| SANGAKKARA SPEAKS UP - A different history of cricket and pluralism | |
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Mukul Kesavan http://www.telegraphindia. | |
Kumar Sangakkara’s Cowdrey Lecture delivered at the invitation of the MCC at Lord’s has been widely praised for its outspoken criticism of corruption and political interference in the administration of Sri Lankan cricket. It isn’t hard to see why this part of his lecture seemed newsworthy: active South Asian cricketers don’t make a habit of risking their careers by calling out dysfunctional and dishonest cricket administrators. It is, however, the least interesting passage of a remarkable speech. Sangakkara gives us a history of Sri Lankan cricket, specifically of the three decades that his country has been a full member of the International Cricket Council. This isn’t a second-hand history cribbed from someone else’s chronicle: this is a great batsman’s account of Sri Lankan cricket’s coming of age. As if this weren’t ambitious enough, Sangakkara’s account of his country's cricketing evolution sets it firmly in its political context: Sri Lanka’s bloody communal divisions and its civil war. The narrative style he uses to tell his story is the first-person memoir, so by the time the speech ends, it is at once a cricketer’s prescription and a citizen’s creed. With a self-awareness that is rare amongst post-colonial elites, Sangakkara emphasizes the comprador origins of cricket in Sri Lanka. Till the late 20th century, representative cricket in Sri Lanka was monopolized by a tiny, anglicized collaborating class, institutionally represented by half-a-dozen private schools that socialized the children of Sri Lanka’s ruling elite into English. One of Sangakkara’s themes is the way in which Sri Lankan cricketers shook off the orthodoxy drilled into them by colonial public schools and found a way of channelling the idiosyncratic flair that he sees as Sri Lankan cricket’s signature style. Till the Nineties, says Sangakkara trenchantly, Sri Lanka produced talented cricketers who lost with grace. “What we needed at the time was a leader. A cricketer from the masses who had the character, the ability and above all the courage and gall to change a system, to stand in the face of unfavourable culture and tradition, unafraid to put himself on the line for the achievement of a greater cause. This much awaited messiah arrived in the form of an immensely talented and slightly rotund Arjuna Ranatunga.” I allowed myself a small shudder of delight at the thought of Sangakkara saying this in a lecture about the spirit of cricket to the guardians of cricketing decorum at the MCC, since Ranatunga pretty much tore up Auntie Mary(lebone)’s manual of cricketing etiquette in the course of an eventful career as Sri Lanka’s captain. From wagging his finger at the umpire, Ross Emerson, when he no-balled Muralitharan for chucking to turning his lawyers loose on the ICC when it tried to fine him, Ranatunga did everything he could to intimidate people that he thought were trying to push Sri Lanka around... and he succeeded. As a spectator I thought he was magnificent when he drew a line near the stumps and forced the grandstanding Ross Emerson to stand where he, Ranatunga, wanted him to, after he had no-balled Murali, so it’s good to know that Sangakkara sees him as the man who turned Sri Lankan cricket around. The spirit of cricket comes in many distillations and the sort that Ranatunga dispensed was a potent brew. Sangakkara is so well-spoken, so much the fluent barrister, that the MCC’s membership embraced him as one of their own and rose to give him a standing ovation. What they didn’t realize was that they were applauding a speech about the spirit of cricket in which that smiling enforcer, Arjuna Ranatunga, had been formally canonized as Sri Lankan cricket’s patron saint. It was a rhetorical coup. But the great matter of Sangakkara’s speech is the business of living in a violent and divided society during the Eighties and Nineties and the role cricket played in giving Sri Lankans hope through a horrible time. He starts telling this story with a startling flourish: he recalls the anti-Tamil pogrom of 1983 as a time of rapt happiness. He was six years old at the time so when Tamil friends of his father and their families came for refuge to Sangakkara’s home, he was delighted because he had friends to play with all day long for many days on end. This vicious, politically sponsored pogrom and the secessionist terror that it helped spawn nearly tore Sri Lanka apart. It was in this uncertain world, a world in which parents travelled in separate buses to make sure that their children weren’t comprehensively orphaned by a random explosion, that