Features

The ‘uncle’ who saw three ages

Published

2 months ago

2026/07/31

Kos Mama

Sixty-six years after his death, Arthur V.Dias — Kos Mama — is remembered not just for a tree, but for a method of facing a crisis before it arrives

By Dr Anuruddha Padeniya, Dr Hashan Amaratunga with Dr Eranga Pathirana ✍️

PANADURA —On 31 July, in gardens across this country, a strange kind of grief will be marked without mourning clothes. Sri Lankans will not gather at a grave so much as under a canopy — the wide, dark-green leaves of the jackfruit tree, kos gasa, that a Panadura planter persuaded a nation to grow a little over a century ago. Sixty-six years after his death on 31 July 1960, Arthur Vincent Dias remains, for most of the country, not a name in a history book but an affectionate title: Kos Mama, the Jackfruit Uncle.

It is a peculiar kind of immortality — earned not through statues or street names, but through fruit hanging from a hundred thousand trunks. And this year, his anniversary carries an uncomfortable echo. Sri Lanka’s meteorologists are watching an El Niño strengthen in the Pacific, with forecasters placing the odds of it affecting the island’s monsoon this season at roughly four in five. A country that still draws more than four-tenths of its calories from a single grain — rice — is once again looking nervously at the sky. It is almost exactly the position Dias found the country in, more than a hundred years ago, when he looked at a nation dependent on imported rice and saw a famine forming on the horizon of the First World War.

A rich man’s son who chose the harder road

Nothing about Arthur Dias’s beginnings predicted the life he would lead. Born on 12 February 1886, the third of eight children, he was born into one of Ceylon’s wealthiest families. His father, Jeremias Dias, had built a fortune in the arrack trade and was reputed to be the richest man in the country of his day. His mother, Selesthina Rodrigo, was formidable in her own right — she would go on to found Visakha Vidyalaya, today one of Colombo’s most respected girls schools.

Arthur was schooled at St John’s College, Panadura, and later at S. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia, where one of his closest friends was D. S. Senanayake, who would become independent Ceylon’s first Prime Minister. Even then, classmates thought him strange — they nicknamed him “Pissu Dias”, mad Dias, for ideas they considered eccentric. Years later, by their own admission, they conceded the madness had been theirs, for failing to see the worth of what he was saying.

The turn toward conscience came early and came hard. When Jeremias Dias died suddenly in 1902, the family’s arrack business passed to Arthur and his elder brother Edmund, barely out of school himself. Edmund kept the taverns; Arthur, uneasy about the harm the liquor trade did to ordinary families, went instead to the estates, learning the craft of planting that would define the rest of his life. When Edmund died young in 1908, the taverns fell to Arthur too — and he did something almost nobody in his position would have done. He persuaded his mother to close the family’s liquor trade altogether, and made certain that not a single worker was cast adrift: those who had depended on the taverns were given work, and often land, on the family estates.

It was an early sign of the man he would become — a reformer unwilling to let principle be paid for by other people’s hardship.

From temperance to a death sentence

Dias threw himself into the Temperance Movement, the campaign against alcohol that, in colonial Ceylon, doubled as a school for national awakening. He worked beside figures who are now written into the country’s history — Anagarika Dharmapala, Walisinghe Harischandra, the Hewavitharana brothers, D. B. Jayatilaka and F. R. Senanayake. A movement that began against drink grew, in their hands, into a movement for the country itself.

That work nearly cost him his life. When communal riots broke out in 1915 and the colonial authorities cracked down hard on Sinhalese leaders, Dias and his brother Harry were arrested and remanded along with many others; several, Dias among them, was sentenced to death. It was his mother who saved him — bringing a lawyer from India, spending a fortune on his defence, and winning his release. He went directly to Kandy and, standing in the hill capital, pledged to give the rest of his life to his country’s freedom.

Of the campaign that followed, Sir Oliver Goonetilleke is said to have remarked that he had no fear of any food shortage harming the country — so long as Arthur’s jack trees were standing.

The famine he saw coming

It was the First World War that turned a planter into what history would remember as a prophet. Ceylon fed itself largely on imported rice, and Dias understood exactly what a long war would do to those supply lines. A shortage was coming — and, as a planter, he already knew what could stand in the gap.

The jackfruit tree, he reasoned, was suited to the task as almost nothing else was: it offered food at every stage of its fruit, plus shelter, timber, medicine, firewood and fodder. It would grow in nearly any corner of the island, and a single mature tree could carry a household through a lean season. On 11 June 1918 he launched a nationwide campaign to plant jack trees against the coming want, under a motto that has outlived him by more than a century: “Jack is good for food and wood.”

