Ayubowan

Welcome to Pri's foray into the 21st century blogging community.

This is a serious venture. It's not a blog about my personal life. It's a blog about my ideas about my work and the state of the world. Ideas that have been informed through a 30 year period of working in development; I've realised, possibly too late, that when you spend much of your career 'doing things' and also 'facilitating' so that things get done, you have little time to write - and it seems like writing and publishing is the key to ownership and attribution of ideas. So if you don't write, your ideas reach the public domain via other peoples' writings (the lazy option) or that they don't reach there at all (or like Chinese whispers reach there in a rather distorted form). It's the latter situation that this blog will try to mitigate. Maybe when I get to that stage where I am no longer doing or facilitating, then I could collate the thoughts in this blog into some coherent writing..

Till then, welcome to the randomness of this blog.. please feel free to share your comments....

Priyanthi Fernando

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Will change come through red gates?

Image
My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violenc...
Read more

Some thoughts on the White Saviour Complex of development consultancies

Image
photo taken from  https://e11e99.wordpress.com/2012/10/06/identity-in-a-post-colonial-world/ I am sharing some thoughts that I picked  randomly from a relatively progressive Christian facebook page (Sojourners)that I follow, mainly to help me counter the rather misinformed opinions of my true believer Christian friends (brown not white).  The article is called , 6 HARMFUL CONSEQUENCES OF THE WHITE SAVIOR COMPLEX, BY RYAN KUJA  and is so relevant to the northern development consultancy space that many of my (white) friends and colleagues occupy (and that I too sometimes venture into) that I thought to use it to write a blog post that I can share with that community.   R yan Kuja confesses that he was "never a missionary in the standard sense of the word, never proselytized or attempted to save souls"  but admits that "the engine driving [him] was the white saviour complex..... The other Westerners [he] worked with believed [they] had it al...
Read more

Year 2014: Buddhist era 2557-2558

Image
There was an interesting debate among colleagues that was triggered by the simple fact that I shared the official government calendar for 2014.  The Calendar has, as it has had in the previous year, and possibly many years prior to that,  the sub title -  Buddhist Era 2557-2558. This triggered a discussion on whether it was appropriate to have that on the calendar or not.  The argument against seemed to be based on it being seen as an imposition by the State of Buddhism, into areas that are perceived as secular and non-religious. [Though of course, as was pointed out,  the Gregorian Calendar is not really secular at all, based on the fact that it counts the years from the birth of Christ!] What was interesting was that we were having this debate at all.  Obviously, the current context has made us all ultra sensitive to certain issues, and the whole question of a state religion led some of us to be uncomfortable, others to be resentful (not overtly ma...
Read more