A book with a lot of food for thought

I have just put down a new book A Tale of Two Countries, written by Ajit Kanagasundram. The author neatly outlines how Sri Lanka has been dragged down to gutter level by sheer incompetence on the part of virtually every ruler since independence from the British.

The book compares Singapore and Sri Lanka.

To quote a random passage ‘ a professor Chandare Dharmawardene was appointed the Vice-Chancellor of Vidyodya University in 1976. He proposed a radical solution (perhaps tongue in cheek) to the problem of students obtaining degrees in Pali and Sinhala who find they are virtually unemployable in the outside world. He said - give them their degree on day one, along with Rs. 2 lakhs (which was the amount it was costing the Govt. per student at the time) and send them to the outside world where they could start an enterprise or get themselves a government job (which was all they could get anyway). The good man was hounded out and migrated to Canada where he became an internationally known Physical Chemist.’ This is just one of the many instances of knee-jerk reactions he catalogues, which over the decades has resulted in a serious brain drain from this country.

In contrast, he says, when there was student unrest in a university in an emerging Singapore, Lee Kwan Yew shut it down immediately, sacked the members of the faculty and sent the students home. He followed this up by offering the students a crash course in English and Mathematics with the option of re-joining the University with this qualification. Can we ever imagine a strong leader of this calibre emerging in an endemically corrupt Sri Lanka?

Back to the book itself, should not this book be translated into Sinhala and Tamil and introduced into our school curriculum as a compulsory text? Maybe we can - albeit belatedly - train young minds to think differently and place the welfare of the nation FIRST! Maybe we could find a way to force all representatives of the people (oops, I nearly wrote servants of the people) to read this book first.

Minister of Education, this is for you too!

Ainsley de Silva Kohuwala.