Features
Ridi Vihare: A temple and a book
Ridi Vihare: The Flowering of Kandyan Art
Dr. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda
Stamford Lake Publications, 2006, pp. 210, Rs 3,750
Reviewed
by Uditha Devapriya
This is a fascinating study of one of the more fascinating Buddhist temples of Sri Lanka, authored by one of our foremost historians. The Ridi Vihare, or the ‘Silver Temple’, traces its history to the second century BC. It occupied a prominent place until the 14th century AD, when it disappeared from view. Three hundred years later, during the time of the Nayakkar kings of Kandy, it regained that position. What Dr. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda attempts in his book is to explore its history and its art, viewing them not in isolation but in unison. The result is a superb work of scholarship, at once edifying and accessible.
Though written 15 years ago, before even the civil war ended, the scope and breadth of ‘Ridi Vihare: The Flowering of Kandyan Art’ resonates well even today. Partly, that is because Sri Lanka’s Buddhist temples have never become the object of study that religious institutions elsewhere have. This is certainly an unfortunate omission, a glaring one.
While the Sangha has been studied as an institution, most discernibly by Leslie Gunawardana, very few have tried to understand the social history of Buddhist temples. It is to the likes of Senake Bandaranayake that we owe our understanding of this aspect of our culture. The finest historian of art to come out of the country, Dr. Bandaranayake authored the finest work of scholarship on Buddhist art. Yet while ‘The Rock and Wall Paintings of Sri Lanka’ remains essential reading, it is a testament to where we are now and how we regard our past that since its publication, no comparable effort has come out.
Sinhala historians frequently do write monographs on these institutions, and many of them are available for cheap and even free, often at the very places their monographs are about. Yet while such efforts are laudable, they are hardly enough. To highlight the uniqueness of these places, it is necessary to dig deeper, to go beyond essays, to put the Buddhist temple of Sri Lanka in its proper historical context. Such an undertaking requires time and money, a sense of purpose, an overwhelming desire to probe.
It is that purpose and desire which colours Dr. Tammita-Delgoda’s outstanding work. It stands out not so much as a scholarly foray as a labour of love, an exploration into our past, who we are, and what we make of ourselves. Interspersed with photographs, diagrams, and illustrations, all painstakingly taken and meticulously captioned, the book doesn’t just focus on the temple, it uses it as the base from which to explore everything around it. As Dr. Siran Deraniyagala informs us in the introduction, Ridi Vihare offers no less than “a microcosm of Sri Lanka’s turbulent past.” This is a point the author engages with constantly.
How the book came about is as interesting as what it contains. Due to the high position it occupied in late mediaeval Sri Lanka, Ridi Vihare forged ties with Malwathu Maha Viharaya, one of the two Buddhist monastic chapters within the Siam Nikaya. Over the last 250 years, three of the Chief Incumbents of Ridi Vihare have wound up as Chief Prelates of Malwatta.
It was one of these Chief Prelates, Thibbotuwawe Sri Siddhartha Sumangala Thera, who took over the task of teaching “the religion, the philosophy and the customs of the Sinhalese” to the author. After his stint ended, Sumangala Thera requested his erstwhile student to write about the temple he was serving and officiating at the time. It was as a result of his request, and the author’s only too eager response, that this book came about.
Writing the book was not easy. Having begun in 1998, Dr. Tammita-Delgoda had to stop mid-way. The main problem was funding; not so much for travel or research as for photography. Desperately in need of money, and with no one to get it from, the entire project had to be stalled for several years. It was picked up again only through the intervention of a much loved icon: Sri Lanka’s most celebrated photographer, Nihal Fernando, who agreed to undertake its photography through his outfit, Studio Times, at no cost.
Thanks to Fernando’s support and the assistance of friends, patrons, and well-wishers, Dr. Tammita-Delgoda found himself digging deep into the history of the land. Having planned it as the story of a temple, his project soon became so much more.
The history of Ridi Vihare begins with “the greatest king of Anuradhapura”, Dutugemunu, in the second century BC. The Mahavamsa records Dutugemunu as the first of the Sinhalese kings who unified the country. Having achieved this task, he embarked on the construction of stupas, the last of which, the Mahathupa, became a huge undertaking. It was in reply to his prayer, that money be found for the Mahathupa, that silver was found at a cave called Ambattakola in Kurunegala. As a token of gratitude, Dutugemunu had a temple built by a jackfruit tree near that cave. It is here that the Varaka Velandhu Vihare, the oldest and perhaps most important establishment at Ridi Vihare, stands today.
