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by Aravinda

Few will contest the fact that during the last decade or so there has been a phenomenal expansion of the mass media. Newspapers have sprouted as never before, view air waves have been opened up and the Idiot Box has sprung a variety of new faces. Accompanying this expansion of the mass media industry has been the emergence of the media men and women themselves as the stars of a new celebrity pantheon. They have started occupying the places which were once strictly reserved for film stars even as film stars have increasingly come to invade the field of television. A by-product of this twin phenomenon has been the emergence of the journalist as author. Novels, memoirs, anthologies of essays and even works of research are now emerging from the pens of journalists, once the strict preserve of venerable writers and men of letters.

Among these recent authors, however, Sundara Nihathamani de Mel stands out. By now he has brought out two volumes of his column 'Manige Theeruwa' which has appeared in the Sunday 'Divaina' and 'Lakbima' newspapers and cover the period between 1989 and today. Based on the choicest event of the week these columns offer a vivid and witty commentary on the convoluted politics of a bizarre time and the foibles, idiosynocracies and absurdities of individual politicians of all complexions.

De Mel's first encounters with columns was when his editor at the 'Divaina' Edmund Ranasinghe asked him to try his hand at translating and localising the columns of Art Buchwald and a columnist writing at that time for the magazine 'India Today'. But if this early experiences have given his columns their satirical flavour Sundara de Mel has gone beyond these boundaries and built on his own. If Buchwald's milieu was that of Washington power de Mel transfers his subjects to an essentially domestic milieu. Most of his columns although they discuss political and social issues emerge from conversations and encounters with his wife and son, his nuclear family.

The present volume covers the period 1994 to 2001 and at a time of a General Election can be profitably read with great amusement for the foibles and the oddities of the past seven years. They bring to mind as no political commentary or history can do what an odd and comic game politics can be.

Nobody escapes the whip of his lampooning. In the best traditions of western column writing he takes on Chandrika Kumaratunga and Ranil Wickremesinghe alike and I liked particularly his piece about the love-hate relationship between the two written in the form of a nursery story.

Sundara de Mel is also a perceptive critic of middle-class manners and mores in this consumerists age when self-aggrandisement has become the name of the game. He pokes fun at the small evasions and self-delusions with which we hedge in and enclose our lives each day.

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