Fake Pearls and Sprigs of Basil

"Oh dear, what are Pearl, Basil and their tribe going to do when both Government and opposition are led by patriots, nationalists, who are anti-separatist, anti-terrorist and anti-LTTE and stand for strong leadership of a sovereign Sri Lanka?"

by Dr Dayan Jayatilleka

(September 18, Singapore City, Sri Lanka Guardian) Poor Pearl Thevanayagam. She writes:” If you know a smattering of Gramsci, Trotsky and Tchaikovsky...” She obviously does not know that one cannot know a smattering of Tchaikovsky because he was a composer of music, not a writer! Furthermore she does not know that you cannot earn a PhD by writing a 10,000 word thesis, and that even an Honours degree at Peradeniya needs a 10,000 word dissertation!

By the way, Mervyn de Silva did complete his degree. Pearl claims that he didn’t. One thing that Mervyn as editor insisted on was that facts should be checked and double checked. A lesson not learned by Pearl. Pearl should have also checked Tchaikovsky. At least on Wikipedia.

Poor Basil Fernando. What is he going to do this time next week, when the government is in the hands of Mahinda and the opposition and perhaps the UNP are led by (Basil’s other villain) R Premadasa’s son, who is quoted by the Daily Mirror this morning as saying “I would take my father the late President R. Premadasa as an example. He is unmatched by anyone in his amazing development programmes that transformed the country.”

Oh dear, what are Pearl, Basil and their tribe going to do when both Government and opposition are led by patriots, nationalists, who are anti-separatist, anti-terrorist and anti-LTTE and stand for strong leadership of a sovereign Sri Lanka?

This pair has a problem with my citing Kalana Senaratne and Nira Wickremasingha as examples of serious, academically credentialed un-hysterical critics of the 18th amendment, with whose basic points I broadly agree.

As for my ‘scholarly credentials’, if ever I needed to remind myself of them, I only need to re-read the reviews of my book by Emeritus Professor Sebastian Balfour of the LSE, in the Bulletin of Latin American Research Volume 27, Issue 4, pages 597–599, October 2008, or the one by Prof Clive Foss, Dept of History, Georgetown University, in the flagship journal of Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Relations), International Affairs 85: 1, 2009.

Please refer to previous article:
Looney critics are anytime preferable to embedded, and runaway, intellectuals Dr. Dayan