As with all such institutions, the temple amply reflected its times. By the time of the Polonnaruwa kingdom, South Indian influences began making their way to the Ridi Vihare. We are told that a Hindu devale was constructed within the courtyard somewhere after the 12th Century. Though popular writers portray this as a period of decay and destruction, it was also a period of cultural fusion. Ridi Vihare did not escape such influences, in spite of the impoverished conditions of these years. It remained a centrepiece of the kingdom well into the 14th Century, though once the capital of the Sinhalese polity shifted from Wayamba to Kotte to Kanda Uda Rata it fell into much decay, decline, and disrepair.
The next chapter of Ridi Vihare unfolds at the time of the Kandyan kings, specifically the Nayakkars and particularly the reign of the second of them, Kirti Sri Rajasinghe. An ardent, passionate patron of Buddhism, Rajasinghe oversaw a period of renaissance marked by the resumption of the ordination of monks, a practice that had fallen into neglect for centuries. We are told of the political conditions prevalent at the time, the ambiguities that dotted the Nayakkars’ rule over an eminently Buddhist realm, and the rebellions against them aided by none less than the leading revivalist of his time, Weliwita Sri Saranankara Thera.
In the course of his reign Kirti Sri Rajasinghe brought Buddhist monasteries under the sway of Malwatta and Asgiriya. This had a profound impact on not just Ridi Vihare, but also the Sangha. It had much to do with the personality of the king himself.
As an outsider looking in, Rajasinghe had to show that he was the true heir to his Sinhalese predecessors. Though Leslie Gunawardana and Gananath Obeyesekere have suggested that opposition to Nayakkar rule was not as prevalent as popular writers make it out to be, there was opposition, and it was considerable. His motives were constantly under scrutiny by the radala aristocracy and clergy, and he needed to prove himself worthy in their eyes. To let go and belittle their concerns was to invite disenchantment and dissent.
It was against this backdrop that Kirti Sri Rajasinghe pursued a policy of detente and then confrontation with Dutch governors, while sponsoring efforts at purifying the Sangha and expelling foreign elements within his kingdom who had been indulged by his predecessors. Spilling over to the religious institutions of his realm, these efforts transformed Ridi Vihare into a leading centre of learning and study, in particular under Thibbotuwawe Sri Siddhartha Buddharakkitha Thera, the closest disciple of Weliwita Sri Saranankara Thera.
Partly due to his upcountry ancestry, Dr. Tammita-Delgoda is at his best in these chapters, when he is charting the social and artistic history of the last Sinhalese kingdom. Having read and researched his sources well, he goes beyond them, conjecturing about the reputation Ridi Vihare would have enjoyed under Buddharakkitha. He takes pains to emphasise that though Kandy was at war with the Dutch, this did not preclude contact between officials and Buddhist monks, a point that shows well in the Delft tiles at the Maha Vihara of Ridi Vihare. Long thought to be a gift from the Dutch Governor to the Vihare’s Chief Incumbent, these objects shed light on the nature of relations between Kandy and Holland.
From historicising Ridi Vihare, Dr. Tammita-Delgoda goes on to deconstruct its topography, periodising its construction from the pre-Christian era to the 20th Century. He then delves into the paintings and sculptures at the temple. With more than a connoisseur’s eye for the elegant and the sublime, he expresses much distaste for contemporary efforts at repairing the site, particularly the “hideous” restored vahalkada at its entrance. In exploring the inner courtyards and sanctums, he also attempts to reconstruct life as it would have been back in the day, especially through the use of archive images and illustrations.
There is clearly an art historian lurking beneath the historian, and in the chapters on the art and sculpture of Ridi Vihare Dr. Tammita-Delgoda lets him out. Not surprisingly, these make up some of the best forays into Kandyan art and architecture I have read.
Colonial officials and scholars often painted Kandy as a period of cultural decay, a pale reflection of the classical art that once prevailed in Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa. Such generalisations were questioned, rightly, by the likes of Dr. Senake Bandaranayake and Siri Gunasinghe. Dr. Tammita-Delgoda continues their line of critique, unearthing Kandyan art for what it is and not for what it is often imagined to be. Its aim, he observes, was to appeal to devotees, not conform to European rules of perspective and representation.
