Features

On the verge of manhood

Published

2 years ago

2024/07/7

Thilina Walpola

Peradeniya campus

by Jayantha Perera

Seniors’ ragging of ‘freshers’ was rampant on the Peradeniya campus. Marcus Fernando Hall, where I was a fresher, was notorious for ragging. A gang of nasty seniors woke us up at 4 am and forced us to crawl naked around the hall pond, pretending to be reptiles looking for water. Some seniors were lenient and wanted to have a good time with freshers. They asked us to sing, dance, or write letters promising to marry off sisters to their lordships – seniors. Once, I wrote a long letter promising to marry off my only sister to a senior. (I had only three brothers). He read the letter, thanked me for my generosity, and asked whether my sister was pretty. When I hesitated to reply, he told me he was uninterested in my sister.

The registration of undergraduates on the ground floor of the Senate provided an ideal opportunity for seniors to catch freshers for ragging. Seniors ordered freshers in their halls of residence to wear long-sleeved white shirts for the registration and to return to their halls after the registration. Seniors waited for them about 100 yards away from the Senate building, picked up freshers, and took them to their rooms for ragging.

During the ragging season, freshers had a busy life. Attendance at the University Health Clinic for a health checkup was mandatory. Weak hearts and poor eyesight were common defects among freshers. A nurse declared me fully colour-blind. Another fresher found that he had only one testicle.

I attended University Welfare Committee interviews to obtain free financial assistance. In the personal information form, I wrote that my mother had no income. Prof Sarachchandra, Chief Welfare Officer, called me for an interview. I told him about Amma’s difficulties in getting essential food with the stipend she received from my granduncle. He was sympathetic and gave me a cheque for Rs. 100. Then he approved a bursary of Rs. 300 per term. He told me although poverty was quite common in rural communities, villagers had enough resources to survive. However, for the urban poor, living was difficult unless a family member earned wages or made profits from a small business. He said he understood the difficulties I encountered.

Ragging lasted for two weeks and ended with an ‘initiation ceremony’. After taking the hall oath, freshers drank cheap arrack and danced until dawn the following day. They promised to respect seniors, not grab their girlfriends, and introduce them to female batch-mates with good recommendations. From the third week, all became equal, and university identity preceded other alliances such as school, region, religion, and ethnicity.

The most famous teacher among the freshers was Professor Sarachchandra, who taught Sinhala and literary criticism. He was a student of Professor A. J. Ayer, a world-renowned logician and philosopher at London University. About 200 students attended his class at the Arts Theatre. Sarachchandra brought a bundle of cyclostyled pages of books and distributed them among the students. He read a poem or an extract from a book aloud, inviting students to express their views, feelings, and thoughts. Most of the time, the class laughed at those students who expressed their opinions and beliefs, which were irrelevant to the discussed topic. Sarachchandra was patient and listened to each student who wanted to talk. Although we did not take notes during his lectures, we knew we had learned a lot.

Professor K N Jayatilleke taught logic and the scientific method. He was also a renowned Buddhist and Pali scholar who studied at Cambridge under the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. Jayatilleke taught us deductive and inductive methods and how to use Venn diagrams to develop precise statements and definitions of phenomena. ‘Is there a God?’ was a popular question we discussed in the classroom. He summarised all the points we put forward on the blackboard and wrote his views in two lines at the bottom.

The teacher who taught us economics was a clever man with his own teaching style. He first gave us a summary of the topic and a question or two. He wanted us to discuss the issue and our answers in the next class. Economic history was my favourite subject. A Tokskyist taught us political theory. He criticised the British monarch and the Parliament and ridiculed maxims such as ‘The Queen can do no wrong’ and ‘The Queen reigns but not administers.’ He taught us how to think critically and independently and to approach a complex issue by dividing it into a series of questions.

