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Writing with passion and conviction

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6 months ago

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“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” ― Anais Nin

My intention is to reflect on writing with passion at a time Sri Lanka is producing writing, at least in the Sinhala language, that is worthy of being introduced to the world. When I say this, I am thinking of creative writing. There is no such promise by and large when it comes to academic writing. And it does not seem to me that the idea of promoting our writing, ways of writing, and reaching to the world, are issues seriously addressed by our universities, despite their focus in training young people in language and literatures. Unfortunately, however, the idea of writing, though central to all disciplines in social sciences and humanities, has been under-emphasised to the extent of being made almost invisible in academic, professional and popular discourses today in our country.

It is my strong personal belief that academic writing, produced in our country in the two languages I am familiar with, is of no significant intellectual consequence, globally. That is, they do not impact the thinking in humanities and social sciences in the world. I know this is not a popular position. But I say so with confidence and responsibility stemming from my experience in traversing in the worlds of writing for over three decades. Also, it is commonsense, if one does not have the command of language and, particularly, the ability to write, however good one’s other technical skills might be, the likelihood of you finding it difficult to find employment or being underemployment is high.

But this also depends on the cultural and social capital within a person’s immediate location and the nature of the market in that location and in different parts of the world one wants to be in, what exact language one must have control over and so on. It is in this specific context that I want to reflect on two kinds of writing that should be important to all disciplines in social sciences and humanities. One is academic writing. The other is creative writing.

But I am not thinking of writing as a mere operational and technical tool of communication and expression. Instead, I am thinking of writing as a matter of passion and a product of conviction. Operational command in writing will allow a person to get by. But one might still remain ordinary, one among thousands of others who have the same abilities in writing, here and globally.

But if you can master your writing with passion and conviction, if you self-consciously put in the effort that is needed to make this happen, then, you will go beyond the ordinary and excel in your individual fields – given reasonable access to right conditions and networks. But this does not downgrade the crucial fact that writing at the most fundamental level is a technical skill allowing for communicating effectively through the written word. In this minimum technical sense, writing needs to embrace the following essential components: grammar; vocabulary; spelling; sentence construction; structure, research and accuracy; clarity and persuasiveness.

Without paying attention to these basic facts, writing cannot be effective, whether it is academic or creative. Passion can help you master these components while confidence will follow after you have mastered these. My argument is, it is due to our collective inability to pay attention to the power of writing, both academically and creatively, that we as a country no longer produce, as we should, practitioners in social sciences or humanities of global repute. If we do, that will be an exception rather than the norm.

Until the mid-1970s this was possible with regard to academic writing in social sciences as well as humanities. For instance, it is through the excellence in their writing that writers in Sri Lankan social sciences, like professors Gananath Obeyesekere and Stanley Tambiah and writers in humanities like Professors Ediriweera Saratchchandra, Siri Gunasinghe and Martin Wickramasinghe received global recognition.

But it should be noted that the creative works of the latter three were mostly in Sinhala. All three were nevertheless capable of expressing their ideas to global readers in English through their own scholarly writing and some of their local works in Sinhala were renowned enough to be translated into English and other culturally and socially powerful languages. This was clearly the case with Martin Wickramasinghe.

So, when I am talking about passion and conviction in writing, I am not making a simplistic reference to English language writing alone as often happens in our country given that language’s global political and cultural dominance. My point is, our writing – be that academic or creative writing or be that in English, Sinhala or Tamil – must be good enough to capture the attention of the world and be noticed. And this can only come via writing, invested with passion and confidence.

And if we write well in Sinhala or Tamil, then, we must find ways to take these to the world through globally dominant languges. That is, through viable translations. This is how writings in languges that vary from Italian to Spanish and Turkish to Chinese and Japanese have travelled to the world from their own original and restricted language domains. However, passion and conviction in writing, or any other professional domain of knowledge, cannot be taught in universities. Universities, particularly at undergraduate level, are only places meant for basic training. They can, however, encourage and create enabling spaces to ensure that basic training is further fine-tuned by receivers of knowledge in these places. That is, students and even teachers. But the actual and professional fine-tuning of writing with passion and conviction must necessarily come from practice to begin with and competition with others, both in this country and beyond. So excelling is an individual effort and cannot be something collective or institutional.

This brings to my mind Stephen King’s words expressed in his book, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft: “If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” But then again, to go in such directions, institutions, which in our case are universities, government or private programmes that encourage excellence in writing, can play a crucial role by introducing our writers to global or regional networks through which their writing can hopefully cross international as well as linguistic borders. I am not only thinking of creative writing when I say this. I also have in mind technical writing – from software development to military strategy – if we produce good enough writing in specific technical fields that the world might find useful.

This is where our country has serious problems. I don’t see our universities, or too many institutions beyond universities, providing access to writers to excel in their craft. In academia, giving extremely naïve recognitions, such as awards for the ‘best paper’ at the end of many conferences for average writing ,will simply not be good enough. Personally, I have never received such an award. But my academic writing has crossed many borders, curricular, institutions and languages in the world. Not having a competitive system of university presses or similar publishing operations in our country to take our writing to the world or to produce the most competitive writing locally, does not help too.

Finally, when I talk about writing produced with passion and conviction, I am not simply thinking about writing that will produce texts for leisure. I am also thinking about the broader local and global markets in which writing would be a conduit for being noticed in a competitive world and a means of employment.

(This essay is based on the keynote address delivered at the 4th Student Research Symposium of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, Open University of Sri Lanka, 2 August 2025)


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Features

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

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14 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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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

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Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

14 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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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

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

2 days ago

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2026/03/12

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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.

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