Archive for the ‘Media and Communications’

A Home for Books

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Original photo courtesy Tarika Wickremeratne For as long as I can remember we have had books in the house. To my child’s eye it seemed that every room was spilling over with books. Books in bedrooms, living room, dining room, kitchen and even bathroom. Most of the books belonged to my father – his study held his law books and his other books were distributed among the other rooms – Dictionaries (the love of his life), classics, spirituality, fiction, art etc. They were housed in various book cupboards, either inherited from his parents or bought from various furniture auctions held on Saturdays and that were common enough during the 60s and 70s. Most of them were of the art deco style, glass fronted wooden cupboards with an abstract wooden design against the glass, others were plain and serviceable. If the book cupboards had keys they were never locked. We were never told which books we could or couldn’t read and…

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Groundviews now formatted for iPad

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After our launch of Sri Lanka’s as well as South Asia’s first citizen journalism app for Apple’s iPhone 4, we are now pleased to launch a version of the site tailored for Apple’s iPad. Leveraging Onswipe for WordPress, the site content now viewed on an iPad 1 or iPad 2 is beautifully rendered and provides easy access to share content through Twitter, Facebook as well as via email. There is no app to download or settings to fiddle around with. Users on any iPad have to just navigate to www.groundviews.org to consume our critically acclaimed content, including reader generated comments, presented in a visually stunning interface. Repost This Article

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Sri Lanka’s and South Asia’s first citizen journalism iPhone app

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19 March 2011, Colombo, Sri Lanka: Groundviews is proud to launch today Sri Lanka’s as well as South Asia’s first citizen journalism app for Apple’s iOS platform. The Groundviews app works on the iPod Touch, iPad and is optimised for the iPhone 4′s Retina display. “This inovative app enables those, particularly in the diaspora, to more easily access updated content published on the site” said Sanjana Hattotuwa, founding Editor of Groundviews. “Based on our experience in developing this app, we welcome inquiries to help develop similar iOS apps for other citizen journalism and mainstream media initiatives”. Apple has around 25% of the smartphone market in the US alone, and its mobile app store is the world’s largest with around 350,000 apps downloaded well over two billion times. The Groundviews app is free and allows a user to, Read all the latest updates to the site Read all the special editions, including the critically acclaimed End of War Special Edition Read…

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Commemorative lecture on second death anniversary of Lasantha Wickrematunge

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“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter” ~ Martin Luther King Jr, (15 January 1929 ~ 4 April 1968), (Activist, Clergyman, and prominent leader in African ~ American Civil rights movement) A commemorative lecture to mark the second death anniversary of Sunday leader editor Lasantha Wickrematunge was held today. This is the first commemorative lecture to pay tribute to Late Lasantha Wickrematunge, who was killed on 8th of January 2009 in Ratmalana, suburb of Colombo. Christopher Warren, former President of the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) delivered the key note address titled ~ “Role of Media in Post-War Democratization”. Candles were lit around the cement monument of pen with a human hollow to pay tribute to the journalists who sacrificed their lives. The monument stands on a barrel painted in white. The monument was created by the Vibhavi Academy of Fine Arts (VAFA). A large number of human rights activists, diplomats, foreign and…

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Focus on Badulla: Landslides

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Editors’ note: Photography and text by P.B. Gowthamam The rains over the last couple of days have had a devastating effect on many parts of Badulla and surroundings.  It is not floods but landslides that are causing most of the damage. The usual stream that runs through the city is brimming with water and has breached its banks in a number of locations. But the widening work that had been done after the previous floods proved to be effective in channeling the deluge without too much damage as feared. So far! But the rain water drainage systems in the city as well as in the surrounding towns and villages are in very poor condition. As a result in most places the roads are flooded. Below are pictures from Hali-Ela where road is still under construction for long stretches. Hundreds of land slips due to rain in the last two days are to be seen throughout the hill country and around…

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GLF: A space for activists?

