Uditha Devapriya

When Colonel Olcott wrote up a Buddhist Catechism (based on the Catholic Catechism), and established schools which followed Christian missionary curricula, he had to fall back on the same institutions he criticised. This meant that the Buddhism he "founded" was not the sort of Buddhism which Gunananda Thero began a journey to find. Devoid of any original roots, it languished, continued by everyone who fell under the spell of Olcott's movement.

Love is a four-letter word. It eludes definition and easy capture. When it's framed, defined, and hence pushed into what you make of it, it tries to escape, to be free. No, you can never limit it. The meaning's wider than you think. It's much more than what you think it means.

In "Cheyenne Autumn", his most atypical and in my opinion most moving story, he tried to redeem himself. For the first time, a prominent director of Westerns portrayed the underside to the American frontier. He took the Indian's side. He tried to show that as much as they rebelled against the notion of civilisation introduced by the White Man, the natives were unjustly treated. Ford went as far as to call it an elegy, an apology for what the American government did to them.

Mahinda Rajapaksa is President no more. Being a former President is not the same as being an incumbent. There's a world between the two. A President theoretically has the entire treasury at his disposal. A former President does not. So when Ranawaka says that Rajapaksa is "buying" all those people who continue to visit (and cry over) him, I tend to lose faith in his core argument.

Charles Dickens was born 203 years ago. His meteoric rise from poverty (his father was jailed at a debtors' prison) has been recorded already, so I won't delve into it here. What is important, however, is the breadth of vision this man had. We remember his writings – novels, short stories, sketches, essays – and we remember them well. Why?

There were lessons to be learnt. We learnt, for example, that inasmuch as S. B. Dissanayake's initiatives in bringing private institutes to Sri Lanka were a must (of sorts), they weren't enough. Quantity mustn't replace quality, after all. Dissanayake's program was flawed not because it was a complete waste, but because outlay did not equal quality.

Unlike other directors who established their signature long after their first film, Premaratne showed his from the start. "Sikuruliya", which slightly borrowed from the Ummagga Jatakaya, summed up everything he stood for. There were songs, there was brilliant camerawork, and most of all, there was a balance. He also showed us his sympathy for women in it, a trait that would occupy every film of his thereafter.

Not all of us may be able to pursue what we want. That's life. Still, it's not all thorns and weeds. There is much to make of life and much to pursue. Ambitions come in different colours, and, as the saying goes, there are plenty of pebbles on the beach.

Gamini Fonseka's Nomiyena Minisun had Sangeetha in her very first serious role. Talking about Fonseka, she says that he knew actors so well that he could grind out whatever he wanted from them. "As you know, I was new to films at the time. One of my biggest challenges was continuity. How does one maintain the same face and emotion in a sequence that is shot in two different days?"

But places aren't abandoned that easily. We try to regain them. Whenever the old order is threatened, whenever the new order comes in, we try to hang on to what must leave. Houses therefore aren't just places where your heart resides. They are symbols. Symbols of the past gone by. Icons and museum pieces for the new order to come.

There is much up for grabs from the winner's side. Perhaps that's what those who defected that day to Maithripala Sirisena, who decided that he should be the party's chairman, thought. After all, it's conceded by everyone that among those who defected, there were "unclean" names too: names the new government must not associate with if it is to remain "clean".

I am in Galle right now. The Fort. It's not easy to get lost here. Not easy to be consumed by nothingness and disappear. But I've been called a paranoid recluse all my life. Maybe that's why things look different to me. Places have stories to tell. The Fort has around 500 years to claim before it. It's been associated with conquest, reconquest, and bloodshed. And I am afraid.

When both Sirimavo Bandaranaike's and her daughter's governments began reforming education, no White Paper was issued. Civil society was not consulted. That's bad. A government is accountable to its people, not the other way around. To rush through reform or delay it for expediency is not the way forward.

"The X-Files" was about lies. It was also about those who lied to hide still other lies. And about friends who turned into enemies overnight. Yes, it was a dubious world we were seeing here. "Trust No One," everyone whispered, even those who gained trust and betrayed.

Books are read by us. They grow with us. We keep up with them. They never age. And with them, part of our hearts and minds stay young. That's how timeless they can get. How timeless the "child" in us can get while reading them. Yes, they endure. They are immortal. And as long as we read them and are moved by them, they remain treasured. By us.

Acquiring an identity and standing for it can't be done overnight. Bandaranaike tried to do that. Some say it worked, others say it didn't. As Kumari Jayawardena has argued in her seminal book Nobodies to Somebodies, the British, more than the Portuguese or the Dutch, tutored a separate class of people to serve their ends. Changing identity, therefore, meant changing over a hundred years of insulation from the country you grew up in.

There'll be new things this year. There'll be old things that'll come by once in a while. There'll also be things from last year that'll come back to you, asking you to remember, to make what you learn this year easier to grasp. If we can take this to heart, if we can remember that school-life is all about taking to the new and never forgetting the old, all will be well.