In a wistful essay titled ‘Memories of War, Dreams of Peace, hurriedly put together in mid May 2009 as Sri Lanka’s long and brutal civil war ended, I wrote: “Our political leaders, in whom we entrust our collective destiny, now face a historic choice… African analogies can go only so far in Asia, but at this juncture, it is tempting to ask: would our leaders now choose the Mandela Road or the Mugabe Road for the journey ahead?”
Four years on, that now reads rather naïve. In hindsight, I should have known better — and not pinned any hopes on political leaders again.
I say “again” because, just once before in my life, I did so: In mid 1994, six months after Nelson Mandela became the first majority elected President of South Africa, we Lankans elected Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga as our own President, with the largest ever electoral mandate (62% of votes).
Like many others at the time, I expected Chandrika to usher in a more pluralistic, accountable and caring form of government. Little did we know that it would all be squandered after her first 1,000 days…
The essay draws on my own memorable experience of listening to Mandela speak at the UN Headquarters in New York, in October 1995, and my three brief visits to post-apartheid South Africa over the past dozen years.
Oh, President Chandrika also came to the UN in New York on that occasion, accompanied by her astute foreign minister, the late Lakshman Kadirgamar — who came closest to being Lanka’s moral and intellectual colossus of global stature.
My South African room mate in New York, Dante Mashile, and I lined up hours ahead of the event to get through the intense UN security. On that chilly and windswept October morning in uptown Manhattan, we were two bright-eyed, idealistic young men fired by the audacity of hope.
In the end, my own leader didn’t walk her talk. But Dante’s did. That made all the difference for our two nations…
The Rainbow Nation had a troubled birth, and nearly two decades on, it’s still a work in progress. There are huge imperfections, and the reality falls short of aspirations. But without Mandela’s statesmanship, things could have been far worse.
As I note in this new essay:
“I have finally realized the futility of waiting for my own Mandela. There won’t be one, and there’s no time to waste.
“We must carry the flame ourselves — even if it’s only a candle in the wind.”
Screen Shot 2013-06-19 at 8.31.53 PM Courtesy Groundviews.org
Along with dozens of tweeps, I took part in an interesting Twitter Q&A session with Lalith Weeratunga, Secretary to the President of Sri Lanka, which unfolded from 14:30 to 16:00 Sri Lanka Time on 19 June 2013.
Our questions were posed using the hashtag #AskLW: they are all displayed on Twitter at https://twitter.com/search/realtime?q=%23askLW While most were in English, some came in the local languages of Sinhala and Tamil too.
Groundviews.org, the citizen journalism website, has archived online 2,680+ tweets related to this exchange. Of these, some 1,140 are original tweets (posted since 14 June 2013, when #askLW was first announced) while others are retweets.
As Groundviews.org noted, “There was no historical precedent for this kind of engagement over social media, especially for someone so high up in Government and in daily contact with the (Lankan) President.”
Commenting on the timing of this exchange, Groundviews editor Sanjana added: “Ironically, the announcement of the Twitter Q&A with Weeratunga came on the same day Gotabaya Rajapaksa, the President’s brother, in a spark of unrivalled genius, called social media no less than a national security threat in post-war Sri Lanka.”
Sanjana has done a quick and very good analysis of what was asked, which selected few among many were actually answered, and which topics gained traction among those participating – especially during the period the event was live.
Even more interesting is how contentious and controversial topics were completely ignored. To be sure, Weeratunga isn’t the first public official to do so, and some might even argue that he had the right to choose his questions. (That won’t have been so easy in a physical press conference.)
All the same, it is highly revealing that the top public servant in Sri Lanka chose not to respond to questions on Islamphobia, Buddhist extremism, hate speech, militarisation, human rights and other topics of great public interest in today’s Sri Lanka.
It’s remarkable that such questions were posed, in a public platform, which is more than what the mainstream media (MSM) of Sri Lanka regularly ask at official press conferences given by senior government officials. From all accounts, the monthly breakfast meetings that the President has with newspaper editors is also a lame affair where no critical questions are raised.
Yes, MSM and citizen journalists are not directly comparable. In the prevailing intolerant environment, it is telling that many social media users took cover under pseudonyms to pose questions to the top civil servant of Lanka (while the rest of us asked under our own names). There was even speculation among some tweeps about what might happen to those who ask pesky questions…
In this post, I want to collate and briefly annotate my own questions to Weeratunga – all of which he chose not to answer. I’m not surprised and certainly not sulky: these were admittedly not as easy as some others.
I posed a few questions in advance, and then some more during the live event. They were in one way or another related to the multiple positions that Weeratunga holds in the Lankan government.