What set Dias apart was not the idea alone but the method behind it — a method that, read today, looks strikingly like modern programme design. He studied the country’s food situation before acting. He weighed his options and judged mass jackfruit planting the most achievable, most useful response. He researched cultivars and found a variety from Johor, in Malaysia, that bore fruit within about eighteen months, against five or six years for local kinds. He trialled the plants in his own garden before asking anyone else to plant them. He built a network of stakeholders district by district. He used every available channel — radio, newspapers, temple sermons, weddings, school functions — to carry the message, and welcomed visiting dignitaries with garlands made of jack flowers and jack seeds.

He secured free postage for seeds and leaflets through the colonial mail service — a favour later confirmed personally by the minister Sir John Kotelawala — and is believed to have sent out more than a million seeds by post alone, without any expectation of return. He drove his own car the length of the country to deliver saplings, reaching as far north as Jaffna.

The man behind the myth

Dias remained, to the end of his life, a proud son of his own culture. He wore national dress everywhere he went, called his wife Sonduriya — “my love” — and would permit no English to be spoken in his home. He is remembered as the first person in the country to sign his cheques in Sinhala.

He gave as generously with his own fortune as with his time. In 1927 he used his private wealth to establish Visakha Vidyalaya in Bambalapitiya, channelling income from his own rubber and tea estates to sustain it, and quietly supported gifted children who could not otherwise afford an education — never once seeking credit for it. He was, by every account, allergic to public praise for his own charity.

Honours came looking for him anyway, and he turned them away. The British offered him a knighthood in recognition of his public service; he declined it. Years later, Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike offered him a seat in the senate, too, pleading, courteously, his advanced age. A man who had once been sentenced to death for his convictions clearly felt no need, in his later years, for the world’s approval.

He was, friends and family recalled, sincere to the point of self-erasure. He kept no double standard between what he preached and what he ate: even at home, his own table held jackfruit, breadfruit and sweet potato rather than imported luxuries. Having once vowed to do no harm to living creatures, he gave up meat entirely, and set aside the entire yield of one jackfruit tree in his own garden purely for the birds and animals that fed on it — a small, private act of generosity typical of the man.

He was laid to rest on 31 July 1960 — the date now kept, each year, as his anniversary. The campaign’s founding date, 11 June, is the reason the country gathers to celebrate; the date of his passing is the reason it remembers the man.

A shadow returns in 2026

The parallel that makes this year’s anniversary feel especially pointed is not poetic license — it is climate science. An El Niño has formed and is strengthening in the Pacific this year, and for an island nation whose harvests rise and fall with the monsoon, that is not distant news. Sri Lanka’s Department of Meteorology has signalled a high likelihood of El Niño influence over the coming Yala and Maha seasons, with drought risk concentrated in the south-west and central districts and rising pressure on both crops and drinking water.

The country has lived through this before. The 2016–17 El Niño brought what many called the worst drought in four decades, leaving close to a third of sown paddy land unharvested in the worst season. The 2023 event starved the south-west monsoon again, withering crops across the hardest-hit districts and leaving some farmers without even seed for the following planting. Rice still supplies roughly 42 percent of the calories in the national diet — meaning a single failed season is never a mere inconvenience. It is a shock that runs from the paddy field to the poorest family’s evening meal.

Reflection of his memorable contribution to Ananda Vidyalaya with Gunapala Malalasekara

It is here that Dias’s tree makes its case all over again. Unlike paddy, which must be resown every season and drinks heavily, a jackfruit tree, once established, is deep-rooted and drought-tolerant; it needs no replanting and keeps bearing through dry spells that would ruin a field crop. Much of its harvest arrives in the very months when a household’s rice stocks run lowest — and, dried, frozen or milled into flour, it can be stored as value rather than left to rot. Sri Lanka holds an estimated 34 distinct jackfruit varieties across roughly 125,000 acres, mostly in home gardens rather than plantations — yet today only around 30 percent of the harvest is actually eaten. The rest, still, goes to waste.

A tree that feeds like a grain and works like a pharmacy

Strip away the sentiment and Kos Mama’s tree still wins the argument on the numbers alone. One hundred grams of mature kos carries about 51 kilocalories, 2.6 grams of protein and 2.8 grams of dietary fibre; the same weight of cooked rice carries 118.6 kilocalories, a near-identical 2.8 grams of protein and barely 0.9 grams of fibre. In other words, kos delivers comparable protein and three times the fibre at less than half the calorie load — and it does it with 30 milligrams of calcium, 1.7 milligrams of iron and 14 milligrams of vitamin C per 100 grams, none of which milled white rice offers in any meaningful quantity. Dias called the jack tree the tree of rice. The composition tables suggest he was being modest.