Because of these insights, the sections on the paintings and sculptures of Ridi Vihare are the most edifying in the book. Even more edifying is the final chapter, a personal meditation on the nature of Sinhalese art. Dr. Tammita-Delgoda provocatively calls it the “art of the poor people”, as it indeed was. Reflecting on Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, he contends that the world around these temples shaped their architecture, differentiating them from the much larger monuments of Anuradhapura and Polonnaruwa.
Scholars may consider that a defect in Kandyan architecture, but it was a form shaped by the society around it and the privations imposed by colonialism. Hemmed in from all sides, Kandyan temples could not aspire to the gigantism of earlier periods. That they managed to attract devotion and patronage despite this is, in that sense, truly remarkable.
A book like this contains few flaws, indeed almost none at all. Its only limitation is its lack of focus on the material conditions of Kandyan society, the contributions of the people to the construction of these edifices, and the point that such institutions were as much the work of kings and monks as of the citizenry. Dr. Tammita-Delgoda does identify the painters of Ridi Vihare and their backgrounds, but all too often he implies that kings, aristocrats, and monks were all that mattered in 18th Century Kandy. What were the conjunctions of class and caste that produced these magnificent edifices? We clearly need to know more.
Nevertheless, as a labour of love and a token of gratitude to the monks who tutored the author, ‘Ridi Vihare: The Flowering of Kandyan Art’ remains a first-rate work, the first of many that would follow. What it shows us is a pathway to the past, a way of life which modernity has eroded. Seeing it, one can only quote Ananda Coomaraswamy.
“In the words of Blake,
‘When nations grow old,
The Arts grow cold,
And commerce settles on every tree’.
In such a grim fashion has commerce settled in the East.”
If we don’t make sense of our past, we are doomed to forget it. The result can only be a hideous reconfiguration and reconstruction of our identity, a distortion that bears little to no resemblance to who we once were. It is this point that Dr. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda brings up, a point we would do well to acknowledge and to heed.
The writer can be reached at udakdev1@gmail.com
In this article, I introduce an idea which is simple to implement but is powerful and helps with building technical skills, strengthening the country brand and creating international opportunities for Sri Lankans. Furthermore, it can diversify and extend the country’s tourism revenue streams.
The simple idea is to introduce a hassle-free visa for Internships, Volunteering, Expert Exchange Programs and Short-term Studies. For brevity, let me call it a Knowledge Transfer Visa or KTV. There are three important clarifications to make up-front. Firstly, this visa is not for those seeking paid employment in Sri Lanka. Secondly, the local partner needs to ensure that if any local permits or permissions are applicable, these are in place and cover any KTV holders. Thirdly, it is not a resident’s visa and tourist rates will have to be paid by KTV holders for their sightseeing.
It is also important to spell out up-front a critical requirement for success. This is that an applicant from a country who is entitled to obtain an online tourist visa quickly and easily should be able to obtain a KTV with the same ease and convenience. It would be reasonable for the Department of Immigration to have an additional information box in the visa application to ask for the name and contact details of the local partner (corporate or individual). But it should not be the role of the visa issuing officer in a Sri Lankan foreign mission or the Department of Immigration to examine paperwork to assess the credentials of the visitor and the local partner. This should be left to the applicant and local partner to assess each other. By analogy, a tourist is not asked to demonstrate that the hotel they have booked into is validly registered as a tourism business. Nor does the visa issuing process ask the hotel if they have vetted the tourist’s ability to pay. If the KTV is kept as simple as an online tourist visa, it will succeed, otherwise it will fail to deliver the potential benefits.
A reader may ask why this sort of visa is needed. The answer is that Sri Lanka is well positioned to benefit from activities covered in a knowledge transfer visa. However, such visits will only materialise if foreign nationals are reassured that they can arrive for such purposes with a visa where the purpose of their visit is explicitly recognised and they are confident that their visit is welcomed. Visitors on a KTV will bring in hard currency revenues in much the same way as ordinary tourists but importantly lead to other benefits such as the import of expertise, building international networks for local corporates and individuals and being potential repeat visitors. Let me explain by running through the various strands.