One question stemmed from Weeratunga’s meaningful speech at the fifth National Conference on the Role of ICT in Reconciliation held at the Lakshman Kadirgamar Institute for International Relations and Strategic Studies (LKIIRSS) in Colombo in Nov 2012.
#AskLW: I read your speech on ICTs at LKIIRSS last Oct. How can #lka govt that doesn't tolerate any dissent really promote #reconciliation?
Commenting on the very different – sometimes contradictory – messages given out by senior elected and other public officials of the Lankan government on matters of domestic and global interest, I asked:
#AskLW#lka Govt publicly stated positions often remind us of 'Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde'. Why this sharply split personality?
Weeratunga, who does not yet have his own Twitter account, gave his selected answers using the President’s official account, @PresRajapaksa. This was noted by others, and I replied to one:
Many tweeps asked him to comment on the Defence Secretary’s recent remark on social media. Having noted, only minutes earlier, that “Social Media is a powerful tool”, Weeratunga added later: “Sec/Defence has a point; since it has been used for destructive purposes elsewhere, he has said so.”
Some tweeps reacted to this observation among ourselves. My contribution:
@AmanthaP@PresRajapaksa Oh, knives, telephones, books, cars, even fists have been used 4 destructive purposes too! Intention matters #AskLW
Knowing well Lankans don’t like to be compared to Indians, who nevertheless hold many lessons for us in managing diversity and in balancing modernity with tradition, I asked:
Not answered. (Well, after all, this wasn’t Hard Talk!).
Prompted by @Groundviews, there was a brief exchange on Sri Lanka’s fully state owned budget airline Mihin, which has been losing billions of public funds from Day One. I reacted:
I’ve described myself as a hybrid journalist with ‘one foot in each grave’ — straddling the worlds of mainstream media and citizen journalism. In years of mainstream journalism — practised in Sri Lanka and across Asia — I have sharpened the art of asking pointed questions. I often ask more questions than I find answers for. So this is part of that process.
But I’m very glad all our questions are archived online — which is highly significant as part of the public record of our times. When Weeratunga next speaks about ICTs nationally or internationally, this digital record will be part of his legacy.
For now, many thanks to Weeratunga and @PresRajapaksa new media team for having organised this event. It’s a good start, and hopefully they will repeat this from time to time with improved capability at their end to cope with the info flood…
My last tweet in this exchange was a salute to the original cyber politician of Sri Lanka:
#AskLW scored around 3.5 on Moragoda Scale of #lka Cyber Engagement where @milindamoragoda set benchmark of 1 & high end is 10. Do u Agree?
In this week’s Ravaya column (in Sinhala), I continue my discussion on challenges of modernisation for small, independent media in the world today when print media industry faces formidable challenges.
I quote Sanjana Hattotuwa, new media researcher and activist, who was a speaker at the recent 65th annual congress of the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) held in Bangkok.
I also refer to the Guardian newspaper’s model of Open Journalism, and ask how this can be adapted to suit our own realities. The challenges are more within the minds of media organisations, I argue, than in the technology tools or platforms.
I observe how, some 18 years after commercial Internet connectivity was introduced in Sri Lanka, not a single Lankan newspaper has been able to develop a modern website: all are stuck in the 1990s first generation web, and their attempts to ‘modernise’ and enter the 21st Century have been pitiful and hilarious at the same time. Ravaya has a real opportunity, therefore, to become the first Lankan newspaper — in any language — to develop an engaging and interactive website. But first, it must make some top level decisions on how it wants to position itself in the rapidly changing world of media content creation, dissemination and consumption.
Ravaya, Sri Lanka’s only newspaper owned by its journalists and editors, has embarked on a process to modernise itself — and sparked off a debate on how new investments should be raised. Some loyal readers are concerned what might happen to the newspaper’s editorial independence when private capital comes in.
In this week’s Ravaya column, I place this debate in the context of economic survival challenges of the newspaper industry worldwide. I take the experience of the Guardian (UK) and the New York Times to explore what changes in strategy and funding they have adopted, and with what degree of success.
The biggest challenge, I argue, is that the newspaper industry must find how to engage the web as a central part of its content creation, dissemination and archiving.
I look at general knowledge quizzing in Sri Lanka in this week’s Ravaya column (in Sinhala).
It’s a mind sport where I have played all the roles possible — as a participant, Sri Lanka’s national quiz champion, quiz compiler, quizmater, quiz programme designer for radio and TV, and chronicler of the game.
