Small step that goes a long way

Yesterday the Sri Lanka Police took a small step. It started recording complaints in Tamil at four Police stations in the metropolitan area - Welikada, Kohuwela, Dehiwela and Mount Lavinia.

Though this is a small step, it marks the beginning of a move to rectify a long-standing injustice. Now Tamil-speaking citizens could go to these Police stations and make complaints or record statements in their mother tongue. Till now they had to make use of a friend or some one else, who would translate the recorded statements for them to know whether it was correctly recorded or not.

This small step goes much further to build and consolidate inter-racial harmony than a thousand speeches on the benefits of that harmony. The fact that it took more than sixty years after independence to begin this process of using Tamil language in recording statements shows the extent of indifference and lethargy of the bureaucracy and the politicians. What has been started should be continued to encompass all Police stations in which there are citizens who are conversant only with Tamil.

Had our education authorities cared to teach Tamil to the Sinhala students and Sinhala to the Tamil students we would have a population that is bilingual. Anyway it would take at least a decade to make such bilingual education available throughout the school system. Till then the government has to give bilingual proficiency to its employees under a crash program.

It should be mentioned here that the government has already rewarded many of its employees who have passed the Tamil Language proficiency tests. However, it has not made it compulsory for those who pass the test to work in that language. The result has been a waste of State resources for rewarding a set of employees whose only aim in reaching the minimum proficiency level was the mercenary benefit. Unfortunately there was no system to check whether these employees had lost the proficiency later for want of practice. Language ability if not used withers away as a knife unused would rust.

During the colonial days when the language of administration was English, the Sinhala and Tamil citizens were at a disadvantage in transacting business with the government. Though Sinhala and Tamil are both official languages there is still much to be done to implement the official language policy in relation to Tamil.

As President Mahinda Rajapaksa has stressed several times the need today in the 21st Century is to make our population conversant in all three languages - Sinhala, Tamil and English. It is up to the educationists and policy planners to implement the President's wish. That is necessary not because it was the President's wish but because in the 21st Century trilingual abilities will make our citizens more suited to face its challenges.

Blind leading the blind

Four Indian astrologers on a tourist visa to Sri Lanka have been found forecasting what is in store for clients on a fee. They were arrested by Immigration authorities for violating visa regulations.

According to the authorities they would be blacklisted and deported to their home country. What interests us here is how this quartet that claimed to predict the future of others failed to read their own future?

Another question that interests any discerning reader would be why they had to come to Sri Lanka with a tiny population of 20 million when they had 500 times more opportunities in India which has a population exceeding one billion people.

Perhaps, prophets are not honoured in their own countries!

Or is it that they had more formidable competitors plying the same trade?

In any case judging from the frequent pilgrimages made to India by Sri Lankan politicians and other VIPs to get their future read they would have safely concluded that Sri Lankans are more gullible than Indians when it comes to 'foreign expertise' in the occult sciences.