Chandi Jayawickrama, the controversial MTV Newsreader who has been filling the letters pages of newspapers for the past year , in the raging debate over her presentation will be quitting the station at the end of the year .Letters page Editors will rant and rave over the lack of a hot topic, housewives and retirees deprived of something to get hot under the collar will feel a sudden vacuum in their weekend and most of us will breathe a sigh of relief that something as trivial as this has finally come to an end. In this exclusive interview with The Sunday Times, she talks to Afdhel Aziz of her decision, the reasons and the future plans she has.
So Chandi, why did you leave ?
I left because I thought the time was right to gain more knowledge in this industry. I've been the news anchor for a year and a half and there was so much else for me to learn.
Did the controversy have anything to do with it ?
No. Absolutely not. The controversy has followed me over the entire time I presented the news but what I figured out early on was that it was impossible to please all of the people all of the time, so I concentrated on pleasing as many of the people as much of the time as I could. I have to admit that some of the criticisms levelled at me were valid however.
What parts of the criticism were valid ?
My pronounciation of certain Sri Lanka names and places needed to be improved on. I did put a lot of work into it, but because I spent so much of my time away from this country , Sinhalese was my third or fourth language as opposed to my second. Also my earrings were a fraction too large sometimes (laughs self deprecatingly).
Specifically what parts of the behind the scenes work do you want to get involved in?
While I was at MTV, I did do a lot of production work for Business Week, the business show. Things like research for stories, help edit the interviews and writing my own scripts.
I felt that this was a direction that I wanted to move in , where I was more fully utilised.
So did newsreading bore you ?
Working at MTV was more than just staring at a camera . But when you reduce the amount of presentation that you do , you can increase the amount of behind the scenes work.
How are your relations with MTV ?
I have worked for the Maharaja Organisation for over two years - first at YES FM and then at MTV . They basically made me what I am, they created me. Throughout this year and a half, it could have been potentially damaging to my morale but they always remained encouraging, supportive and very positive.
Who will be taking over your job ?
I believe Sanjeevani Ranasinghe. She is becoming a pretty good reporter and I hope she manages to continue reporting as well as anchoring the show.
Who are the TV people internationally that you admire?
Michael Buerk from the BBC is the most incredible reporter. Kate Adie because she's a woman whose placed in the middle of war zones and survived - she's someone who is respected in a so-called 'man's world '. I admire Oprah Winfrey , because she struggled during her formative years, but has channeled her energies to get the whole of America to reveal their true selves. She is, however, becoming a little too commercialised.
Ever think of doing a talk show yourself ?
I'd love to do a talk show but it's a big challenge . I found when interviewing one on one , you are using so many of your communicative functions simultaneously ... So I guess a talk show would be that multiplied by however many people that were there.
So we won't be seeing the debut of CHANDI LIVE ! any time soon ?
No, not until I learn a lot more.
What are your future plans ?
I have a few projects in hand . I definitely want to increase my knowledge of what goes on behind the camera as opposed to in front of it.
Lots of job offers?
At the moment, I am involved with Young Asia Television which makes programmes for the Asian region. It's a very exciting innovative place to work in because it has a combination of an experienced management who give the young people who work there a lot of freedom and encouragement to express their creativity.
Are you thinking of joining any other station's news team ?
No, definitely not.
I am going in a different direction now, and that's not for me. MTV News was the best news team in Sri Lanka and joining any other would be a step in the wrong direction.
How have your feelings of cultural alienation changed ? Last time we talked about how you felt you didn't fit in to either world you belong to.
Recently a school friend of mine came over, who I've known for over a decade. I've always thought that we were extremely similar but now I can't believe how much I've changed. Sri Lanka has definitely improved me but people like me still do not really fit in as much as we'd like to.
What's your parting message to your critics ?
I think it's important that when you put pen to paper that you get your facts straight, and that constructive criticism is always preferable to an all out assault.
What's there been on Sri Lankan TV that made you want to write to the papers?
Well, I work really long hours so funnily enough I don't get to watch much television. But I've always hated it when we try to emulate and ape the West and miss our target . For example, those teenage dancing troupes in baseball caps and jeans that you always see.
So there's nothing wrong with good emulation ?
Yeah , there is ! .... it just tells me that we're not maintaining our traditions. The best thing is when we take the best from all cultures .
And your parting words to your fans ?
There's this three year old who apparently hugs the television screen when I'm on. Since I'm off the air at the moment, I hope that this means his mummy won't have to worry about him getting electrocuted !!! To everyone else I did very much enjoy presenting. Right now it feels like it's time to change direction, but once you're on TV, you get hooked. So it may not be too long before you see ( to quote my critics) my big owl eyes and hear my 'cockney' accent on your screens again. Chandi will be back. Elvis has not left the building.
He's just gone out for some banana cream pie ?
That's right.
In this two-part article, Richard Boyle recounts the mysterious affair of C.G. Jung's Ceylon journey, the island's association with what appears to have been a Near Death Experience (NDE) undergone by him some years later, and the remarkable correspondence between this experience and a NASA photograph.
