- Mirror Magazine (MM) What influences in your childhood do you feel have contributed towards this book?
WW: Well, I suppose the most obvious one was that my father (who the book is dedicated to) was a social scientist, but to be quite honest when I was young I myself never wanted to follow in his footsteps, I wanted to be an inventor! I found myself drawn to the social sciences quite unwittingly only in my late teen years.
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| Wimarshana |
Specifically in regards to the book, along with my inherited proclivity towards the social science, I believe a crucial contributing factor was that from the age of 3 until I was 9 I grew up in England and then suddenly almost overnight we moved back to Sri-Lanka, which needless to say was a shock that resulted in the gaping cultural contrasts becoming engraved into my thoughts and the exercise of deciphering their rudiments becoming habitual for me.
Looking back throughout my life I have always been cast in the role of an outsider to the social group that I have been thrust into – firstly in England, I was only (or one of the very few) Sri Lankan children in both the schools I attended, then when I came back to Sri-Lanka
after my father passed away, I had to attend an International School since my Sinhala literacy was not adequate to enter a Sinhala medium school, here I was about the poorest boy in a school attended by the children of some of the richest families in Sri Lanka.
Although at times being the perpetual outsider was tough and lonely, it afforded me the opportunity to objectively scrutinize diverse cultural substances of various social groups as opposed to accepting them as axiomatic finalities.
- MM: Why did you choose organisational psychology to pursue a master’s degree ? Considering that the scope for psychology related fields in the country is a bit limiting.
WW :After high school, I enrolled at a private tertiary institute offering a foreign degree, the only problem was it offered only two majors – management & marketing. I really wanted to go abroad so I started giving tuition in the various subjects in these two majors while I was completing my degree and for a year afterwards, even after living the most abstemious of lifestyles I could only afford to go to Australia – since I could stay with my Aunties’ family – and do a course offered by the university with the lowest fees and in the social sciences this is the only course they offered! Once I got my foot-in-the-door so to speak, I forgot about my major and delved into those areas of social science which I was passionate about, availing myself of the university’s vast library. My aim was never job-market related, it was and is the destiny of my passions.
- MM: Was teaching a career you envisioned or was it something that you stumbled upon?
WW : No, although once again maybe I just didn’t know it, since my mother is a teacher. I stumbled upon it when, as I alluded to in the previous question, I started tutoring classmates whilst completing my bachelor’s degree. As for the more formal lecturingjob, I have to thank the former principal of this self same institution; noticing the burgeoning numbers in my private tuition classes he invited me to lecture at this institution (which I did initially for one semester before going off for my masters and then resumed when I returned after its completion for nearly five years) if not for which I may have never become a lecturer.
(MM) Do you recall your first batch of students how did they take to you? And for how long have you been teaching?
WW: The week prior to the moment I stood before the first batch of students I lectured to- was the most nerve racking of my life, and the moment itself when I had to introduce myself to students some of whom were younger than me (I was only 21) and who had been with me in the same college was dizzyingly terrifying, but after I edgily forced out an introduction, it was exhilarating as the student’s took well to a younger person whom they felt they could relate to on account of the fact that only a few months earlier I was one of them. One thing that was not easy to get accustomed to, even to this day, is being called – Sir! Given that I started giving private tuition in the second semester of my bachelor’s degree and that I have in some form or another and continue to teach to this day, I guess I have been teaching for 9 years.
- MM What do you feel about teaching/lecturing as a career? It’s not everyday that young people turn to teaching as career
WW: My thought on status quo of education are articulated in the essay ‘Education: A
Teacher’s Reflection’; but to be brief I believe it can be a rewarding for those individuals with a suitable personality type for it, providing the prevalent paradigm on education which is solely centered on rote learning and passing the all-important exam is changed, both on the part of students and teachers.
The traditional education we have inherited is to be quite curt - utterly ineffectual beyond imparting some semblance of literacy, it stifles creativity and critical thinking, it is absolute drudgery for all parties involved – I can understand why few young people contemplate teaching as a career.
- (MM) Which aspects from your teaching have you brought out in your book?