The part we throw away is the best part

The most under-appreciated food on the island may be the jack seed. At roughly 133 kilocalories, 6.6 grams of protein, 25.8 grams of carbohydrate and only 0.4 grams of fat per 100 grams, kos eta is more protein-dense than cooked rice by better than two to one, and carries some 250 micrograms of thiamine and 50 milligrams of calcium with it. Indian laboratory analyses put seed protein at around 11.9 grams and carbohydrate at 26.2 grams per 100 grams of seed material with barely a gram of fat, and describe a composition closer to that of a cereal grain than of a fruit — potassium dominating the mineral profile at some 787 parts per million, alongside calcium, sodium and a useful contribution of zinc. A seed that is naturally fat-free, gluten-free, mineral-rich and, milled, storable for months is not kitchen waste. It is a strategic reserve nobody has bothered to open. Sri Lankans currently eat about 139 grams of jack seed each per year.

Determined to fight for Independence

Ripe waraka and young polos complete the picture. Waraka offers roughly 88 kilocalories and 400 micrograms of riboflavin per 100 grams — among the highest of any stage of the fruit — while polos behaves in the pot as a vegetable and, in the diet, as a low-calorie, high-satiety bulk food. The four kitchen stages the Sinhala language has always distinguished — polos, kos, waraka, kos eta — turn out to map almost exactly onto four different nutritional functions.

Measurable medicine, not folklore

The functional claims are no longer anecdotal. Peer-reviewed work on jackfruit pulp has confirmed dose-dependent antioxidant activity across three independent assay systems — DPPH radical scavenging, ferric reducing power and DMPD radical decolorisation — with phenolics best extracted in ethanol and flavonoids in water, and the activity tracking closely with phenolic and flavonoid content. Seeds do considerably better than the flesh: total phenolic content in jackfruit seed has been reported at 27.7 milligrams of gallic acid equivalent per gram, far above the edible portions, and seed extracts show appreciable DPPH and ABTS scavenging alongside genuine iron-chelating capacity, with an inhibitory concentration of roughly 0.065 milligrams per millilitre in the metal-chelation assay. Seeds also carry saponins at some 6.3 grams and alkaloids at 1.2 grams per 100 grams — the reason the same seed appears in both a village curry and a pharmacology paper.

The traditional pharmacopoeia said as much long before the assays existed. D. M. A. Jayaweera’s Medicinal Plants Used in Ceylon records tender jack leaves minced and roasted with scraped coconut for insomnia; the juice of the tender fruit with coconut milk and jaggery as an antidote in narcotic poisoning; leaves for skin disease and the root for diarrhoea and fever; the milky latex mixed with vinegar applied to swellings and abscesses; seed starch given in bilious colic; and an infusion of mature leaves and bark for bladder stones and for diabetes. Modern phytochemistry has since put names to several of those uses — chalcones in leaf and seed with antifungal activity, oxyresveratrol in the seed with antiviral activity, isoprenyl flavones in fruit, bark and leaf with antibacterial activity, prenylated flavonoids in leaf and bark associated with anti-diabetic and anti-diarrhoeal effects, flavonoids in root and seed with anti-platelet action, and jacalin, the seed lectin with documented immunological properties. A single tree, root to leaf, has generated an entire research literature.

Why this is the answer to an El Niño year

Here is the point that matters in 2026. A drought does not merely reduce calories; it narrows diets, and narrowed diets are where micronutrient deficiency, stunting and anaemia begin. Rice supplies the calories and very little else. Jackfruit, across its four stages, supplies calories plus fibre, potassium, calcium, iron, vitamin C, B-vitamins and a documented antioxidant load — from a tree that is already standing, needs no reseeding, tolerates dry spells that flatten a paddy field, and is grown almost entirely without agrochemicals. In a probable El Niño season, that combination is not a nutritional curiosity. It is resilience with a root system.

Jeramias Dias Hall of Visakha Vidyalaya in memory of its founder

The arithmetic is almost embarrassing. A mature tree yields 500 to 700 kilograms a year, and an acre between 25,000 and 32,000 kilograms. Fifty-three percent of the fruit is edible, and 15 percent of that is seed. The island holds roughly 125,000 acres and 34 established varieties. Yet per capita consumption runs between 2.8 and 21.8 kilograms a year — around 30 percent of what the trees actually produce. Roughly seventy percent rots. Even the inedible 43 percent is not truly waste: it is animal fodder and compost. So the country is discarding, every single season, a food supply it does not have to plant, water, subsidise or import — while budgeting foreign exchange for rice against a monsoon it cannot control.

