Author Archives: Kevin Philipupillai

Parallel Lines

by

1

Back when the Earth was flat,
they said parallel lines could never intersect.
They said some were natural masters
and others natural slaves.

When the paradigm shifted and the Earth became round,
there was a chance for parallel lines to meet as equals.
But the righteous heard God instruct them otherwise.
East was East and West was West,
and never the two should meet.
They made themselves more equal than others
and kept them separate and three fifths.

Now the paradigm has shifted again.
The water is rising and the sky falling.
Space and time are folding in on themselves.

Perhaps this time ceilings will crack and certainties crumble.
Perhaps glory will run out of oil.
Perhaps history will become histories,
and spray-paint will be welcomed
when it corrects the inaccuracies of marble.

Perhaps this time parallel lines will meet.
To converge, yes, but also to re-unite.

My grandmother’s brother, Father Xavier Thaninayagam (BA, DD, MA, MLitt, PhD)

by

2

This is a biographical note I wrote about my grandmother’s brother, a priest and academic who was prominent in the study of Tamil literature, history and philosophy. The article was written as part of a publication commemorating the 140th anniversary of the school he attended as a boy growing up on the island of Kayts, off the northern coast of Sri Lanka.

***

Rev. Father Xavier Stanislaus Thaninayagam believed that his mother tongue deserved a place in the front row of the world’s great languages. In a Master’s thesis he presented at Annamalai University in 1947, he wrote:

“With Greek and Latin, Tamil shares the misfortune of having lost the vast portion of its ancient literature… Yet what has escaped the ravages of time, though not even a hundredth of the actual output, reveals elements so original and fresh in the history of literature and throws such new light on the history of the world, that to study the literary features of ancient literatures or to describe the world as it was at the age of Asoka or Alexander or Augustus, it would not be sufficient to take count only of Greek, and Latin, and Sanskrit and Chinese. It would be equally necessary to consider Tamil.”

Thirty-two years after his death, we remember him for his efforts as a “roving ambassador for Tamil.”

Fr Thaninayagam as a young priest

Fr. Thaninayagam was born in Kayts on August 2nd, 1913. He attended St. Anthony’s College, Kayts (1920-22) and St. Patrick’s College, Jaffna (1923-30) before accepting a vocation as a Catholic priest. He obtained a Bachelor’s degree in philosophy at St. Bernard’s Seminary, Colombo (1931-34) and then spent five years in Rome studying theology, finishing in 1939 with a Doctorate of Divinity from the University de Propaganda Fide. He later acquired two Master’s degrees in the study of Tamil literature at Annamalai University and a Ph.D. in education in London.

Fr. Thaninayagam lectured in the Department of Education at the University of Ceylon from 1952 to 1961. He moved to Kuala Lumpur in 1962 to become head of the Department of Indian Studies and eventually dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Malaya. As a strong proponent of the academic study of Tamil language, literature and philosophy, he played a major role in forming the International Association for Tamil Research and in organizing the first World Tamil Conference, which took place in Malaysia in 1966.

My grandfather, now 92, still passes along precious bits of advice collected from the brother-in-law he considered an intellectual and moral guide. My father’s siblings remember frantic preparations for visits from their refined and elegant uncle. But Fr. Thaninayagam died in 1980, before anyone from my generation was born. With no direct experience of the man, my cousins and I have had to rely on photographs and anecdotes.

However, we now find that the priest is not as far away as we thought he was. It turns out he left published works on the shelves of libraries at our own universities. Robarts Library at the University of Toronto lists seven titles under his name. And a few months ago, my father found a bookseller in the U.S. with a copy of the dissertation his uncle wrote to complete his theological studies in Rome. Presented to his supervisors in 1939, The Carthaginian Clergy is a historical study of the fledgling Christian community in North Africa in the third century AD — a hundred years before that same community produced St. Augustine. The young Fr. Thaninayagam, possibly wondering how to reconcile his Roman Catholic education with centuries of Dravidian religion and philosophy, wrote that he wanted to see how the early North African clergy chose to approach their own ancient Carthaginian and Egyptian heritage.

