By Vishwamithra –
“What lies behind us, and what lies before us, are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
One has a civilization of more than two thousand five hundred years; the other, as Oscar Wilde said, has no civilization. In the year 1293, Marco Polo sailed homeward bound from China, pausing at Ceylon along the way; he wrote thus: “On leaving the island of Andaman and steering for 1,000 miles a little South of West, the traveler reaches the island of Ceylon. This, for its actual size, is better circumstanced than any other island in the world.”
Nevertheless, the dissimilarities are more pronounced than the similarities between the two countries. One might wonder, what an absurd attempt to compare America to Ceylon! Yet what’s apparent and still appealing to human curiosity in this twenty first century is breathtakingly remarkable. At the same time when considering the preposterous religious-racial beliefs on the one hand and their consumption of common sense on the other, the two countries and their respective sociopolitical stances deserve critical analysis.
Majority in a minority thinking frame
Majorities of both, the United States of America and Ceylon, suffer from an incorrigible complex which usually is attributed to minorities in the context of relative numbers. An overwhelming seventy five percent (75%) of the American population is white; fourteen percent (14%) is African American while six percent (6%) represents Asian (all Asians counted as one single grouping).
In Sri Lanka, Seventy five percent (75%) is Sinhalese while the Tamil population, both Sri Lankan and Indian Tamil, constitute a mere fifteen percent (15%). The similarity is so stark and clear. But how each majority community, represented by a specific political coalition, is responding to …read more
Source:: Colombo Telegraph
