The window to the soul

Saturday, 28 January 2023 01:41 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

In many spiritual traditions they see the eye as a route to the soul or the core energy or spirit of a human being. We judge from the eyes of a person and determine whether he looks honest or not, kind or not, bold or not and so on. At a practical level the eyes constitute of a vital component of the human anatomy. The eyes are our key human resource enabling us to write, draw, be a carpenter, scholar, gardener, craftsman and jeweller, just to name a few vocations.

But as we grow older the eyes get weaker and many are affected by different eye-related degeneration. For many of us attending to our eyes is an expensive task especially if it is related with surgery and contact lenses.

On Thursday, 26 January, at the Gampaha District General Hospital, an eye treatment and surgery camp was carried out facilitated by Dr. Velautham Sarveswaran, a Sri Lankan Tamil from Jaffna who brings in foreign revenue to Sri Lanka through the Ananthi Hotel in Vavuniya established after 2009. A resident of both Sri Lanka and UK Dr. Sarveswaran has carried out many charities in Sri Lanka for all citizens of this country. The eye treatment camps are regularly conducted by him across the country in affiliation with several organisations and facilitated by the organisation Assist Resettlement and Renaissance, UK. The recent most such treatments were conducted in Jaffna and Gampaha funded by the Alaka Foundation in Malaysia.

We feature below a briefly narrated pictorial of the Gampaha eye treatment camp. The full story will be carried out in the coming week. We publish below brief quotes of those who received the treatment and their full commentaries and the complete descriptive story will be featured in our next edition.

“I do not know whether this gentleman is Sinhala or Tamil or Muslim or anything else. All I know is that he is a god. Anyone who does this kind is a god. War? What war? Wars do not belong to ordinary people because wars are not created by them.” – Balasuriyage J. Perera

“I have three children who are schooling. I am a labourer. It is my right eye that had the cataract. Without my eyes I cannot keep food on the table. Paying for this would have taken me years to save the amount needed.” – J. Weerawardena

“I am an artist. In my whole life I have made a living for me and my family as an artist. It may not be much but I love what I do. One of my eyes was seriously affected for over a year now. Being here and getting this operation done and the lenses sorted means I can go back to my art. I cancelled over five art based contracts in the last weeks.” – M.R.A. Ratna

Dr. Velautham Sarveswaran

“You ask me why I am doing for Sinhalese? Why do I get asked this often! I am a human being and I and other human beings need their eyes. I don’t see races or ethnicities. I see people. My sister was killed because of the war. Yes I have suffered. But, talking about wars and talking about ordinary people may be two different things. Ordinary people in Sri Lanka are poor. Whether they are Sinhala or Tamil or Muslim they are poor. Eyes are their treasure. They need the health of their eyes to work.”

(SV)