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| Sri lankan Malays |
| 02.29.04 (5:27 am) [edit] |
[b]The Origins[/b]
The ancestors of the present day Malay community of Sri Lanka arrived mostly during the period of the Dutch colonial rule. The Dutch had ousted the Portuguese from the coastal regions of the island in the middle of the 17th century.
The Malay/Javanese soldiers served in the regular army of the Dutch led by the princely class of Malay/Javanese families. Aside from these soldiers, the early Sri Lankan Malay population was comprised significantly of the Javanese/Malay ruling class who were exiled to the island by the Dutch in Java.
An important Javanese ruler thus banished to the island in 1707 was Susunan Mangkurat Mas who lived in Sri Lanka with a large retinue of royal families. A host of other rulers from the Dutch East Indies, presently Indonesia, spent their time in Sri Lanka as political exiles.
The list is a long one from Rajas and nobles from as far as Goa in Celebes, Tidore, Ternate, Bacan, Kupang, Timur and other spice islands. There were so many political exiles in Sri Lanka that in the Indonesian language the word 'disailankan', or to be sent to Ceylon came to mean banishment. The other place of exile was the Cape Town in South Africa where a similar Malay community emerged in later years.
When the British fought the Dutch in 1796, the Malay soldiers in the latter's service provided stiff and brave resistance. The bravery and discipline of the Malay troops appealed to the British who decided to retain their services and formed a full battalion in Sri Lanka. Thus was born the Malay regiment of Sri Lanka, the first ever Malay regiment to be formed and receive Queen's colours in 1802.
Later the name was changed to the Ceylon Rifle Regiment composed of the Malay majority, some Indian Sepoys and some Kaffirs. During the 19th century, Malay life in Sri Lanka was dominated by the military that became their family occupation until the Regiment was disbanded in 1873.
The original Malay population of Sri Lanka consisted of diverse East Indian nationalities, preponderantly of Javanese origin, while others belonged to Sundanese, Bugis, Madurese, Minangkabaus, Amboinese, Balinese, Tidorese, Spice Islanders, and not the least the Malays themselves.
In Dutch records they are referred to as Oosterlingen, or Easterners. Most of them already formed their own kampongs outside the fort of Batavia (now Jakarta) founded by the Dutch Governor Cohen in 1619. When the Dutch fought wars in Sri Lanka and in the Malabar coast these kampongs became depopulated due to heavy recruitment to serve in the Dutch army.
Though the Batavians spoke different dialects within their own communities, they used a common lingua franca, namely the Batavia Malay, or Pasar Melayu to interact among themselves. Besides, they were bound by the common Islamic religious bond. Based on these two strong markers of identity, a strong localised Malay community emerged in Sri Lanka with its own culture and characteristics. It is this community which the British came across when they occupied Lanka in 1796.
The British not only 'martialised' the Malays like the Gurkhas to serve in their native army, but also took firm steps to strengthen the numbers of Malays in Sri Lanka by inviting Malay families from the areas in the Peninsular Malaya which were under their control.
In 1802, the Sultan of Kedah had sent a contingent of his Malay subjects to serve in Sri Lanka who were also joined by a number of Malays from Penang, Malacca and Singapore. Reinforced by new blood from Malaya, the Sri Lankan Malay community truly gained roots in Sri Lanka and was thoroughly indigenous with its own culture and language.
taken frm http://www.rootsweb.com/~lkawgw/malays1.html
-will hv more later
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| life is a box of chocolates |
| 02.29.04 (5:21 am) [edit] |
lol. seer i know i said i'd get this blog started again last nite..silly me..totally got caught up in watching movies that i went to bed w/out thinking. ne ways, here i am folks!! back again.
busy week. honestly i don't know why they call it reading week, coz i only got 3 chapters out of 6 for geography done..and i didn't get to even read ne of my assignments...one week ain't enough!!! ne ways, i still had a great reading week. went for the job fair. i only took a couple of resumes n found out there were more employers than they'd advertised! so obviously i ran out. n e ways, it went off pretty good. i'm hopin to go to another one again. better chances of getting a job rite? :)
i also got the chance to visit my long lost friends in t.o. now normally our dad would drop us off..but this time he actually let us go by ourselves! lol. we were pretty surprised..ne ways, we took the bus at 8am and got there 10am. yea long ride. ne ways, we met up w/ ange, vash, her bf avais, tom, avi n diana. it's been over 2 yrs since we saw all of 'em so it was good! we were supposed to go to a chinese buffet, but ended up goin to an indian/pakistani buffet..which was amazing!! stuffed ourselves and then headed to tom's apartment. watched "Finding Nemo". i was crying n laughing the whole time! ne ways, after that, din n i went to uoft to meet jana. spent an hour w/ her catching up on 'stuff'. :) and finally at 6pm, we left. got home around 9:40pm. had such a blast!! on saturday we went for our aunt/uncle's 25th anniversary. it was pretty good meeting the whole 'malay' community after 2 yrs. they were surprised to see us too..said we'd changed n all. hopefully it was in a good way..than bad. at home, we also did a bit of packing up..our parents wanted us to pack all their stuff coz a family finally decided to rent out our place. Inshallah everything will work out.
