21st century Sri Lankan academia has seemed to have failed in understanding the very purpose of conducting a symposium. True credit to Plato's definition of the term would see a meeting or conference in which a forum was created for men (nowadays it includes women too) to engage in intellectual debate and discussion. The failed state of academic symposiums today, at least in the Sri Lankan context, has reduced intellectual discussion to a mere boast of and utter revelation of one's immense stupidity in public. True intellectuals would entice their audience and would trigger them to think further along the lines of thought of their papers or presentations. It also supposedly creates space for the presenter to incorporate new ideas, and further develop in the lines of orientation. Mere presentation of the ordinary and mundane that would hardly keep a moose awake is simply ridiculous, but has become the guise under which most academics would gather points for their renowned existence in academia, however with hardly any contribution to the development of knowledge. The culture of research and interpretation should be resuscitated with a generous love for interpretation, broadening of boundaries, true to the cause effort to serve the world to better its paradigm of knowledge. Otherwise, rather than stimulating intellectual debates, symposiums of this sort would be a merry-making farce. Let me say it like this- "international symposiums" held in our nation today are quite similar and no different to "arpico sale centres", where the fact of obtaining low-priced goods, as expected by the term "sale" has nothing to do with arpico at all. It is just the name of the consumerist retailer. Likewise, the term "international" in the way it used to describe the symposiums above, does not carry the meaning of having distinguished personnel who present research breakthroughs in Sri Lanka. Rather it is just the name of the symposium- dust in our own eyes to fool our own existence.
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