Several newspaper articles have praised the new Yala administration. A recent visit confirmed the successes of the new army officer in charge. Roads are repaired, culverts built tanks restored and three bungalows rebuilt from the ashes - all in just a few months.

Speaking to the staff, whose morale is back to the old days of Lyn de Alwis' directorship, they told me they were now prepared to risk their lives to stop poaching which has, in fact, been stopped.

What has brought about this change? Just main honest leadership free of political bias, not expertise. Expertise comes from experienced minor staff who have vowed to protect this heritage.

In contrast study the other parks. In Uda Walawe gun shots are heard day and night. Indiscipline is rampart and roads ere treacherous. An architectural monstrosity has come up at Gonaviddagala one of the most exquisite sites in the island, it is an example of engineering, not architectural skills. It is worthy of a study by the Faculty of Architecture, Moratuwa University as how NOT to build in a national park. The other buildings are just as bad. The bungalow in Block III, Yala is known as the horror of Dambakotte. The two new bungalows by the river in Wasgamuwa have inexplicable designs, fixtures and levels, furniture spaces, pillars and toilets.

Inquiries should be made as regards:

1) How long Anderson Bungalow, Horton Plains' took to repair - is it two or three years?

2) What has been done to reduce Lantana in Uda Walawe?

3) Why was the staff blamed and transferred for now confirmed LTTE attacks in Yala, the cost of these LTTE attacks and who is to blame for misleading the public?

4) Why are comments books in national parks not looked into?

5) Why cannot the same methods used to revive Yala be used in the other parks? It is no secret why administration of Yala is good. The methodology should be introduced to other parks. Maybe the same person too, before he is shifted out by jealous political bureaucrats.

The public await an answer

This is a department which guards a heritage and is very much in the public eye. It has been criticised ad lib by so many, many people, including myself with no response. Now I give credit where credit is due. There is a tremendous amount of funding available and stacks of goodwill both locally and internationally. But while insidious influences known to all remain nothing can be achieved expect in Yala under military rule.

Nihal Fernando

India's nuclear testing - a rationale?

India's recent action in testing Nuclear Bombs came under wide criticism world-wide. Different countries condemned India's action for different reasons. Japan, the only country subjected to the horrors of atomic warfare on a large scale, was critical for reasons connected with memories of her own traumatic past. Many in the subcontinent took exception to India's action on the grounds the region must be kept free of nuclear weapons and warfare. While this debate lingers on, it is interesting to note global reaction - and, particularly by the well-informed sections of the media in the US and Europe - some of whom have gone to the extent of sympathising with India's action. While the US Government was vociferous and went to the extent of slapping down sanctions here's what the influential US Press has to say.

"The New York Post" in May 1998 said "The Indians are uncomfortably aware that the US has turned a blind eye to the arming of hostile Pakistan by North Korea and China. They also know that China is building airfields and storing weapons on their Tibetan border and arming their other hostile neighbours in (Pakistan) and Burma".

The influential "Washington Post" said in June 1998 "China's immense population, its trade and market potential, its place among the Permanent Five at the U.N. Security Council and its role as a nuclear power with a modernizing military. With these qualifications China has been able to win top priority and attention from U.S. government and business leaders ...The message sent by the Clinton foreign policy team has encouraged India to conclude that the most effective way to ensure that its powerful Asian superpower, and to garner greater diplomatic and commercial attention from the West, is to remind the world of its nuclear deterrent capability."

As friends of China and India, we are happy while in the process of both these Asian giants taking those necessary steps which they consider to be in their greater national interest of preparedness - both countries in recent months have held many high-level talks aimed at narrowing differences between them in a wide range of contentious issues - including border disputes. Happily, India and Pakistan too are engaged in official talks to reduce tension between them. We hope that these fraternal countries will soon succeed in reducing differences between them so that the need for them even to reluctantly go nuclear will not arise - so that the millions in the region are not subject to an already polluted environment further worsened by radio-active material.

A. Kandappah
Colombo 7.

Chanting over loudspeakers

The other day Mr. Mark Bostock wrote a letter to the newspapers complaining of the irritation caused to him by chanting over loudspeakers at ungodly hours.

