Lanka Citizen

Here’s your chance to complain, and possibly make a change!

It has been over 25 years since JRJ regime introduced the private bus operations, purportedly to develop a national bourgeoisie! There are still some of us who believe that private bus operators can develop capitalism in Sri Lanka. When that happens one day that will be a first in the entire world. And the name of that capitalism will be lumpen-capitalism or rather, petti-kada capitalism. At one point, there were 13,000 private ‘buses’ and 10,000 owners.

Anyway, I suppose, that’s why in the presidential elections, bus operators association which has been allowed to become a law unto itself, has officially declared their support to one candidate. In the meantime, the helpless public will have to put up with all the thuggery and violence of the private bus operators probably for another 25 years. Having to suffer the tastes of music of the bus operators, and that is also at the most irritating noise level is one such hazard the public has to undergo on a daily basis.

There are people like Amal Kumarage from Moratuwa University, who, for a long time, have been trying to influence policy making to ameliorate the ill effects of handing over of the public transport to private operators by the UNP regime.

Now, we hear of another such attempt by the National Transport Commission in their recent request issued to the public to come forward with opinions and suggestions or proposals to formulate a suitable noise level standard inside the buses.

NTC says that a number of complaints are received regarding the hardships people undergo with regard to irritating and ear-splitting noise levels inside buses. The NTC in cooperation with Industrial Technical Institute (ITI) has initiated a research base project to set Noise Level Standards inside buses after a survey.

Your proposals to formulate a suitable Noise Level Standard inside buses must be forwarded on or before October 25, 2005 to the following address: Standard and Specifications Unit, National Transport Commission, 241, Park Road, Colombo 05. Telephone: 2587372, 2554476; Fax: 2503725, 2503969; e-mail: info@ntc.gov.lk/ samantha@nt.gov.lk

“Not only has Harold Pinter written some of the outstanding plays of his time, he has also blown fresh air into the musty attic of conventional English literature, by insisting that everything he does has a public and political dimension,” said Hare, whose own political works include the Iraq war drama Stuff Happens.

Stockholm — In honouring British playwright Harold Pinter on Thursday, Nobel Prize judges have again chosen an artist of literary achievement and political contention.

The 75-year-old Pinter, the most influential British playwright of his generation, is also an unrelenting critic of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, and of the government of Prime Minister Tony Blair.

“I think the world is going down the drain if we’re not very careful,” a frail but defiant Pinter, who has been treated for throat cancer in recent years, said to reporters outside his London home.

Among his recent publications, a new collection of political writings, Death Etc., for a total of 31,000 is expected to be popular.

Pinter told reporters that he felt “quite overwhelmed” by the honour. “I have no idea why they gave me the award. I respect their judgment. I am very grateful,” he said.

Pinter continues a long tradition of Nobel laureates who believe in taking sides and not settling for art for art’s sake.

Last year’s winner, Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek, once instructed her publishers to withhold the performance rights of her plays in Austrian theatres as long as the rightist Freedom Party was part of the government.

Germany’s Guenter Grass, who won in 1999, has been one of his country’s leading liberals and repeatedly questioned the reunification of East and West Germany.

British playwright David Hare cited Pinter’s political engagement in praising his Nobel win.

Pinter, the son of a Jewish tailor, was born in 1930 and was a rebel from an early age, declaring himself a conscientious objector and refusing to do then-compulsory military service. He was influenced by anti-Semitism and by the wartime bombing of London, when he would at times open the back door and “find our garden in flames.”

He published poetry under the name Harold Pinta and emerged as a playwright with The Birthday Party (1957), in which the intruders Goldberg and McCann enter the retreat of Stanley, a young man who is hiding from childhood guilt and who tells them, “You stink of sin, you contaminate womankind.”

The play established Pinter’s dark, distinctive style that relished the juxtaposition of brutality and the banal and could stop hearts with the conversational pause. His characters’ internal fears and longings, their guilt and unruly sexual drives, are set against the neat lives they have constructed to survive, a grim game in which actions often contradict words.

Influenced by Samuel Beckett, Pinter once said of language, “The speech we hear is an indication of that which we don’t hear. It is a necessary avoidance, a violent, sly, and anguished or mocking smoke screen which keeps the other in its true place.”

In The Caretaker (1959), which established him as a commercial and critical success, a manipulative old man threatens the fragile relationship of two brothers; The Homecoming (1964) explores the hidden rage and confused sexuality of an all-male household by inserting a woman.

Over time, Pinter’s attention turned to the world at large. A vocal critic of the market economics of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s — he said his vote for her in 1979 was “idiotic, infantile” — his work became more overtly political.

The New World Order, billed as “a short satiric response to the Gulf War,” was a 10-minute play whose title derives from a phrase used by then-President George Bush. In 2003, Pinter published a volume of anti-war poetry about the current Iraq conflict. He later joined a group of celebrities calling for the impeachment of Blair, who sent British troops to Iraq.

In March 2005, Pinter announced his retirement as a playwright to concentrate on politics. But he created a radio play, Voices, that was recently broadcast on BBC radio to mark his 75th birthday, and said Thursday that he would continue writing poetry.

“And I’ll certainly remain deeply engaged in the question of political structures in this world,” he said.

From a report by By MATT MOORE, Thursday, October 13, 2005, Associated Press