Closing that gap is not primarily an agricultural problem any more; it is a product and processing problem. Dehydrated polos and kos, frozen and IQF-packed flesh, retorted curries, seed flour for gluten-free baking, chips, cordials, jams and confectionery all convert a two-month glut into a twelve-month food reserve — and, incidentally, into export value, at a moment when global demand for plant-based and gluten-aware foods has rarely been higher. Kos in hospital, school, military and institutional menus would move volume immediately. And because jackfruit is cheap, locally grown and largely toxin-free, wider consumption pushes in exactly the direction Sri Lanka’s non-communicable disease burden requires: more fibre, more potassium, more micronutrients, fewer refined calories.

This takes us, uncomfortably, to Kos Mama. In 1918 he did the nutritional reasoning without a laboratory and reached the conclusion the laboratories have since confirmed. The trees he asked for are standing. What he could not post out by the million, in the end, was the habit of eating what hangs on them.

A method, not just a memorial

Institutions in Sri Lanka now invoke Dias’s name in a more organised way than a family recalling an ancestor. The Institution of Food, working with the Sri Lanka Medical Nutrition Association and the Kos Naturals initiative, has taken up jackfruit as what its advocates call a proving ground — an attempt to show that a fruit long dismissed at home as “poor man’s food” can be made nutritious, consistent, branded and genuinely profitable, at a moment when global demand for plant-based, gluten-aware foods has rarely been higher.

But the deeper tribute this anniversary asks for is not agricultural at all. It is behavioural. What made Dias remarkable was never really the tree — it was the sequence: study the problem before it arrives, choose the most useful and achievable answer, prove it yourself before asking others to trust it, and then do the patient, unglamorous work of making the remedy real, seed by seed, garden by garden, letter by letter, for forty years, without asking for a title in return.

He was called, in Sinhala, thun kal dutu Kos Mama — the uncle who saw the three ages: past, present and future. A century on, with the Pacific warming again and the same old vulnerability exposed, the tribute Sri Lanka owes him each 31 July may be less about ceremony than about repetition — planting, once more, the answer to a hardship that has not yet fully arrived.

((Dr Pathirana is great grandson of ‘Kos mama’)

Sources: historical accounts of Arthur V. Dias’s life and the 1918 jack-planting campaign; Institution of Food commemorative materials, 2026; Department of Meteorology and World Meteorological Organization El Niño advisories, 2026; reporting on Sri Lanka’s 2016–17 and 2023 drought seasons.

All News Advertisement

Features

Beyond traditional jobs: Why Sri Lanka needs to facilitate the gig economy

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/25

Thilina Walpola

Image courtesy Oxford University

by Kapila Chinthaka Premarathne
Head of the Department of Agricultural Systems and a Senior Lecturer in Agricultural Economics at the Faculty of Agriculture,
Rajarata University of Sri Lanka

Beyond the Graduate Unemployment Number

Sri Lanka’s economic recovery has improved macroeconomic stability, but youth unemployment remains a significant labour-market concern. Around 43% of Sri Lankan youth aged 15–24 with postsecondary education are unemployed, the highest among the Asian economies compared in the IMF analysis, compared with about 36% in Bangladesh and 13.2% in Thailand. This reflects a problem of skills mismatches and the difficulty of connecting higher education with changing labour-market demand. The concern goes beyond unemployment itself. Sri Lanka has invested heavily in educating its younger population, yet the conventional labour market is not creating enough opportunities to convert these qualifications into income. Many young people possess degrees, technical knowledge and growing digital familiarity, but remain outside formal employment because suitable jobs may not exist in the right place, at the right time or under conditions compatible with their circumstances. This makes it necessary to think beyond traditional employment models and explore new ways of connecting Sri Lanka’s educated youth with economic opportunities.

This is where Sri Lanka needs to reconsider how it understands employment

Employment has traditionally been viewed through the employer–employee relationship, with qualifications leading to a formal job and regular salary. While this model remains important, digital platforms are creating new ways to generate income, allowing individuals to work for multiple clients across geographical boundaries without permanent employment. Sri Lanka therefore needs to look beyond simply creating conventional jobs and consider whether it is building the conditions for its educated population to participate in the growing global market for digital services.

