‘Corridors of Power’ exhibition in Jaffna
Auditorium of the Jaffna Public Library 22 – 24 November 2016 Open 10am to 6pm Entrance free for all. What is a constitution? What place and relevance, if any, does it have…
Year: 2016
Review of ‘In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka’
Photograph courtesy Al Jazeera John Berger[1] The dominant discourse of post-independence Lanka is that of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism, with a counter-narrative of Tamil nationalism. This debilitating scenario has blotted out a multitude of…
Social Movement, Continued
A particular segment of the country was decisively committed to defeat the Rajapaksa regime and replace it with the present regime of Good Governance. This segment was motivated not by party politics…
Budget 2017: The good, bad and ugly
Mixed feelings prevail in the wake of Budget 2017 being presented in Parliament. Overall, the Budget was fairly holistic in coverage, being broadly linked to Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s statements to Parliament earlier…
What Trump’s Win Teaches Sri Lanka
Photograph from NBC News Donald Trump’s surprising electoral victory last week gives us Americans a lot to think about. One takeaway is particularly relevant for Sri Lanka. Over the last eight years,…
Still Searching for the Truth: One woman’s relentless quest for justice
Will Sri Lanka’s report to the Committee Against Torture Review on 15 November give updates? Sandya Ekneligoda is the wife of Prageeth, a Sri Lankan journalist, cartoonist and political analyst who has…
Who’s Afraid of Donald Trump? | America Elects a Fact-Free President
### America Elects a Fact-Free President In the presidential election this week, US voters just elected an unorthodox, unlikely and unpredictable head of state. There are many ways of analysing this result.…
Regaining Paradise with Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s victory is a beacon of hope to extremists of every stripe, from the Ku Klux Klan to Marine Le Pen, from Islamic extremists and Hindu nationalists to our very own…
Leonard Cohen: The Stranger, the Master
The master of the modern love song, whose intricate and intense musical cartography of the relationships between men and women provided the soundtrack of our private lives, has come down like Moses…
Trigger Warning
America just chose a rapist to be their president. Let that sink in. Let that properly sink in. Let’s put aside the politics, policies and international relations aside for a minute and…
A Podium to Spit Venom
Two days ago a video was posted on YouTube where a man named Abdul Razik belonging to an extremist sect that calls itself ‘Sri Lanka Tawheed Jamath’ (SLTJ) makes a speech in Sinhala in…
My Uchipattam
My mother parts my hair in the middle, Places the Uchipattam at the center. It rests on my forehead. It feels cold. She tells me that I look like my grandmother; Not…
Guided Tour: ‘Corridors of Power’ at the WINGS Festival of Arts
Led by the input of Asanga Welikala and in collaboration with Channa Daswatta, ‘Corridors of Power’ through architectural drawings and models, interrogates key moments in Sri Lanka’s constitutional evolution since 1972. The…
Chinese Whispering in Sri Lanka: On Gossip, Anxieties and Politics
Chinese whispering in Sri Lanka is suggestive of at least twofold meanings – literally and metaphorically. One has to do with the geo-political and international trade related issues, as many International Relations…
Continued impunity: Journalist killings unresolved in 2016
In 2016, Sri Lanka was removed from the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) Impunity Index. Each year, CPJ reviews countries for a 10-year period. If there are five or more unsolved cases, the…