There is an exquisite NASA photograph of Sri Lanka and part of the Indian sub-continent from space, taken during the Gemini 11 mission in September 1996. In it, Sri Lanka is patchworked and fretted by cloud formations, with a vortex-eye exposing Adam's Peak and the Central hills to the heavens. To the north lies India with its cirrus-flecked mountains and cumulus-encrusted plains, highlighted by the surrounding wastes of blue-green water. Linking the two land masses is a curious semi-circular chain of small but dense cloud, which evokes the much-quoted traveller's bouquet: 'Ceylon, the pearl in the necklace of India'.
Whenever I study this photograph (which is often as happily it graces my study wall) my thoughts almost invariably shift to the Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung: the twentieth century's master physician of the soul, interpreter of symbols, and intrepid explorer of the human mind who was described by J.B. Priestley as 'One of Western Man's great liberators'. It was Jung who redefined alchemy for the modern world, who rediscovered the universality of myth and symbol, who diverted psychology from the confines of Freudianism, and who gave us the concepts of the Collective Unconscious, the Libido, the Archetype, Syncronicity, and Introversion and Extraversion among many others.
Although he was a great sage, he was not without fault and foible, as is evident from Frank McLynn's Carl Gustav Jung (1996), which, surprisingly, is the first comprehensive biography of the psychologist. There is little doubt that Jung was a xenophobe and anti-Semite, and his right-wing views and Nazi sympathies certainly drove Thomas Mann to denounce him publicly. Jung was also a prodigious philanderer, whose long-suffering wife had to live in a menage-a-trois with his long-term mistress Toni Woolf, as well as put up with a coterie of female admirers known as the 'Valkyries'. Moreover, his unconscionable professional ethics permitted him to seduce many of his female analysands.
In late 1937, Jung left Switzerland for India on the invitation of the British Government to attend the twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations of the University of Calcutta. Jung had been anxious for some to go to India to affirm his convictions on the value of Oriental wisdom. As he would admit in his idiosyncratic autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1963), he was also in search of himself, or rather the truth peculiar to himself. He considered the Oriental to be archetypal, without the Occidental extremes of personal differentiation. Jung therefore made no plans to visit holy men or spiritual leaders, as he had an exact notion of their archetype, and refused to accept that which he could not attain on his own.
The beginning of Jung's Indian journey was not very promising, for when he landed in Bombay in December, 1937 he was depressed by the endless bustle of the city. Delhi and Agra were a distinct improvement, but it was the next destination, Sanchi, which was the most significant of his stay in India. Sanchi was of special interest to Jung because for him Buddhism was the most appealing of religions. 'It was not surprising that Jung was drawn to Buddhism', states Frank McLynn. 'He preferred Buddha's mode of overcoming the world by reason to that of Christ by sacrifice'. As McLynn points out, Jung's work is full of admiration for Buddhism and its founder.
Visits to Allahabad, Benares and Darjeeling were to follow before Jung went to stay in Calcutta. At the University there he became involved in a discussion regarding the extinction of consciousness with various Brahmins. He believed that it was impossible to gain the state of being 'Not-conscious' while alive and still be able to remember it, as Hindus claimed. Patiently he argued with the Brahmins that you could not get rid of ego even in the deepest samadhi, for the moments of existence would have been non-existent and left no memory trace.
While he was in Calcutta, Jung travelled to Orissa to visit the famous temple of Konarak, celebrated for its erotic sculptures. Unfortunately, however, Jung went down with dysentery and was unable to attend the honorary degree ceremony. He spent ten days in hospital, but admitted that he welcomed the rest after his strenuous itinerary. 'Yet he had a last, and important call to make before departing for Europe', declares McLynn. 'He sailed to Ceylon, and here found the Buddhist paradise he had sought'.
Ceylon immediately struck Jung as being 'no longer India; there is already something of the South Seas about it, and a touch of paradise, in which one cannot linger too long.' The comparison with the Pacific Isles and the reference to paradise are familiar, but the passing admonition against staying on is somewhat curious, and certainly runs counter to tradition. Could Jung have believed that intellectual laxity was inevitable in such a near-paradise?
A short while after his arrival in Colombo, Jung gave an informal talk on the subject of dreams to the Rotherfield Psychological Society, which had been founded the previous year by Dr. W.S. Ratnavale - a pioneering Ceylonese psychiatrist - to educate the public in matters of mental health, and to promote mental well-being. Jung's talk, which took place at Dr. Ratnavale's residence in Albert Crescent was the focus of a lengthy report featured in the Ceylon Daily News of 2 February, 1938.
Introduced by Dr. Ratnavale as 'one of the few who have contributed towards the knowledge of modern psychology'. Jung declared to the large gathering present that, 'Dreams are not the product of conscious and intelligent thinking or conscious activity. They cannot be directed, produced at will, or controlled. They are the expression of an autonomous functioning of our psyche'.
