Kumar David is misguided in his writing on Aelian de Silva in your issue of 21 September 2008. ‘It is "putting an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations drowning in heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor and ancient and venerable prejudices" that lies at the root of the conflict between RMB and the Silvas’ This can be written only by someone entirely ignorant of Aelian de Silva’s writings and his other work during the last few years, in which I have known him well. I have not read Nalin de Silvawriting wherefore I cannot say anything about him.

There are two objectives that Aelian de Silva has been after. First, he wants to meet the challenge of enabling ordinary Sinhala speaking people to understand even the elements of modern science and technology. We have two hundred years of English teaching here and my guess is that another two hundred years of that effort will not bring English to ordinary men and women of this country. We are mighty happy about the achievements of men like Kumar David in modern science and technology but we are equally unhappy that ordinary people cannot see some of the beauty in modern science and marvel meaningfully at achievements in modern technology.

At a more rudimentary level, Aelian de Silva has always worried that ordinary people must know and understand the risks in, say, wiring her house or using LPG to cook in his kitchen. Every time a shop goes up in an electrical fire or an LPG tank explodes, Aelian de Silva would call me to bemoan the absence of elementary precautions, because of ignorance, that may have avoided that disaster. He speaks with great fondness of booklets that in the 1950s that explained to the average person in Britain elementary things about electrical wiring and dangers from gas in their homes. He started writing on science and technology in Sinhala, in part, to address these problems. He immediately came up against problems in vocabulary and forms of expression to say what he wanted to say.

Many young engineers who taught science and technology in Sinhala came to him with the same problems. The most recent crop is people trying to write software in Sinhala. (I face similar problems writing economics in Sinhala. If you want to face real incomprehension, read Sinhala writing on post-modernism.) Fortunately for us, Aelian de Silva is an exceptionally competent scholar in Sinhala. His endeavours in this direction are summed up in the dictionary ‘Sinhalen Sipyuru Vadan’ (2002). It is open for every one to criticize and improve upon. If his work is of the naisHe ture that Kumar David identified, why would Aelian de Silva build so magnificent a bridge between modern science and technology in English on one side and Sinhala on the other? He received no material benefit of any kind for his labours.

His second objective is to give some self-confidence to our engineers that they are capable of finding solutions to local problems with the use of the first principles that they learnt at university. He has much experience working with engineers who often go back to England seeking solutions to local problems when some thoughtfulness would provide more suitable and cheaper local solutions. They need the self-confidence that they can find the solutions here by themselves. The frequent example he gives is that we cannot design and build a hoe (a mammoty) to suit the various soils in our land and that we have to import it from Sheffield. Another telling example (this mine) is that we have built large dams from 1950 (Gal Oya) and a fair number after that and large structures across Mahaveli. Yet we must depend on foreigners when we have a problem in a leak in a dam or when we need to design one. The Chinese built the Three Gorges Dam (a far larger enterprise than in our country) a few years ago and I expect them to become dam builders to the world pretty soon.

The tactic Aelian de Silva uses to give that self-confidence is to draw attention to the marvellous structures built by their ancestors some 2,000, 1,500 or a 1,000 years ago. The huge brick structures have stood thousands of years without crumbling on themselves. He points to techniques used in Anuradhapura to protect tall structures from lightning, the marvellous bisokotuva, the amazingly low gradient of canals carrying water long distances by gravity. He mentions that Rajasinghe’s smiths copied Portuguese guns excellently. These, he uses to remind us that people who lived in this country at some stage were innovators in their own right and that we must take heart from them now to do even simple things on our own. His attitude is no form of atavism.

Yes, science is global but each person must learn about and practice it locally. In our country we need a knowledge of science and technology in Sinhala/Tamil (I have not written about Tamil literature because I don’t know about it.) not to proceed to Timbaktu to debate advances in quantum electro-dynamics but simply to live as literate citizens.