Editorial

The traditional New Year was celebrated in Sri Lanka linked as it is to a millennia-old common heritage in many parts of India and South East Asia around the rice harvesting season.
Age-old customs and rituals largely connected to auspicious times laid down by astrologers take centre-stage. In this backdrop of the country’s historical connectivity with this part of the world, renewed discussions have emerged of linguistic relations that exist among the same constituencies with regard to the Sinhala language.

Sri Lanka and, particularly, India have had a shared cultural heritage outside the Tamil Nadu sphere from the Mauryan Empire; the land of Magadha, India’s ancient seat of Buddhism which is now Eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Bengal and Jharkland, Chhatisgarh and Orissa. Similarities between the Sinhala language and the Sanskrit-based languages are many. In the states of Western India, Marathi and Gujarati share many Sanskrit words even in current usage like ‘Akka’ and ‘Archchi’.

Pali books from Sri Lanka were the first to be transliterated in Devangiri for the Indians to gain an understanding of the Dhamma. Given the cultural sea-links between Lanka and the Indian state of Maharashtra, there was similarity in dress, food and even architecture. The Sinhala language must therefore be made to link with the larger family of Sanskrit- based languages in Western India which can also help spread the Dhamma.

After partaking in the New Year sweetmeats and performing the customary rituals, the Sri Lankan linguistic academia must buckle down to doing something substantial to promote and widen the horizons of the Sinhala language and establish links with Indian academics such as those in the Pali Department in the University of Mumbai — and it should be part of Government foreign policy as well.
Western India today has a GDP six times that of Sri Lanka and it makes sense for academics and governments of both Sri Lanka and India to look at that long neglected historical connectivity between Sri Lanka and Western India to bring the two countries closer together rather than to be bogged down in the political theatrics of the state of Tamil Nadu that has been the bane of Indo-Lanka relations now for decades.
For Christ’s sake, dismantle  the arms industry
Easter Sunday, celebrated universally by Christians of all denominations today coming as it does following a dastardly attack on Coptic churches in Egypt is a grim reminder that the world is not at peace.
West Asia, where Christianity was born and took root continues to be in turmoil. Syria and Iraq — the cradle of human civilisation are torn asunder by superpower rivalries playing out in the midst of ferocious theological and ideological differences.

In Egypt, one week ago when Coptic Christians were marking Palm Sunday, the beginning of the Holy Week preceding Easter, a solemn day in the Christian calendar, two bombs killed scores of worshippers.
It was the Friday before that an aerial bombardment of chemical weapons allegedly on the orders of the Syrian President Bashar al Assad triggered a response from the United States: 59 Tomahawk missiles (ironically named after the weapon used by native American-Indians to scalp the ‘white’ immigrant settlers) were fired into Syria without any United Nations by-your-leaves.
The US President who ordered the strike seemed confused as to what he had ordered. He told a TV station that he had ordered the Tomahawks be fired into Iraq only to be corrected by the interviewer that it was to Syria.

This came only days after the US President had said the Syrian President must stay to defeat ISIS. It is now said that US foreign policy depends on which side of the bed their President gets up from in the morning.
Suddenly, the G-7 countries of the West have also backed the US flip-flop stance and called for Assad’s ouster as President. This, of a sovereign country that is a UN member-state fighting terrorism.
The Russians have called this “an obsession” of the West to get rid of ‘dictators’ they don’t like and cited how much worse off the peoples of Iraq and Libya are since the West’s intervention in those countries.
Pope Francis has placed his finger on the right button. He sees the bigger picture in these superpower games exploiting sectarian differences in West Asia and parts of Africa.

On the same Palm Sunday, he spoke from St. Peter’s Square in the Vatican and condemning the attack in the Nile delta of Egypt said; “May the Lord convert the hearts of the people who sow terror, violence and death and even the hearts of those who produce and traffic in weapons.” He has said this before — in the heart of the American capital while addressing the US Congress but it all falls, alas, on deaf ears. The arms industry is too intrinsic to the West’s economies and foreign policy to listen even to the Pope.

Till then, West Asia where Christ was born, crucified and resurrected, continues to be a hotbed of violence and strife even as the world prays that Christ’s message to His disciples when He appeared to them in the Upper Room that first Easter; “Peace be with you” will prevail. This Easter, we should recall the prayer of another Francis – St. Francis of Assisi: “Lord, make me an instrument of Your peace. Where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy…..”.