Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
I landed in Sydney as an immigrant on May 1, 1976, to settle down in tropical Queensland. We (my spouse and I) decided that Australia, not Sri Lanka, would be the better place for an inter-racial couple to raise a family. Had we chosen Sri Lanka, both money and language problems would [...]

Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
During my decade in Australia, one of my major newspaper articles appeared in the national daily, The Australian, as its featured Forum column on Feb. 23, 1977. The article, which appeared with both my byline and picture, was headlined “Telling the Third World like it is.” It was an attempt to explain [...]

Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
The teething problems of teaching journalism at the CIAE arose out of the fear of the administrators that publication of student writing might taint the image of the institute, particularly its administrators. That’s why they scuttled my original attempt to publish student-written news in the Morning Bulletin.
CIAE Director Arthur Appleton was an [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
In Therigatha, bhikkuni Vajira is said to have responded to Mara:
It’s only suffering that comes to be,
Suffering that stands and falls away.
Nothing but suffering comes to be,
Nothing but suffering ceases.
In retrospect, I find my quest for a PhD in journalism and mass communication and the subsequent travel across oceans in quest of [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
Vincent Lowe, Dean Sharom Ahmat’s emissary from the School of Humanities, Universiti Sains Malaysia, welcomed me at the Penang airport. He took me to the campus and gave me some idea of the university’s communication program. I stayed the first three nights at the colonial seaside hotel, the Eastern & Orient. Then [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
On the last Sunday of November 1974, just after my parents had left Malaysia to return to Sri Lanka, an incident that occurred at the beachside garden of Rasa Sayang Hotel in Batu Ferrenghi devastated me—a clear reminder that exceeding the middle path would rebound in accelerating dukkha.
 Leslie Allen, an avuncular New [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
My aim was to become a journalist-scholar although my childhood ambition was to be a “renowned statesman.” (Well, aren’t statesmen a breed of scholars?) I was determined to enrich my journalistic skills with a sound understanding of the “social science” of mass communication—“the academic study of the various means by which individuals [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
I returned to Ceylon on Aug. 14, 1971—five years after I left on the WPI fellowship. More than six months later, on Feb. 27, 1972, after collecting all the data I needed, I left Ceylon for the second time to land in America to complete my quest for the degree of doctor [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne ©2009
My great ambition as a 15-year-old child was to become “one of the outstanding statesmen of the world” and to go overseas to “get acquainted with foreigners and their ways of life.” These revelations appeared in a regular “What I want to be” children’s feature published in a Colombo daily on [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
I, “Weligama Podda” from Pathegama, was on the way to becoming a global citizen. My knowledge in Buddhist philosophy tells me, however, that “I” is the wrong term to use because a characteristic of existence is anatta (no-self).  “I’ implies a permanent soul. So the reference here is to the stream of [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, …
we had everything before us, we had nothing before us.
These two lines from “A Tale of Two Cities” written by my favorite English novelist Charles Dickens aptly describe the contrasting conditions in Ceylon, which I left in August 1966, and [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
The World Press Institute made arrangements for me to work with the Eugene Register-Guard in Oregon on a 10-week internship (Feb, 6 – April 14, 1967).  When the news of my internship reached Fred W. Welty, who served as the information chief at the USIS in Colombo in the mid ‘60s, he [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
[The writer is professor of mass communications emeritus, Minnesota State University Moorhead.]  
The newspaper industry in the United States is bracing itself for its eventual demise by 2043 (Sri Lanka Guardian, 24 Feb; 2009). The fate of the newspaper is doomed in all leading capitalist countries, where print newspaper circulation and readership have [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009 [The writer is professor of mass communications emeritus, Minnesota State University Moorhead]
China, the emerging superpower, has achieved its success through the pragmatic application of its three-pronged cultural inheritance based on a hybrid of Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist principles. Pragmatism, defined so elegantly by the illustrious Deng Xiaoping—“It does not matter whether [...]

By Shelton A. Gunaratne©2009
Tamil immigrant communities and the diaspora, spurred by the Tiger activists who have established a complex network of associations as fronts for “tax” collection and promotion of Tamil nationalism, appears to be now focusing their attention on setting up a trans-state nation, something akin to a worldwide Tamil Nadu, a far bigger [...]

By Shelton Gunaratne, professor of mass communications emeritus
 Philip Fernando, journalist and author
Thalif Deen, Interpress bureau chief, United Nations
 
Speaking of the ‘50s and the ‘60s, the Golden Age of Peradeniya, Brendon Gooneratne, an expatriate domiciled in Australia, wrote: “It was a period that will be remembered as a time that has passed, and will probably never [...]