Kill the Families
When I set off for Columbia University to become a foreign correspondent, to cover wars and peacemaking, famine, floods, murders, kidnappings, larceny on a global scale, I never imagined that…
Author: Indran Amirthanayagam
Tamilian in Paris
Weekly The restaurant served idly and dosai around the corner from Notre Dame, before the fire, in a perfect union of India and Europe, while at my table a waitress asked…
Rebirth and Memory Black July, 40 Years Later
It is painful to read how Sri Lankan government ministers rallied their goondas to fan out in neighborhoods looking for Tamil homes marked on voter lists. It is painful to…
War Never Ends
This anniversary marks a stage, a pause in the fighting, does not a lasting peace reflect( especially when celebrated as if one party won). But dictates of reason, and…
Jaffna Today
How to select keys for the door when you know the gatekeeper all too well, when chance and destiny carry the same code words, when love no longer depends on…
Independence Song, 2023
Are we free in 2023? To declare love and friendship without fear, without visits from police or blackmail from nosy neighbors? Are we free in 2023? To deny low wages or flagrant…
Resolution Dream
We cared for Indira Gandhi. She understood Lankan Tamil plight and the need for redress, return of lands, control over local affairs. And how could a liberation movement win without…
New Year Aragalaya
We have reached January 9th, 2023. We cannot go any farther or longer or deeper. We are at the turning point, on the cusp, early in the New Year, and we…
The Year’s Fruits
What did this year bring? It brought the Palais des Nations in Geneva to hear my thoughts on poetry and diplomacy in the early months of the now even more…
Aragalaya, Tsunami and the New Year Dividend
On this Boxing Day, eighteenth anniversary of the Tsunami I write about the year in which the Aragalaya swept up and dispatched the ruler of the ruling family. He fled first to…
On the Operating Table
Paralysis, blocked arteries, arrests cutting off ringleaders, in a plot to silence the flow and will of the majority, this reality implemented swiftly once the dictator fled to be replaced by…
Gota At Home
“Gota go home” the Aragalaya demanded. Now, fifty odd days after going abroad instead, he has returned, to a garland and a motorcade, to bodyguards and decoy cars, to a house…
Free the People
We will not be distracted. The emotion rushes through us like a river enraged, if a river, or a fault line, the heating jet stream, if these can be given human volition,…
Tourism Guidance
Wait a minute Sanath. First congrats on your appointment as Tourism Ambassador. Now you say Sri Lanka is back and tourists can come. But will the Prevention of Terrorism Act apply…
The Right Queue
Poems are waiting in a queue. But that is alright. They are poems only, not people lining up for kerosene, or fish, or paper. or petrol. I write them in a…