The Opportunity of the Gig Economy

The gig economy extends far beyond ride-hailing and delivery services. Digital platforms increasingly connect skilled individuals with opportunities in software development, design, accounting, data analysis, digital marketing, translation, online education, research and consultancy. This is particularly relevant to Sri Lanka, where a highly educated population faces a relatively limited domestic market for specialised skills. Digital platforms can overcome geographical constraints by connecting Sri Lankan workers directly with international clients.

As highlighted in my previous LSE South Asia article on women and the gig economy, such work should not replace formal employment but can create additional income opportunities when supported by appropriate skills, digital infrastructure, training and institutional support. A skilled person in Anuradhapura, Jaffna, Batticaloa or Monaragala could potentially serve clients in London, Melbourne or Dubai without first relocating to Colombo. This makes the gig economy relevant not only to employment but also to Sri Lanka’s emerging digital services-export strategy.

A Digitally Familiar Generation

Sri Lanka’s younger generation is growing up with smartphones, social media, online learning, digital applications and digital financial services, giving them a level of digital familiarity that previous generations did not have. However, digital familiarity does not automatically translate into digital employability. The challenge is to transform everyday digital use into productive skills such as data analysis, artificial intelligence, software development, digital marketing, financial analysis and online professional services.

Sri Lanka therefore needs to move young people from being consumers of digital services to producers of digital value. Universities, vocational institutions and training providers can play an important role in converting existing digital familiarity into marketable skills that connect young people with both domestic and international opportunities. This is increasingly important as technological change and AI reshape labour markets and intensify the need for skills that match emerging forms of work.

The Gender Dimension

The gig economy may be particularly relevant to women, who often face barriers to conventional employment arising from childcare, eldercare, mobility, social expectations and rigid working arrangements. For mothers and women living outside major urban centres, fixed working hours and daily commuting can make formal employment difficult even when suitable jobs exist.

Digital gig work can provide greater flexibility, allowing women to undertake professional assignments from home or their communities and potentially serve international clients without relocating. As discussed in my earlier LSE South Asia article, this opportunity is most meaningful when supported by digital infrastructure, skills training, virtual work hubs, mentorship and appropriate institutional support. However, flexibility should expand women’s economic choices rather than simply add paid work to existing unpaid household responsibilities.

Pressure on Labour-Market Opportunity

The value of a job cannot be judged by salary alone, as commuting, working hours and household responsibilities can significantly affect its real economic value. Flexible digital work can potentially reduce some of these costs by allowing people to work from home or nearby digital hubs and participate in employment on a part-time or project basis. While gig work cannot solve all household pressures, a more flexible organisation of work can create additional employment opportunities while helping households manage their limited time and resources more effectively.

A Possible Third Option Between Unemployment and Migration

Sri Lanka’s migration and brain-drain concerns highlight the need to explore employment opportunities beyond the domestic labour market. While overseas migration will remain an important individual and economic choice, digital work can provide another pathway by allowing skilled Sri Lankans to serve international clients without physically leaving the country. Software developers, designers, analysts, researchers, translators and consultants can potentially earn from global markets while remaining in Sri Lanka. Digital gig work cannot eliminate migration or reverse brain drain, but it can create an additional option between domestic unemployment and physical migration—working for the world while remaining in Sri Lanka.

Recognising and Making Digital Work Reputable

A major institutional gap is that conventional systems are designed around salaried employment, while a freelancer may earn from multiple clients without a single employer or salary certificate. This can make legitimate digital workers difficult to recognise when they seek loans, leasing, insurance or business finance. Sri Lanka could address this through a voluntary digital-worker or independent-professional registration mechanism, providing a recognised economic identity based on qualifications, verified skills, platform activity and documented income, without creating unnecessary bureaucracy.

Such recognition should also make digital income bankable. Banks could assess verified platform earnings, bank transactions, contracts, invoices, tax records, savings and repayment history alongside conventional employment documents. A standardised digital income statement could further help workers demonstrate their financial capacity. The key shift is from asking “Who is your employer?” to asking “Can your income be verified and is it sufficiently stable?”. This would allow successful digital workers to build financial credibility and use their earnings to access credit, acquire assets and develop their own businesses.

Digital Payments Are Part of the Labour Market

Access to reliable international payment systems is essential if Sri Lankans are to participate effectively in the global digital economy. Recent developments in PayPal’s local banking arrangements, including its partnerships with Sampath Bank and Commercial Bank, indicate progress in this direction. However, the broader priority should be a regulated and efficient digital-payment ecosystem that allows workers to receive international earnings, transfer them to Sri Lankan bank accounts, document their income and meet relevant financial and tax requirements with minimal friction. International payment infrastructure is therefore not simply a technology issue; it is an essential component of Sri Lanka’s emerging services-export economy.

