Connect with us

Features

Two memorable years in Jaffna

Published

2 years ago

on

Reading the late ACB Pethiyagoda’s memoir of his time at Jaffna College, Vadukoddai, Goolbai Gunasekera’s memory was jogged about just under two years she herself spent in Jaffna. Pethiyagoda went from Trinity to Jaffna College as he was interested in a career in agriculture and though that this would be better served in Jaffna rather than in Kandy. Goolbai went to Jaffna when her mother, the eminent educationist Clara Motwani, accepted the post of principal at Hindu Ladies College. She has recounted this experience in two chapters of the book she wrote about her mother, Chosen Ground. We publish the first of these today.

Jaffna, the Peninsula in the north of the island, is only about three hundred and ninety kilometres distant from Colombo, yet contrasts in living styles and language, the majority religion of Hinduism, and the attitudes of its people made it seem virtually another country. The Tamils of the north and the Sinhalese of the south co-existed in reasonable comfort, peace and quiet despite earlier historical depredations on both sides. Distinguished Tamils were at the forefront of the national movement for Independence, along with other great leaders belonging to the Sinhalese, Muslim and Burgher communities.

Colombo schools – indeed, schools all over the island, had Tamils studying happily beside the Sinhalese majority island race. Alongside were Parsis, Indians, and the earlier mentioned Muslims and Burghers. This rich mix made up the multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-religious population of Sri Lanka, and has done so for as long as we remember.

Life flowed along with very little trouble. True inter-racial and inter-religious marriages were rare, but they did occasionally occur. Socially, there was no divide. Sports clubs, social clubs, Government services, the Mercantile sector, Universities and of course, schools, contained a judicious mix of all Sri Lankans. And this idyllic state continued after Independence was achieved, until a kind of crude, unfocused day of terrorism in 1983 drove the Sinhalese and Tamils irrevocably apart destroying any illusion of cordiality. Only in 2003 did peace talks at last begin.

Colombo was always a cosmopolitan city, standing, as it does, at the crossroads of the sea-lanes. The British fleets brought not only trade to our shores but also visitors, tourists … and not only just visitors from other British colonies, but also some famous Americans who were enchanted with the island of Ceylon. “My God, but it’s beautiful,” Mark Twain wrote, although he was wilting in the heat.

Missionary activity was at its height during British colonial days. Strangely however, the American missionaries got to Jaffna before the British did. There they continued to remain, and the excellent schools they founded exist to this day, albeit now under the Government’s National Education system.

Many years ago an Archbishop of Canterbury made the comment that it had to be admitted that the Christian missions to Asia had failed. Percentage-wise, converts were few among the general population, but the influence of those schools was immense.

St. Patrick’s College and the Uduvil Girls’ School in Jaffna are still among the best in the island. Heading Uduvil at this moment of writing is a colleague and friend — Mrs. Shiranee Mills who belongs to the highly respected Tamil Christian Mills family of Jaffna.

That Mother would consider working outside Colombo, and in Jaffna of all places, never entered our heads. She had not visited the north, and her knowledge of the district was minimal. She had many Tamil friends of course. Her bridge foursome buddies at the Womens’ International Club (where eventually she became both President and then Chairman) were ladies like Mrs. Girlie Cooke, Mrs. Podi Singham, Mrs. Nagulamba Somasunderam, Miss Alagi Muttukumaru, and others. She had also had many Tamil colleagues in the world of education. One was the gracious Inspector of Schools, Miss Chelliah. However, Mother’s friends were not necessarily in the habit of discussing Jaffna at the bridge table while bidding their hands.

Once Mother was comfortably ensconced in Jaffna, Miss Chelliah paid a visit to Hindu Ladies’ College to see how she was getting along in this totally unfamiliar milieu. Visiting my class – Grade 6 – she asked the girls if they knew which religious group worshipped fire. Thanks to my father’s Parsi guardian, I knew the answer to that one. “The Parsis, I said. “Very good.” Miss Chelliah was surprised. She had no idea who I was, but just to make sure we were all on the ball, she then asked if anyone could name the Seven Modern Wonders of the World. To a girl, the class reeled them off. Miss Chelliah was more taken aback than surprised. We seemed a splendidly knowledgeable bunch.

Back in Mother’s office, she mentioned that the General Knowledge standard seemed very high. This was not very good news to Mother who was having student problems she had never dreamed of ever facing. Her students in Jaffna were TOO study-oriented. But more of this later.

Mother had asked her Tamil friends in Colombo if they thought she would like Jaffna.

“You’ll love it,” they replied, although on what they based this certainty was hard to ascertain. Love it we did. Father went off on one of his lecture tours in the States leaving Mother to cope with the problems of moving. Fortunately we had Cathleen still with us, and she coped easily.

Cathleen’s older sister, Nimal, a gentle and loving woman, had been mother’s maid at the time of my birth. When she left to get married, 16-year-old Cathleen stayed on to care for Su. Su had been born in America, and had spent her first years with my grandparents in Illinois. She was not too well at birth, and travel in those days was not the ’round the world in 24 hours’ business that it is today. Mother left Su behind and she only came out to the East when she was nearly five.

