Morning Spice by Ginger
The hour to repay our debt to Lylie Godridge

Ginger was particularly grieved to hear that Lylie Godridge the man with a golden voice and almost a divine gift to this country was ill and needed dialysis and so his fans and friends were setting up a fund to help pay for this rather costly process that he needs thrice a week. He gave of his great talent without ever asking a red cent for it as far as I know. Ginger remembers when his mother was dying of cancer he and his friends got Lylie to come and sing to her. He cheered her up considerably and when his father tried to slip something into his pocket he firmly refused him saying his voice was a gift of god and he never charged for god's work. He could have been a rich man if he wanted to.

Lylie was perhaps at his best when he was a very young man and was one of the ''Three Crochets'' which included Ram Sivalingam an impish and likeable chap in the late forties and early fifties. His deep rich voice was ideal for Negro spirituals and the type of song he sang. Later he switched to opera and other types of singing and lost a little of the boom there was to his singing but even so he was among the best this country ever produced. All lovers of western music owe Lylie a debt of gratitude to his contribution to music here and there could be no better way of doing this than by giving what they could spare to this fund. The number of the fund was given in another weekly.

Today's cars
They talk a lot of today's cars. Their speed their comfort and their economy. Somehow I don't see much of a metamorphosis in the cars I see on the roads today. If they had gained in one respect they have lost in another. I got into a friend's car the other day and realized when he brought me home that I may not be able to ease my bulky frame out of it because the seats were so low.

Recently I was told that there was a headon collision between two cars that were supposed to be about the safest in the world. (They were the same make). One occupant died instantly air bags and crumple zones notwithstanding. Have the new cars come a long way from the fifties and sixties except perhaps that they have ACs. Give me my old clapped out Riley any day. It was sheer fun driving it.

Abuse of power
What happened to Leonid Brezhnev's daughter perhaps is a clear example of the consequences of the abuse of power. Galina Brezhnev died at the age of sixty nine recently and not in the manner the daughter of a Russian political leader should have crossed that great divide. She set a pace that was her downfall. She was fond of high living and the dive was painful

At the time she died she was in a mental asylum close to Moscow. She was considered an alcoholic and two of her husbands were involved in scandals that brought the family image to disrepute. Her lover a circus man was caught smuggling and a few years later her third husband was convicted of bribery.

Useless Idlers

The views regarding the pensioners expressed by our President in the course of her address at the Annual General Meeting of the Sri Lanka Administrative Officers' Association recently, make us quite disconcerted as the pensioners' only means of survival is going to hang in the balance.

We, pensioners have been referred to as a big burden to her government due to the reason that 25 per cent of the national expenditure has to be utilized for the maintenance of the pensioners who practically do no work other than eating, drinking and idling. But sad to say four years ago we were spoken of as respectable senior citizens and heard all kinds of promises to redress our grievances being given from election platforms.

These rosy pledges included the removal of multifarious pension anomalies which make us utterly frustrated and miserable in the evening of our life.

Some of the ano-malies that the pensioners subjected to are like, school principals retired before 1985 drawing a monthly pension of a little over Rs. 3000/-, just about Rs. 100/- a day. (A daily paid lobourer gets Rs. 250/- to Rs. 350/-, and assistant teachers who retired quite recently draw pensions three times over. I know there are retired Administrative Officers who had held very high positions in the respective governments (coveted CCS personalities) now drawing a pension around Rs. 4500. A retired teacher with my qualification and with the same service, (35 years) but who retired quite recently now draws a pension three times mine.

Regarding such chronic injustices, some "Pandits" argue that the particular government which was in power at the time of the anomalies were created, is responsible for such discrepancies. This kind of unfair theorizing is actually like adding insult to injury. I believe such injustices can never be rectified until our pensions are related in some reasonable manner to the existing Cost of Living Index.

During the good old days, we were attracted to government service mainly because of the old-age pension. When I was appointed as an English Assistant Teacher in 1951, my salary was Rs. 60/- and living allowance Rs. 70/- from that Rs. 3.50 was deducted for provident fund, so my take home pay was Rs. 126.50.