Building Infrastructure Outside Colombo

Digital familiarity alone is insufficient without reliable internet, electricity, computers, software and suitable working environments, particularly in rural and underserved areas. To ensure that the gig economy supports regional development rather than becoming another Colombo-centred opportunity, Sri Lanka could establish regional digital-work hubs through universities, vocational institutions, libraries and public-private partnerships. These hubs could provide connectivity, equipment, training, mentoring and assistance with platform registration and international payments. If graduates must migrate to Colombo simply to access such infrastructure, the geographical advantage of digital work is significantly reduced.

From Freelancer to Entrepreneur

Gig work should not be viewed as an end in itself. A person may begin with small online assignments, develop regular clients and professional credibility, and eventually establish a small digital enterprise. This creates a potential pathway from graduate to freelancer, professional service provider and entrepreneur, allowing individuals to create markets around their own skills rather than waiting for conventional vacancies. Universities can support this transition by teaching students not only subject knowledge but also portfolio development, market identification, client communication, digital platforms and contract management. A degree demonstrates educational attainment, while a professional portfolio demonstrates what a graduate can offer to the market.

Facilitation Must Be Matched by Protection

Promoting the gig economy without appropriate safeguards could simply transfer employment risks from institutions to individuals. Digital workers may face uncertain incomes, weak bargaining power and limited social protection. Sri Lanka should therefore facilitate digital work while also ensuring opportunities for independent workers to build savings, access insurance and participate in portable social-protection mechanisms. Flexibility should create greater economic choice without compromising long-term financial security, particularly for women.

A regional Example from India: Think Globally and act Locally

India provides a useful regional example of how the gig economy can be approached as a policy issue rather than simply as informal or temporary work. NITI Aayog has estimated the size and future employment potential of India’s gig and platform economy and has developed recommendations covering employment generation, skills, financial inclusion and social protection. More importantly, India has begun creating institutional mechanisms around these workers. Its e-Shram portal provides a national database of unorganised workers, including gig and platform workers, creating a recognised identity through which workers can potentially access employment, skills development and social-security services. India has also explored platform-led skills development through skill certificates, skill passports and on-the-job training, while NITI Aayog has proposed cash-flow-based lending models that could allow platform workers to demonstrate creditworthiness through their earnings rather than conventional employment or collateral.

Social protection has also entered the policy framework. India’s Code on Social Security, 2020 formally recognises gig and platform workers and provides a basis for schemes covering areas such as accident insurance, health, maternity, disability and old-age protection. India is still developing and refining these arrangements, and Sri Lanka need not replicate the Indian model.

However, the experience demonstrates an important policy lesson: the gig economy can be supported through a system that identifies workers, develops their skills, makes their income more visible to financial institutions and extends appropriate social protection. Sri Lanka could develop its own simpler framework suited to its smaller economy, beginning with recognising digital workers and building the institutional conditions that allow their skills and earnings to become part of the formal economy.

Rethinking Employment and the Next Opportunity

The 43 percent figure for educated young Sri Lankans should encourage a wider discussion about the changing nature of work. Sri Lanka will continue to need conventional employment through firms, industries, farms, professional organisations and public institutions, but the changing labour market also requires new opportunities to connect educated Sri Lankans with global digital markets. The gig economy can provide an additional pathway to increase female labour-force participation, reduce the pressure for migration and brain drain, and connect Sri Lankan skills with markets beyond geographical boundaries.

This does not require a complicated bureaucracy. It requires recognising legitimate digital workers, facilitating access to international platforms and payment systems, allowing verified digital income to support credit assessment, developing portable social protection, and strengthening digital infrastructure and skills beyond major urban centres. Better data on digital workers would also help policymakers develop evidence-based interventions.

The future of work is therefore not only about creating more jobs, but about creating more ways for Sri Lankans to work, earn and build livelihoods while continuing to live and contribute in Sri Lanka. The gig economy should be recognised as part of an emerging digital labour market and services-export economy, where workers can build professional identities, earn internationally, access finance and eventually develop their own enterprises.

Features

Are religions getting redundant in the modern world?

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/25

Thilina Walpola

by Dr Upul Wijayawardhana

We are living in an era of astonishingly rapid scientific advancement. From the time Apple launched the ‘iPhone’ in January 2007, the first targeting the mass market, smartphones have taken over the world, making them indispensable. According to the latest statistics, there are around 8.1 billion mobile phones with 7.4 billion active smartphones, for the world population of 8.25 billion. Except for a tiny minority of the very poor, most people have at least one smartphone.