This is a matter that should be cause for concern in a free, pluralistic society such as ours. Chanting over loudspeakers, whether by temples or mosques, should not be permitted at any time for a number of reasons.

Firstly, there is no doubt that it causes irritation to those who do not want to hear it. That would include all those of different religions, and even the large majority of those of the religion concerned. It should be obvious to those who organise these loudspeakers (the clergy and mullahs) that those who are keen on listening to such chanting could easily find their way to the temples and mosques which do the chanting.

Secondly, it should strike religious leaders who encourage this sort of inconsiderate behaviour, that they are making it easier for members of their flock, those who may be interested in the chants, to make excuses not to attend their temples and mosques. After all, they can tell themselves, they could stay at home and get the benefit of listening to the prayers and chants. Thus it seems to militate against increasing attendance at temples and mosques which presumably should be a concern of religious leaders.

The third, and most important reason, is that it is an inconsiderate thing to do. Consideration for others should be paramount in any religion. Religion should be a personal thing, not a commodity to be thrust down people's throats. The use of loudspeakers is ugly, inconsiderate, behaviour unbecoming of any religion that is not going down the fundamentalist road.

A strong leadership would soon put a stop to such behaviour. Noise pollution is as bad for the health and nerves as smoke and dust pollution.

Charitha P. de. Silva

The great buffoons

I would like to bring to the notice of your readers the following extract from the book, Between Tears and Laughter by Lin Yutang, in view of the buffoonery that is going on all over the world today.

"Every age has its buffoons and the buffoons make you laugh. Great men make great mistakes and small men make small mistakes. Then the great men love to point out the small mistakes of the small men, while they do not want to have their great mistakes pointed out by the small men. A mistake is something which is the privilege of the great men to commit and of the small men of this earth to point out after they are dead. Death comes and the buffoonery is over and we take the historical view.

"Dead men tell no tales and answer no arguments, and dead censors delete no pages from the books of posterity; so let them have the pleasure of deleting them now. We can already smile at the mistakes of Neville Chamberlain at Versailles and of all the League of Nations officials in the decade, because now the mistakes are irretrievable and pointing them out indicates a fine historical sense.

"On the assumption that all our dead ancestors and all the great statesmen of the earth are fools or buffoons except those still controlling our lives we can go safely. The great thing about teaching history is that we must teach history but must not let history teach us".

Arul
Colombo.

Appreciation
In Memoriam

DR CHITRA ELAINE FERNANDO (born in Kalutara, Sri Lanka, 14 October 1935, died in Sydney, Australia, 9 December 1998)

I heard my friend, the writer Chitra Fernando, described once as a quiet, shy person who did not seem to have very much to say for herself. If the speaker had been more attentive, he would have realized that some silence speaks more eloquently than words. Conversations with Chitra were full of such eloquent silences, the equivalent of a sardonic humour distinctly her own to which she gave artistic form in her fiction.

Buddhist
Chitra's carefully crafted stories, most of which are inspired by the Buddhist values that informed her childhood, take up certain recurrent themes. One of these is the exploitation by the strong, unscrupulous or hypocritical, of weak and defenceless people; another the need for young people, especially women, to resolutely make their own way in the world, following the prompting of their own minds and hearts. Her characteristic tone in engaging with such potentially emotional themes is not angry but ironic, a controlled, dry style so subtle that its point can easily be missed by the superficial or hasty reader.

In my opinion Chitra's fiction will survive into the future as far and away the finest from a Sri Lankan author of her generation. It will be a source of lasting satisfaction to me that, though we were not given to effusiveness or gush in our relationship with each other, I was able in her last days to tell her so.