It was a novel experience for me to associate with female colleagues. The names of some of my colleagues were new to me. At school, my friends were Hillary, Bonaventure, Joseph, Ivan, Winston, Bernard, and Lucian. At the University, my friends were Premathileke, Piyaseeli, Piyadasa, Gamage, Tilakaratne, and Wijeratne. In the first term, I got used to such names. The other significant difference was that most of them were Buddhists, and I was a Catholic. With religion came many different cultural practices.

I went to the Catholic Church on the campus on Sundays. My friends went to the Dalada Maligawa during the weekends and to a nearby Buddhist temple on a full moon day. They worshipped their parents by kneeling and touching their feet. I usually greeted my mother and other female relatives by kissing their cheeks. When they left home, their parents told them, “Theruwan saranai” (may the triple gems bless you). My mother bid me farewell by saying “Jesu pihitai” (may Jesus bless you). Parents usually brought cooked food sufficient to serve many friends of their sons or daughters. I was thrilled when my granduncle sent me a large cake from Kandy for Easter, which I shared with my friends. Most of them did not know Easter. For them, April’s Sinhala and Tamil New Year was the time to celebrate. I once visited a friend in his village during the New Year season. I was amazed to see how well women played the rabanas and men competed in thirikkal (cart) races.

Freshers joined various political parties. I was interested in joining JVP, but JVP leaders were reluctant to accept me as a JVP member. A friend told me that was because I was a Catholic and came from an urban school. I then joined the Communist Party (Peking Wing). I took part in campus student elections and political seminars held in Kandy. A friend from the Science Faculty became an ardent political theorist with great sympathy for the poor. He engaged in various welfare programs in rural areas. Once, he returned to the hall at midnight and found no food. He shouted at the hall steward and demanded food. The steward told him that dinner time was 8 pm, and he was late. My friend barked, “I can be anywhere in the universe. You should keep my dinner regardless of the rules.”

I occasionally visited the SK shop in Kandy (which my granduncle introduced to me). I obtained milk powder, packets of biscuits, writing paper, file covers, and pens on my granduncle’s account. I shared writing papers, Marmite and Horlicks (a hot milk beverage) with my two room-mates. When I got my bursary, I gave my two younger brothers some money. I frequently travelled home to see Amma and my brothers.

I often thought about Thaththa and imagined discussing my new subjects with him in the backyard of our house. I wanted to tell him how well I did in Sinhala, economics, and philosophy. Sometimes, my mind wandered. Once, I lost the teacher’s critical line of argument. When he wrote ‘V’ on the blackboard, I asked him “V stands for what?” He told me ‘Vimala’ (a girl’s name), suggesting I was thinking of a girl during my lessons. The entire class laughed. But immediately he said ‘V’ was for vishwaya (universe).

At the end of the third term, I returned home to revise for the General Arts Qualifying examination (GAQ). My younger brothers were at Padiyapellala. Nihal was at the minor seminary in Colombo. Amma was thrilled to have me at home. On Sundays, we went together to church, where she proudly introduced me to her friends. She boasted about me, saying I might someday become a university lecturer.

This calm and happy interlude in my life was shattered again when Amma fell ill. She got a severe throat and lung infection. We had about Rs. 50 at home, and within three days, it dwindled to Rs. 10, as medicine cost a lot. She was lying on the floor with great pain. I did not want to go to my granduncle to get more money.

Amma

could not eat any food because of her throat infection. I was worried that I too, would get the virus and fall sick. I decided to eat bread with brown sugar for all three meals. I bought a loaf of bread in the morning for 25 cents. I soaked a piece of bread in water and forced Amma to swallow it, and I ate a slice of bread with sugar. For lunch, I ate another piece of bread with sugar and fed Amma with bread and water. Dinner was also bread with sugar. I left for Peradeniya when Amma recovered from her illness.

Soon after the examination, I visited my granduncle’s shop at Padiyapelalla. One morning, at the cashier’s desk, I met the most beautiful girl in my life. She was about 16 years old and came with her sister, who was about 10 years old. The girls were breathtakingly pretty and talked with a different accent. The elder sister told me that the sugar she had bought from the shop was not properly wrapped, and by the time she reached home, there was no sugar in the packet. I asked her, “What can we do for you?” She said, “Please give me another sugar packet; otherwise, my mother will punish me!”