We are now entering the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and smart robots. Recently, a ‘Chinese’ robot ran 100 metres faster than Usain Bolt! Though Alan Turing proposed the idea of ‘Thinking Machines’ way back in 1950, the real AI boom commenced with the release of the generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, by OpenAI in November 2020. Number of technology firms in the US as well as in China have joined the race, China catching up very fast, quite unexpectedly. There is a frenzy at the moment, raising expectations, as the imminent floating of these companies is likely to value the two leaders, OpenAI and Anthropic, trillion dollars each!

However, trouble is brewing in the AI field. On top of the concerns raised by environmentalists regarding the huge power drain by AI centres, there are recent reports of some AI models hacking independently into other systems, without human input. Worse still, a senior researcher at Anthropic, who has previously worked for OpenAI as well, resigned in early September on ethical grounds stating that the way the two companies are fast-tracking AI poses an existential threat to humanity. Surprisingly, instead of a rebuttal the head of Anthropic supported his view, soon joined by three more heads of leading AI developers. Whilst they agreed on slowing progress, President Trump has claimed that slowing is totally unnecessary as long as a super intelligent President like himself is at the helm! There does not seem to be an end to Trump’s grandiosity! He was joined by Tony Blair. In contrast, King Charles held a summit with representatives of all AI developers to find a way AI could be developed without a threat to humanity. That is how wise leaders act!

Less sophisticated AI tools are already in widespread use and installed in computers, laptops and smartphones. Some of us are using these automatically. However, the more advanced AI tools like ChatGPT can change even reality. For instance, AI can generate videos hardly distinguishable from real ones. What you enjoy watching on YouTube may be just the creations of AI! Some people use AI to write articles; only a few of them admit that they do so. Very soon we may be reading stories AI creates and listening to music, courtesy of AI. Technology seems to be fast becoming the new religion? Or, will the existential threat move us more towards religion?

Religion, perhaps, is as old as humanity itself; various belief systems evolving and disappearing coupled with the fortunes of the associated civilizations. Just like AI, religion is also a creation of the human mind which our ancestors did to explain many phenomena which appeared, at that time, to be supernatural. Starting with Animism, perceiving the divine in the natural world around, humans went on to Polytheism, believing in many gods like in Hinduism, culminating in the concept of Monotheism.

World’s oldest religion, Hinduism, still in wide practice, is devoid of a founder or a single text. The earliest scriptures, Rigveda, is considered to be around 3,500 years old but archaeologists have discovered symbols of importance to Hinduism as far back as 7,000 BCE. Though it is considered to be Polytheistic, it can be argued that it was the precursor of Monotheism, the concept of a creator God, as Brahma was the creator in the triad, Trimurti, Vishnu being the preserver and Shiva being the destroyer. It seems to be a sensible balancing act; create, destroy and repair with improvements.

It is pretty obvious that as science expands, the importance of religion contracts but it is hardly likely religions would be totally redundant. We have no choice as to which family we are born to and that invariably determines what your religion would be, if any. Religion is the first brainwashing a child encounters and most remain in the same faith, often trying to defend even the indefensible, but some change through conviction or conversion due to one of many reasons. Further, religious rituals have social values and religious practices often come to one’s solace at times of distress. Therefore, many will continue with the religion they were born to but with declining enthusiasm, at times. However, some religions seem to be facing problems like falling attendances in places of worship. With education and tech savviness expanding, one would expect the youth to be less enthusiastic about religion but the converse is true in some religions, some youth becoming very militant unfortunately.

While most religions make you subservient to a supernatural power, the Buddha was wise and bold enough to remove those shackles. He proclaimed that one’s destiny is in one’s own hands. However, many Buddhists appear to attach greater significance to rituals than to practising the Dhamma.

Buddhism as a religion may become less relevant as the frontiers of science expands but the Buddha Dhamma, especially Abhidhamma and Vipassana, would receive increasing recognition, the Buddha remaining an authority on consciousness and the mind.

Scientific progress should be for the betterment of society but AI developers are taking huge risks, taking massive loans threatening the world economy, for one aim: profit! Some do not seem to care even if their actions pose an existential threat to humanity.

Perhaps, if the Four Sublime Attitudes (Sathara Brahma Vihara) expounded by the Buddha; loving kindness (Metta), compassion (Karuna), empathetic joy (Muditha) and equanimity (Upekkha) are adopted as universal values, the world would become a safer place to live in, with or without AI.