Internships
With the first strand, Internships, there is an overt intention that people want to work in a very structured manner and obtain useful work experience to help obtain paid employment back in their home country. Sri Lanka for various reasons, wishes to have tight controls over foreign workers and to limit foreign nationals on work visas. It is important to point out that facilitating internships need not conflict with this thinking. Incoming foreign interns are different to full-time foreign workers and caters to a younger demographic looking for a short period of work experience. If Sri Lanka restricts foreign internships to unpaid internships, this will limit the candidate pool to those interns who have parental financial support. Nevertheless, this is still a start and better than not opening the door at all.
In many sectors, Sri Lanka can offer meaningful summer internships of up to 3 months or longer. Two obvious examples are Tourism and Information Technology (IT). Sri Lankan companies cannot run viable business models by relying on a supply of foreign interns. Therefore, foreign interns do not in any way threaten the prospects for locals for employment. On the contrary, foreign interns from developed economies can benefit locals working with them in various ways. These could include improving language skills, and locals gaining exposure to skills such as time-management and project planning. Internships can also be used for foreign students to engage in undergraduate and postgraduate university projects with local academics.
To explain how foreign interns can be very useful, let me construct an example. It is a fact that Sri Lankan companies are writing the software for some of the most technologically advanced companies in the world. Imagine Sri Lankan IT companies actively pitch this to foreign universities in advanced economies and foreign undergraduates take up internships in Sri Lanka. Not only do they gain work experience of an equivalent standard to working in London or New York, but they will have a more exciting time in a tropical country. When they graduate, they will take up jobs in London, New York or wherever. When their employers are looking to outsource work, they may recommend the companies they worked with in Sri Lanka. Some of these foreign interns may even start their own companies in the future and look to outsource work to the Sri Lankan companies they worked with. If the new start-ups do well, there may be frequent business visits. When their former interns start families, they will visit Sri Lanka on visits which combine business meetings with a family holiday. Their children in turn will grow up with Sri Lanka being a place that was a regular holiday destination and, in the future, bring their own children on holiday. Internships in Sri Lanka to foreign students can grow future business revenues and also create a multi-generation chain of tourists.
Some foreign interns can also work in a three-way collaboration between their university, a local university and a private sector company. Take for example, a hotel that has placed camera traps on its property to study wildlife. If they do it on their own, it may simply be for marketing the hotel. If they can partner with a local academic or conservation NGO, it could be elevated into a formal study, perhaps even a long-term study. For both the local academic and the hotel, it would be useful if any work they do is part of a long-term study with a foreign university. International collaborations like this are also more useful to the hotel in their efforts for international publicity. For the local academic or conservation NGO, the international collaboration could also open opportunities for funding and recognition and invitations to present in international conferences. A win for all.
If Sri Lanka companies open up to foreign interns, it may result in them realising the value of well-structured internship programs and the dialogue with overseas interns and their academic supervisors may lead to good internship programs being set up for both local and foreign applicants. This can only help young resident Sri Lankans who at present are frustrated by the paucity of structured internship programs even amongst Sri Lanka’s leading companies.
Before I continue to the next two strands, it is useful to reiterate why a knowledge transfer visa is important. The above-mentioned benefits can only arise if potential foreign interns and volunteers have a mechanism of a special visa to reassure them that the purpose of their visit is properly disclosed and that their activity in Sri Lanka is welcomed and completely above-board within the stated purpose of the visa.
The same will apply, with voluntourism, which is a form of commercial tourism activity. Overseas companies that have a business model of arranging voluntourism abroad are more likely to add Sri Lanka as a destination if a KTV existed.
Volunteering
The second strand is Volunteering and here I define it narrowly to cases where a volunteer is not volunteering to build out their CV to help them gain paid employment in their home country. If they are doing so, it is covered under the Internship category. Under this definition, volunteers are people who fall into two broad categories. They may be volunteering for recreational purposes, coupled with wanting to do something that is societally useful. Or they may be people who are retired and on a comfortable retirement income who now have time and money to give something back to society. For example, a person in a highly paid job may come and volunteer for two weeks on a science (e.g. biodiversity surveys) or an arts project (e.g. cataloguing temple art). They may do this because they enjoy doing something different from their day job which is related to their personal interests and societally useful. This type of volunteering has become a significant form of tourism, known as voluntourism.