Ranatunga gathered the players who would give Sri Lankans something to live for. Sangakkara counts them off: Sanath, the provincial from Matara, Murali, the Tamil from Kandy, Kaluwitharana, Aravinda de Silva, not one them from the posh public schools that had been the nurseries of Sri Lankan cricket, but originals each one, who would go on to win the 1996 World Cup for Sri Lanka and make cricket both a mass sport and Sri Lanka’s national game. But before that happened, something was needed to fuse the team into a single unit and forge a bond between the team and Sri Lanka’s people. That something, of course, was the no-balling of Muralitharan by Darrell Hair on Boxing Day at the Melbourne Cricket Ground in 1995 which rallied all Sri Lankans in collective indignation. It’s this ability to make big schematic connections that makes Sangakkara a compelling historian. In his telling of this story, the World Cup win makes the Sri Lankan team a microcosm of Sri Lanka’s better self: “Our cricket embodied everything in our lives, our laughter and tears, our hospitality our generosity, our music our food and drink. It was normality and hope and inspiration in a war-ravaged island. In it was our culture and heritage, enriched by our myriad ethnicities and religions. In it we were untouched, at least for a while, by petty politics and division. It is indeed a pity that life is not cricket. If it were we would not have seen the festering wounds of an ignorant war.” Sangakkara’s experience of what cricket meant to a small, racked nation and his ability to evoke both the darkness of the time and the role of the team as a kind of beacon, make his belief that Sri Lankan cricketers are the keepers of a sacred trust seem deeply felt, not just inflated windbaggery. The Sri Lankan team in its diversity becomes a blueprint for a pluralist Sri Lanka, and cricket becomes, potentially, an agent of reconciliation at the end of a brutal war. Time and again Sangakkara returns to Murali in his speech, not just as a symbol for a diverse Sri Lanka, but as a moral actor whose extraordinary relief work after the tsunami exemplifies the team’s responsibility to its people. Even the frightening and near-lethal attack on the Sri Lankan team bus in Lahore becomes a way of understanding at first hand the violence suffered by every section of Sri Lankan society during the civil war. It is in the context of this near- religious conception of cricket’s role in the life of his island nation, that Sangakkara attacks the administrators who have milked the game since the World Cup victory in 1996. This isn’t what his political masters in Colombo wanted to hear; already the sports minister has condemned Sangakkara speech and ordered an inquiry into his conduct. Given the controversy and criticism that Channel 4’s film, Sri Lanka’s Killing Fields, has stirred up, the regime of the president, Mahinda Rajapaksa, needs bad publicity like a hole in the head. But having seen disaffected Tamils protesting during Sri Lanka’s English tour, Sangakkara was reminded that a great game, which ought to have been used as a catalyst for national reconciliation, had been reduced to a cash cow for greedy men and was moved to speak up. He ends his speech with a resounding affirmation of cricket as the embodiment of Sri Lanka’s pluralism: “Fans of different races, castes, ethnicities and religions who together celebrate their diversity by uniting for a common national cause. They are my foundation, they are my family. I will play my cricket for them. Their spirit is the true spirit of cricket. With me are all my people. I am Tamil, Sinhalese, Muslim and Burgher. I am a Buddhist, a Hindu, a follower of Islam and Christianity. I am today, and always, proudly Sri Lankan.” Sangakkara almost certainly overstates cricket’s capacity to embody diversity and transcend division. Some might find his quasi-mystical identification with Sri Lankans of all sorts a little over the top. But his speech has one thing going for it: this isn’t Lalit Modi speaking. Or Sharad Pawar. Unlike India’s mute cricketing maestros, too busy counting their money to think about cricket and its connection with the world, this is the testament of a great cricketer trying to be a good citizen. Even (or especially) in Kalyug, that’s reason enough to listen. | |
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This blog is about the entrants in the year 1960, to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ceylon, Colombo. The email address for communications is, 1960batch@gmail.com. Please BOOKMARK this page for easier access later.Photo is the entrance porch of the old General Hospital, Colombo, still in existence. Please use the search box below to look for your requirement.
