2013 Round-Up
published 142 articles over 2013. Our Facebook fan page grew by over 4,000. Our Twitter feed, the most probing, interactive and engaging of any media related Twitter account in Sri Lanka, grew…
Author: Dr Sanjana Hattotuwa
Interview with Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke, Director of ‘Paraya’
Directed by Arun Welandawe-Prematilleke and produced by Mind Adventures, will begin its run on 18th of this month to the 21st. For any other theatrical production, that description would suffice, along with…
Sunila Abeysekera: 1952 – 2013
Photo courtesy BBC World Service Sunila Abeysekera passed away earlier today after a long battle with cancer. Sunila has a profile on Wikipedia but reading it would deeply frustrate anyone who knew…
Remembering, to never again repeat: Launch of 30 Years Ago site
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…
Framed music: ‘The Show Must Go On’ by Sachini Perera
Photo courtesy Sachini Perera Photography How ‘The Show Must Go On’ came about described on the exhibition’s Facebook event page. Sachini Perera, who I first came to know of through her work…
Sri Lanka: After the world’s media has moved on
As the Editor of , I was invited by World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN/IFRA) to give a presentation on Sri Lanka at the 20th World Editors Forum (WEF) and…
Helping the Police arrest brutish “monks” in Sri Lanka
Apparently the infamous Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) has condemned the attack on Fashion Bug warehouse a few days ago and asked the Police to arrest those involved in it, even if they…
Reflections on ‘Widows’ and ‘Unearthed’
Work and travel kept me from writing about two significant theatre productions in the past month. Ariel Dorfman’s ‘Widows’ directed by Feroze Kamardeen and produced by Sirraj Abdul Hameed was staged at…
Sri Lanka’s forgotten mass graves: Google Earth and remembering the dead in Nandikadal
was the first look at the end of the war in Sri Lanka through historical satellite imagery freely accessible via Google Earth. The article was an open invitation for those using Google…
The end of war in Sri Lanka, captured for posterity by Google Earth
When in early 2009, UNOSAT released satellite imagery of what later turned out to be the final weeks of Sri Lanka’s 27-year old war with the LTTE, the images were met with…
Mediated: Portraying hard data on Sri Lanka through art
runs till the 15th of September at the Saskia Fernando Art Gallery. As noted on the exhibition’s website, four individuals – a researcher, an economist, a constitutional theorist and an award winning…
Invitation to prospective writers: A Sri Lankan Anthology of Hint Fiction
Photo courtesy The Blue Bookcase Around two months ago, I picked up on a whim edited by Robert Swartwood. Swartwood’s definition of hint fiction is ‘a story of 25 words or fewer that…
In conversation with Bishop Duleep de Chickera
I clearly remember Bishop de Chickera at S. Thomas’ College, from around 25 years years ago. The fact that I hadn’t seen him in person for a quarter of a century hit…
The middle finger to the middle-path in Sri Lanka
A week ago, we disgraced ourselves. Racist louts, some in the garb of Buddhist monks, engaged openly in speech and behaviour so violent, even those who led it were forced to suggest…
Are Chinese Telecoms acting as the ears for the Sri Lankan government?
The title is inspired by the article published in Eurasianet.org, examining the probable role of Chinese telecoms firms, notably Huawei and ZTE, in espionage and surveillance. The article notes that both ZTE…