The Burning Questions
A stroll through the Public Library of Jaffna, and some reflections on knowledge, culture and the open space to question, create and dissent The sun burns the Jaffna peninsula. It devours every…
A stroll through the Public Library of Jaffna, and some reflections on knowledge, culture and the open space to question, create and dissent The sun burns the Jaffna peninsula. It devours every…
Photo courtesy INSI Notes of a talk at the Sydney Reconciliation Forum, August 17, 2013 there is an unexploded land mine heart in us under every breast chest waiting for breath tears…
Photo by Seshanka Samarajiwa/The Picture Press The culmination of months of dedicated research, travel, challenging production work and curation, I am very pleased to launch . The project is an attempt to…
To remember Black July, brought together leading documentary filmmakers, photographers, activists, theorists and designers, in Sri Lanka and abroad, to focus on just how deeply the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983 shaped our imagination, lives,…
July ’83. It was the month and year I would like to forget. As we woke up that fateful July morning, all I knew and felt was the tension in the air,…
An introduction Prosterman in 1976 estimated that some 68 million people have perished from all forms of deliberate human violence from 1820 to 1970. Zimmerman in 2013 found that if the victims…
To remember Black July, brought together leading documentary filmmakers, photographers, activists, theorists and designers, in Sri Lanka and abroad, to focus on just how deeply the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983 shaped our imagination, lives,…
To remember Black July, brought together leading documentary filmmakers, photographers, activists, theorists and designers, in Sri Lanka and abroad, to focus on just how deeply the anti-Tamil pogrom in 1983 shaped our…
Photography by Dinouk Colombage We the undersigned strongly condemn the violent and unprovoked attack on the Masjid Deenul Islam in Grandpass area on Saturday, August 10, 2013 by an extremist mob injuring…
In the space of a week Sri Lanka’s freedoms of speech and religion were overridden by acts of violence and intolerance. A heavy handed response by the government towards protesters in Weliweriya…
Image courtesy Sri Lanka Guardian “Now intolerance is the badge of the tribe and the scribe. A papier-mâché patriotism is the last refuge of a petrified elite that has lost its nerve,…
Image courtesy Thuppahi’s blog June 2013 saw violent clashes between small groups of Sri Lankans at cricket grounds around the UK. Although barely reported by the mainstream media, for members of Voices…
The following poem was read out to the Sri Lanka parliament by the Hon Lakshman Jayakody and appeared in the Hansard 1998. It was reprinted in the ‘Anthology of the Galle Literary…
Image courtesy chosinhvien.info I threw the pot containing my father’s ash to the sea and watched how it drifted away in the current. I had already made up my mind. He was 81…
In 2009 , the then Ministry of Disaster Management and Human Rights (hence disbanded) ‘sought to remedy’ the many deficiencies that exist in the current fundamental rights chapter of the 1978 constitution.…