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Kumar Sangakkara - A voice of the nation - Sri Lanka
Friday, July 22, 2011
Advice of a Professor of Orthopaedics
This is also another story related by Dr.Mark Amerasinghe.
This was at the first lecture by the Professor of Orthopaedics at Liverpool. As he walked in all the post graduate students preparing for the MCh Orthopaedics course stood up. He had the following advice for them:-
‘Sit down gentleman, please sit down. When you all stand up like that it gives me a false sense of importance and it gives you a false sense of security.’
Sayings for Surgeons
In the days of steam-ship travel to UK, Liverpool was the first port of call. Quite a lot of the Medical Post-Graduate trainees trained in and around Liverpool.
Lord Cohen of Birkenhead was Professor of Medicine at Liverpool. Once at a lecture which Dr.Amerasinghe attended Lord Cohen wrote on the blackboard in large letters the following message:-
'Feasibility of an operation, is no indication for it'.
Advice of an old Obstetrician
It was in the 1950s. Dr.Henry Nannayakkara, had recently returned after getting his FRCS and MRCOG from UK to Ceylon. He was attached to the De Soyza Maternity Home, Colombo. He was full of new ideas in early intervention in Obstetrics. One day he was seated in a room next to the Operating Theatre at the DMH with Dr.Caldera the Senior Obstetrician. There was a mango tree with a lot of fruits hanging and a few ripe fruits fallen on the ground below. Dr.Caldera pointed the tree to young Dr. Nannayakkara and told him ' Dr.Nannayakkara, do you see those mango fruits? When the time is ripe they fall down.' That was all Dr.Caldera said and Henry understood.
The DMH story
by Professor H. R. Seneviratne
Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Medicine, University of Colombo. DN Mon Dec 13 2004
Services like everything in life evolve with the passage of time. Similarly Reproductive Health Services in Sri Lanka have evolved to what it is today due to a multitude of events which have occurred over the years. It is recorded in the country's history that from early times royal patronage ensured free health care for our people while maintaining the status of women in high esteem. With the advent of colonial rule, which commenced five hundred years ago, Western type of healthcare was eventually introduced to Sri Lanka.
A landmark event in the progress towards enhanced healthcare was the establishment of the De Soysa Lying-in-Home (the LIH) on December 13th, 1879. The hospital owes its beginning to a philanthropic gesture by Sir Charles Henry de Soysa, a businessman from Moratuwa. He was deeply touched by the plight of women of poor socio-economic status who were deprived of the facility for safe care in a hospital during childbirth. Hence he proceeded to establish a hospital by personal donation of property and funds for their care. The De Soysa Lying-in-Home is the second oldest maternity home in Asia. Since then it has played the lead role in providing for all aspects of healthcare for women and in the training of staff in all grades for this field of work.
During the initial years, maternity services was the main thrust of activities at De Soysa Lying-in-Home. At its commencement it consisted of 22 beds and provided for 52 births during its first year. A decade later the hospital was providing for 425 births annually then on to 1051 in 1909 and 2000 in 1921. The bed strength had now increased to 100. Today this mother of all maternity services in Sri Lanka provides care for over 14,000 maternity cases annually, most of which are of a high-risk nature.
The range of facilities in the hospital developed to include those to treat diseases of the reproductive system while the bed strength has increased to 343.
Along with the expansion of services the staff infrastructure was also developed. Dr. A. M. Fernando was appointed in 1887 as the first Medical Superintendent. The hospital was to see a glorious era of development from 1899 with the appointment of Dr. Murugesar Sinnathambi as its second Medical Superintendent and also as its first qualified specialist. The first caesarean delivery to be performed in Sri Lanka was done at the De Soysa LIH in 1905 and in 1907 the first organised operating theatre was commenced. During his term of office which lasted twenty years Dr. Sinnathambi was instrumental in establishing the De Soysa Lying-in-Home as the premier training institute in midwifery. Thus in addition to providing the clinical services for women's' health, initiating and developing training in midwifery for midwives (1909), Nurses (1916) and in Obstetrics and Gynaecology for medical students (1915) has been the greatest contribution of De Soysa Hospital to the people of Sri Lanka.
