Sinha – Le, Lion’s Blood?

By Shohorab Ahamed –January 2, 2016

Shohorab Ahamed

The interviewer asked on TV from Ziauddin Yousafzai, the father of Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Prize winner, about the man who shot her. He replied “It wasn’t a man, it was an ideology”. I write this with a tingling sensation that warns me of a growing, instigated and extremely ignorant akin ideology in my mother country, Sri Lanka.

I am sure as a reader you would have definitely seen this new “Sinha-Le” image going viral not only through digital media like Facebook but also in print. Taxis are branding themselves with a sticker and even some boutiques have joined the band wagon. The image has the lion taken from the national flag accompanied with the word “Sinha (Lion)” written in yellow and the last letter “Le” in red. “Le” means blood in Sinhalese and the picture tries to portray the word Sinhale as a conjunction of the two words “Lion” and “Blood” very obviously trying to tell all of us that he belongs to the Sinhala race, born of Lions Blood. Who is funding this? Who is printing this image? Who’s idea was this?

Those are questions that would come to your mind but the more potent question should be, “Is that what Sinhale Means”? I am a Muslim, my mother tongue is Sinhalese, my mother country is Sinhale (Sri Lanka is a new name) and I say to the intellectual who designed this ideology, you have got the whole thing wrong, so please don’t lead astray the future generations of this glorious and probably the most tolerant, genuine nation in the world.

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