Features

Two brilliant writers – Booker Prize winners

Published

3 years ago

2023/02/5

Salman Rushdie (age 75) is back on the world literary stage and welcomed strongly by other novelists and writers in general. His new book, handed over to his publisher – Random House – in December 2021 is to be released on February 7. He was not physically present at the many seminars and meetings held to herald his book and pay tribute; he is blinded in one eye and still recovering from the stabbing on stage in the Chatutauqua Institute in New York on August 12, 2022, just before he was due to address his audience. The assailant, 24 year old Hadi Matar, was arrested at the scene but has pleaded not guilty to charges of assault and attempted murder.

The government of Iran denied knowing about the stabbing though state media celebrated it. Never to be forgotten is the fatwa declared by the then Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini with a promised bounty of $3 million for Rushdie’s death soon after he published The Satanic Verses in 1988. Die hard Muslims thought it blasphemous of Prophet Mohammed. Rushdie went into hiding in Britain, protected by British security forces for almost a decade. He then shifted to New York. He was knighted in 2007.

The 2022 attack shocked the world and shook writers. He had been revered as a free speech icon and in spite of the fatwa (rescinded in 1998) he continued to write and speak against intolerance. After the grievous attack last summer, fellow writers and cultural figures expressed outrage and gathered for vigils in his honor, sharing personal stories about him and reading from his novels. One of these I read about was on the steps of the New York Library with Kiran Desai joining many others. Chief Executive of PEN America, Suzanne Nossal commented: “They failed to silence him.”

New Book

Titled Victory City, Rushdie’s recent novel is about a gifted storyteller and poet named Pampa Kampana who creates a new civilization through her imagination. Blessed by a goddess, she lives nearly 240 years, long enough to witness the rise and fall of her empire in southern India – Vijayanagar – which translates to Victory City. Her lasting legacy is an epic poem. She writes a message at the end of her epic which she buries in a pot as a message for future generations: “All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors.” So true for the present and particularly in the author’s case where he was nearly killed twice; his books are read and re-read and his new book eagerly awaited and commented on, even pre-publication.

One comment: “Framed as the text of a rediscovered medieval Sanskrit epic, Victory City is about myth making, story-telling and the enduring power of language.” Novelist Colum McCann writes: “He is saying something quite profound in Victory City. He’s saying ‘you will never take the fundamental act of storytelling away from people’. In the face of danger, even in the face of death, he manages to say that storytelling is one currency we all have.”

Margaret Atwood at a panel discussion on the novel said she felt an obligation to speak about Rushdie’s latest work, given that he was not able to appear publicly himself, as reported by Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A Harris in the January 25 New York Times. “You have to, as it were, foil the attempt to shut him down. He’s been through so much, being in hiding for all those years, feeling under threat.” The article I quote from is titled: Victory City in which a gifted story teller and poet created a new civilization through the sheer power of her imagination. The two reviewers indicate that in the novel Rushdie seems to be saying: “I will use this mighty weapon of language which is stronger than anything you can throw at me.” They also comment on his nature – funny, quick-witted, extraordinarily resilient. “It is hoped Victory City would shift attention back to Rushdie’s fiction – a novelist more than free speech advocate or a victim of malicious assault.” They classify Victory City as a joyful, oversize romp of a book, an extravagant book wherein his full creative capabilities are shown. “He is a story teller and novelist more than a political symbol.”

I admit Rushdie is not easy to read. I attempted many times to get into Midnight’s Children (1981) but failed until I saw the Deepa Mehta directed 2012 film which clearly depicted the plot of two infant boys being exchanged in a maternity ward by a nurse on malicious instructions given her on the night of Partition when Pakistan was created and India gained independence from the British Raj. The boys are from a rich Hindu mother and Muslim roadside singer. Their fortunes are traced magically through terrible vicissitudes against the backdrop of Hindu- Muslim racial tensions and rich against poor. This, Rushdie’s second novel, shot him to fame and won him the Booker Prize.

Then came the fateful Satanic Verses with its satirical depictions of Prophet Muhammad in 1988. The Moor’s Last Sigh followed in 1995 “which traced the downward spiral of expectations experienced by India as post-independence hopes for democracy crumbled during the emergency rule declared by PM Indira Gandhi in 1975.” Fury was out in 2001, after the author’s move to the US. It traces a doll maker’s arrival in New York leaving his wife and child in London. A Times reviewer said “Although Rushdie inhabits his novels in all manner of guises and transformations, he had never been so literally present as in this one.” His one but the last novel Joseph Anton (2012) is a memoir narrating his experiences after the fatwa was issued. The title is the name Rushdie assumed while in hiding, a combination of the names of two of his favourite authors: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. It gives glimpses of his childhood – an alcoholic father and Rushdie’s s marriages. He has been much married! Clarissa Luard 1976-87; Marrianne Wiggins 1888-93; Elizabeth West 1999-2004 and Padma Lakshmi – Latin American actress, model and TV host from 2004 to 2007; having met her in 1999.