A playground for Colombo’s “artsy fartsy?” A personal initiative by G. Dobbs (Founder) to increase the per capita income of G. Dobbs? A promotional tactic to draw tourists to our fair land? An ideal getaway for the middle and upper classes to catch up with old friends and make merry? A platform for cultural and literary exchange and constructive discussion/debate? An ideal forum for writers and participants to engage and learn from one another? The Galle Literary Festival (GLF) is probably a combination of all this put together. I’m no ‘party pooper,’  and that’s all well and good. But, is it permissible to claim that the festival provides “relatively ‘safe’ spaces for literary and political exploration and debate” and is a forum at which the “real situation of the country” can be brought to light? http://groundviews.org/2011/01/24/writing-against-the-rsfjds-appeal-to-boycott-the-galle-literary-festival/ I find this particular claim to be quite difficult to digest. Firstly, because it has been stated by a well -respected human rights activist…

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On Relative Rights

A short fall in human rights suggests a failure in the harvest, perhaps a missing plank in the slide, and some will go flying, others hungry, while you add ridiculous to describe the call for a boycott of your literary party by so-called rights activists, which I presume to mean men and women who agitate on behalf of humans; their call certainly draws unwanted attention to murder of journalists so let me propose that we make fun of it by such ridiculous excesses as burning an effigy of a doll named censorship without addressing the argument of the boycott which did not say don’t go, just be aware of where you speak in deed. Repost This Article

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Writing against the RSF/JDS appeal to boycott the Galle Literary Festival

[Editors note: We were sent this personal letter from Sunila Abeysekara addressed to a leading signatory of the RSF/JDS appeal to boycott the Galle Literary Festival. She kindly agreed to publish it on Groundviews for a wider appreciation. As noted in our response to the RSF/JDS appeal, Sunila is an outspoken and award winning human rights activist. Amongst a number of other awards recognising her work, former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan presented Sunila with a UN Human Rights Award in 1999. See a video interview with Sunila conducted by Groundviews for Human Rights Day in 2009 here.] Dear Cheran, I am writing to you after seeing your signature on the petition circulated by the JDS (Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka) and RSF (Reporters without Borders) calling for a boycott of the Galle Literary Festival. I was really sorry to see your signature there. As you know I have dedicated the past thirty years of my life to defend…

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Party

To spoil a party, call the police to enforce noise laws or prohibitions against drinking by minors, we can understand as a necessary if unpleasant right of a neighbor who cannot sleep or is bothered by willful disregard for children. But to say, do not come to literary feasting at Galle because journalists are killed, or kidnapped, or forced to go abroad to save their lives, this I read is an attack on the country, which allows murder, rape and kidnapping to bypass judicial review, and will not accept responsibility for those who drive around without license plates on its roads, or unfortunate trapping of human beings on a killing spit of land between lagoon and sea, which allows a minister to chain a constituent to a tree, denies visas to left and sundry, detaining a pesky lawyer from Tamil Nadu at a checkpoint near former Tiger dominions, meanwhile English elite, including me on one occasion, have enjoyed, and will,…

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Responding to a facile appeal: Galle Literary Festival and the freedom of expression

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Michelle de Kretser signing. Photo by Sharni Jayawardena, courtesy Galle Literary Festival The Editors of Groundviews received via email this morning intimation of an international appeal made by Reporters Without Borders and Journalists for Democracy in Sri Lanka (JDS), a network of exiled Sri Lankan journalists. The Galle literary festival appeal notes inter alia, “We believe this is not the right time for prominent international writers like you to give legitimacy to the Sri Lankan government’s suppression of free speech by attending a conference that does not in any way push for greater freedom of expression inside that country.” Now in its fifth consecutive year, the Galle Literary Festival has been called many things, but a ‘conference’ it has not. Things go inexorably downhill from here. This ill-advised appeal reminds us of the equally ill-conceived Amnesty International human rights campaign during the last cricket world cup in 2007. At the time, even well-known human rights defenders in Sri Lanka wrote…

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WikiLeaks, Swiss Banks and Alien invasions

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A month ago, I wrote an open letter to the late Sir Arthur C Clarke, titled ‘Living in the Global Glass House’. It was inspired by the WikiLeaks cablegate controversy, which heralded a new level of transparency in international relations triggered by a disruptive technology – something Sir Arthur had predicted decades ago. I researched the essay over a few days in early December 2010. While following the unfolding cablegate saga with much interest, I looked up and re-read many published articles and speeches of Sir Arthur related to the social and political impacts of new communications technologies. I was already familiar with his thinking on the subject, but was still amazed to discover the extent of his prescience. And dismayed by how little his timeless advice was being followed. My essay was first published on 19 December 2010 by Groundviews.org; it has since been reproduced widely, and my own compact versions have appeared in a number of print media…