WW: As I mentioned earliar, the essay about education is obviously taken from my own experiences. Beyond this I found that the rich exposure that a classroom atmosphere facilitates refined my insights on who the prototypical Sri-Lankan is – which is the focus of this book; thus I found that even in other essays I used stories drawn from my classroom experiences to explain the defining characteristics of the quintessential Sri Lankan. Importantly, since my classes primarily consisted of young people in the 18 – 24 demographic, I was privy to changes currently occurring in the Sri-Lankan cultural profile which formed several essays in my book most significantly ‘The Rising Creed of Consumerism’.
- MM What sort of a readership is your book geared to - is it only those that fancy the Social Sciences or have a curiosity about the communities around them?
It is aimed for the latter (those eager to introspect about the Sri-Lankan experience) using the tools of the former, therefore it at points is a little bit complicated and nuanced, yet this only so because the social reality and the explanation for the social phenomenon which define the Sri-Lankan experience often defy simplistic explanation.
I urge the readers of this book to take up the challenge of the understanding what it means to be Sri-Lankan paying heed to all its intricacies and subtleties. My hope is to translate this book to Sinhala & Tamil thereby increasing its reverberation throughout our society and hopefully catalyzing a much needed contemporary discourse on what our ‘culture’ really is removed of all pretensions and grandiose misconceptions.
- MM You’ve chosen to title one of your essays in the book as the relevance of Buddhism - what does that chapter entail?
WW: The fact that Sri-Lanka is a predominantly Buddhist country is precisely what makes this particular essay one of the most seminal in this book.
For a society to progress, that which is held aloft as its guiding philosophy and indeed the state of its current mutation and evolution must feature among the central loci of the intellectual discourse.
Where it is so that out of sentiment and reverence, this supposedly guiding philosophy becomes too sacrosanct that its worth and contemporary applicability are off-limits & incendiary subjects, then what hope is there for the adaptability of this guiding philosophy to meet contemporary realities & imperatives?
And so in this resultant moral vacuum a socially cancerous amorality predominates, and that is what I believe has happened and continues to happen to Sri-Lankan society.
- MM The book will obviously touch a few nerves how do you feel about that?
WW: I certainly do not expect and do not believe it to be ideal that everybody agrees with my dissection of who the prototypical Sri-Lankan is and how this conspires to create our collective reality. Let me assure that this book does not stoke controversy for its own sake. An important point that I want to convey to my readers and indeed all Sri-Lankans who look around at society in which they live in and find pervasive phenomena such as corruption and nepotism reprehensible is that these are but manifestations of the underlying core of who the quintessential Sri-Lankan is, thus one cannot in all fairness look critically upon only these symptoms and expediently refuse to look inwards; and where so one does looks inward – where one introspects – the greatest challenge posed is the genuine acceptance of one’s shortcomings and deficits.
- MM What do you want your readers to take with them when they read your book?
WW: I suppose in the broadest sense what I would like my readers to take away from this book is that, that which is inherited from our past whether it be culture, religion or even styles of thinking are not exclusively by their antiquity superior to that which is being contemporarily being created especially so given that we have no choice but to live by the dictates of modernity.
By stubbornly refusing to accept this truth, we are stuck with obsolete tools which can only hope to elicit sub-optimal outcomes from the modern systems we finds ourselves in. Secondly, that we Sri-Lankans who - almost as if it is a national pastime – are given to bemoan the perpetually malfunctioning state of our country must resolve ourselves to do something about it, whether it be informed by the critiques put forth in this book or otherwise.
- MM What plans for the future? More books ?
WW: Definitely more books, but before the next book I want to dedicate my energies to two dreams I have had in mind for a long time. Firstly a documentary based on this book – though have no idea about videography! – and then I want to start a college whose core mission is to rectify the fundamental deficiencies of traditional education I alluded to previously and as explored in this book. In fact the college idea is already in the works I envision it to be an education revolution.
‘Colombo: A Critical introspection’ by Wimarshana Wijesuriya will be laucnhed today January 8, at the “KENT GALLERY” 192, St. James Peiris Mawatha, Colombo 2. The author invites the public to not just buy the book but welcomes a discussion about the focus of its contents. To strike up an ongoing conversation with other readers and indeed other Sri-Lankans about the book they can do so online at - www.facebook.com/Colombo.Book
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