For the second type of volunteering an example would be a retired wildlife reserve manager from overseas who is happy to work for free with a Sri Lankan hotel or game lodge to train guides and provide practical help in rewilding the grounds of the property. They may enjoy mentoring and want to share their experience with others who are happy to learn from them. To take another example, it could be a retired museum curator who is happy to volunteer at a government museum to train local staff and inject fresh thinking into how exhibitions are curated.
The host country receives free expertise and valuable time from such volunteers. The volunteers are also paying tourists.
In G20 countries, volunteering is highly organised and has resulted in businesses that provide on-line platforms to match volunteers with recipient organisations. Sri Lanka can benefit from making it easy for people to volunteer and to come over, whether it is to paint hospital wards, help in beach clean-ups, or to help at a literary, music or cultural festival or to train local wildlife guides. Many volunteers will also look to add on a holiday extension to their volunteering stay. It is not just free people-hours of work and spending as foreign visitors: Carefully chosen good volunteers also bring in ideas, know-how, enthusiasm and energy.
Expert Exchange
The third strand in the knowledge transfer visa is for Expert Exchange. This is for people who are established in their discipline and looking to diversify their experience and build an international network by engaging in short term unpaid assignments overseas. For example, let’s assume a senior academic would like to spend a month working with local counterparts. Perhaps it is someone from a Management Science faculty who is interested in South Asian trade and wishes to work with local counterparts in a Sri Lankan professional institution or the Management Science faculty of a university. Or, perhaps it is an academic with an interest in contemporary Asian art. In such situations, a mutually useful arrangement between the foreign visitor and any local counterparts would be for the visitor to be provided a desk and some working space in the local faculty. Perhaps the visiting academic or professional can even undertake to give a certain number of lectures to Sri Lankan students. Relationships established in this way could lead to reciprocal invitations for Sri Lankan academics to attend foreign conferences and workshops and possibly help with Sri Lankan students receiving guidance and support with doing a PhD overseas. The visiting academic or expert is not being paid by the local partners in Sri Lanka and will continue to be on the payroll of their employer in their home country. Again, such visitors need to be reassured that what they are doing is deemed above -board and welcomed. They would not wish to come to Sri Lanka on a standard tourist visa for an engagement of this kind.
Short-term Study
The final strand of the knowledge transfer visa is for Short-term Study. Sri Lanka already has the skilled teachers and education infrastructure to offer undergraduate degrees from several foreign universities. It also runs accredited courses for professional qualifications from organisations that are based in G20 countries, whether it is in Accountancy or Marketing or IT. This capability can be expanded to provide ‘summer schools’ where foreign students arrive for a combination of classroom and field teaching. Local educational institutions can use their business initiative to develop curricula in consultation with foreign universities to meet the coursework credit requirements. If it is simple and easy to obtain a visa to attend such a course in Sri Lanka, this becomes a tempting offer for foreign students. In areas spanning from medicine, tourism, and the biological sciences, Sri Lanka can become an exciting destination for classroom and field work.
Conclusion
The results won’t be seen immediately as it takes years for local counterparts and foreign counterparts to respond and adapt to the benefits of such a visa. But slowly and steadily, we will see benefits accruing to the country. We also need to keep in mind that with anything that involves people, sometimes things don’t work out. A few foreign visitors or the Sri Lankan partners may not fulfil their obligations properly. We should not allow misguided fears of a few bad apples to block the massive potential for Sri Lanka to benefit from a simple but powerful idea that is easy to implement. It would benefit the private sector, state institutions, the universities, and many other sectors to encourage the government to introduce such a visa.
