#AskMR: Twitter Q&A, January 2017
Photo by AP, via The first #AskMR Twitter Q&A, conducted when former President Mahinda Rajapaksa was in New York attending the UN sessions in September 2013, was an unmitigated disaster. A complete…
Author: Sanjana Hattotuwa
How not to release an official report on reconciliation
Image courtesy Consultation Task Force, featuring submission by to it. Details here. After months of waiting, the final report of the Consultation Task Force, set up by the Prime Minister in January…
Editorial: Groundviews at 10
I often say I have two children. My son, born in December 2006. And , launched in November of the same year. The first post on the site went up on the…
Some thoughts on ‘Close to the Bone’
‘Close to the Bone’, billed as a theatrical collaboration between Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke and Isuru Kumarasinghe, was part of Colomboscope 2016 and held at the Presidential Suite, Cinnamon Lakeside. Almost exactly three years…
Shanthi Sachithanandan: In Memoriam
It was with deep sadness that I learnt Shanthi Sachithanandan had passed away yesterday. In emails and face to face conversations spanning many years, I remember an individual who was, at her core, deeply…
Hacking the hackers: Surveillance in Sri Lanka revealed
It was sometime in April 2013, that I wrote my last blog post. Titled ‘And Then They Came For Us’, or something along those morbid lines, the piece was a commentary of…
Power mapping
Image by I was asked to contribute an article to an up-coming issue of , the journal of the Sri Lanka Institute of Architects. The issue will be anchored to the idea of…
Hope
I drove past Temple Trees this morning at sunrise, a few minutes after the first SMS from a major news service proclaimed Mahinda Rajapaksa would step down as President. I couldn’t believe…
Insights into Mahinda Rajapaksa’s re-election campaign on social media
On the same day the Centre for Policy Alternatives, through an online survey, flagged the importance of social media in the up-coming Presidential Election to reach young voters, a series of retweets…
2014: Year in Review
published over 300 articles in 2014. Since its launch in 2006, the most amount of traffic to the website was generated over May this year, around the compelling content featured in the End…
Liking violence: A study of hate speech on Facebook in Sri Lanka
Photo courtesy Sri Lanka Brief The Centre for Policy Alternatives, the institutional anchor of , released today a report co-authored by Shilpa Samaratunge and I on hate speech online, looking at Facebook…
When press releases become propaganda
How the World Justice Project’s Rule of Law Index 2014 was reported in Sri Lankan media reads as a cautionary tale when dealing with press releases. The report was brought to my…
Invisible architectures: Thoughts on Walking Path
Franz Kafka, ‘Beyond the Law’ Designed and directed by Jayampathi Guruge and scripted by Ruwanthie de Chickera, ‘Walking Path’, performed recently at the Lionel Wendt offered an interesting critique of Colombo’s post-war…
Sri Lanka redefines “curfew” in Beruwela
Lest we forget, the Police imposed a curfew in Beruwela and Aluthgama on 15th June in an effort to stop the violence against Muslims in the area. The curfew in Aluthgama was…
Aluthgama violence: Where was Sri Lanka’s President?
Photo by Dinouk Colombage, via The horrible killings and destruction in Aluthgama on Sunday was blacked out by almost all mainstream media in Sri Lanka at the height of the violence and the morning after.…