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Shyam Selvadurai: Literature, identity, politics and the Galle Literary Festival

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Shyam Selvadurai was born in 1965. His book Funny Boy introduced gay fiction to mainstream English literature in Sri Lanka, and indeed as Shyam notes, in South Asia. Born to a Sinhalese mother and Tamil father, Shyam was 19 when he left Sri Lanka in 1983 for Canada. Funny Boy was as much about class and ethnicity as sexual identities, and though Shyam has repeatedly noted that it was not autobiographical, the fiction is set against a violent Sri Lanka. Shyam is presently the curator of the Galle Literary Festival. In an essay (Coming Out) penned for Time in 2003, Shyam brought out the vexed relationship he has with Sri Lanka. On the one hand is the love for the country, “…live and let live generosity and good humour that I love most about Sri Lanka” and on the other, the unsettling nature of it “in this country that I still considered my home, I could never be at home.” Yet…

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Re-mediating Sri Lanka: Cyberspace, Groundviews and Political Engagement

The thoughts below are taken from a longer article published as ‘Sri Lanka inside/out: cyberspace and the mediated geographies of political engagement’, in Contemporary South Asia (2010) 18 (4), pps.443-449. 1. Readers of Groundviews will know well that delineations of who gets to speak, how and which critical voices are allowed or not to intervene in political debate, and the effective bite of civil society organizations have long been tightly controlled in Sri Lanka. Such acts of intellectual and representational enclosure are, I want to suggest, key to the perpetuation of an island imagination characterized by the insularity and exceptionalism with which Sri Lanka is so associated by the international community. In other words, state regulation and censorship of key media outlets has played a large role in determining the common sense meanings of phrases as innocent as ‘in Sri Lanka’. For it is in this context that such an innocuous turn of phrase comes to imply not just a…

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Now our New Year has no moon

The moon rises to the top of the Eiffel Tower. Dreaming, I take the rifle and shoot my own heart. Now our New Year has no moon. The streetlamps of La Chappelle bend down to the darkness but still spread their light. I shoot them out, one by one. An unknown Tamil comes along. I say Hello and ask him for a match. Then I see that his eyes are seeking a life. I am asking for a light and he is asking for a life? Yes, we are the generation That lit our cigarettes On the pyres of burning bodies. Was there a dead person staggering along the street Smoking a cigarette in your New Year dream? He had a house but no bed to sleep He had a village but no road to walk He had a country but no freedom to smile. This is why our New Year has no moon. When you gobble your milk rice…

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Two years hence, the murder of an Editor

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Image courtesy Canadian Committee for Press Freedom Two years ago in Ratmalana – the suburb of Colombo I grew up in – Lasantha Wickremetunge was murdered in broad daylight. Every weekend, as I pass the spot he was killed on the way to see my parents, I wonder how many others remember him today, the significance of that place, his work, life or legacy. Photos taken from the memorial service held in the morning at Lasantha’s grave in Colombo. Courtesy Vikalpa Groundviews published a number of articles, including poems by award winning poets, condemning Lasantha’s murder and celebrating his life. In Memoriam: Lasantha Wickremetunge, Editor in Chief, Sunday Leader is a collection of this writing, and the debates they generated that are still, tragically, resonant today. Following Lasantha’s murder, our website transformed to black for a week, as a mark of protest and defiance. In March 2009, we reproduced in full a letter from Sonali Samarasinghe, herself a senior journalist…

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About Groundviews

Located at the Centre for Policy Alternatives in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Groundviews is a citizen journalism website that uses a range of genres and media to highlight critical perspectives on governance, reconciliation, human rights, the arts and literature, democracy and other issues. The site has won two international awards, including the prestigious Manthan Award South Asia in 2009. The grand jury's evaluation of the site noted, "What no media dares to report, Groundviews publicly exposes. It's a new age media for a new Sri Lanka... Free media at it's very best!"

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