King Sasanka – Sri Lankan Writer & Retired Aviation Professional.

The English Barrier: How "Ideology" is Keeping the Poor, Poor For decades, a specific brand of "left-aligned" rhetoric has echoed through the corridors of Sri Lankan academia and politics: the idea that English education is a threat to national identity or a barrier to social equality. But as the world watched a recent international conference where a Sri Lankan representative became an inadvertent " laughing stock " due to a lack of linguistic fluency, the mask finally slipped.  The joke, however, isn’t on the individual, it’s on the system that failed them. The Great Equalizer, Not the Great Divider There is a fundamental flaw in the thinking that narrowing the gap between the rich and the poor requires pulling the successful down.  True progress doesn't come from making the rich poor; it comes from making the poor rich. In a globalized economy, the primary tool for that transformation is English. The Market Speaks: Look at any billboar...

We met a Greek family on our recent flight to the USA and had a long chat on the 10+ hour flight from Athens to the USA. I knew by looking at them they were in their retirement. I asked them what they were doing during their working life. The answer really surprised me. The gentleman had been working as a bartender all his life and his wife was a homemaker. They were going to the US to see their son and grandchildren, whom they had not seen for awhile due to travel restrictions imposed to combat the spread of the virus. And when they wanted to know where we were coming from, I was happy to say that we were from Sri Lanka, but unfortunately, they had never heard of a country called Sri Lanka before. Bringing the tea into the conversation would stir their memory of the famous Ceylon Tea brand name, too, was met with the same response. This made me think of two important things. The first one was, "Can a bartender from Sri Lanka afford to pay for airfare to visit someon...