Relationship
That relationship began a long time ago, when we found ourselves sitting next to each other as seven-year- old Second Graders, in a classroom in Bandarawela in Sri Lanka. There followed a gap of 11 years in which we lost touch entirely, but had evidently not forgotten each other, for mutual recognition was almost instant when we met again as First Year undergraduates at the University of Ceylon in Peradeniya. Renewing our friendship, sharing a 3rd floor balcony overlooking the most beautiful campus in the world, walking daily together to lectures through the University Park with its magnificent jacaranda tree by the lake, sitting up late at night over coffee and cocoa, I discovered in Chitra a person whose reading already went far beyond our somewhat staid University English curriculum. She was exploring Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. She was also reading European authors who had interpreted societies like our own, and encouraging others to read them. She gave me some years ago her own annotated copies of The Raj Ouartet,, and I owe one of the greatest pleasures of my own reading life to the moment when Chitra asked me: 'Have you read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala? They say she's an Indian Jane Austen'. She kept diaries and a literary journal throughout her life; and after she became too weak to hold a pen, I believe she spent hours in contemplative thought, moving back and forth over times past and books read.

During a conversation in her last days, she referred to the way the curious pattering of our lives had brought us together many times over, in different countries and contexts, placing us finally opposite each other on the same corridor in the same Department at Macquarie University. She said it made her think of a passage from Jhabvala's novel Heat and Dust, the context of which she could not now recall, except that it involved the Nawab of Khatm and a reference to paradise. When I got home from Concord Hospital, I looked the passage up. And here it is:

[The Nawab said] "There are certain people who if they are absent life becomes hard to bear. Once I asked a faqir from Ajmere (a very holy person): 'Why these people? Why they and not others?' He gave me the following reply ... 'These are the people who once sat close to you in Paradise'.

Impressions
In my impressions of Chitra, memories of her as friend and as writer constantly change places. This is inevitable, I suppose, since we read and discussed literature and the art of writing throughout our four undergraduate years at the University of Ceylon as well as throughout our 22 years as colleagues at Macquarie University. I had the pleasure and privilege of publishing the first (and one of the finest) of her adult tales, Missilin.. Eventually, I suppose, memories of Chitra as writer and as friend will merge and become one. The lives of writers were a subject of inexhaustible interest to her: Johnson's Lives of the Poets, Charles Osborne's biography of W.H. Auden,, the life of her particular literary hero, Anton Chekhov, are only three of the subjects that came in for constant, indeed ceaseless, discussion.

As illness increasingly narrowed the field of her physical activity, the more she read in the area of literary biography, making connections between her own experience of the creative life and that of the writers she most admired. To fit herself for the task of writing (to which, from a quite early age, she had privately dedicated herself), she strove with extraordinary strength of will to rid her mind of cant and clutter and defend it against disruption and distraction. It is as if she took an editorial blue pencil to her own life. deleting irrelevancies from the text, trying always and above everything else for greater clarity.

The determination with which she established boundaries for herself, refusing to be taken in by the hype attending contemporary literary publishing today, refusing to subscribe to it in any way herself, is typical of her chosen form of self-defence. She became, in fact, as has been admirably said of the heroines of Jane Austen's novels, 'the guardian of her own repose'.

Extraordinary
One of the concerns on which she focused during her last years with the extraordinary strength of will of which I have spoken was the desire to make, as she said, 'a contribution,. Chitra was strongly attached to members of her family, and she worked actively to make their lives happier and more comfortable, but the 'contribution', of which she was thinking went beyond family obligations. The present troubles in our homeland were constantly in her thoughts, especially the damage being done to the nation's social fabric through the disruption of the education of its young men and women. This became clear when she spoke warmly to her friend and mentor Arthur Delbridge (and later to me) of her admiration for my husband's establishment of Pemberley House, an international study centre in Sri Lanka, one strand of which assists students disadvantaged by the war to make something of their talents. Part of Chitra's own effort to help has been the setting up of a Hospital Trust in her parents' names in her hometown of Kalutara, and the financing from her own funds of the education of several medical students. Chitra's generosity took the additional form of donations of books to libraries in Sri Lanka and Australia, the most recent of which has been a donation of $5,000 to the Macquarie University Library. Many people would have knowledge of several other instances of Chitra's social concern. I have mentioned only the acts of kindness of which I am personally aware because I have been told of them by others. Chitra herself never mentioned them.

