Department superiors.

The Shoah did not end with the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945.”In 1946 in Kielce 180km from Warsaw a Polish mob killed 40 out of the 200 Jews who returned. Britain too was cautious about receiving Jewish survivors, like Blacks from the West Indies they were only accepted if they were “of good human stock!”

“Jews have been prominent figures in the Western Internationalist Left that emerged after the Russian Revolution and distinguished itself through a valiant losing battle against fascism in Spain. Socialism offered Jews not only integration and acceptance within their (European) societies, but also a likely role in shaping their future. Thus Jews came to be disproportionately represented in left wing parties, noticeably in Soviet Russia.”

Not only Karl Marx but Eduard Bernstein in Germany, Rosa Luxembourg in Poland, Bela Kun in Hungary, Kurt Eisner in Bavaria and Leon Trotsky in Russia had dominated revolutionary politics in Europe. Jews like Martov, Dan, Radek, Zinoviev and Trotsky were conspicuous in the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917. “Zionist settlers from Europe brought with them to Palestine socialistic ideas of collective farming, trade unions and economic planning.” The kibbutz a communal settlement, engaging in agriculture and other activities, was first introduced by European Jews in 1910 at Degania in Palestine.

In 1947 Stalin crucially supported, together with Belorussia, Ukraine, Poland and Czechoslovakia and the Communist Parties in UK and Italy, the UN plan for partitioning Palestine and creating a Jewish State. “The Soviet Union also armed the Zionists, enabling the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 remembered as the Nakba (catastrophe).”

Radical intellectuals in western Europe and north America like Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Luther King also viewed Israel through sympathetic eyes; but this enthusiasm waned after the 1967 War.

On the other hand Dan Stone in The Liberation of the Camps (2015) records how British Diplomats were cautious about accepting Jewish survivors at the end of World War II citing the danger of ‘Judeo-Bolshevism.’ Unattributed quotations taken from MISHRA, Pankkaj The World After Gaza (2025) Fern Press, London

By Jayantha Somasundaram

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

23 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

23 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

23 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins