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Kala Korner by Dee Cee 'Asian Film Culture Award' for Lester The doyen of Sri Lankan cinema, Lester James Peries is being honoured once again - this time by the Asian Film Foundation in Mumbai. He is being conferred the 'Asian Film Culture Award' given to 'a distinguished director from Asia whose contribution to cinema has been very significant'. The Foundation
is organising the first Asian Film Festival in Mumbai next month
and the award will be made on the last day of the Festival - Saturday,
August 10. Director of
the Asian Film Festival, Sudhir Nandgaonkar has informed Lester
that the Organising Committee has unanimously selected him for the
award, which is being given for the first time. The Committee has
also decided to screen Lester's latest creation, 'Wekande Walauwe'
(Mansion by the Lake) to wind up the Festival which will be held
from August 3-10. This is the
second occasion India is honouring Lester. He was given the Lifetime
Achievement Award at the 2000 International Film Festival of India
held in New Delhi. Following that award, the Indian Government was
prompted to further honour Lester by making a documentary film on
him by the leading Indian documentary filmmaker, K. Bikram Singh.
He titled it 'The World of Peries'. "Fifty
years of making films...it has been a long, long pilgrimage. Life
and my people have been very good to me. I hope that through my
films I am giving something back to them," Lester summed up
talking to Bikram Singh. Reviving
a book club It is obviously
because of the interest shown by readers that Godage Publishers
have decided to revive the Godage Book Club. At a recent book launch,
a leaflet distributed among those present invited everyone to join
the Club. It is also intended to renew the membership of earlier
members. Once membership is secured, each member will be issued
with a membership card, which will entitle him or her to obtain
a 25% discount on Godage publications. A once and
for all payment of Rs 50 will entitle anyone to be a life member
of the Club. Those who are already members need not pay. They are
requested to mention their membership number on the application. It's indeed
a welcome start and is bound to boost the reading habit. Judging
from the turnout at book launches, and from the large number of
books released every week, it is obvious that many do read still.
(There is a school of thought that with the advent of electronic
media and rise in the price of books, the reading habit is gradually
dwindling). Even though the publishers lament that not enough copies
are being sold, they continue to put out at least a thousand copies
of each title regularly. Godage Publishers
continue to bag the award for putting out the largest number of
new titles during a single year. For the past so many years, Godages
have won this award at the annual State Literary Awards during the
Sahitya Week. Another publisher
of repute Dayawansa Jayakody has a book launch every Tuesday, generally
at his bookshop. He always extends an open invitation to come and
meet the author, have a chit chat and get his autograph. Vishva Lekha
puts out at least 30 titles during the year and prefers to plan
one big launch for the whole lot. Sarasavi Publishers
too release a fair number, often on a quiet note. There are many
more that continuously release new books. He demanded
perfection Tracing the
early days of his association with Sarachchandra to the University
Mela, (Professor Gunapala Malalasekera was the Mela President then),
Amaradeva recollected how Sarachchandra was instrumental in getting
him in as a music instructor and Premakumara Epitawela as a dance
instructor. He was also invited to compose a song for his early
play 'Pabavati' (1952) and from then on began their musical journey
together. The biggest challenge came when he was invited to compose
music for 'Vessantara' (1981). He elaborated on how it was done,
illustrating with renderings by Mahanama Wickremasinghe, Nissanka
Diddeniya and Menike Attanayake. To Amaradeva,
'Lomahansa' (1985) is a rare type of creative effort in Sinhala
similar to a 'tragedy' in Greek literature. Its language is excellent.
Amaradeva found it difficult to confine himself to nadagam tradition
for its music. He tried out a combination of several. Amaradeva
was also responsible for the music in Sarachchandra's last play,
'Bavakadaturawa' (1990). "Great teacher, you are the type of noble man of learning, erudite scholar, a rasika, a good friend who will not appear even in an aeon. It is a privilege to pay homage to you," Amaradeva concluded. Unrepentantly
uncomplicated? This is probably
as sweet a book about Peradeniya that you would ever read. Daya
de Silva's uncomplicated novel set in the Peradeniya campus before
its loss of innocence, talks of a time in which high tea and holding
hands were almost the high points of academic life. It is a quaint
almost cute flashback into an era in which everything seemed to
be fresh fascinating and yet hugely intimidating for a school leaver
who enters the big bad world (.. which turns out to be a big unspoiled
world though.) "The world is our oyster,'' the new girl on
campus fairly seems to chirp by the second page of the book. Daya
de Silva was in campus during the mid fifties; but yet, this book
is not a first person account. The author
writes of real people though (Sarachchandra, Sirima Kiribamune,
Leslie Panditaratne, the Halpes, Professor Karl Goonwardene), with
a relish and an almost audible gush of awe that is fairly palpable
if not obvious. This does not mean that she eschews the occasional
unbarbed shots at the lecturers of her time. Of the economics and
history lecturer she writes. " He stepped into the Arts theater
podium shabbily dressed, hair unbrushed, and acted as if he had
just consumed a couple of pints of coconut toddy.'' 'Bliss was
it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.' The
author doesn't quite use the heavy yet lusty Wordsworthian, but
maybe she should have, at least in the Author's Note. Really - this
is what de Silva's book is all about. If the book borders on the
mawkishly sentimental sometimes in the prose reserved for both Peradeniya
scenery and Peradeniya academic ambience alike, well one might just
as well say that's the only way the novel remains such a sweet rendition
of Peradeniya's early charms. A book's sweetness demands a certain
innocence in its chapters, and "The Days That We Wished Would
Never End'' makes no excuse for being unrelentingly innocent. It is also
a vista of Peradeniya that one wouldn't gather from the Kaduwa magazine
(now defunct) or from Peradeniya Alumni reunion souvenirs, or from
the treatise on "Peradeniya and a History of University Education
in Sri Lanka". This is Peradeniya in the eyes of the upwardly
mobile in the nascent Bandaranaike era of the hopelessly threatened
pukka sahib - sorry, pukka memsahib. She does have
an eye for detail, and though not exactly a raging Carl Muller,
de Silva recreates the Hilda Tuck shop, Sandhagiri Bakery, Kissing
Bend, and the flight overseas of the sahib professors in the onrush
of Swabasha (Vanden Dreisen, Arasaratnam, Wickramanayake) and a
thousand other things with some felicity. Girlish love-tales and
lovely girlish tales they may be, but the book skims along lithely
on the detail and it is as if a little bit of Peradeniya can do
a lot for a book that's first a "memoir'' of skittish youth
- before it is novel in the truest sense. "We talked seriously
about being happy,'' she says in the last chapter. That sums it
up. The book is about being happy with simple things. Also of course
of putting a lot of it on the record, which nobody seems to have
done before - at least not in English. At the end of it you might
say "shoosh, even this kind of innocence prevails.'' Thoreau notoriously
invoked in Walden "simplify simplify simplify.'' The charms
of Peradeniya used to be in the simplest things, one learns. By
conveying some of these simple things simply, a book can be very
charming too, or so de Silva proves. |
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Copyright © 2001 Wijeya Newspapers
Ltd. All rights reserved. |
