Think of SLAF pilots too
Recently Sri Lankan pilots of Air Lanka went on strike for more pay to be on par with expatriate pilots of the national carrier. The increment would no doubt place local Air Lanka pilots in a position that no government or semi government servant would ever get close to: earning a huge monthly income from 1300 US$ to 4000 US$. The cause for such action is somewhat justifiable in terms of recognising a unique profession where local pilots are paid much lower than their foreign counterparts. But the country lost millions of rupees if not in dollars on that single day the pilots struck work.
But remember a similar set of young pilots in the SLAF are undergoing severe hardships in day to day hazardous flying to support the war. These pilots are not even allowed to think of joining the national carrier due to the acute shortage of pilots in the SLAF. Believe it or not these men who dominate the Sri Lankan skies are paid only 21 US dollars (average) as a flying allowance and a total of 160 US$ (average) a month for their much needed services to the country. Can they ask for more or resort to strike action thinking of parity in terms of emoluments and keep the poor soldiers on the ground as hostages? Never. The true servicemen won't even dream of that.
But the authorities must wake up. It is time to plan a strategy to induct pilots to the national carrier from the SLAF as most of them deserve a break. They will never let the national flag carrier down with nasty acts but would perhaps provide a better service for a nominal sum the country can afford at this hour of need. Also a system should be worked out to utilise those who want to fly for a career to first do so in the SLAF and be of some true service to the country before thinking of the huge rewards of commercial aviation. In other word serving in the SLAF should be a mandatory qualification to become a pilot in the Air Lanka. Then everybody would get a fair share. In this way the country would not lose foreign exchange for training pilots. Let these facts be a reminder to Air Lanka pilots, management and the concerned government authorities.
Concerned Flyer
A flannelled fool and the invertebrates
Will someone please assure me that a juvenile delinquent has not replaced the Captain of the National Cricket Team and that a herd of circus-clowns has not usurped the functions of the Selection Committee ? The available evidence, I am afraid, does nothing but feed my fears for worst. I write with reference to the front page article of a Sunday Newspaper 14/3/99 titled "Arjuna threatens to throw captaincy".
Going on past form, it is a safe prediction that the final outcome of this slap-stick comedy is that Arjuna would have thrown, not the captaincy, but his usual tantrums and [ as usual ] had his way. Consistency in villainy, though no virtue, has at least the merit of enabling us to identify the malefactor with reasonable accuracy. Mr. A. Ranatunge's present ill-bred and mannerless conduct follows a precedent set (naturally) by himself prior to the last Tour of England with only a minor variation: - Today he stamps his feet in frustrated irritation, throws somersaults and damages the furniture (metaphorically speaking of course) to have Hashan Tillekeratne included in the Pool, on pain of throwing the captaincy. It was only before the last England Tour, that this retarded little chap produced the identical manifestations to have a highly experienced batsman (and a world class fielder) omitted, with the threat that otherwise he would himself opt out of the tour. He won, thereby displaying even better tactics outside the field than in it. And he will continue to be a winner, given the pack of invertebrates that constitute the Selection Committee.
Let me now adopt a more formal and procedural approach to this question. The Selection Committee after due and grave deliberation (or so let us charitably assume) named an 18-member Pool for the World Cup. It was within their discretion to have named 19 players, but in their "wisdom" they settled for 18. It is at this stage that our juvenile delinquent launched into his now familiar burlesque and low comedy ( With what distinction he would have graced the boards of the Old Tower Hall)! And with absolute fidelity to their spineless and quaking conduct of the past, the Selection Committee meekly capitulated and did what they normally do in such circumstances, to wit, made door-mats of themselves for Mr. Ranatunge to wipe his muddy boots on. They allowed themselves to be confronted with a list of 19 members, the 19th gentleman obviously not receiving the benediction of these petrified puppets. The question that clamours for an answer is: Who then has supplied the 19th name for the Minister's approval ? In short, who has usurped the functions of the Selection Committee? This is a gross irregularity which warrants due investigation and which should be followed by the most severe condemnation if, in cricketing matters at least, a democracy is not to be replaced by a dictatorship.
A few years ago this country had (we can hardly say boasted) as its Army Commander a gentleman who unblushingly stated that whatever the blemishes, blunders and irregularities an Army Commander may have countenanced nevertheless "it is not the custom in this country for anyone to resign". Nothing could more disgrace a soldier's uniform than such a self-abasing statement. Be that as it may, we now are invited to witness the resurgence of this admirable "custom" as currently exhibited in the conduct of the gentlemen of the Selection Committee. If the logic of the aforementioned events is that the Committee is to be overridden in its decisions by Arjuna Ranatunge, they have, ipso facto, made themselves redundant. In such a situation if they were to, as indeed they ought to, resign, then it can at least be said of them that they did not permit Arjuna Ranatunge to strip them of the remaining vestiges of their self-respect. But will these honourable gentlemen resign? Sadly, the answer is easily guessed. They will not uproot themselves as long as the glittering perquisites of office continue to dazzle their eyes and the wretched words of the Army Commander continue to echo in their ears.
