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Kulatunge judges the nation
Disorder in Sri Lanka By K.M.B. Kulatunge Nidahas Publiations
There cannot be much disorder in Sri Lanka with this orderly book.
Justice Kulatunge claims that the practice of prosecuting editors for criminal defamation is one that should be stopped. From order into disorder — criminal defamation is now indeed out of the statute books since that thought.

It does not give much ballast to a nation that struggles to come out of its state of underdevelopment, to keep focused on its inadequacies. But gloom and doom is almost an ex-judge's stock in trade — this not said pejoratively. And painting gloom and doom is a trait shared both by pen and wig -- journalist and judge alike.

This judge talks of rambuttans, Prabhakaran and bigamy. Its gloom and doom with a gamboling quality of irreverence. Kulatunge has always been irreverent anyway, and impish -- even though we should thank the deities in advance that he is not a judge anymore and cannot make any Supreme Court order holding this publication in contempt for this review.

In Kulatunge's orderly Sri Lanka, Buddhists cannot turn Muslim in order to have more than a single wife — and we see that Kulatunge is a gentleman and judge. He is rooted in principle, and in the fading virtue of keeping a society moored to civilized norms.

But it's his black-coatedness that eventually seems to give his thoughts a somewhat mothballed quality. Why shouldn't the reader assume that this judge-in-retirement is one who tries to live out his retirement trying to correct society in some crotchety way?

But yet, Kulatunge can be excused from being damned in this way. He gets his teeth into a problem. Communalism, he says, is a result of the solutions that are meant to keep communities together. True, but Kulatunge's own solution seems similarly problematic.

He sees the link language as a solution -- teach Sinhala and teach Tamil to those whose mother tongues are Tamil and Sinhala respectively. Such linkages are not easy as the links that his book seems to make in its mapping of the Sri Lankan disorderly condition. Kulatunge's chapters represent a chain that is coupled linked and de-linked to the point of boggling the mind; Kulatunge goes from talking about elders' rights to the subjects of SriLankan airlines and the LTTE and Norway.

It's the gems that Kulatunge unearths at random that somehow makes this book one that should be red-marked by a speed reader -- and then given to the collector of significant trivia, even though we are aware of the oxymoronic quality of that reference. Example:

A newspaper once claimed that a certain officer of the Attorney General's Department left in a huff, because he wanted the department to maintain its independence. But the story that appeared in the paper never referred to the officer by name — and so says Kulatunge "the man should be saved from his friends (…..in the media.)''

That's to give in its crispest form the contemporary Lankan condition. It's hypocrisy, oiled by loads of incompetence, which holds the hypocrisy together like a hair gel.

It's certainly clichetic to say that Kulatunge is part of a disappearing breed, but he is the authentic article being a scholar who didn't collect his letters for display.

It contrasts well with the younger set of NGO academicians who are coming out of a cocooned self-congratulatory academic milieu.

Kulatunge would have stood out like a sore thumb if he got into that set of jet setters and junket lovers. He may be mothballed by the standards of that kind of academic junkie, but Kulatunge packs some punch — and even his somewhat eccentrically inclined ramblings have a stamp of authenticity that modern day PhDs and parrots should desire. - RA

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