Now, with the release of Victory City, writers are again rallying around Rushdie to champion his work. Many see it as a moment to celebrate Rushdie’s exuberant and playful imagination, to turn attention back to his fiction. Some say the book’s “overarching message — that stories will outlast political clashes, wars, the collapse of empires and civilizations” — has taken on a heightened resonance in light of what Rushdie has endured.

One cannot help but mourn the deaths of our own writers who championed honesty and free speech. No closure to most of those instigated assassinations. Lasantha Wickrematunge’s in particular.

Chat with Shehan Karunatilaka Ashok Ferrey

asked a couple of questions from Shehan Karunatilaka and commented on his work with the venue –library of the British Council in Kollupitiya – filled to capacity by invitees and guests who paid for admission.

It is opportune that I write about Salman Rushdie and Shehan K in the same article as they are both Booker Prize winners and thus equal in honour and consideration as novelists. India boasts ten Booker short listed of whom six were winners: V S Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Arundathi Roy, Kiran Desai, Arvind Adigar and Gitanjali Shree who won the International Booker awarded to a non-English and translated novel. Tiny Sri Lanka boasts three short listed – Anuk Arulpragasam in 2021; and two of them who won the coveted, very competitive prize: Shehan K and Michael Ondaatji. Ondaataji is Canadian but makes it a point to add Sri Lanka to his country origin.

The entire conversation was absorbingly interesting and made light and easy by the two on stage. Shehan noted that plot is easy in novel writing; it is style, voice, choice of language and building up characters that needed concentration and working on. He condensed 40 years of civil war and the turmoil of the late 1980s which was really the tip of the iceberg. A criticism, mentioned by Ashok, that the Seven Moons of Maali Almeida conveys a rather ugly picture of the country and its people, and shows Sri Lanka in a very negative light, had Shehan reply with a chuckle that he was not writing a touristy novel, far from it. He said tourism would not be adversely affected by his descriptions; and for history, his book should not be read. However, his fiction is heavily coloured by fact. He mentioned here the success of the film series The Crown which he watched avidly. He said the protagonist Maali Almeida was not at all him, not even completely Richard de Zoysa on whom he based his character. Maali was a photographer and gambler which Richard was not.

He chose to write about ghosts and the underworld since it was a niche not written much about. He did much research, spoke to people and of course edited heavily as the novel was first published as Chats with the Dead but was revised heavily. He acknowledged the debt he owed Natalia Jansz who suggested improvements and changes, and her husband Mark Ellingham who published his book. He magnanimously said that much of the honour of winning was due to her painstaking and scrupulous editing. For example as suggested by her, he spent much time defining the four minor characters in the book – the van driver and garbage collector included.

He admitted to having a sixth sense in his proven-to-be-successful choice of subject and plot. One was choice of a ‘ghost story’ and in the earlier novel – cricket. He was surprised that though Sri Lankans are crazy about cricket, no novel centered the game.Hence his plot and character development in Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, which won him awards and international fame.

Black humour was hugely present in his novel, pointed Ashok. Shehan admitted it was deliberate, specially its lack of lightness as writing about the dead and where they go to is black. He added that humour and enjoyment of fun are Sri Lankan characteristics.

He added “I enjoy writing. Research is good. Plotting, character building and rewriting consequent to suggested edits is painstaking. When you start writing you don’t think about sales, targets etc. But you have in mind the imperative that you write a book that appeals, more especially when it’s a novel. “

A personal note here. I found it, like others, difficult to go through Shehan’s book easily. That is a deficit of mine. Seven Moons… is truly multifaceted carrying significance and symbolism, so it is a great book. After all it won the world’s most prestigious literary prize in English, now having to compete with vast numbers of American writers. It and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children are on par. Our own Shehan Karunatilake is up there among the world’s greatest literary fiction writers in the English language. We appreciatively thank him for bringing honour to this country; and to Ashok Ferrey – Gratiaen Prize winner for 2022 – for making the evening of literary appreciation at the British Council a super event.

Again I end with the thought that haunts many a Sri Lankan, the planned merciless killing of Richard de Zoysa just because, it is surmised, he wrote a play parodying a sentence used to characterize the leader of then. And also of Rajini Thiranagama, mercilessly shot from behind by a Tamil Tiger. These are just two innocents who lost their lives at the whim of the Lankan govt heads, LTTE and JVP terrorists. But the comfort is that their written words lives on. They must never be forgotten.

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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.