C. T. Warnakulasuriya
Don't close down SLBC's English Music unit!
The radio listenership of Sri Lanka is conscious that the several dynamic short wave stations (FM radio) provide a brand of music that's suited essentially for youthful persons and lovers of the beat tempo tradition. Therefore, the older generations who enjoy a more mellow flavour in musical taste have recourse only to the SLBC's English service! It is also true that these are the most perceptive listeners who have fluency in English, and who also have more time available to tune in.
They endure the "fractured English" of some of the inefficient SLBC announcers and the sick political propaganda of government because of this love of their particular brand of music, which is available to them as "Hobson's Choice" over this one station only (outside of possessing recorded music with Hi-Fi equipment!).
The SLBC is also the possessor of the best library of the older variety of recorded music and of other historical radio material. It is additionally, the only station equipped right now to handle extensive features in Spoken English.
However, despite this vital aggregation of favourable data to handle a first-class service the SLBC is now mostly an "advertising medium" of government, as well known.
The absurd standards of English and its blatant politicking has also resulted in enormous losses of commercial sponsors to the new FM Radio stations. Consequently, it appears that the Media Ministry has problems in carrying the general load of overhead expenses!
The outcome is that the Director-General has proposed to staff the scrapping of the English music unit altogether!
This is in line with the official concept that English radio is not "a service" at the SLBC, but an "arm of the government", although when radio was nationalised it was rated the top most station of Asia!
The weak reason given by the Director-General is that "there's plenty of CDs" so people don't listen. He has therefore also forgotten the type of listener who mostly tunes in to SLBC!
More dis-service, it seems. Do "nationalised" corporations therefore become, at the end, the servants of politicians and of political parties? If not, why cannot the English music unit become genuinely competitive with the newer FM Radio stations through updating itself and improving the quality of staffing generally?
If seems indispensable too that staff replacements must commence at the top. That may be a means of restoring the English Features in Spoken World which were once imaginatively programmed through the weeks and months by past SLBC management up to the 1970s.
Rohan Jayawardane
Shift the Dehiwela Zoo
The Urban Areas are meant to house people & businesses & not meant to house animals.
It is high time the authorities thought seriously of shifting the Dehiwela Zoo to a more spacious surrounding in the suburbs where plenty of Land Water & Food to the animals are more freely available. I understand there is a move to open a new Zoo at the Pinnawela Elephant Orphanage. It would have been very much better to shift the Dehiwela Zoo to Pinnawela. It is a crime to keep the animals in congested urban conditions where there is an eternal shortage of space, water & fodder. Animal Rights Organizations & the Animal Lovers Association should take note of this factor and agitate to keep the animals in natural & congenial surroundings. Any casual visitor to the Dehiwela Zoo can observe how unhappy the animals are and under what cruel conditions they are kept. The Singapore Zoo is a very good model for us to build our own Zoo. The cost of the new zoo can be recovered ten times over by selling the land occupied by Dehiwela Zoo.
The benefits that will accrue to the country will be enormous if the Zoo is shifted to Pinnawela. The sleepy town of Kegalle will wake up and will become a major tourist attraction in the world. The tourist coming to see the Zoo in Kegalle can easily combine their visit to see Kandy in one trip. A vast extent of land in Dehiwela will suddenly become available to the land hungry populace of Colombo, for urban housing projects. This extent of land combined with the extent of land now tied up in the former premises of Wellawatta Mills, if released to the public for housing projects can ease the severe housing shortage that now exists in the capital city of Colombo and can even help to bring down the sky-rocketting land & rental values, which has gone beyond the reach of the ordinary man. But last not the least the animals will be happy in their natural & spacious surroundings. And when the animals are happy, we the visitors to the Zoo will be the more happier ones. Will the authorities open their eyes.
P. V. S. Ranjan
OBITUARY
Glenn T. Seaborg, 1912-1999Dr. Glenn Theodore Seaborg, the discoverer of Plutonium died on 26 February, 1999 at the age of 86, after a long and distinguished career as a radiochemist.