By the third decade of the twentieth century changes occurred in the total healthcare structure in Sri Lanka and De Soysa Hospital contributed as a leader in this sphere. These events mainly focused on improving the quality of care, establishing links with the community services and further enhancing its role as a leading institute for training. De Soysa LIH commenced the first Ante Natal Clinic in Asia in 1921. By this time the country was moving towards community based domicilliary healthcare with the organisation of health units and the first such unit was commenced in Kalutara in 1926. The unit provided a template for promotive and preventive healthcare in the country and maternal and child health constituted its main component of activity. Even today it forms the core organisation for Maternal and Child Health (MCH) care services in the country. De Soysa LIH was in the centre of MCH activity at that time as a tertiary care institution as well as the main training institute for all grades of staff.
Major changes were to occur in 1940 when the physical facilities of the hospital were improved with the opening of an administrative building. During that year the hospital was renamed the De Soysa Maternity Home (DMH). Even more significantly along with the commencement of the University of Colombo, the Faculty of Medicine was established and with it the appointment of the first Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. This event brought university education in Sri Lanka in general and medical training in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in particular to the forefront. In addition to clinical care and training, clinical research also gradually commenced. Professor G. A. Wickremasuriya's work on the severe complications of blood pressure in pregnancy published in the Journal of the Ceylon Branch of the British Medical Association in 1941 is one such example.
The post independence period saw major changes in the facilities for healthcare in the country. The overall expansion of the preventive and curative services included integration of the field and hospital facilities. Maternal mortality was on the decline after the traumatic years of the malaria epidemics in the 1930s and 1940s. Free education was established and family planning was introduced with the commencement of the Family Planning Association of Sri Lanka. The establishment of a second tertiary care maternity hospital in Colombo namely the Castle Street Hospital for Women (CSHW) in 1950 eased the burden on the De Soysa Maternity Home which was renamed the De Soysa Hospital for Women (DSHW) that year. The hospital by then was a fully established teaching institute consisting of three specialist units headed by consultants from the Ministry of Health and an academic unit headed by the Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology along with the specialist academic staff who serve as honorary consultants.
From then onwards the hospital has continued to provide routine health services, training and research into Obstetrics and Gynaecology while introducing new techniques to the country for more advanced care.
In 1979 combined medical clinics were introduced so that women with medical disorders would be cared for jointly by a specialist in Obstetrics and Gynaecology and a specialist in clinical medicine. This introduced the concept of sub specialisation in maternity care. De Soysa Hospital for Women now has such services of specialist academics in Reproductive Medicine Endocrinology, Perinatology and Specialists in Neonatology etc.
Along with the introduction of a wider range of services, efforts have been made to improve the quality of care despite meagre resources.
The establishment of the Intensive Care Units for the mothers and that for the new born babies has provided major improvement in the care of high risk and life threatening situations. DSHW was declared a "Baby Friendly Hospital" by the UNICEF and the Government of Sri Lanka in 1992 and received the "Taiki Akimoto 5S Award" in 2003 for the bet implementation of "5S" in the service sector. These achievements have been possible due to the joint efforts of generations of all grades of staff of the institution, the members of the de Soysa family, the volunteers serving in the Hospital Welfare Committee and the leadership provided by the hospital administrators.
What is the role of the De Soysa Hospital for Women in serving the public of this country in the future? Like a true mother it has survived many crises from within and without. It has served the people of our country continuously even during times of national turmoil. It still has a leadership role to play in introducing more advanced facilities, improving quality of care and providing for training of care providers of the future. May those who serve in this unique institution be blessed with clarity of mind, a high level of dedication, physical strength and joy in service to our nation all of which is needed to take De Soysa Hospital for Women through the future years as the mother of maternity services in Sri Lanka.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Kapu
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