As Sri Lanka marks 65th anniversary of independence this weekend, I dedicate my Ravaya column to the memory the brilliant Lankan engineer, designer and artist H R Premaratne who was closely associated with preparation for the historic ceremony held in Colombo.
In this week’s Ravaya column (in Sinhala), I look back at the Newsweek magazine’s illustrious history of nearly 80 years, and reflect on the phenomenon of news magazines: are their days numbered, at least in print?
For much of 2012, a large section of the print and broadcast media in Sri Lanka behaved like the proverbial chicken who panicked himself and the rest of the jungle claiming the sky was falling.
They uncritically and sometimes gleefully peddled the completely unsubstantiated and imaginary prophecies of doom and gloom – specifically, about the world ending on 21 December 2012.
And just like Chicken Little did, our media too had plenty of uncritical followers – a case of the blind leading the blind. They worked themselves into a misplaced frenzy, imagining all sorts of scenarios for the world’s end.
In this week’s Ravaya column (in Sinhala), I take a critical look at our uncritical and fear-mongering media, especially broadcast media. Appears in print issue of 30 Dec 2012.
Arthur C Clarke Chintana Charika – Sinhala Book of essays and interviews by Nalaka Gunawardene (Wijesooriya Book Centre, Colombo, 2012). Cover photos by Shahidul Alam, Drik
In a literary career spanning over six decades, Sir Arthur C Clarke (1917 – 2008) wrote 100 books and more than 1,000 short stories and essays. He was the first to propose geostationary communications satellites, and inspired the World Wide Web.
To mark his 95th birth anniversary which falls this month, science writer Nalaka Gunawardene is releasing a new Sinhala book offering a quick tour of Clarke’s imagination, analyses and extrapolations on the world’s current challenges and our choice of futures.
Titled ‘Arthur C Clarke Chintana Charika’ (Mind Journeys with Arthur C Clarke), the book is a collection of Nalaka’s articles, media columns and interviews based on the late author and visionary’s formidable intellectual output. Some have appeared in Lankan newspapers or magazines during the past 25 years, while others are coming out in print for the first time.
“These are not translations, and most are not even adaptations. Instead, I have distilled Sir Arthur’s ideas and imagination and presented them in simple Sinhala,” says Nalaka, who worked with Clarke for 21 years as research associate at his personal office in Colombo.
Indicative of Clarke’s diverse career and interests, the book is divided into five sections: highlights of his illustrious life; astronomy and space travel; information and communications technology; futuristic visions; and his long association with Sri Lanka.
“Sir Arthur cheered and promoted Sri Lanka for half a century – in both good times and bad. The section on Sri Lanka captures his visions and hopes for his adopted homeland: on how we may overcome the burdens of evolution and history to create a truly peaceful and prosperous island for all,” says Nalaka.
The book contains Clarke’s advice on rebuilding Sri Lanka after the 2004 tsunami, the story of the first Sinhala feature film in colour (Ran Muthu Duwa, 1962) that Clarke financed, and the text of his 90th birthday video, which eventually became his public farewell.
Other essays focus on Clarke’s cautious optimism for information society and the future of artificial intelligence, his hopes of developing clean energy sources to end humanity’s addiction to fossil fuels, and his advocacy of a world free of nuclear weapons.
Nalaka reiterates that the best way to celebrate the legacy of Arthur C Clarke is to adapt his ideas for a better world based on knowledge, ethics, compassion and imagination.
The 280-page book, published by Wijesooriya Grantha Kendraya (Wijesooriya Book Centre), will be launched at 3 pm on Tuesday, 18 December 2012 at the National Library Services and Documentation Board, 14, Independence Avenue, Colombo 7. The main speaker will be Prof Rohan Samarajiva, Chair and CEO of LIRNEasia. Copies will be sold on discount at the launch.
illy and windswept October morning in uptown Manhattan, we were two bright-eyed, idealistic young men fired by the audacity of hope.
ලෝක විනාශ මිථ්යාවක් මතු වූ ප්රථම වතාව මෙය නොවෙයි. එහෙත් මෙතරම් ලෝක ව්යාප්ත මට්ටමින් මෙබඳු මුලාවක් හා භීතියක් මෙවර හට ගත්තේ ජනමාධ්ය හා තොරතුරු තාක්ෂණය හරහා මේ ප්රබන්ධය අති විශාල ජනකායක් අතරට ඉක්මනින් පැතිරුණු නිසයි. තොරතුරු සමාජය හා මාධ්ය චර්යාව ගැන නෙත් යොමා සිටින මට මේ ගැන නිරීක්ෂණ හා අත්දැකීම් කිහිපයක් තිබෙනවා.
Open Minds! 