Glenn Seaborg was born in Ishpeming in Michigan in 1912 to a Swedish mother and American father. As a result of his mixed parentage, he was bilingual - fluent in both Swedish and English. He grew up in Los Angeles and went to Berkeley in 1934, and obtained his PhD in Chemistry in 1937 at the age of 25. At Berkeley, he was much influenced by Otto Hahn's 1933 Cornell Lectures published as Applied Radiochemistry, which encouraged him to study radiochemistry. In 1939, while still at Berkeley, the news of fission reached him.
He started bombarding samples of uranium to produce neptunium. In 1940, he used the cyclotron introduced to him by Ernest Lawrence to produce a new element 94, by shooting deuterium ions into uranium atoms at such speeds that their nuclei merged. Seaborg named the element 94 after Pluto, the ninth planet discovered in 1930 and named for the Greek God of the underworld, and called it Plutonium. Seaborg once described Plutonium as being "so unusual as to approach the unbelievable. Under some conditions, plutonium can be nearly as hard and brittle as glass; under others, as soft and plastic as lead.... it undergoes no less than five phase transitions between room temperature and its melting point.
Strangely enough, in two of its phases, plutonium actually contracts as it is being heated.... It is unique among all of the chemical elements". Ernest Lawrence not only introduced the cyclotron to Seaborg, but his pretty secretary Helen Griggs as well. Seaborg took Helen in a mail truck to get married in Pioche, Nevada. Their witnesses were a janitor and a friendly clerk.
The discovery of plutonium was classified and would not be announced until the end of World War II, but these experiments were reported in secret letters by Seaborg to Lyman Briggs, the American Physicist and a member of the Uranium Committee, for transmittal to Enrico Fermi and Emilio Segre as both were then considered aliens. This was the most important secret during the early years of the nuclear arms race. Subsequently, Seaborg was recruited by Robert Oppenheimer to join the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos to develop the Atom Bomb. His studies on fast neutron reactions were crucial to the design of the bomb. Plutonium was found to be more fissionable than U235, and furthermore, it could be separated chemically from natural uranium. This paved the way for the development of the atomic bomb. Seaborg believed that the outside world would learn about plutonium at Nagasaki in 1945, but thanks to Klaus Fuchs, the Soviet scientists knew about it early in 1943.
Although Seaborg was one of the many scientists responsible for the ultimate production of the atom bomb, he was also one of the few who wrote to President Truman urging him to give the Japanese a demonstration of the power of the bomb before dropping it on them. Their plea fell on deaf ears and the bomb - known as Little Boy - was dropped on Hiroshima on 6th August 1945 from the B-29 plane named Enola Gay piloted by Paul Tibbets. It was followed three days later by another bomb - Fat Man - on Nagasaki. A hundred thousand people were killed by the bomb.
When Seaborg was invited by the Swedish Nobel laureate physicist, Manne Siegbahn to lecture in Sweden, he knew that he was being considered for a Nobel prize, which he won in 1951 for Chemistry. Glenn Seaborg is best remembered for his work in adding ten elements to the Periodic Table that was invented by the Russian Chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev in the mid 19th century. Mendeleyev predicted the existence of the elements gallium, scandium and germanium before their discovery. The Periodic Table currently includes 106 elements. The last one to be discovered by Dr. Seaborg was named after him as "Seaborgium".
C. Santiapillai
University of Peradeniya
APPRECIATION
S. de. S. GunetillekeIt is 3 months since the passing away of Mr. S. de. S. Gunetilleke. With his untimely death, the country has lost an outstanding professional banker and a man of unimpeachable integrity the like of whom is not easy to come by.
My association with Mr. Gunetilleke dates back to the year 1996 when I had the good fortune of meeting with him at a time when the SANASA movement was in search of a professionally competent person to advise them on the setting up of a bank of the Movement and for the Movement.
After a brief discussion, Mr. Gunetilleke was quick in his response to support our worthy cause. He lost no time in gathering all the vital information and data concerning the Movement and with remarkably high professionalism, skill and speed completed the assignment having obtained the approval of the Monetary Board for the establishment of the SANASA Bank .
Even after the setting up of the Bank Mr. Gunetilleke's advice was freely available to guide the Bank in its infancy.
Although Mr. Gunetilleke cherished his freedom and a quiet family life after retirement from a long and distinguished banking career, I was fortunate enough in convincing him to accept a seat on the Board of the SANASA Development Bank during the latter part of 1998.
I recall with nostalgia his presence at the several Board meetings that preceded his untimely departure from our midst, wherein he so ably guided the entire Board on matters concerning Banking as his speciality and equally competently on principles of good Management.
I salute the memory of Mr. Gunetilleke who was truly a colossus in his chosen field.
May he attain Nibbana
P. A. Kiriwandeniya