so last nite, my sis n i decided to try our hand at some cooking..and it was a success!! hehe. we've been experimenting..n so far, no one's gaggin on our food. :D as for the movies we watched last nite..it was green mile again and forrest gump. these movies always make me teary-eyed!! :cry: they r awesome movies!! well that's abt it for now..catch y'all latez..
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| The truth about university-Dave Barry |
| 02.21.04 (7:19 am) [edit] |
University is a bunch of rooms where you sit for 2,000 hours or so and try to memorize things. The 2,000 hours are spread out over four years. You spend the rest of the time sleeping, partying, and trying to get dates.
Basically, you learn two kinds of things in University:
1. Things you will need to know in later life (two hours)
2. Things you will not need to know in later life (1,998 hours)
The latter are the things you learn in classes whose names end in -ology, -osophy, -istry, -ics, and so on. The idea is you memorize these things, then write them down in little exam books, then forget them. If you fail to forget them, you become a professor and have to stay in University for the rest of your life.
After you've been in University for a year or so, you're supposed to choose a major, which is the subject you intend to memorize and forget the most things about. Here is a very important piece of advice: Be sure to choose a major that does not involve Known Facts and Right Answers. This means you must not major in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, or geology because these subjects involve actual facts. If, for example, you major in mathematics, you're going to wander into class one day and the professor will say: "Define the cosine integer of the quadrant of a rhomboid binary axis, and extrapolate your result to five significant vertices." If you don't come up with exactly the answer the professor has in mind, you fail. The same is true of chemistry: If you write in your exam book that carbon and hydrogen combine to form oak, your professor will flunk you. He wants you to come up with the same answer he and all the other chemists have agreed on. Scientists are extremely snotty about this.
So you should major in subjects like English, philosophy, psychology, and sociology -- subjects in which nobody really understands what anybody else is talking about, and which involve virtually no actual facts. I attended classes in all these subjects, so I'll give you a quick overview of each:
ENGLISH: This involves writing papers about long books or little snippets you have read before class. Here is a tip on how to get good grades on your English papers: Never say anything about a book that anybody with any common sense would say. For example, suppose you are studying Moby Dick. Anybody with any common sense would say Moby Dick is a big white whale, since the characters in the book refer to it as a big white whale roughly 11,000 times. So in your paper, you say Moby Dick is actually the Republic of Ireland. Your professor, who is sick to death of reading papers and never liked Moby Dick anyway, will think you are enormously creative. If you can regularly come up with lunatic interpretations of simple stories, you should major in English.
PHILOSOPHY: Basically, this involves sitting in a room and deciding there is no such thing as reality and then going to lunch. You should major in philosophy if you plan to take a lot of drugs.
PSYCHOLOGY: This involves talking about rats and dreams. Psychologists are obsessed with rats and dreams. I once spent an entire semester training a rat to punch little buttons in a certain sequence, then training my roommate to do the same thing. The rat learned much faster. My roommate is now a doctor. If you like rats or dreams, and above all if you dream about rats, you should major in psychology.
SOCIOLOGY: For sheer lack of intelligibility, sociology is far and away the number one subject. I sat through hundreds of hours of sociology courses, and read gobs of sociology writing, and I never once heard or read a coherent statement. This is because sociologists want to be considered scientists, so they spend most of their time translating simple, obvious observations into scientific-sounding code. If you plan to major in sociology, you'll have to learn to do the same thing. For example, suppose you have observed that children cry when they fall down. You should write: "Methodological observation of the sociometrical behavior tendencies of prematurated isolates indicates that a causal relationship exists between groundward tropism and lachrimatory behavior forms." If you can keep this up for 50 or 60 pages, you will get a large government grant.
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Quotes:
"Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile." -Albert Einstein
"Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement."-Barry LePatner
"Thinking: The talking of the soul with itself."-Plato
"Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens."-Jimi Hendrix
"Imagination is more important than knowledge"-Albert Einstein
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