To conclude, if a knowledge transfer visa (KTV) is created which is as simple and quick to obtain as an online tourist visa, it will create a comforting and reassuring environment to encourage foreign visitors who are looking for something more than a short holiday. This will result in hard currency revenues in multiple ways as with ordinary tourism. However, there are potentially significant additional benefits from the bringing in of know-how, skilled people-hours of work, the scope for new types of businesses to develop, and allow Sri Lankan individuals, corporates and institutions to have doors opened for them for international business and academic opportunities. Furthermore, there is a huge Sri Lankan diaspora out there whose children and grandchildren do not have dual nationality but could be encouraged to bring their money and know-how for a longer length of time in Sri Lanka through a knowledge transfer visa.
by Gehan de Silva Wijeyeratne
TV news showed Keheliya Rambukwella with a walking aid and grizzled unshaven, attending courts and leaving in a prison van. His son Ramith is implicated in a corruption case being heard against his father. So it’s a case of like father, like son. We recall this cricketer son was no gentleman. He supposedly broke into an office in his college – Royal, Colombo 7 – to interfere with a marks sheet or whatever. More notoriously, returning from Australia as a member of a cricket team, he attempted opening a door of the Sri Lankan plane they were in. Doors in planes are extra strong and difficult to open; otherwise if he had succeeded, there would have been a fierce rush of air and he surely would have been dragged out to fall to the ocean or land and sure death. More seriously, havoc would have been created within the plane accompanied by dire danger to passengers. He is supposed to be unemployed but living in a very expensive, luxurious flat.
Wages of sin
Not many like to see others suffering, particularly mothers of sons. But there was no sorrow, not a twinge, on seeing Keheliya limping and getting into a prison van; so different from the suave man he was. The reason is that one has to pay for sins and transgressions including the procurement of substandard and fake medicinal drugs for government hospitals.
There is no sympathy in Cass’ heart, even for Rambukwella Jr. since he developed within himself his father’s nature. The uppermost thought in her is that retribution is inevitable. Most people think it passes to manifest itself in the sinner’s next and future births. Not always. They suffer in this life too. Here is a solid example to prove this point.
When we women talk about corruption in this beautiful island some note that entire families are corrupt to the core and have collected vast amounts of illicit money, safely stashed away. They seem to be fine; the younger ones grinning from ear to ear, cock sure of themselves. But what about their minds, their nightly dreams? Are they afraid? Do nightmares torment them? Sure the older thieves suffer thus.
“Retribution often means that we eventually do to ourselves what we have done unto others.”
Qatar’s gift to President Trump
Why two remembrances?
Politicians particularly, often prove that Sri Lanka is a land like no other – negatively – Cass adds. The Medamulana Rajapaksa family proved this point on Tuesday 20 May.
The War Heroes Commemorative ceremony, which is Remembrance Day in Sri Lanka, is observed on May 19, when the end of the civil war in 2009 is marked. Those who died in the 28 year war, both armed forces personnel and civilians, are remembered on this day. A solemn ceremony was held in Battaramulla in the grounds of the stately National War Memorial, with the President, and army, navy and air force heads of that time present. Also the nearest kin of those who gave their lives to save the country, mostly mothers and wives, laid red roses at the foot of the memorial.
Then surprise, surprise, another ceremony was held the following day at the same venue and most prominent were Mahinda and Gotabaya Rajapaksa. The news reporter of the channel Cass watched announced it was a memorial service for war heroes. But the war heroes had already been duly remembered the previous day by the entire nation. Pohottu members would have been present but it was not an SLPP ceremony. What was it then? A public remembrance by private persons since both brothers are out of politics and out of job now.
It is only in Sri Lanka that such a ‘circus’ can be staged. IWere the dead being used to shore waning popularity? Perfectly true, the two brothers did much to bring peace to the country; they went to war against severe objections and obstacles placed by local persons in secondary power, and foreign nations. But that does not justify a separate remembrance.
Maybe they do not know how such ceremonies are conducted in civilized foreign countries. They would not have watched the anniversary of VE Day (May 8) held in London and the respect and homage paid to WWII veterans and the remembrance of those who died in battle. Such an impressive, dignified late morning ceremony with King Charles III, Queen Camilla and other Royals present. The country and its leaders unified in remembrance and gratitude. No politics whatsoever. In this country politics rears its Medusa head in all public occasions and even very private ones like weddings. Next year we may have two separate celebratory events for National Day – February 4.
Lies and subterfuges
As usual a mega Trump deal is surrounded by lies, denials, drawing the wool over the public eye and subterfuges which last means “deceit used in order to achieve one’s goal.” The goal was getting a replacement for the presidential airplane which certainly is old – 40 years – and its interior not up to Trump’s garishly lavish standards. The Trump administration first approached Qatar to acquire a redundant Boeing 747 with a price around USD 400m to replace Air Force One. The other story is that Qatar reached out and offered the jet as a gift to Trump. The 747 flew to Florida in March so Trump could inspect it, which he did. A circulated report is that Qatar gifts the 747 to Trump personally to be used as his presidential jet and once he leaves the White House, it is his private possession. This tale one could well believe knowing the sort of a person Trump is and how wily Middle East potentates are: no giving without getting in return.
