Posts Categorized: Sri Kantha

In his second term, will President Obama elevate himself to the rank of an admirable statesman? Can Eelam Tamils expect something better than his previous performance?

By design or accident, Weiss has conveniently ignored the contributions of CIA to the Sri Lankan civil war in his book of 342 pages. This is more exasperating, as he was “the United Nations spokesperson in Sri Lanka”! Phew! He cannot claim ignorance.

The tragedy of the Hindu is the tragedy of newspaper editors who allow themselves to be sucked into the decision-making processes of their governments! [Tamil Times, London, October 1988, p.12]

My verdict: Those who read the editorials presented in the Appendix can recognize that Kasturi posed as a wiseacre and his wishy-washy writing style was verbose, pretentious, repetitive, unimaginative and unrealistic to the aspirations of Eelam Tamils. Last but not the least, his written stuff was boring to read!

So, what’s the price for a Ceylon Tamil politician? If you are a keen student of politics in independent Sri Lanka, the answer is a Cabinet portfolio. For the sake of Cabinet positions, two independent Tamils namely Chellapah Suntharalingam (1895-1985) and Cathiravelu Sittampalam (1898-1964) pawned Eelam rights.

That Prabhakaran committed suicide cannot be provable, but is certainly believable, considering the above-listed five strikes against the probability that he was killed by an army sniper. If the Sri Lankan army offers sustainable evidences to negate the five strikes that I list above, then I will buy their version of Prabhakaran’s death.

The malady faced by the Hindu was aptly diagnosed by S. Sivanayagam, while he was residing in Chennai. He wrote in 1988, “The tragedy of the Hindu is the tragedy of newspaper editors who allow themselves to be sucked into the decision-making processes of their governments!” [Tamil Times, London, Oct. 1988].

On September 9, Lakbima (a Sinhala daily newspaper in Colombo) carried a cartoon by HasanthaWijenayake. It featured a plump Jayalalitha Jayaram, the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, in an aggressive posture against Sri Lanka. While her right index finger was pointing at Sri Lanka, her left hand holding the lower end of saree to her… Read more »

The shock that an LTTE landmine had decapitated the Sinhalese military leadership of the Northern Province, who had bragged only a week before to the India Today magazine (July 31, 1992) that they were about to humiliate LTTE, was too much to absorb by the Sinhala media and politicians. There was an orgy of breast beating, finger pointing and blame shifting. For popular consumption, these military heroes had died either due to carelessness (as Chandraprema opined recently) or due to internal back-stabbing by President Premadasa who was envious of the popularity of Major General Denzil Kobbekaduwa. Sinhalese military analysts and public found it difficult to gulp that they lost their heroes to the LTTE’s adept reconnaissance tactics.