A boy struggles to complete high school and he is the first person in his village to do so. A year later, when he cannot find employment, he ends up digging for sand on a dry riverbed. A dairy farmer breaks her hip while milking a cow, and is forced to sell her silver anklets to pay for substandard but expensive medical care.
Multiculturalism as a political idea has gained significance with the encounter of Islam and liberalism in the West. Although the idea is not limited to Islam and Muslims in the so-called liberal societies, the debates surrounding it in the United Kingdom has taken on this unique dimension. Liberalism as an offshoot of Enlightenment has always had a troublesome relation with Islam and its advocates.
We must be bilingual even in a single language, we must have a minor language inside our own language, we must create a minor use of our own language. Multilingualism is not merely the property of several systems each of which would be homogenous in itself…. Not speaking like an Irishman or a Romanian in a language other than one’s own, but on the contrary speaking in one’s own language like a foreigner…
Where does culture live? In the past, or the present? In stony monuments, in hallowed museums and temples and mosques, in laws and codes, or in homes and on the streets, in sights and sounds and assumptions so often taken for granted? Is it everywhere we have touched with the ways in which we live, and the ways in which we imagine our collective lives?
A remarkable series of letters written in the pleasanter vein of fiction rather than of history, interspersed with intimate personal touches here and there, and giving glimpses of the growth of the world from ages past, down to the days of Napoleon, setting out the results of intro¬spection as much as of study forced by physical inactivity when inside a prison, is this book of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru which presents history not as a mere piling up of names and events, but as a helpful guide in determining the Time-spirit of days gone by as well as of the present.
Which is the best place to look for systematically organized, comprehensive research material on the persisting ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka? India? No; Sri Lanka? No. It is, surprisingly, Oslo, which has no more than a tiny Tamil population of 8000. This is because of an important data base project undertaken by the Inter¬national Peace Research Institute of Oslo under the competent and committed gui¬dance of Dr. Kumar Rupesinghe, a well known Sri Lankan socially active scholar.