Cancer stalks American VVIP
Trump’s immediate predecessor has had another trauma. President Joe Biden announced he had been diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, which means his days are numbered. He was the oldest US Prez but much admired and polled to be the 14th best president in the history of the US. His first wife and one-year daughter died in a car accident on December 18, 1972, just four years after marriage. He was a devoted father to his two sons aged 2 and 3 years then. At age 46, in 2015, his elder son Beau died of brain cancer, which Biden maintained was due to his service in the Kosovo war where dangerous gases were used. And now this illness at 82. A good man given more than his fair share of tribulations.
Cruelty beyond measure
Deaths in the Gaza strip increase by the day as Israel bombards it with air missiles and debars food aid getting in. Children are dying by the hundreds and doctors in large numbers as hospitals are targeted for attack. Netanyahu has pronounced he wants the entire Gaza strip as part of Israel. How can he possibly expect this? However, at the rate the war is proceeding he will soon overcome Hamas and ride into Gaza as a vanquisher and acquirer. No nation seems to be ready to help the Palestinians.
Colombo, Sri Lanka – While U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war primarily targeted global economic heavyweights like China and the European Union, its ripple effects are being felt across smaller economies including Sri Lanka. Experts warn that Trump’s protectionist trade policies, particularly the imposition of tariffs and the “America First” doctrine, could significantly impact Sri Lanka’s export-driven growth model.
Global Supply Chains Under Pressure
One of the most immediate threats stems from the disruption of global supply chains. Sri Lanka’s key industries, including textiles, apparel, and electronics components, are heavily reliant on imported raw materials. The U.S. tariffs on Chinese and other foreign goods increased global production costs, leading to delays and price hikes that affect Sri Lankan exporters.
“These disruptions trickle down,” says an economist at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka. “Higher input costs and reduced access to affordable materials can hurt the competitiveness of our exports.”
Falling Global Demand Hits Exports
Trump’s tariffs contributed to broader economic uncertainty, weakening global trade and slowing growth. This downturn has lowered demand for Sri Lankan goods, particularly in Western markets. Apparel exports, which account for over 40% of Sri Lanka’s total exports and rely heavily on U.S. consumers, are especially vulnerable.
“As American retailers reevaluate their sourcing strategies, Sri Lankan garment manufacturers face increased competition from countries like Vietnam and Bangladesh, some of which benefit from more favourable trade agreements,” notes a trade policy analyst in Colombo.
Foreign Investment and Tourism at Risk
The trade tensions also made investors more cautious, leading to a decline in foreign direct investment (FDI) in emerging markets. Sri Lanka, already grappling with high debt levels and political instability, may find it increasingly difficult to attract investment in its export-oriented industries and infrastructure projects.
Tourism a vital source of foreign exchange could also see knock-on effects. Global economic instability tends to reduce travel spending, which directly impacts Sri Lanka’s tourism sector.
Regional Spillovers from China and India
China, a key trading partner and infrastructure investor in Sri Lanka, was one of the main targets of Trump’s tariffs. As Chinese economic growth slows due to reduced U.S. trade, its demand for Sri Lankan commodities and its ability to invest abroad could also decline. Similarly, any reduction in India’s economic engagement due to trade tensions with the U.S. may impact regional cooperation and investment flows.
Out of the Trade Bloc Loop
Perhaps, more concerning in the long term is the global realignment of trade alliances. As the U.S. withdrew from multilateral trade deals and others like the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) gained momentum, Sri Lanka risks being left behind.
A Wake-Up Call for Trade Policy Reform
The indirect but significant threats posed by Trump-era tariffs underline the urgent need for Sri Lanka to diversify its markets, join new trade alliances, and upgrade its export infrastructure.
While the Trump administration, the shift towards economic nationalism and trade protectionism continues to influence global policy. Sri Lanka, as a small and open economy, must adapt quickly or risk falling further behind.
By M. I. D Perera,
Economist
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