Features | Online edition of Daily News

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Home

dailynews
ONLINE

Celebrating Media

Nalaka Gunawardene and Vindana Ariyawansa

The United Nations General Assembly has declared May 3 of every year to be World Press Freedom Day. It is promoted and coordinated by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation or UNESCO, in which Sri Lanka is an active member. It seeks “to raise awareness of the importance of freedom of the press and remind governments of their duty to respect and uphold the right to freedom of expression enshrined under Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”.

The 2011 World Press Freedom Day main celebration is being held in Washington, DC, USA from May 1 to 3. The theme of this year’s event is 21st Century Media: New Frontiers, New Barriers. It is an attempt to affirm fundamental principles of media freedom in the digital age - the ability of citizens to voice their opinions and access diverse, independent information sources.

To celebrate the role of media in society, we start off with questions related to the colourful history of our own media.

1. He joined Ceylon Daily News as Assistant Editor in 1950, and soon became its News Editor and began to make a national reputation as the author of two popular columns. ‘Cursory Glances,’ exposed graft, nepotism and maladministration in the Government while ‘Bouquets and Brickbats’ became the most widely read satire on Ceylon’s social and political moves.

In 1952, aged 32, he became Editor of the Ceylon Observer, the youngest Editor appointed to the oldest newspaper in Asia (founded in 1834). Later he went on to have an illustrious international career with global media as well as the United Nations. Who was he?

2. D B Dhanapala (1905 – 1971) was a giant in Sri Lankan journalism who left his mark in both English and Sinhala newspapers. He was well known to a generation of Daily News readers for his columns, written under the pseudonym ‘Janus’, and later founded Lankadeepa newspaper from the Times of Ceylon publishing house and Davasa from Independent Newspapers (both companies now defunct). His profiles of leading personalities of the time were much admired by readers. Some of these were later collected and published as a book. What was its title?

3. Media includes not just newspapers and magazines but also radio and television channels, and websites covering news and current affairs. The Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation (SLBC), formerly Radio Ceylon, is the oldest radio station in South Asia, and started life as ‘Colombo Radio’ in 1925.

The first experimental radio broadcast in took place in 1923 when gramophone music was played from a tiny room at the Ceylon Telegraph Office using a transmitter built with radio equipment from a captured German submarine! Name the Chief Engineer of the Telegraph Department at the time, considered the Father of Broadcasting in Ceylon – he also founded the Ceylon Wireless Club with English and Ceylonese radio enthusiasts.

4. When India and Pakistan played one semi-final in the World Cup Cricket 2011 in Mohali, India, on 30 March 2011, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh invited his Pakistani counterpart to watch the game with him and then had informal talks over dinner. Who is the Prime Minister of Pakistan who was so honoured and entertained?

5. A group of Sri Lankan scientists have recently introduced to the annals of zoology a new genus of frogs that is endemic to the island, thus boosting the country’s image as an amphibian hotspot. The new group name literally means ‘tree climber’ in ancient Sinhala and Sanskrit, which is appropriate as the adults of these are tree-inhabiting frogs rarely come to the ground, even laying their eggs on trees on overhanging foam nests.

What is the new genus of frogs? Definition of a new genus is a rare occurrence, and for a vertebrate group, even rarer. The task of separating these species into a new genus is indeed complex and demanding.

6. Located in south-west Sri Lanka, the Sinharaja forest is the country’s last viable area of primary tropical rainforest. More than 60 per cent of the trees are endemic (found nowhere else in the world) and many are considered rare. There is much endemic wildlife, especially birds, but the reserve is also home to over half of Sri Lanka’s endemic species of mammals and butterflies, as well as many kinds of insects, reptiles and rare amphibians. The forest covers land that falls within administrative boundaries of two Provinces. Which are they?

7. The well known Sinhala folk drama Nari Bena was first staged in November 1961 as a school play (by Thurstan College Drama Society), and continues to be popular even 50 years later. Kumatada Sobaniye Kandulu Salanne, the top hit song in Nari Bena, still retains its appeal, as does another song ‘Ahela mahe mal pipila balanna hari lassanai’. Who produced Nari Bena?

8. In February 2011, the Indian educationist and artist who created the country’s best known indigenous comic books, Amar Chitra Katha (ACK), died aged 81. Launched in 1967, and combining learning and entertainment, Amar Chitra Katha books now sell about three million copies a year in English and more than 20 Indian languages. Over time, they have sold more than 100 million copies. Who founded Amar Chitra Katha?

9. Some countries have commercially exploited their Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD). One example is .tv (dot tv), which is now widely used for websites of television broadcasters or television/entertainment industry purposes. Which Pacific island nation was originally assigned .tv as its country domain name?

10. After Yuri Gagarin’s maiden spaceflight, the Soviet Union scored a major victory in its ‘Great Space Race’ over the United States. The American space agency NASA scrambled to get one of its own nationals into space, which they succeeded in doing on 5 May 1961, when the launched the Freedom 7 capsule atop a Mercury-Redstone rocket. Who on that day became the first American in space with a 15-minute, sub-orbital flight?

11. Along with Mark Hamill and Joe Mantegna, she is one of only three actors to play both themselves and a fictional character in long running TV cartoon show The Simpsons. She supplied the voice of Maggie Simpson in the Season Four episode ‘Lisa’s First Word’, and portrayed herself in the Season Four episode ‘Krusty Gets Kancelled’. Who is this famous actress?

12. This scientist and theologian had to flee to the USA in 1791 from England when his books on chemistry caused uproar. He founded not only English Unitarianism, but helped found the modern basis of chemistry by discovering Oxygen (which he called ‘dephlogisticated air’) and explaining Photosynthesis, the process with which plants convert the Sun’s energy into food. Who is he?

13. Born into a poor family in a Ukranian village in 1894, he served as a political commissar in the Red Army during the Russian civil war, 1918-21. In 1939, he became a full member of the Soviet Politburo, and rose in the ranks to become Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964. He is remembered for backing the progress of the early Soviet space program, and for being responsible for Cuban missile crisis in 1962. Who was he?

14. The Indian Premier League, better known by its abbreviation IPL, is a professional league for Twenty20 cricket competition in India where one team can play up to 4 international players at a time. It is currently contested by 10 teams consisting of players from around the world. In 2011, IPL became the first sporting event ever to be broadcast live on YouTube. Name the two new franchises which joined the IPL fourth edition in 2011.

15. A mutiny by Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) soldiers against their British officers on this group of islands in May 1942 during the Second World War failed after it was suppressed within an hour. The mutineers tried to seize control of the islands and disable the British garrison.

It was claimed that the mutineers also planned to transfer the islands to the Empire of Japan. Many mutineers were punished, and the three leaders were executed. They were the only British Commonwealth servicemen to be executed for mutiny during the Second World War. Name these islands in the Indian Ocean. Answers will be published next week.