So fascinated by these narratives of Sri Lanka's cricket 'icons'. Let me tell you another cricket story. My Tamil physics tutor has 2 sons. They went to school in Jaffna, at a leading school. The eldest was captain of the school cricket team. Lets call ' him Raj' https://twitter.com/KushilFOG/status/1317722906277785600

In the 12+ months following the genocide of July 83, just as Murali was starting to learn cricket in Kandy, SriLanka's President had sent his Sinhala army to quell the pro-independence uprising in the North. Now Raj was an all-round sports leader & one of 4 black belts in Karate

in the local Jaffna Karate club. One day an informant warned Raj's mother that the Sri Lankan army was planning to kill young Tamil athletes to pre-empt them from joining the Tamil insurgency. Raj was approached by an insurgent group & had turned them down.

Shortly thereafter, the Srilankan army tied Raj's friend, one of 4 Karate blackbelts at his club, to a lamp post and battered him to death - as an example. Raj's mother, my tutor's wife, took her children out of Jaffna that night. They left with nothing, grateful to have lived.

This is the way of genocide. Hitler liquidated polish academia, Pakistan went after Bangladeshi universities in 1971. People - journalists, academics, leaders - who work in these countries would know this. Today SriLanka's national cricket team has never acknowledged genocide.