Features

‘The Bullet that Missed’

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/25

Thilina Walpola

Tales of Mystery and Suspense 21

by Prof. Rajiva Wijesinha

Another book that is part of a series, today—one that is fun without the brooding concentration on criminality in different forms that marks the Rebus novels. This one about the Thursday Murder Club, is a romp as its two predecessors were interspersed with deaths and what might be deaths.

The Bullet that Missed

begins with a meeting with the presenter of ‘South East Tonight’, a programme about the area, in which Coopers Chase is situated. The meeting is held because the club has decided to look into the murder of the producer’s assistant, Bethany Waites, whose car was found at the bottom of a cliff ten years ago. There was blood in it, but the body was never found.

Or, rather, the book begins with an account of Bethany Waites deciding, on the night she vanished, to meet someone in connection with a case of massive fraud that she had been investigating, after sending the producer, Mike Waghorn, a message that she had found new evidence though he had no idea what it was. The night she died, she sent him another message: “I don’t say this often enough, but thank you.”

CCTV cameras showed her leaving her place, but then the vehicle vanished, before being sighted near the cliff, with two people in it. Investigation of the fraud had led to the imprisonment of a woman, Heather Garbutt, though it proved impossible to pin anything on Jack Mason, the mastermind for whom she had worked.

The Club conducts investigations on several fronts, including through Connie Johnson, the drug dealer they had helped imprison in the earlier book. The psychiatrist Ibrahim, the most respectable member of the Club, interviews her in an attempt to get her to find out more from Heather, who is in the same prison as she. They also investigate the CCTV record of the night Bethany vanished, and deduce that she went to an apartment block and exited from its other side, and that is why she was not seen leaving the town. But some time had elapsed between her being seen in the town and then on the cliff.

Meanwhile, Elizabeth has been kidnapped, along with her husband, and taken to a house in Staffordshire, where she is told by a man called the Viking that she must kill a former KGB agent now in London, who has a profitable career in money laundering. The Viking tells her he will inform Viktor that she was responsible for stealing the diamonds, the story of which is told in the previous Murder Club Mystery, and Viktor will then kill her.

Elizabeth, who has an affair with Viktor, knows he will not kill her, but when the Viking says he will also send Viktor a picture of Joyce, she decides she must act, and goes to see Viktor, and fires when she gets him in the bathroom. But, of course, she fired into the ceiling, and Viktor is then taken to Coopers Chase, to stay with Joyce until they have dealt with the Viking. And Viktor then enjoys the camaraderie of the retirement home so much that he wonders whether he too should settle there.

Elizabeth does trace the Viking, or rather her husband does, for he has noticed rare books on the shelves in his library, and an antiquarian book dealer friend managed to find out who bought them. But before they could confront him, he comes to Coopers Chase, for he has seen the bullet hole in the bathroom of Viktor’s flat and realized he was fooled.

But he cannot bring himself to kill Joyce straight away, and she knocks him out with a drug in a cup of tea. When he meets Viktor, they both decide to fall in with the plans of the Club.

Before this, Heather has been found dead in her cell, with a note saying that ‘they’ were going to kill her, and only Connie could help. Before that she had admitted that she was frightened to name the man behind the fraud. Jack Mason said the same, after Ron had won his confidence. The Club had deduced by then that the body was buried in the garden of Heather’s house which Jack had bought, after she had been jailed, and digging reveals a gun and money, but no body. Jack tells them that the mastermind had said that Bethany was buried with a bullet with his DNA on it.

The Club is now working with the Chief Constable of Kent, Andrew Everton, who writes thrillers himself, but in the form of e-books. He is in search of a publisher, and delighted when Mike Waghorn puts him on his programme, as is Donna, who is substituted at the last minute for Chris.

The Club finds out whom Bethany visited in the apartment block—Mike’s assistant Pauline, who tells them later what she and Bethany had been doing. But this is after the man behind the fraud has been unmasked up in the house in Staffordshire, where he was trying to hire the Viking and Viktor to find the money that he had stashed away, using accounts that he could no longer trace. He has also confessed to murdering Bethany, hoping this will persuade the two money launderers to help him, but it turns out that he did not do this. Nor did he kill Heather, the incriminating note having been placed in her room by Connie, who decided that Heather’s suicide should be treated as murder so that the person who had been blackmailing her should be found out.

It was Jack Mason’s murder that was brought home to the crook. It turns out that Bethany, her appearance altered by Pauline, has vanished, to a new life in Dubai, where she has taken control of the missing millions. She has gone there because the threat, she received through the bullet she was looking at in the preamble, was to Mike and she wanted him out of danger.

Yet another whimsical conclusion to a whimsical book with enough loose ends left hanging for another sequel.