Thoughts from London

Third world intellectuals or mere pretenders?
"Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing, more than any other man in Venice. His reasons are as two grains of wheat, hid in two bushels of chaff: you shall seek all the day ere you find them; and, when you have them, they are not worth the search." - (Merchant of Venice).

I just love this man. No, not the Merchant of Venice. Not Shakespeare. Not even Milinda Moragoda, who, for all his lecturing is not a pompous, arrogant man.
My man of the millennium is Dr. Nalin Swaris. He is no simple chap like most of us. He is thinker, philosopher, historian, political commentator, critic, amateur journalist and anything else he might wish to add, all rolled into one.

With a little more practice, he might even be able to get his facts correct.
And just in case no one has noticed it, he is also a self- respecting Third World intellectual. He is not the kind of chap who lets modesty stand in the way of self-advertisement.

Real intellectuals let the world recognise their learning and wisdom and pay due respect. Not Nalin Swaris. He announces publicly his self assessment.
In a personal attack on me in his column "Between the Blinds" (The Island Dec 17) and under a headline that gambles with a puerile pun, Swaris calls himself "a self-respecting Third World intellectual".

Had I but space enough and time, to adapt the words of Andrew Marvell, I might have dredged the shallow depths of this self-description. But suffice it deal with a few matters that clearly establish the validity of his self-portrait as a scholarly persona.
In his reply to me in The Sunday Times (Dec 14), Swaris admits to the factual errors I had pointed out in his long-winded articles on Chris Patten and other issues.

"My errors are reprehensible," he admits. Then later in his own column he writes: " I admit, that as an academically trained person, I should not have made these mistakes." Having cried mea culpa not once but twice, Swaris then goes on to accuse me of "ranting".

One could expect this from ordinary persons unable to defend themselves adequately against charges of factual distortion, deliberate or otherwise. But coming from the self-proclaimed intellectual, academically trained and armed with qualifications from the University of Utrecht which gave him a PhD cum laude (nobody could have said it louder either), one expects to see the workings of a scholarly mind.

Particularly so when he says in The Sunday Times: "I agree with him that incorrect facts and figures can undermine an argument especially if its substance and conclusions are based on erroneous data. I owe it to my readers to acknowledge these errors."

But is he then more circumspect, more careful in using data culled from websites, reproduced from lecture notes or gathered from his informers? Hardly. If this is what makes Third World (a western concept surely and outdated now) intellectuals, scant wonder the developing world is in all sorts of trouble. Showing an unusual interest in my background, Swaris says he made inquiries. He even announced the date of my departure from Colombo with the sense of discovery one might have expected from Newton when the legendary apple descended on his dome.

He could have simply asked me and saved himself much mental effort. Never mind the fact that Swaris has a decided penchant for the irrelevant. His great investigative effort came up with the claim that I entered the Peradeniya University to do agriculture but later opted to do English. Having earlier admitted his factual mistakes is he cautious now? Of course not. He makes ex-cathedra statements and they, like ecclesiastical edicts, are not to be challenged.

But once again he is wrong. If I entered to study agriculture, then I must be unique to have done so after passing in English, double history and government. In retrospect perhaps agriculture might have been more useful seeing the many bulls in china shops one witnesses and so much bovine rubbish that is published in the name of scholarly study.

He says I scraped through with a third class degree. I did not know that Swaris had corrected my exam papers or was my external examiner. I wonder whether his admiration for Mervyn de Silva, who he refers to with some reverence, would diminish if he knows that my brother too passed out with a third class. His contemporaries at university know why just as my contemporaries know about me.

Swaris seems to think that a third class degree does not permit a person to gain a PhD. I can name several dozen persons who have got their doctorates from more prominent universities than Utrecht and achieved academic and professional eminence.

Here again Swaris shows an ignorance of academia and academic practices.
While wasting time and energy on what might be described as inconsequential at best and irrelevant at worst, Swaris carefully avoids mentioning the subject of his own doctoral thesis, where he got his first degree from and in what.

The public could then judge whether he is competent to speak on politics, history, semantics and even journalism as he does in the characteristic manner and tone of a preacher from the pulpit.

Swaris parades in the garb of a patriot while describing me as an anglophile, after reading my writings with a "casual interest". I always suspected there was a certain casualness in his writings that meander more than the Mahaweli.

But his recent effort compounds the casualness with an obvious sloppiness rarely found among genuine scholars and intellectuals. While some might find self-proclaimed patriotism a convenient fig leaf to hide other inadequacies, I do not wear my patriotism or nationalism on my shirt sleeves, robes or cassocks, discarded or not.
Nalin Swaris runs to his Concise Oxford Dictionary like a little boy with his first toy and even tries to explain away the word philistine as one of colonial vintage.

Will somebody please take this chap by the hand and give him a few elementary lessons in history, etymology, diplomacy and Chinese and Hong Kong politics.
If further proof is necessary that Swaris does not know what he is talking about read this: "The future status of Hong Kong was settled by an agreement between the Chinese authorities and the Thatcher government of which Patten was a minister. Agreement was also reached on the Basic Law….".

Note, the Basic Law implying that the Basic Law under which Hong Kong is now governed was one agreed to by China and Britain. What utter nonsense. The Basic Law was essentially a product of a group of people -- the Basic Law Drafting Committee -- that was carefully selected by Beijing and imposed on the Hong Kong people. That is why some half a million Hong Kong people demonstrated earlier this year against Article 23, which clearly introduces a new offence of subversion, among others.

Swaris advises me to read my fellow columnist Rajpal Abeynayake. My advice to Swaris is to take heed of the words of the philosopher Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereon one must be silent."

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