The Carthaginian Clergy is peppered with passages in Latin, French, Italian and the other European languages Fr. Thaninayagam learned before he mastered his mother tongue. As a young alien in one of the centres of European learning, how and when did he realize that the language of his parents in Kayts had as much wisdom to offer as the languages of Rome and Paris? The question is as relevant for young people in today’s Tamil diaspora as it was for a 26-year-old seminary student in the Tamil diaspora of 1939.

Whatever the immediate cause, it is clear that in his thirties Fr. Thaninayagam flung himself into the study of his own heritage. He had a special interest in how the ancient Tamil poets described and fed off the natural world. Years later, when delivering the Second Thirumathi Sornammal Endowment Lecture, he argued that ancient Tamil civilizations had evolved sophisticated ideals of humanism and universal kinship. In an article in the Hong Kong periodical Eastern Horizon in 1966, he wrote that Tamil deserved special notice as the only Indian language whose literary life spanned both the ancient and modern periods. He wanted to pull Tamil out from under the shadow of Sanskrit.

It was important to Fr. Thaninayagam that Tamil language and literature be studied at a high level by people who were not themselves Tamil. In 1968, he wrote in the editor’s introduction to Tamil Studies Abroad: A Symposium,

“Though Tamil is a Dravidian language with an ancient and uninterrupted literary and artistic tradition, it is studied in most foreign universities mostly because of its peculiar linguistic characteristics or because it is a tool for field work in Tamil districts.”

He felt that literature, philosophy and religion – the soul of the culture – were not getting sufficient attention abroad. The book, published for presentation at the Second International Conference of Tamil Studies in Madras, was a survey of the state of Tamil Studies around the world. He compiled and edited entries about pioneer scholars and ongoing work in France, Germany, Britain, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, the USA, India beyond Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and elsewhere. The collection functioned both as a history of the field and as a directory to further future association.

My cousins and I are members of a generation which is wary of stature and suspicious of traditional institutions. We experience two conflicting impulses when it comes to this prominent relative. First we feel the urge to emphasize the blood we share with him. But then we feel the obligation to assess him as objectively as we would any other prominent person. It is wonderful to be able to engage with his published works. It would have been more wonderful still to engage directly with the man himself.

“If Latin is the Language of Law and of Medicine
French the Language of the Diplomacy
German the Language of Science
And English the Language of Commerce
Then Tamil is the Language of Bhakti
The devotion to the sacred and the holy.”

–Father Xavier S. Thaninayagam

Back cover of “The Carthaginian Clergy,” presented as a doctoral thesis in 1939 and published after WWII

***

The author is the grandson of Mrs. Theresa Philipupillai (sister of Rev. Fr. Xavier S. Thaninayagam) and Mr. V.A. Philipupillai (who taught at St. Anthony’s College, Kayts).

My first segment on CBC Tapestry

by

0

Tapestry is a CBC national radio program which explores the big questions in philosophy, religion and spirituality. Yesterday, the show broadcast the first episode of its 18th season. I prepared one of the segments, my first for a national radio program.

The episode is a look at ashes and cremation. I interviewed a Hindu priest from Guyana about the difficulties he faced when releasing his father’s ashes into Lake Ontario 15 years ago.

If you’d like to listen to the entire show (you should) here’s the link. My piece is the last of the four segments. If you just want to listen to my segment, here’s the link.

One of the producers at Tapestry (Carma Jolly) coached me through the interviewing and editing process and did some mixing after I finished. It sounds like she decided to keep most of what I’d done intact for the final version. Which is gratifying, because she’s very very good at this.

Hope you like it.

suggested reading July 8 — CNN and Fox get it wrong // low-caste over-achievers // Anonymous

by

0

1) We’re getting wildly differing assessments
by Tom Goldstein for SCOTUSblog

On June 28th, the Supreme Court of the United States assembled to deliver its widely-anticipated decision on President Obama’s healthcare bill. CNN and Fox News reported that the court had struck down the entire bill. SCOTUSblog and the wire services reported that the court had upheld most of the bill.

The publisher of SCOTUSblog offers this incredibly specific play-by-play of the nine chaotic minutes after the decision was released, when the official Court website buckled, breaking news outlets contradicted each other, the President didn’t know which source to believe, the stock market responded to competing information… and the Huffington Post copied the wrong answer.

Quoting:

The Court’s own technical staff prepares to load the opinion on to the Court’s website.  In years past, the Court would have emailed copies of the decision to the Solicitor General and the parties’ lawyers once it was announced.  But now it relies only on its website, where opinions are released approximately two minutes later.  The week before, the Court declined our request that it distribute this opinion to the press by email; it has complete faith in the exceptional effort it has made to ensure that the website will not fail.

But it does.  At this moment, the website is the subject of perhaps greater demand than any other site on the Internet – ever.  It is the one and only place where anyone in the country not at the building – including not just the public, but press editors and the White House – can get the ruling.  And millions of people are now on the site anxiously looking for the decision.  They multiply the burden of their individual visits many times over – hitting refresh again, and again, and again.  In the face of the crushing demand, the Court cannot publish its own decision.

The opinion will not appear on the website for a half-hour.  So everyone in the country not personally at 1 First St., NE in Washington, DC is completely dependent on the press to get the decision right.

.

2) Why there’s an alarming rash of suicides among Dalit students
by Stephanie Nolen for The Globe and Mail

Part of the Globe‘s “Breaking Caste” series. Note: “reservations” are part of the affirmative action policies set up to help students from Dalit and aboriginal communities.

Quoting:

Anoop Kumar, who runs the Insight Foundation, says most of the backlash against reservations comes from an (often deliberate) misunderstanding of the principle. “People are defining merit strictly in terms of marks in the entrance exam, and that conveniently discounts all the other factors affecting the performance of the students,” he says.

“So a student from an urban, upper-caste, upper-class background who has both parents literate and studied at a an elite, private [English-language] school is considered more ‘meritorious’ when he or she has 85-per-cent marks, than a reservation-category student who goes to a terrible government school in [Hindi] and has no one in the family who is literate but still scores 75-per-cent marks.”

Yet their dominant-caste peers still grouse that the reserved-category students would never make it if they had to compete on an open field. Their professors often share that view: As Ms. Barge points out, the faculty in these prestigious institutes is overwhelming made up of people from the dominant castes, since only a single generation of Dalits really has had the chance for a professional education.

.

3) How Anonymous Picks Targets, Launches Attacks, and Takes Powerful Organizations Down
by Quinn Norton for Wired

If you haven’t heard of the online hacking collective Anonymous, I also recommend the documentary We Are Legion, which showed at Hot Docs this year. I first heard about the group about a year and a half ago when it attacked PayPal and shut down the websites of Visa and MasterCard in retaliation for their refusal to process donations to WikiLeaks.

As Norton puts it in this article, Anonymous is “a sort of self-appointed immune system for the Internet”.

Quoting:

Back in the hacking realm, Anonymous was also flexing its muscles. On February 5, 2011, the Financial Times quoted Aaron Barr, CEO of a security company called HBGary Federal, as saying that he had uncovered the leadership of Anonymous. He claimed the group had around 30 active members, including 10 senior hackers who made all the decisions, and he purportedly had linked their IRC handles to real names using social-network analysis. He was planning to announce all this, he said, during a presentation at an upcoming security conference.

Anonymous responded with inhuman severity and swiftness. Within 48 hours, all the data on the email servers of HBGary Federal and its former parent company, HBGary, had been stolen and then released in full on the Pirate Bay. Anons further humiliated Barr by seizing his Twitter account and (they allege, though this has never been confirmed) even erasing his iPad remotely. Barr’s Anonymous presentation was posted on the net and laughed at for its supposed inaccuracies.

.

What Singaporean history textbooks told me about British rule

by

0

On Canada Day, the Toronto Star published a story about a civil rights lawyer who is fighting to be allowed to become a Canadian citizen on his own terms. Charles Roach came to Canada from Trinidad in 1955 and fulfilled the requirements for citizenship in the 1970s. His wife got her citizenship but he didn’t get his because he refuses to swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen. The oath is at the centre of the citizenship ceremony for new citizens.

Roach says the Queen is a symbol of centuries of colonialism and racism. He and several other would-be citizens, one of whom is an Irish republican, have been fighting for years to have the oath of allegiance removed as a mandatory part of the citizenship ceremony. Their most recent lawsuit is in front of the Ontario Court of Appeal. With doctors predicting that terminal brain cancer will kill him within two years, this might be Roach’s last chance to become a Canadian citizen.

I know the oath, because I took it when I became a citizen myself about eight years ago.

