A-Z of Sri Lankan English: Q is for quazi
Equality before the law? I’m no lawyer, but I have always wondered how this fundamental principle is possible in a country with several different legal systems operating alongside one another. The main…
Year: 2012
Rights, Return & Resettlement: A Critique of the TNA Report on Resettlement
The ‘Resettlement Report October- December 2011’, available on the Tamil National Alliance’s (TNA) temporary website, DBS Jeyraj’s blog and Sangam.org, is the second report of the Tamil National Alliance Research Series, and…
Women’s Day 2012: Concerns, challenges and opportunities from Sri Lanka
For years, has featured content that probes gender from a Sri Lankan perspective. For Women’s Day 2012 we have created a Bundlr bundle of over 35 of the most compelling submissions. The…
Forging a Culture of Mutual Tolerance among Sri Lankans: A Path to Reconciliation?
Photo courtesy Reuters Alertnet “” – Friedrich Nietzsche I recently learned that intervening in favor of a “ after reading such a comment. I still wonder whether Welikela’s approach would have been…
Some Comments of Udayasiri Wickramaratne’s ‘Suddek Oba Amathai’
Photo courtesy Facebook page It is Lakshman Piyasena, introduced to me by my friend Jayantha Dhanapala, who first told me of Udayasiri Wickramaratne’s play. Piyasena urged Dhanapala and me to see a performance…
We Are Resolved
Sri Lanka is small but the government thinks big, always has; since independence its growth rate in ministries and delegations the envy of Asia, and now defeat of the resolution the charge…
Sri Lanka and its ‘Geneva-problem’
The year 2009 was when the Western group of States at the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) made a serious diplomatic blunder, by attempting to pass a resolution against Sri Lanka. The…
GENEVA-II & FOUR-LEGGED FURNITURE
Photo courtesy The US resolution at the UN HRC in Geneva has deepened the schisms in Sri Lankan society. That resolution will have the same polarising function as did the Ceasefire Agreement…
Why Sri Lanka must ‘win’ at UNHRC
The following is an excerpt from a statement recently made by Ambassador Eileen Chambarlain Donahoe JD PhD, top US diplomat to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC): The case of Sri…
Five Precepts of Identifying a Sri Lankan Traitor
Image courtesy Transparency International Recently an air of nervousness has insinuated itself in to the Sri Lankan psyche. Doubt and uneasiness seem to be seeping like moisture through invisible social capillaries, carrying…
JAYATISSA, JEYARAJ AND JACOBINISM: DEBATING ‘SRI LANKAN-NESS’ IN POST-WAR SRI LANKA
Photo courtesy Much is being written nowadays about post-war Sri Lankan identity and the challenges of unity in diversity, among which are well-meaning interventions extolling the virtues of building a modernist, inclusive…
Thank you, Madam Navi Pillai
Photo courtesy JDS Thank you madam, for being the voice for the voiceless. The poverty stricken, wounded, displaced and marginalized Muslim and Tamil victims of the brutal thirty year war in our…
Youth unemployment in Sri Lanka: The foundations of violence?
In an interview broadcast on public TV recently, Dr. Harini Amarasuriya, Senior Lecturer, Department of Social Studies at the Open University of Sri Lanka and co-author of looks into what is a…
The Loss of Identity: Development and Agriculture
The ecological impact of increasing energy input into a system has been well documented. In any ecosystem an increase in the flow of energy tends to organize and simplify that ecosystem, with…
A Search for Identity: Tomorrow’s Sri Lankan!
Few are those who believe in the existence of what I would like to call a . Indeed, most of us will identify themselves according to their ethnicity, some according to their…