Opponent
I asked Chitra once what her religious beliefs were. I expected her to answer 'Buddhism', but she surprised me with her answer. 'I am,' she said, 'a Stoic'. It seemed to me that her attitude to her illness was like that of someone playing chess, trying to read her opponent's mind and, if possible, forestall his next move. The sunny nature that had led her as an undergraduate to view the curious behaviour of staff and fellow-students as part of the human comedy, became in her last months grimly sardonic. On one occasion that I shall never forget, she told me with amusement bordering on what seemed like admiration that the cancer, having attached itself affectionately to the right side of her pelvis, had unexpectedly 'taken a fancy' to the left side. She wanted, above all, to see her the novel she was writing in print, and as I watched her struggle for months with sickness and pain, trying to keep up the energy that would allow her to complete the manuscript, never once expressing resentment or self-pity,, I began to understand what 'stoicism' means in practical terms.

Reference
In all the months of our constant meetings, during which I was continually haunted - as I am sure: many others among her friends were, too - by the knowledge of her imminent death, Chitra made no reference to it. Conscious of the old superstition that by speaking of something one dreads, one might unwittingly cause it to happen, I too deliberately omitted to mention it. Instead, I did my best to relay to her entertaining pieces of everyday news, or to recall moments in our undergraduate years - and there were many of those - when we had laughed together over personalities or incidents. However, there came an evening - our final meeting but one - when our silence on the subject was broken at last. It was broken by Chitra herself as we said goodbye, and in words that showed she was, in the truest sense of E.B. White's words in Charlotte's Web, 'not only a good friend but a good writer'.

'Yasmine,' Chitra said, 'Thank you for coming. It's been lovely. As you can see, I've just about reached the last page.'

Professor Yasmine Gooneratne
Macquarie University, New South Wales

Professor H. H. Costa

I got the sad news of the death of Professor Henry Costa in the afternoon of Tuesday, 15th December 1998. He had passed away in the morning. Sri Lanka has lost a great scientist and an educator.

Henry was educated at St. Anne's, Kurunegala and entered the then University of Ceylon in 1953. He specialized in Zoology and graduated with first class Honours in 1958. He joined the permanent staff of the university in 1959. He did his postgraduate studies at the University of Wales and was awarded the Ph.D. in Aquatic Ecology in 1964.

On his return to the island after the Ph.D. he was attached to the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya Campus from 1964 to 1967. The new universities of Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara were just planning to start faculties of Science and Henry came in September 1967 to the Vidyalankara University of Ceylon, Kelaniya (now University of Kelaniya) to become the founding Professor of Zoology. He was the Head of the Department till 1970.

He was very active in his research activities connected with Fisheries and Acquaculture and was prolific in publishing research papers. Then in March 1994 he was appointed as the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Kelaniya which position he held with distinction for the full length of his term till June 1997. Professor Costa retired from University Service in September 1998.

During his academic career, Henry was at various times Visiting Professor at University of Washington, Max Planck Institute for Limnologie, University of London and University of Agriculture, Malaysia.

He was a founder fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, Sri Lanka. He was awarded the Fullbright Hayes Fellowship, UNESCO Fellowship and the Commonwealth University Fellowship.

Among his services to the country may be mentioned the fact that he was an Advisor to the Ministry of Fisheries, a member of the governing board of National Aquatic Resources Agency (NARA) and also its acting Chairman, and a member of the National Advisory Committee on Malaria.

Henry was happily married to Srima and had two sons and a daughter. I had known Henry almost from his undergraduate days, but he became very close when together with Prof. J. K. P. Ariyaratne as Professor of Chemistry and me as Professor of Physics, we were able to start the Faculty of Science at University of Kelaniya in 1967 later to be joined by late Professor Balasuriya as Professor of Botany. Professor S. B. P. Wickremasuriya was already there as Head of Mathematics.

Professor Costa's contribution to the development of Science education and research can be seen from the excellent products of his department, abundance of research papers published and the present highly developed states of his department. I have lost a dear friend and a close colleague. Our deepest condolences go to his wife and children.

May he rest in peace.

Prof. C. Dahanayake