The young maid brought in to care for a homesick little girl was Cathleen. Su and she remained close till Cathleen died in 2000. Su was very unhappy at all this uprooting. She desperately missed her grandparents and voiced her fury each night at bedtime. In the hope that we would grow close as sisters, Mother made us sleep in the same room. Su’s nightly bellows put paid to any such maternal hopes. We have pretty much remained guardedly tolerant of each other all our lives. And to add to our mental and psychological differences, our adult lives have been lived on opposite sides of the world. Su now lives in New York near her married daughter Anu, son-in-law Sumith, and her enchanting grandson, Sohan.

In Jaffna the American Missionaries had been active since the days of British rule. I have never been quite sure why they opted for Jaffna, but there they descended, and made a roaring success of the schools they founded. They naturally sought converts while they were about it. Mrs. Ranji Senanayake, wife of Maitripala Senanayake, former Government Minister of Irrigation, once told me that if one delved deep enough one would find that all Tamil Christians were related.

Missionaries encouraged the members of their flock to marry one another, and there soon emerged a highly educated and professionally qualified community of Tamil Christians. The Hindus were not slow in founding their own Hindu schools, and Hindu Ladies’ College (which Mother now headed) was one such Institution.

Tamil Hindus studied in Christian institutions, but it was natural and inevitable that a movement would develop that would aim at educating Hindu children in a Hindu environment. I was too young to recall if Jaffna had ever needed the services of a Colonel Olcott who revitalized Buddhism so dramatically. I do not know if Hinduism in the North was ever at risk as was Buddhism in the South. I do not think so.

At any rate, an American Principal, and one as well known as Mother, was a popular choice with the parents of HLC.

Mother was not a missionary, but her appointment gave the fledgling school a certain cachet. So to Jaffna we went. Our long love affair with the North started from the minute we got off the train. The crisp, dry air was very much to Mother’s liking. Even the sparse landscape suited her preference for a simple, uncluttered environment. I bonded with the Tamil girls instantly and copied whatever they did, even to the wearing of the pavada/sattai (the long skirt, blouse and half sari). I straightaway developed a schoolgirl crush on Miss Vijayalakshmi Pathy who taught History and Botany. Had she taught Mathematics, my attainment in that subject might not have been in the sorry state it was for most of my school life.

To get back to Mother’s unhappiness with Miss Chelliah’s compliment: at first she was ecstatic at the work ethic displayed by the girls of Jaffna. She was not given to breathing down the necks of her pupils urging them to study, study, study. She wanted a balanced, well-rounded student to emerge, as it were from a cocoon, well prepared for the hard world of the day — but cultured and very feminine withal.

The girls of HLC were a revelation. Never had Mother encountered the seriousness with which these traditionally reared Tamil girls approached life. Education is revered in Asia. In Jaffna it is worshipped. Imagine, if you will, a class of 25 students who hung on every word uttered by the teacher and accepted these nuggets of knowledge with the same reverence Prophet Mohammed displayed on Mount Hira when the Angel Gabriel revealed his message.

A teacher’s Nirvana, would you not say? Indeed, yes. But Mother was not a happy being. She worried that the lack of discussion and a total avoidance of confrontational issues caused the Tamil girls to lack analytical skills. “You must not believe everything a teacher tells you,” she would say. “Learn to question even your Principal.” The senior students smiled politely, unbelieving of such heresy, and went right on accepting a teacher’s word as an act of faith.

Mother’s general impression of young people was probably that of teachers all over the world. Lassitude and a drooping of energy would follow moments of clarity and hard mental activity. This appeared normal. The sustained high achievement maintained by her Jaffna girls was a new experience.

“Teach your students how to study,” she used to direct her teachers in Colombo. “Children often need to be taught methods and mnemonic schemes as aides to memory.”

She did not say this in Jaffna. She didn’t need to. Everybody studied, including me.

Mother was ecstatic at the work ethic I was so uncharacteristically displaying, and she rightly gave credit to the peer pressure exerted by my classmates and those motivated teachers like Miss Pathy and Miss Leela Ponniah. Mother never forced study times on either Su or me. My sudden self-motivation surprised her no end.

Mother had a brain like a satellite dish – always picking things out of clear, blue skies. Student questionnaires was one such brainwave. Determined to get her Tamil girls to be more aggressive, she started a series of ‘Yes/No’ type questionnaires, which forced students to think independently. The slightly horrified girls of HLC could not believe they were being forced to make judgments on “Do you find Maths interesting? If not, why? How would you like it taught?”

They found it all slightly heretical. Excitement and lively discussion, opposition to a teacher’s views, or argumentative attitudes, were not part of a Jaffna girl’s psyche at that time (1946). Those particular questionnaires did not galvanize them into becoming the sort of question boxes Mother had hoped for, but let it go on record that Mother never had to write, “Not trying” on any student report she signed in Jaffna.


Related Topics:
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

Published

15 hours ago

on

2026/03/13

By

Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

Continue Reading

Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

15 hours ago

on

2026/03/13

By

International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

Continue Reading

Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

2 days ago

on

2026/03/12

By

A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.

Continue Reading

Trending