Today we hear that the very same pension scheme is being misrepresented as some unnecessary expenditure which could gainfully be diverted to the economic development of the country. But the earlier strategy of the government was to save 30 per cent of the national expenditure by bringing the futile north-east war to an end. Now it seems that this excellent plan has mysteriously been changed over to lay the cruel hands on the tottering pensioners, relevant to the most unreasonable warnings hurled at them.

Pensioners are already struggling for survival under the vagaries of highest ever cost of living, the index of which was 2347.5 for June 98. Most of the old pensioners are invalids as they are suffering from some ailment or other. Under these circumstances, all the essential items medicines, invalid-foods, provisions, vegetables, fruits, fish, meat and eggs, have gone up in price beyond our reach. All vitamins have gone up in price by 40% and some drugs are not available anywhere, one example is "Nificard" a capsule prescribed for heart patients and substitutes are not effective as the prescribed brand.

A packet of non-fat Anchor is Rs. 105/- the earlier price of which was Rs. 95.

I need 4 packets a month and the tax on that item alone comes to Rs. 40/-. The prices of all these items have been increased under the pretext of GST. In such a setting what moral right as there leaders have to talk of doing away with pension or reducing it?

Worried Pensioner,
Kottawa.

A response to Mr. Noel Fernando

Your article, 'Exploring the Bible as Literature and History' (Island, June 13th, 1998) was discussed in our class on the Bible at our Institute of Spiritual Formation of Asia. We found it very informative as it was put into simple, very readable, language. We concluded that you, seem to be conversant with the subject matter.

We would like, however, to add a few points for your consideration:

(1) Canonicity of the Bible: Today current scholarship has exposed the so-called Council at Jamnia in AD 90 as dubious for the following reasons.

(a) It is not clear whether there was a Rabbinic school or a Jewish synod at Jamnia around the year AD 90.

(b) If there had been such a synod, how come the proposed list of sacred books coming from Jamnia is not mentioned in any Rabbinic writings we know of today.

(c) The fact that the Rabbis in the 3rd century AD were still arguing about the list of sacred books clearly indicates that there was no fixation of the canon in the year AD 90 in Jamnia.

(2) The Sources of the Vulgate Bible: You mentioned that, "the Septuagint was used by Jerome in the 4th and 5th century AD to produce a Bible in the Latin Language".

May we point out that this is not so as Jerome's text was based on the Hebrew texts then in vogue.

Suffice it to quote directly from the NJBC: "Jerome broke with the LXX-OL tradition to provide Western Christendom with a rendering based directly on the Hebrew O.T. Text preserved among the Jews". (NJBC 68:139).

It is our strong hope, dear sir, that your article could be further improved by taking the two aforementioned points into consideration.

Students of NT.
Class of 1998/99
Institute of Spiritual Formation of Asia.
Colombo 15.

Assimilation - the answer

"United we stand; divided we fall." There are 26 castes in the Sinhala community, which means that there are 26 divisions among the Sinhalese. No wonder that there is no unity among us.

Before the advent of the Portuguese, all castes other than Govigama were considered to be low, and this principle is sadly upheld by the Siam Nikaya of Buddhist monks even to this day. However, the Karawa, Salagama and Durawa castes have even written books to show that they are descendants of royal families.

Be that as it may, the Brahmins of yore, in order to preserve the caste system decreed that a person must marry within his/her own caste and community. So, the only way of destroying the caste system, root and branch, is to defy this rule and escape from the watertight compartment in which each caste lives. This should be done on a mass scale as one swallow does not make a summer and government should give plenty of incentives, including jobs in the public sector, to couples who intermarry and their progeny.

With regard to racial or ethnic differences, the famous playwright H. C. N. Lanerolle made actor E. C. B. Wijesinghe say:

"All the Sinhalese must marry all the Tamils. All the Tamils must marry all the Malays. All the Malays must marry all the Kandyans and all the Kandyans must marry all the Europeans and they will be called simply "BURGHERS!"

In the British Isles, Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons and Jutes have all gone to make this English race. But the Sinhalese and the Tamils have been living here for centuries without any assimilations!

Unity,
Mt. Lavinia.