I read G. Wickramaratne’s  letter under the heading "Amarasekera and the monolingual class"(see The Island, 23 March, 2009) and felt very sorry for my country. Even after half a century and more of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s "Sinhala Only" and its murderous aftermath, we have people like Battaramulla’s Wickremaratne talking of Amarasekara’s role in bringing youth to the forefront via the pseudo nationalist route! This despite April 1971 and the worse bloodbath of the late 1980s.  Some forefront!

Surely  the easier way to get to that front is by being competitive and entering the mainstream for which purpose a sound education is imperative. And a part of such an education should ideally include, among other themes, the acquisition of knowledge of as many languages and cultures of the world as possible together with a solid awareness of our own. We need to know Sinhala and Tamil and be familiar with our own multi-cultural heritage as well as learn at least  English, the most widely used international language of today. If we are able to pick up Chinese, Hindi, Arabic and any other language along the way and something of the cultures of those lands so much the better.

Like Bandaranaike, Amarasekera is one of those who reached that enriching and rewarding frontier.  Both of them had the best of both worlds, paved the way for their children to have the same, and ironically contributed handsomely to deprive our rural youth the benefit of such a fruitful encounter with the world outside our little island. It is the failed Bandaranaike language policies that Amarasekera and Wickremaratne continue to seek to foist on our youth. We must instead do all at our command to empower our youth, rural and urban alike, to get out of the deep pit the Bandaranaikes and Amarasekeras and their kind have pushed them into while ensuring a vastly different future for their respective progeny. 

Wickremaratne  mentions but two good examples of those who are outstanding victims of  "Sinhala Only"- Mahinda Rajapaksa and Wimal Weerawansa. The latter, we know, did not know until very recently that Hemingway is neither Tolstoy nor Chekov ! ! Former President R.Premadasa, on the other hand, unlike Rajapaksa and Weerawansa, but like Amarakeerthi, strove manfully to overcome the awful disadvantages of marginalisation. 

Amarakeerthi is an excellent example of an empowered youth who has resolutely pulled himself out of that pit referred to above through hard work. He competed for and won a Fulbright scholarship on his merits unlike at least one Bandaranaike who, we are aware, went to university overseas only because of his family background. Wickremaratne, by the way, should apply for a Fulbright scholarship and gauge for himself/herself if he/she could secure one on a platter.

Upon completion of his Master’s degree, on the basis of his innate ability and brilliant performance at his Master’s degree, Amarakeerthi obtained funding for his doctoral studies. After successfully completing his tertiary studies, he taught Sinhala at the prestigious Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. An achievement that far surpasses anything Weerawansa or his other Rathu Sahodarays have done to-date.

Rather than calling Amarakeerthi names, Wickramaratne and those other pseudo-nationalists like him  should use Amarakeerthi as a model for other youth to follow. And if he wishes to disagree with Amarakeerthi’s judgement of Amarasekera’s creative writing and politics, he should meet the arguments made by Amarakeerthi instead of resorting to the all too familiar pastime of name-calling and the hurling of personal abuse. But, then, these precisely are the routine tools of pseudo-nationalists like Wickramaratne. They appear congenitally incapable of any better.

Indeed Gunadasa Amarasekera is right. The future of this country lies with our educated rural youth, educated being the operative word. These members of our rural intelligentsia must receive the best possible education as Amarakeerthi has. We need to shed the hypocrisy of the past even at this late tragic stage  and rescue our youth from the "Nimal Sirs and Sunil Sirs" who seek to teach them an English they do not themselves know, in the guise of seeking to contribute to the education and upliftment of these youth. For far too long the members of our rural intelligentsia have been marginalised. It is time they are truly liberated by real prophets instead of the phonies within the ranks of the JVP/JHU and the other sundry champions of Jathika Chintanaya.

Such a task is as noble and as urgent as rescuing our citizens from the nightmare of the LTTE. It is perhaps with this intention that our intrepid President Rajapaksa has sought to revive the proper teaching of English and  IT in our land instead of parroting, a la Battaramulla’s Wickramaratne, the ancient hackneyed battle cries of the failed Marxists. It is not the hegemony exerted by the Anglophile elitist class ( where are they to be found today? ) that is presently keeping the educated rural masses from emancipation. It is the privileged urban-based peudo-nationalists like Bandaranaike (of old), Amarasekeras and Wickramaratnes and others like them that are doing so today. These perhaps well meaning but misguided people are responsible to a great extent for the bloody tragedy of April 1971 and the late 1980s. They should at least now wash this blood clean off their hands and begin to think afresh.

How I wish Gunadasa Amarasekera had stuck to dentistry and creative writing instead of dabbling in politics. We might then all have had better dental care and a richer contemporary literature in Sinhala. And we would also not have had Battaramulla’s Wickramaratnes bad mouthing self-made men like Dr.Liyanage Amarakeerthi.