As dreaming was a process that intimately involved the unconscious, Jung went on to say, the meaning of dreams could only be deduced by consulting with the unconscious, which he referred to as 'the two million year-old man". To lend support to the theories he propounded, Jung delved into his considerable case-book as a practising analytical psychologist to relate, for the elucidation of his audience, several examples where his interpretation of a patient's dream was vital in effecting a cure.
Jung quickly left the heat and daily precipitation of Colombo for the cooler climes of Kandy, where he was to witness and perfectly comprehend the significance (although not the ritual) of the evening pooja at the Dalada Maligawa. It is indeed fortunate that the eminent psychologist has left us a vivid impression of this perennial ceremony, which was as popular a tourist attraction then as it is nearly sixty years later:
'Young men and girls poured out enormous mounds of jasmine flowers in front of the altars, at the same time singing a prayer under their breath: a mantram. I thought they were praying to Buddha, but the monk who was guiding me explained, 'No, Buddha is no more; He is in Nirvana; we cannot pray to Him. They are singing: 'This life is transitory as the beauty of these flowers. May my God (God = deva = guardian angel) share with me the merit of this offering".
'As a prelude to the ceremony a one-hour drum concert was performed in the mandapam, or what in Indian temples is called the hall of waiting. There were five drummers; one stood in each corner of the square hall, and the fifth stood in the middle. He was the soloist, and a very fine drummer. Naked to the waist, his dark-brown trunk glistening, he stepped up to the golden Buddha bearing a double drum, 'to sacrifice the music'. There, with beautiful movements of the body and arms, he drummed alone a strange melody, artistically perfect. I watched him from behind; he stood in front of the entrance of the mandapam, which was covered with little oil lamps. The drum speaks the ancient language of the belly and solar plexus; the belly does not 'pray' but engenders the 'meritorious' mantram or meditative utterance. It is therefore not adoration of a non-existent Buddha, but one of the many acts of self-redemption performed by the awakened human being.'
McLynn interprets Jung's Dalada Maligawa experience in the following way: 'Intoxicated by the drumming and the singing, Jung realized that it was Buddhism that had made Ceylon and the south come alive for him as Benares, Calcutta and Orissa never had; these temple ceremonies summed up the relationship between the Self as eternal and the Ego as bounded by space and time'.
In his Collected Works (Volume 10) Jung relates several incidents he witnessed in Ceylon that for him exemplified this 'living Buddhism'. The first occurred when he came across two men in their bullock carts who had met in a narrow lane and could not pass one another. Jung maintained that in Switzerland this situation would invariably have ended up in argument, however in Ceylon the two carters just bowed politely to each other and said 'Passing disturbances, no soul' - in other words these events were taking place in the ephemeral world of maya. On another occasion Jung recounts how he saw two boys fighting, but when they threw punches the fists always stopped in the air just inches away from the face.
As a contrast to Jung's reactions to Ceylon it is of interest to note those of his friend and admirer, J.B. Priestley who was one visitor who was unable to empathize with the island. In J.B. Priestley : Outcries and Asides, the author explains his unease with Ceylon in decidedly Jungian terms. 'Ceylon's history is divided between long peaceful stretches of reservoir building and outbursts of appalling violence and cruelty', he writes, 'and it was as if my unconscious was obscurely aware, on a mysterious wavelength, of these abominable outbursts and their orgies of sadism, and some feeling of revulsion seeped through into consciousness'.
Most of Jung's time in Ceylon was spent in 'mist-swathed Kandy, primarily at the Dalada Maligawa, which he felt radiated a special charm. He was attracted in particular to its impressive library, where he conversed with the monks and studied the Buddhist canon, marvelling at the texts 'engraved on silver leaves'.
Jung left Kandy and proceeded to Colombo, where he boarded a steamer for Trivandrum. After a meeting in Trivandrum with a disciple of Ramana Maharishi (the guru who had so fascinated Somerset Maugham), Jung returned to Colombo and embarked on the voyage back to Europe. Aboard ship Jung began work on a new alchemical synthesis, and became so absorbed that he did not go ashore at Bombay.
On his return to Switzerland at the end of February 1938, Jung was advised to rest in order to recover fully from the dysentery he went down with in Calcutta. During this convalescence Jung had an opportunity to reflect on his visit to the Orient. He considered it to be important for many reasons. One was that it had confirmed for him that whereas the religious impulse was as deeply rooted in human beings as the sexual instinct, no religion except perhaps an ultra-sophisticated version of Buddhism, was capable of eclipsing the others.
In addition, the India and Ceylon experience confirmed Jung's holistic theory that ultimately everything links up with everything else, which he felt was evidence for the existence of a collective unconscious. He also believed that there was a convincing parallel between mandalas and the circular symbols so often drawn by his patients while undergoing treatment. Most significantly, the difference between Orient and Occident matched perfectly Jung's concept of introversion and extraversion, since the Occidental being projected meaning into objects, while the Oriental being felt the existence of meaning within.
Part II next week
Continue to Plus page 2 - Our own Christmas tunes * Thoughts for this season * A book to reflect and regret
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