(This is the 100th column of the Out of the Box series, which began on 6 September, 2023, at the invitation of this newspaper – Ed.)

A new year is an appropriate moment to pause, not for celebration, but to interrogate what our politics, policies, and public institutions have chosen to remember, forget, and repeat. We celebrate the dawn of another brand-new year. But whose calendar defines this moment?

We hang calendars on our walls and carry them in our phones, trusting them to keep our lives in order, meetings, exams, weddings, tax deadlines, pilgrimages. Yet calendars are anything but neutral. They are among humanity’s oldest instruments of power: tools that turn celestial rhythms into social rules and convert culture into governance. In Sri Lanka, where multiple traditions of time coexist, the calendar is not just a convenience, it is a contested terrain of identity, authority, and fairness.

Time is never just time

Every calendar expresses a political philosophy. Solar systems prioritise agricultural predictability and administrative stability; lunar systems preserve religious ritual even when seasons drift; lunisolar systems stitch both together, with intercalary months added to keep festivals in season while respecting the moon’s phases. Ancient India and China perfected this balancing act, proving that precision and meaning can coexist. Sri Lanka’s own rhythms, Vesak and Poson, Avurudu in April, Ramadan, Deepavali, sit inside this wider tradition.

What looks “technical” is actually social. A calendar decides when courts sit, when budgets reset, when harvests are planned, when children sit exams, when debts are due, and when communities celebrate. It says who gets to define “normal time,” and whose rhythms must adapt.

The colonial clock still ticks

Like many postcolonial societies, Sri Lanka inherited the Gregorian calendar as the default language of administration. January 1 is our “New Year” for financial statements, annual reports, contracts, fiscal plans, school terms, and parliamentary sittings, an imported date shaped by European liturgical cycles and temperate seasons rather than our monsoons or zodiac transitions. The lived heartbeat of the island, however, is Avurudu: tied to the sun’s movement into Mesha Rāshi, agricultural renewal, and shared rituals of restraint and generosity. The result is a quiet tension: the calendar of governance versus the calendar of lived culture.

This is not mere inconvenience; it is a subtle form of epistemic dominance. The administrative clock frames Gregorian time as “real,” while Sinhala, Tamil, and Islamic calendars are relegated to “cultural” exceptions. That framing shapes everything, from office leave norms to the pace at which development programmes expect communities to “comply”.

When calendars enforce authority

History reminds us that calendar reforms are rarely innocent. Julius Caesar’s reshaping of Rome’s calendar consolidated imperial power. Pope Gregory XIII’s reform aligned Christian ritual with solar accuracy while entrenching ecclesiastical authority. When Britain finally adopted the Gregorian system in 1752, the change erased 11 days and was imposed across its empire; colonial assemblies had little or no say. In that moment, time itself became a technology for governing distant subjects.

Sri Lanka knows this logic. The administrative layers built under colonial rule taught us to treat Gregorian dates as “official” and indigenous rhythms as “traditional.” Our contemporary fiscal deadlines, debt restructurings, even election cycles, now march to that imported drumbeat, often without asking how this timing sits with the island’s ecological and cultural cycles.

Development, deadlines and temporal violence

Modern governance is obsessed with deadlines: quarters, annual budgets, five-year plans, review missions. The assumption is that time is linear, uniform, and compressible. But a farmer in Anuradhapura and a rideshare driver in Colombo do not live in the same temporal reality. Monsoons, harvests, pilgrimage seasons, fasting cycles, school term transitions, these shape when people can comply with policy, pay taxes, attend trainings, or repay loans. When programmes ignore these rhythms, failure is framed as “noncompliance,” when in fact the calendar itself has misread society. This mismatch is a form of temporal violence: harm produced not by bad intentions, but by insensitive timing.

Consider microcredit repayment windows that peak during lean agricultural months, or school examinations scheduled without regard to Avurudu obligations. Disaster relief often runs on the donor’s quarterly clock rather than the community’s recovery pace. In each case, governance time disciplines lived time, and the least powerful bend the most.

Religious time vs administrative time

Sri Lanka’s plural religious landscape intensifies the calendar question. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity relate to time differently: lunar cycles, solar markers, sacred anniversaries. The state acknowledges these mainly as public holidays, rather than integrating their deeper temporal logic into planning. Vesak is a day off, not a rhythm of reflection and restraint; Ramadan is accommodated as schedule disruption, not as a month that reorganises energy, sleep, and work patterns; Avurudu is celebrated culturally but remains administratively marginal. The hidden assumption is that “real work” happens on the Gregorian clock; culture is decorative. That assumption deserves challenge.

The wisdom in complexity

Precolonial South and East Asian calendars were not confused compromises. They were sophisticated integrations of astronomy, agriculture, and ritual life, adding intercalary months precisely to keep festivals aligned with the seasons, and using lunar mansions (nakshatra) to mark auspicious thresholds. This plural logic admits that societies live on multiple cycles at once. Administrative convenience won with the Gregorian system, but at a cost: months that no longer relate to the moon (even though “month” comes from “moon”), and a yearstart with no intrinsic astronomical significance for our context.

Towards temporal pluralism

The solution is not to abandon the Gregorian calendar. Global coordination, trade, aviation, science, requires shared reference points. But ‘shared’ does not mean uncritical. Sri Lanka can lead by modelling temporal pluralism: a policy posture that recognises different ways of organising time as legitimate, and integrates them thoughtfully into governance.

Why timing is justice

In an age of economic adjustment and climate volatility, time becomes a question of justice: Whose rhythms does the state respect? Whose deadlines dominate? Whose festivals shape planning, and whose are treated as interruptions? The more governance assumes a single, imported tempo, the wider the gap between the citizens and the state. Conversely, when policy listens to local calendars, legitimacy grows, as does efficacy. People comply more when the schedule makes sense in their lives.

Reclaiming time without romanticism

This is not nostalgia. It is a pragmatic recognition that societies live on multiple cycles: ecological, economic, ritual, familial. Good policy stitches these cycles into a workable fabric. Poor policy flattens them into a grid and then blames citizens for falling through the squares.

Sri Lanka’s temporal landscape, Avurudu’s thresholds, lunar fasts, monsoon pulses, exam seasons, budget cycles, is rich, not chaotic. The task before us is translation: making administrative time converse respectfully with cultural time. We don’t need to slow down; we need to sync differently.

The last word

When British subjects woke to find 11 days erased in 1752, they learned that time could be rearranged by distant power. Our lesson, centuries later, is the opposite: time can be rearranged by near power, by a state that chooses to listen.

Calendars shape memory, expectation, discipline, and hope. If Sri Lanka can reimagine the governance of time, without abandoning global coordination, we might recover something profound: a calendar that measures not just hours but meaning. That would be a reform worthy of our island’s wisdom.

(The writer, a senior Chartered Accountant and professional banker, is Professor at SLIIT, Malabe. The views and opinions expressed in this article are personal.)

The recent wave of pharmaceutical tragedies in Sri Lanka, as well as some others that have occurred regularly in the past, has exposed a terrifying reality: our medicine cabinets have become a frontline of risk and potential danger. In recent months, the silent sanctuary of Sri Lanka’s healthcare system has been shattered by a series of tragic, preventable deaths. The common denominator in these tragedies has been a failure in the most basic promise of medicine: that it will heal, not harm. This issue is entirely contrary to the immortal writings of the Father of Medicine, Hippocrates of the island of Kos, who wrote, “Primum non nocere,” which translates classically from Latin as “First do no harm.” The question of the safety of medicinal drugs is, at present, a real dilemma for those of us who, by virtue of our vocation, need to use them to help our patients.

For a nation that imports the vast majority of its medicinal drugs, largely from regional hubs like India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the promise of healing is only as strong as the laboratory that verifies these very same medicinal drugs. To prevent further problems, and even loss of lives, we must demand a world-class laboratory infrastructure that operates on science, not just sentiment. We desperately need a total overhaul of our pharmaceutical quality assurance architecture.

The detailed anatomy of a national drug testing facility is not merely a government office. It is a high-precision fortress. To meet international standards like ISO/IEC 17025 and World Health Organisation (WHO) Good Practices for Pharmaceutical Quality Control Laboratories, such a high-quality laboratory must be zoned into specialised units, each designed to catch a different type of failure.

It is absolutely vital to assess whether the medicine is available in the preparation in the prescribed amounts and whether it is active and is likely to work. This is Bioavailability. Sri Lanka’s heavy reliance on “generic” imports raises a critical question: Is the cheaper version from abroad as effective as the original, more expensive branded formulation? This is determined by Bioavailability (BA) and Bioequivalence (BE) studies.

A drug might have the right chemical formula, but if it does not dissolve properly in the stomach or reach the blood at the right speed, it is therapeutically useless. Bioavailability measures the rate and extent to which the active ingredient is absorbed into the bloodstream. If a cheaper generic drug is not “bioequivalent” to the original brand-named version, the patient is essentially taking a useless placebo. For patients with heart disease or epilepsy, even a 10% difference in bioavailability can lead to treatment failure. A proper national system must include a facility to conduct these studies, ensuring that every generic drug imported is a true “therapeutic equivalent” to the brand-named original.

As far as testing goes, the current testing philosophy is best described as Reactive, rather than Proactive. The current Sri Lankan system is “reactive”: we test a drug only after a patient has already suffered. This is a proven recipe for disaster. To protect the public, we must shift to a Proactive Surveillance Model of testing ALL drugs at many stages of their dispensing.

Once a proper system is put in place, we need to assess as to how our facilities measure up against the WHO’s “Model Quality Assurance System.” That will ensure maintenance of internationally recognised standards. The confirmed unfavourable results of any testing procedure, if any, should lead to a very prompt “Blacklist” Initiative, which can be used to legally bar failing manufacturers from future tenders. Such an endeavour would help to keep all drug manufacturers and importers on their toes at all times.

This author believes that this article is based on the premise that the cost of silence by the medical profession would be catastrophic. Quality assurance of medicinal compounds is not an “extra” cost. It is a fundamental right of every Sri Lankan citizen, which is not at all subject to any kind of negotiation. Until our testing facilities match the sophistication of the manufacturers we buy from, we are not just importing medicine; we are importing potential risk.

The promises made by the powers-that-be to “update” the testing laboratories will remain as a rather familiar, unreliable, political theatre until we see a committed budget for mass spectrometry, cleanroom certifications, highly trained and committed staff and a fleet of independent inspectors. Quality control of therapeutic medicines is not a luxury; it is the price to be paid for a portal of entry into a civilised and intensively safe healthcare system. Every time we delay the construction of a comprehensive, proactive testing infrastructure, we are playing a game of Russian Roulette with the lives of our people.

The science is available, and the necessary technology exists. What is missing is the political will to put patient safety as the premier deciding criterion. The time for hollow rhetoric has passed, and the time for a scientifically fortified, transparent, and proactive regulatory mechanism is right now. The good health of all Sri Lankans, as well as even their lives, depend on it.

Dr B. J. C. Perera  

MBBS(Cey), DCH(Cey), DCH(Eng), MD(Paediatrics), MRCP(UK), FRCP(Edin), FRCP(Lond), FRCPCH(UK), FSLCPaed, FCCP, Hony. FRCPCH(UK), Hony. FCGP(SL) 

Specialist Consultant Paediatrician and Honorary Senior Fellow, Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Joint Editor, Sri Lanka Journal of Child Health

Section Editor, Ceylon Medical Journal

In the immediate aftermath of Cyclone Ditwah, the government has moved swiftly to establish a Presidential Task Force for Rebuilding Sri Lanka with a core committee to assess requirements, set priorities, allocate resources and raise and disburse funds. Public reaction, however, has focused on the committee’s problematic composition. All eleven committee members are men, and all non-government seats are held by business personalities with no known expertise in complex national development projects, disaster management and addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They belong to the top echelon of Sri Lanka’s private sector which has been making extraordinary profits. The government has been urged by civil society groups to reconsider the role and purpose of this task force and reconstitute it to be more representative of the country and its multiple  needs.

 The group of high-powered businessmen initially appointed might greatly help mobilise funds from corporates and international donors, but this group may be ill equipped to determine priorities and oversee disbursement and spending. It would be necessary to separate fundraising, fund oversight and spending prioritisation, given the different capabilities and considerations required for each. International experience in post disaster recovery shows that inclusive and representative structures are more likely to produce outcomes that are equitable, efficient and publicly accepted. Civil society, for instance, brings knowledge rooted in communities, experience in working with vulnerable groups and a capacity to question assumptions that may otherwise go unchallenged.

 A positive and important development is that the government has been responsive to these criticisms and has invited at least one civil society representative to join the Rebuilding Sri Lanka committee. This decision deserves to be taken seriously and responded to positively by civil society which needs to call for more representation rather than a single representative.  Such a demand would reflect an understanding that rebuilding after a national disaster cannot be undertaken by the state and the business community alone. The inclusion of civil society will strengthen transparency and public confidence, particularly at a moment when trust in institutions remains fragile. While one appointment does not in itself ensure inclusive governance, it opens the door to a more participatory approach that needs to be expanded and institutionalised.

Costly Exclusions

 Going  down the road of history, the absence of inclusion in government policymaking has cost the country dearly. The exclusion of others, not of one’s own community or political party, started at the very dawn of Independence in 1948. The Father of the Nation, D S Senanayake, led his government to exclude the Malaiyaha Tamil community by depriving them of their citizenship rights. Eight years later, in 1956, the Oxford educated S W R D Bandaranaike effectively excluded the Tamil speaking people from the government by making Sinhala the sole official language. These early decisions normalised exclusion as a tool of governance rather than accommodation and paved the way for seven decades of political conflict and three decades of internal war.

Exclusion has also taken place virulently on a political party basis. Both of Sri Lanka’s post Independence constitutions were decided on by the government alone. The opposition political parties voted against the new constitutions of 1972 and 1977 because they had been excluded from participating in their design. The proposals they had made were not accepted. The basic law of the country was never forged by consensus. This legacy continues to shape adversarial politics and institutional fragility. The exclusion of other communities and political parties from decision making has led to frequent reversals of government policy. Whether in education or economic regulation or foreign policy, what one government has done the successor government has undone.

 Sri Lanka’s poor performance in securing the foreign investment necessary for rapid economic growth can be attributed to this factor in the main. Policy instability is not simply an economic problem but a political one rooted in narrow ownership of power. In 2022, when the people went on to the streets to protest against the government and caused it to fall, they demanded system change in which their primary focus was corruption, which had reached very high levels both literally and figuratively. The focus on corruption, as being done by the government at present, has two beneficial impacts for the government. The first is that it ensures that a minimum of resources will be wasted so that the maximum may be used for the people’s welfare.

Second Benefit

 The second benefit is that by focusing on the crime of corruption, the government can disable many leaders in the opposition. The more opposition leaders who are behind bars on charges of corruption, the less competition the government faces. Yet these gains do not substitute for the deeper requirement of inclusive governance. The present government seems to have identified corruption as the problem it will emphasise. However, reducing or eliminating corruption by itself is not going to lead to rapid economic development. Corruption is not the sole reason for the absence of economic growth. The most important factor in rapid economic growth is to have government policies that are not reversed every time a new government comes to power.

 For Sri Lanka to make the transition to self-sustaining and rapid economic development, it is necessary that the economic policies followed today are not reversed tomorrow. The best way to ensure continuity of policy is to be inclusive in governance. Instead of excluding those in the opposition, the mainstream opposition in particular needs to be included. In terms of system change, the government has scored high with regard to corruption. There is a general feeling that corruption in the country is much reduced compared to the past. However, with regard to inclusion the government needs to demonstrate more commitment. This was evident in the initial choice of cabinet ministers, who were nearly all men from the majority ethnic community. Important committees it formed, including the Presidential Task Force for a Clean Sri Lanka and the Rebuilding Sri Lanka Task Force, also failed at first to reflect the diversity of the country.

 In a multi ethnic and multi religious society like Sri Lanka, inclusivity is not merely symbolic. It is essential for addressing diverse perspectives and fostering mutual understanding. It is important to have members of the Tamil, Muslim and other minority communities, and women who are 52 percent of the population, appointed to important decision making bodies, especially those tasked with national recovery. Without such representation, the risk is that the very communities most affected by the crisis will remain unheard, and old grievances will be reproduced in new forms. The invitation extended to civil society to participate in the Rebuilding Sri Lanka Task Force is an important beginning. Whether it becomes a turning point will depend on whether the government chooses to make inclusion a principle of governance rather than treat it as a show of concession made under pressure.

by Jehan Perera