I swear (or affirm) that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, Her Heirs and Successors, and that I will faithfully observe the laws of Canada and fulfil my duties as a Canadian citizen.

Eight years ago, I hadn’t heard that immigrants have to swear the oath while most natural-born citizens never have and never will. I hadn’t learned about the legacies of colonialism. I hadn’t realized that a hereditary monarchy violates the basic democratic premise that every person is born equal. I hadn’t read that conservative senator Hugh Segal, anticipating that the oath of allegiance might be challenged as a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, had tried to use the “notwithstanding” clause to exempt it from Charter scrutiny.

Eight years ago, I hadn’t heard or learned or realized or read these things. So pledging fealty to Elizabeth II wasn’t a problem for me then. It would be a problem today.

But my opposition to hereditary monarchy is not a new or particularly interesting issue for me anymore. The more interesting question is where this opposition comes from. Why can’t I just sit back and enjoy a glamorous taxpayer-funded wedding? How did I become such a snarky anti-colonial killjoy?

The irony for many immigrants who take the oath is that they come from Commonwealth countries — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc. — which decided a long time ago to replace the English monarch with elected local presidents. I was born in a former colony which wiped the Queen off its currency at the earliest possible opportunity. Singapore was once one of the most comfortable postings a British colonial officer could hope for. Pearl of the whatever. Country clubs and appreciative natives.

And the site of the largest surrender of British troops in history.

Our history textbooks didn’t say very much about the war in Europe, about Churchill’s rousing speeches during the Battle of Britain . We learned instead about the war in the Pacific, and how it unravelled the myth of British superiority.

Fortress Singapore, the rock around which the empire would organize its reconquest of southeast Asia. A reconquest made necessary when two of the empire’s battleships, the HMS Repulse and the brand-new HMS Prince of Wales, were sent to intimidate the Japanese and prevent them from landing on the coast of Malaya. The ships, sent without any air support, were sunk on December 8th, 1941, along with 840 sailors.

Fortress Singapore, defended by huge guns which faced south. Undone by February 1942 when the Japanese came from the north, riding bicycles through the formerly impenetrable Malayan jungle. Fortress Singapore, where about 85,000 English, Indian and Australian troops surrendered to about 30,000 Japanese troops after a week of fighting. A surrender not to France or Germany or some other acceptably European power, but to an Asian upstart.

The Japanese general, Tomoyuki Yamashita, who was eventually hanged for war crimes, said after the surrender:

“My attack on Singapore was a bluff, a bluff that worked… I was very frightened that all the time the British would discover our numerical weakness and lack of supplies and force me into disastrous street fighting.”

Instead, 80,000 British troops were signed away by their own general to prisoner-of-war camps and to the Siam-Burma Death Railway. The local population was abandoned to the amusement of demented Japanese soldiers. I heard these stories over and over again, from semi-retired old history teachers who’d lived through the years of Japanese occupation. About how the Japanese targeted the Chinese population. About the island, Pulau Belakang Mati (“island of death from behind”), where prisoners were taken to dig their own graves.

The Japanese were the villains in these stories, but the British were portrayed as the swaggering incompetents who’d earned decades of subservience based largely on the promise of protection. We were taught that when the British came back to Singapore after the war, they were welcomed back not as saviours but as administrators. And that from then it was only a matter of time before local leaders, no longer feeling quite so inferior, pushed them off and claimed independence.

This was the narrative I was immersed in until I was 12. I know now that the Singaporean government used anti-colonialism as one of several ingredients in a new nationalism created to bind four tense ethnic groups into one country. But those stories are still real enough. They allow me an entirely different perspective when talking to born-in-Canada friends about what degree of loyalty or reverence we owe to England’s colonial past.

This is my particular version of the irony that many immigrants are faced with when, coming from developing countries which are sometimes derided as “backwards” and excessively fond of tradition, we run smack into the Canadian custom of subservience to an English monarch. Our own countries of origin, flawed as they certainly are, overcame that decades ago.

demo reel — from Jan 24 — Gzowski memorial

by

0

A simple piece I stitched together to mark the 10th anniversary of the death of CBC broadcasting god Peter Gzowski. At the time, we were getting stressed trying to fill 10 or 20 minutes a day. Gzowski and his crew filled three hours every weekday. For 15 years.