I told a shop assistant to give her a packet of sugar. That decision was correct. But no sooner had they left than the senior workers criticised me for giving them an extra sugar packet. One asked me, “Do you know those two girls are of the lowest caste? They are padu (untouchable) girls. That is why they are so pretty. A young man like you should be cautious because they are known for charming men with their beauty and 64 mayam (strategies). You should not walk alone in villages because they may trap you to marry one of their girls!” Their nagging went on for over an hour. Fortunately, the story did not reach my granduncle. I never saw the two girls again.

The GAQ results were out in mid-August. I did well and was among the four ‘exhibition’ prize winners. I consulted several professors before deciding whether to do a special or general degree. My desire was to do law. Peradeniya University did not offer law as a subject. It was available only at Colombo University. I could have joined the law faculty in Colombo with good advanced-level results. But I did not want to burden Amma as she had little money. Also, studying law requires a good knowledge of English as it is taught in English. I was not confident I could switch from Sinhala to English to read law. At that time, I had the false impression that legal studies were for wealthy and well-connected students.

I applied for a special course in sociology. The Professor of Sociology asked me to translate two passages from English to Sinhala to check my English proficiency. One passage was from an anthropology textbook, and the other from a political science textbook. I translated the first passage without any difficulty. The other was a difficult passage. Two days later, at the interview, he told me that I got 1 out of 10 for the translation while others got 0/10; therefore, he would allow me to study sociology! I did not know whether he was joking or serious. I expected to get at least 5/10 for the translation. His statement hurt me. I should have enrolled in Philosophy or Sinhala ‘special’ degree. In fact, the heads of the philosophy department and the Sinhala department invited me to read their ‘special’ degree courses. I did not join them because I thought a sociology degree would help me find a job after graduation.

The Professor taught two students in the English medium. A lecturer taught the seven Sinhala medium students. He arranged a special English class at the English Department to help us understand Sociology textbooks written in English. Social and Political Thought class was at the Department of Political Science. The Professor stammered a lot, making his lectures challenging to follow. He brilliantly summarised the ideas of thinkers such as Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Machiavelli, and Gandhi. By the end of the year, I understood the main currents of social and political thought and how they had affected various political regimes and civilisations. This knowledge formed the foundation of my future studies.

I conducted field research with visiting researchers at the department. Professor Nur Yalman of Chicago University recruited me as a research assistant to study the changing Buddhist culture in rural Sri Lanka. I visited about 20 Buddhist temples and discussed with about 50 bhikkus topics, such as whether Armstrong landed on the Moon. Only 30% of them believed that Armstrong reached the Moon. A communication specialist engaged me in fieldwork on mass communication and development in rural Sri Lanka. Each of them paid me a daily stipend. I bought my first saree for Amma with the money I earned from the fieldwork.

The Sociology department’s annual field trip to the Udawalawe region was a memorable episode in my second year at the University. Our first stop was at the Ratnapura Resthouse, where the Government Agent of the District, a Sociology graduate, hosted us for lunch. We had lots of beer and a sumptuous lunch. Each ate with a spoon, fork, and napkin tucked into the shirt or blouse. One vegetable served at lunch was murunga (drumstick). We did not know how to scoop the flesh from open lengths of murunga with a spoon. Most of us did not touch the dish, saying that we did not like murunga.

At Embilipitya, we stayed at a government circuit bungalow. We spent one day at the famous Victorian-era mansion of Maduwanwela Dissawa (Chieftain) in Thanamalwila. We learned from villagers that the government held elephant kraals in the 1940s near the small stream there. They explained how the hasthi rajaya (lead elephant) in one of the kraals attempted to break the stockade to protect its herd and how a marksman shot and killed it. We sang the song Panamure ath rajaya, written in memory of the elephant, before leaving the spot. Although our interactions with the local people were limited, we had an opportunity to observe rural living and to listen to folklore.

I sat next to a female undergrad on the bus during the trip. At the journey’s end, my friends thought I was ‘hitched’ to her. They mockingly blessed us for being the fortunate ones on the field trip! When I returned to Peradeniya, I had strange disorientation and loneliness. I thought I was sick. A friend told me that I was in love. He promised to talk to the lady concerned. I told him that I was not ready to start a relationship. About 40 years later, I checked facts and rumours of the bygone era with her. With more effort from each side, our mutual interest could have led to a lasting life relationship.

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Features

The gambling that wears a suit: Forex, commodities and CFD Trap – III

Published

13 hours ago

2026/09/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. C. A. Saliya

(The third instalment in a five-part series on the business of gambling, legal and illegal.)

Somewhere in the fine print of every trading app you’ve ever seen advertised on social media, there’s a sentence that almost nobody reads all the way through. It usually says something like this: “77% of retail investor accounts lose money when trading CFDs with this provider.”

Read that again. Not “some people lose money.” Not “trading carries risk.” Seventy-seven out of every hundred ordinary customers who sign up and put their own money in, lose it. And that number isn’t a scandal uncovered by an investigative journalist. It’s a legally required disclosure, printed by the company itself, sitting quietly at the bottom of the same advertisement promising you financial freedom.

Now imagine a casino was legally required to put a sign on its front door reading: “77 out of every 100 people who walk through this door will lose money.” Would anyone still walk in? Probably far fewer than they do today. And yet millions of people, a good number of them here in Sri Lanka, drawn in through Telegram groups, YouTube “gurus,” and slickly produced Instagram ads, open trading accounts every year, often with no idea that the product they’ve just signed up for behaves, mathematically, almost exactly like a casino game.

What a CFD actually is in plain language

CFD stands for “contract for difference.” Strip away the jargon and it means this: you’re not actually buying gold, or oil, or US dollars, or shares in a company. You’re placing a bet with a broker on whether the price of that thing will go up or down over some period of time, usually 24 hours. If you’re right, the broker pays you the difference. If you’re wrong, you pay them.

That alone isn’t necessarily gambling, plenty of legitimate financial hedging works this way. What tips it firmly into gambling territory is leverage. Most CFD and forex platforms let ordinary customers control a position many, many times larger than the money they’ve actually put in, sometimes 50 or 100 times larger. That sounds thrilling, because it means a small price move in your favour turns into a big profit. It also means a small price move against you wipes out your entire deposit in minutes, sometimes seconds. Currency and commodity prices wobble up and down constantly, for reasons that have nothing to do with any individual trader’s skill or analysis. Leverage simply turns that normal, everyday wobble into a coin flip with your rent money.

And underneath all of it sits something called the spread, the small gap between the price you can buy at and the price you can sell at. Every single trade you make, win or lose, hands the broker a slice through that spread. It costs the broker nothing to run more of them through the system. It is, in every meaningful sense, the exact same mechanism as a casino’s house edge on a roulette wheel, a guaranteed cut for the house, built into the game before a single card is dealt or a single trade is placed.

The numbers behind the disclosure

That 77 percent figure isn’t an outlier. Britain’s financial regulator found, in a review of the industry, that 82 percent of CFD customers lost money. Regulators across Europe studied 10 different countries and found the average retail customer lost somewhere between roughly €1,600 and €29,000 trading these products. Academic researchers, who have studied trading apps directly, including their “practice mode” demo accounts, found something else troubling: many of these apps are deliberately designed using the same psychological tricks as gambling apps. Near-miss messaging that makes a losing trade feel like it was almost a win. Streak counters. Push notifications nudging you back in right when you’ve stepped away. The researchers’ own conclusion was blunt: this “supports comparisons with gambling, where an overwhelming majority loses money.”

To be fair to the trading industry, it has a real counter-argument, and it deserves to be heard rather than dismissed. Genuine investing and trading, done properly, does involve skill, understanding a market, managing risk, not betting more than you can afford to lose, using regulated brokers who are supervised by real financial authorities. Nobody sensible would say buying shares in a well-run company is “gambling” in the same sense as a slot machine. The industry’s argument is that CFDs, used responsibly by informed traders, sit closer to that end of the spectrum than to a casino floor.

The trouble is that “used responsibly by informed traders” describes almost none of the customers these apps are actually advertising to. Nobody runs a slick Instagram campaign targeting sophisticated hedge fund managers. They target 19-year-olds with a bit of spare cash and a phone.

The Sri Lankan blind spot

Here is where this story becomes genuinely local, and genuinely urgent. Sri Lanka’s new gambling law, the one creating a single Gambling Regulatory Authority to oversee casinos, card games, and betting, has nothing to do with any of this. Forex and CFD trading falls under an entirely different part of the government’s rulebook, treated as a financial services matter for the Central Bank and securities regulators, not as gambling at all. On paper, that makes sense: trading involves real financial markets, real currencies, real commodities.

But in practice, it creates a gap you could drive a truck through. A card game at a funeral house, played for a few hundred rupees, falls under strict 19th-century anti-gambling law. A trading app that can empty a young person’s entire savings account in an afternoon, using exactly the same psychological hooks as a slot machine, falls under none of it, no age verification standard built for gambling harm, no loss limits, no cooling-off periods, no self-exclusion registers.

Meanwhile, unlicensed offshore forex “signal groups” and trading channels, plenty of them explicitly targeting Sri Lankan youth through Telegram and WhatsApp, operate almost entirely outside any meaningful oversight at all, local or foreign.

There’s a newer wrinkle worth a mention too: cryptocurrency trading and crypto-based gambling products increasingly blur into the exact same category as CFDs, some analysts value the global crypto gambling market in the tens of billions of dollars, though even the experts disagree wildly on the real number, which tells you how little anyone is actually tracking this corner of the industry closely.

The question this instalment leaves open

So here’s the question worth putting to Sri Lanka’s policymakers, and to readers thinking about their own accounts: if a product produces the same loss rates as a casino, uses the same psychological design as a betting app, and overwhelmingly targets the same young, inexperienced customers as illegal gambling operators, does it matter, for the purposes of protecting people, whether we call it “trading” or “gambling”? Right now, in Sri Lanka and in most of the world, the label is doing an enormous amount of legal work that the underlying product doesn’t actually earn.

We’ll return to this exact tension in our final instalment, when we ask what genuinely joined-up gambling regulation would look like, one that judges a product by what it does to the people using it, rather than by what its marketing department decided to call it.

Next week,

Part 4 heads to the racecourse, the one form of gambling that has stayed legal almost everywhere on Earth for centuries, to explain, in plain English, exactly how a bookmaker guarantees itself a profit no matter which horse crosses the line first.

Prof. C. A. Saliya, is a charted accountant, academic, researcher and former banker. He is the author of SAMAJA GAVESHAKAYA and Springer Publication DOING SOCIAL RESEARCH. He can be contacted at saliya.ca@gmail.com. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent those of the organisations with which he is affiliated.

Features

Addressing human rights needs multi-pronged approach

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

Volker Türk

by Jehan Perera

The ongoing 63rd session of the United Nations Human Rights Council, which runs from September 7 to October 7, 2026, in Geneva is important to Sri Lanka. Its outcome will send a signal to other international actors, including the European Union, as to whether Sri Lanka’s reform policy is on track. The written update on Sri Lanka, prepared by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights under High Commissioner Volker Türk and presented by Deputy High Commissioner Nada Al-Nashif, has taken a more holistic approach to the government’s performance over the past year. It acknowledged the progress Sri Lanka has made under the NPP government in relation to accountability for financial fraud and other economic crimes. At the same time, the High Commissioner’s update made clear that progress in relation to economic crime cannot be equated with progress in relation to accountability for grave human rights violations committed during the armed conflict and in other periods of political violence.

The government may have felt sufficiently confident that its response to the High Commissioner’s update could be handled by its representative in Geneva and did not require the attendance of Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath. Sri Lanka’s representative Sumith Dassanayake called for a fundamental review of country-specific mandates within the UN Human Rights Council. Sri Lanka has been facing repeated scrutiny in the form of successive UNHRC resolutions from 2012 onwards. Ambassador Dassanayake argued that such mandates should not continue indefinitely and must be regularly assessed against measurable objectives and tangible outcomes. This may reflect confidence that its record of reform is beginning to receive recognition internationally. The reports and statements at the Human Rights Council acknowledged progress in the government’s efforts to address corruption and economic crime.

The government’s anti-corruption drive has included investigations into allegations involving individuals who held the highest political offices in the country. The arrest of former President Ranil Wickremesinghe in connection with alleged misuse of public funds, and the investigation into the controversial SriLankan Airlines Airbus transaction involving former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s son, are examples of the reach of these investigations. The arrest of SLPP National Organiser and Member of Parliament Namal Rajapaksa in connection with allegations relating to the Airbus purchase scandal has also demonstrated that the government is willing to pursue cases involving politically powerful figures.

Wide Range

The ongoing investigations appear to encompass a wide range of parliamentarians and government members, both past and present. They suggest that accountability for corruption is not being confined to lower-level officials or to individuals who lack political influence. This is precisely the kind of accountability that the public has long demanded and that previous governments have too often failed to deliver. The government is also reaching into the upper levels of the military hierarchies of the past. The case in which 11 young men, most of them Tamil, disappeared after being abducted in Colombo between 2008 and 2009 involved allegations that some families were asked to pay ransoms. The investigation into this case has reached senior military figures. The willingness to pursue such cases is important because it challenges the assumption that those who exercised power during the war are beyond the reach of the law. Such cases would provide a practical test of whether the government’s commitment to accountability for economic crimes is part of a broader commitment to the rule of law.

Success in prosecuting corruption cannot substitute for justice for those who were unlawfully killed, disappeared, tortured or otherwise victimised. The UN report noted that there had been no recognition or accountability for crimes under international law, gross human rights violations and serious violations of international humanitarian law committed by all parties during the war. The government has yet to establish a credible and effective process to address the many cases of enforced disappearance, extrajudicial killing, torture and other serious violations. The government needs to take the international commitments it has inherited on human rights issues seriously. It needs to adopt a multi-pronged approach and go beyond focusing primarily on financial and corruption-related accountability.

Need Action

As a member of the international community, Sri Lanka has a responsibility to abide by the commitments it has made. It cannot selectively uphold international obligations postponing those that are politically difficult. Also, as a small country, Sri Lanka has a self-interest in ensuring the survival of international law, which is all that it has to protect it from the depredations of the bigger international actors. The erosion of international law by powerful states makes it all the more important that smaller states uphold the principles on which the international system is based. Sri Lanka cannot credibly appeal to international law when it is threatened from outside while disregarding its own obligations within. Sri Lanka also needs to win the confidence of its own population that it is committed to justice and equality for all. Public opinion polls and community-level research have disclosed that ethnic and religious minorities are appreciative of the sense of greater security they enjoy under the present government from ethnic or religious extremists.

But a sense of security is not the same as the fulfilment of rights. As far as the Tamil people are concerned, the government has yet to deliver on several of its specific promises. These include the long-standing problems of missing persons, the release of political prisoners who have been members of Tamil militant organisations, and the return of land taken over for military purposes during the war. The issue of Buddhist statues and archaeological sites found on their properties which are then taken from their control continue to trouble them especially as they see no signs of resolution of those disputes. The issue of pastureland in the east of the country in Mylathamadu is particularly concerning to them as they see orders by successive presidents, both President Ranil Wickremesinghe and President Anura Kumara Dissanayake, being disregarded on the ground. The Mylathamadu pastureland dispute is where traditional Tamil dairy farmers have engaged in multi-year protests against the ongoing encroachment of their ancestral grazing lands by Sinhalese crop cultivators relocated under government development schemes.

The government’s failure to hold Provincial Council elections is particularly troubling. The provincial council system is the only one that can provide the Tamil people and other ethnic minorities the opportunity to wield political power and exercise a measure of self-determination in the areas in which they are the numerical majority. The continued postponement of Provincial Council elections therefore has consequences that go beyond an ordinary electoral delay. It deprives communities of an important constitutional avenue for democratic participation and power-sharing. The ethnic and religious minorities appreciate what the government is doing in the larger national interest, but they must not be made to feel that their special concerns are being ignored. The government cannot resolve Sri Lanka’s entire legacy of rights violations overnight. But it does need to demonstrate that it is willing to move forward on multiple fronts, not only on a few.

Features

The emptying university: why are academics leaving?

Published

2 days ago

2026/09/15

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Hasini Lecamwasam

Brain drain in Sri Lanka is at an all-time high. The latest Human Flight and Brain Drain Index for 2024 shows that we are 16^th of 175 countries on this count, and first in South Asia. That this is a crisis goes without saying. Brain drain affects all sectors, and is a huge strain on the resources of a developing country. Particularly in Sri Lanka, where considerable public investment is made in the moulding of professionals through the system of free education, this amounts to transferring the resources of poorer countries to richer ones with top migration destinations. It is, therefore, important to consider the push and pull factors behind skilled outmigration, specifically from the public university system of Sri Lanka, a key focus of the Kuppi column.

From frustration to exit

Several bitter realities in our crumbling public university system act as push factors in the migration decisions of academics. Many essays on this column have, over several years, attempted to highlight numerous aspects of this erosion. Perhaps, primary among them is the lack of adequate funding, which has debilitating ramifications for the system: very little investment is made in the up-keep of infrastructure (and even less in its expansion), resulting in serious constraints in accommodating growing batches of students and the wellbeing of the staff (particularly in regional universities); research funding is negligible, severely curtailing academics’ ability to effectively discharge their primary duty of teaching which should ideally be informed by their research (and the research of others, access to which is also, unfortunately, mediated by funding); a funding crunch also means a slash in (or greater constraints on) recruitments, increasing the workloads of academics, currently in service, and eating into the quality of their teaching and research.

What recruitments are done frustrate those with any faith in merit. As many of our interventions in this column have shown, recruitment processes are characterised by archaic selection criteria that place very little weight on a candidate’s postgraduate growth and the advantages of interdisciplinary training. Added to this is the general preference for ‘culturally compliant’ candidates who would not rock the boat too much. The combined effect is that those with the capacity and spirit to try out innovations in education are discouraged from joining or staying on in the public university system. Some, or many, of them may instead seek appointments abroad.

A thread that binds all of these problems together is pervasive hierarchy which, again, many interventions on this column have sought to highlight. It is the interest in preserving hierarchy that leads to the preference for alumni in recruitment processes. Hierarchy within universities can be particularly frustrating for younger faculty and women, who typically have to bear the brunt of the workload of their senior, often male, colleagues. In a context of funding, and, therefore, recruitment, restrictions, this translates into a disproportionate burden being placed on junior (usually female) faculty, seriously hindering their prospects of growing into successful academics due to the time constraints within which they have to operate. Junior academics, therefore, are more likely to look to educational institutions abroad for what they hope would be a different work culture that respects them more.

Ideological ruses

On top of these structural frustrations are also the workings of neoliberal ideology. For one, the nature of relations between the global metropole and peripheral countries like Sri Lanka largely dictates what is desirable and what is not. The apparent lifestyles of Western countries – from food to clothing, housing, appliances, and so on – have continued to lure people from the periphery with the promise of a ‘better’ life, alongside better career advancement opportunities. This, of course, masks much of the struggle that goes on behind the scenes to survive in Western societies. For instance, in most cases highly attractive public infrastructure such as roads, public transport, clean air, quality control of food, and so on belie the astronomical privatised costs of healthcare and education. Health insurance is usually mandatory and steep in most high-income settings, while even subsidised education (for which eligibility criteria are strict) creates a serious dent in household earnings. Of course, the happy images of glossy trams and gleeful international travellers don’t convey this.

A second ideological ruse is the myth of greater opportunities and recognition abroad. While there is no denying that local skilled sectors – be it higher education, health, civil service, or private white-collar positions – are replete with issues that inhibit merit-based professional advancement, the notion that things are fundamentally different in Western countries stems from an uninformed optimism. As is now increasingly known and discussed, Western labour markets are notoriously racialised, and equivalent skills are rarely treated as such. Instead, it is usually demanded that skilled migrants clear certain formal examinations in their host countries. In fields like medicine, this is followed by an interview that may also be racially prejudiced. Once these initial steps are cleared, remuneration reverts to square one irrespective of experience accumulated abroad, not to mention the many subtle aggressions, rejections, and trials one has to go through in the negotiation of everyday life. In the many cases where professional qualifications are used as leverage for a move abroad, sights are set on a better future for one’s children, which again is informed by the misplaced faith in greater opportunities and a lack of awareness of the factors outlined above. Needless to say, in the global swing to the Right, things have become even more challenging. In such a context, considering the few rare cases where skilled migrants live extremely comfortable lives as the norm becomes a dangerous misconception.

The two ideological pull factors mentioned above are complemented by a push factor, which has to do with a highly classed understanding of what a white-collar professional is due in their society. Many of these aspirations are clearly articulated in academic trade union action demanding separate quotas for school entry, increased fuel allowances, winning back the presently stalled vehicle permit scheme, salary hikes, and so on. While working people have every right to agitate for better material conditions, insofar as it remains unconnected to a broader movement for improving the conditions of the lot of the working class, it remains self-serving and very much within the class logic of capitalist society. Since these demands are articulated as a means of maintaining distinction, it is clear that they are not envisaged as part of a class movement. The frustration of not having these needs for distinction satisfied may push some to seek greener pastures abroad, at least financially, (perhaps as a means of social mobility based on it), only to be disappointed on most occasions.

What is to be done?

Addressing the systemic push factors listed above requires, first and foremost, greater allocations for free public higher education. This would immediately translate into more recruitments and less work per academic, and better research and teaching in the long haul. An increase in funding would also ideally lead to greater infrastructural investments, especially including improving the living conditions of those who work in regional universities amid untold hardships. Next, fairer, more creative, and, therefore, more effective recruitment policies are badly needed to attract talented individuals to university positions. Rather than carving out a ‘special category’ for academics to achieve this purpose, which is informed by a classed logic, this needs to be done through fundamental reforms in recruitment processes. Third, a persistent attack on the entrenched hierarchy within universities through internal reform is much called for. Reforming recruitment practices will go a long way towards addressing this. Measures should also be taken to introduce more stringent policies against SGBV (not to mention ragging, even though it is not directly connected to brain drain). Such measures would create a safer, fairer, and more attractive workplace, which would give more reasons for people to stay.

On top of greater allocations, we also need a transformation of our aspirations themselves if this situation is to change. That necessitates a kind of education capable of questioning the ‘paradise’ conception of Western societies, and lays bare their colonial material and ideological dimensions, in both their historical and contemporary manifestations. These colonial understandings of the ‘good life’, moreover, have devastating ecological implications for the planet, not to mention social justice. An education with the ability to transform this mindset would hopefully prove to be more than a mere path to social mobility, rather being a tool of social emancipation that renders mobility moot.

(Hasini Lecamwasam is with the Department of Political Science, University of Peradeniya)

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