We closed the show with this instead of our normal theme music.

Here’s the link to the full version of the song, by the Doug Edmond Band.

demo reel — from Jan 23 — New Brunswick considering lower minimum wage for servers

by

0

This was when legislators in New Brunswick were considering cutting restaurant servers off from a scheduled increase in the provincial minimum wage. (The proposal was later rejected.) I spoke to a restaurant industry representative and to a student union representative.

Here’s the host’s on-air intro:

Servers in New Brunswick may soon have a lower minimum wage than everyone else in the province.

Provincial politicians are debating legislation that would allow restaurant owners to pay servers less if they make money from tips.

Kevin Philipupillai tells us more.

And here’s my voicer:

demo reel — from Jan 19 — media coverage of accused spy

by

0

This piece was about The Chronicle Herald‘s decision to print relevant as well as seemingly irrelevant personal information about accused spy Jeffrey Delisle. Within the industry this is called “running the phone book” on someone. I interviewed Nathalie Des Rosiers, head of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and Dan Leger, at the time director of news content at the Herald.

We presented this piece as a “talk/tape.” That’s when the reporter comes in to the studio for a live interview with the host (“talk”), bringing along several pre-recorded audio clips (“tape”). I was the reporter and Niko Bell was the host.

Here’s the intro Niko read out:

This week, a naval intelligence officer was accused of espionage.
We know his name, his age, and where he lives.

We also know how old his children are,
how many pets he has,
where his girlfriend comes from,
his financial history,
and more.

Kevin Philipupillai is in the studio to tell us
why we know so much about
Sub-Lieutenant Jeffrey Paul Delisle.

Niko and I spoke about how Delisle is the first serving member of the Canadian forces in living memory to be charged with espionage. I introduced this clip from my interview with Dan Leger of The Chronicle Herald.

I’d asked Leger about the front page of the Herald from the previous day, January 18th. Delisle’s personal information was splashed across the page in big letters. Leger admitted it had turned into a media circus. He also said it was usually only murderers and pedophiles — Public Enemies — who got this kind of front-page treatment.

Niko and I then spoke about Delisle’s right to privacy and his right to be presumed innocent. I introduced a clip from my interview with Nathalie Des Rosiers, head of the CCLA. It’s often up to her to defend the rights of the people everyone else hates.

[Disclosure: my partner works for the CCLA.]

But Leger had mentioned another reason for printing so much personal information about the accused spy. It brought a third party into the conversation: the government. Here’s Leger again:

A publication ban would mean that a judge would order a complete media blackout and newspapers wouldn’t be allowed to print any information about the trial. Leger had said he’d been talking with other major news organizations, getting ready to fight any publication ban. In his words: “getting lawyered up.”

The mention of the government brought the newspaper editor and the civil liberties lawyer much closer together. When I asked Des Rosiers about Leger’s opposition to a publication ban, she re-iterated her concern for Delisle’s right to be presumed innocent. But she then said, between the government’s desire to keep the details of the case secret and the public’s desire to know as much as possible, she would prefer for the public to have access to all the information.

And then my four minutes was up and I quietly kicked myself out of the studio so Niko could get on with the rest of the show.

demo reel — from Jan 18 — WikiDown

by

0

I had a little more fun with this short voicer about Wikipedia and other major websites shutting themselves down to protest against government censorship of the internet. Thanks to Mark, our in-house tech guru, for the sound effects.

Here’s the announcer’s intro:

Wikipedia is on strike today.
You already know that.

Kevin Philipupillai went to find out
if students know why
there is a blackout.

And here’s the clip:

demo reel — from Jan 17 — Families with Children from China

by

0

This is one of the better pieces I got on the air during the radio news workshop at King’s. Amy Crofts, a friend in the journalism program, had heard about a community group for families which had adopted children from China. Amy couldn’t do the story herself so she kindly passed it on to me.

I interviewed Karla, the president of the Nova Scotian branch of the group, as she had lunch with her daughter, AnnaLeisa. The story aired on January 17th.

Here’s the host’s intro to the segment:

Chinese New Year is coming up at the end of January,
and Karla Sonnichsen is helping to plan a big celebration.

She’s not Chinese,
but her little girl is.

Kevin Philipupillai tells us more.

And here’s the clip: