The news barely made the news. Defence secretary (retired) General Kamal Gunaratne and Army Commander General Vikum Liyanage were ordered by the Parliamentary Privileges Committee to apologise to parliamentarian Chandima Weerakkody. Last…
The Tripitaka is silent on the subject but the Buddha’s three visits to the isle of Lanka constitute an article of faith for most Sinhala-Buddhists. Kelaniya is believed to have been the…
On August 14, 2006 the Sri Lankan air force bombed an orphanage in Vallipunam killing 61 schoolgirls. The Rajapaksa administration insisted that the location was a LTTE training camp and the victims…
The Supreme Court judgement about the Rajapaksa culpability for Sri Lanka’s economic ruin couldn’t have come at a better time. The sense of hope generated by the ending of chronic shortages and…
Jewish Currents is a US-based leftwing Jewish magazine. Soon after October 7 Hamas attack, its editor, Arielle Angel, a vocal proponent of Palestinian liberation, penned a letter to the readers. “I watched…
It was the spring of infatuation. Millions of Sinhala voters saw Gotabaya Rajapaksa the way he saw himself, a colossus among men, a king reborn. He and his acolytes had spent much…
“Patriotism,” wrote Ambrose Bierce in is “The combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” Patriotism is not the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Samuel Johnson…
Half a century ago, it was higher education, saving universities from Tamil encroachment. Today it is Buddhist heritage, saving archaeological sites in the North and the East from Tamil encroachment. Tomorrow another…
In his fifth labour, Heracles cleans the Augean Stables by rerouting the rivers Alpheus and Peneus through the filthy abode of King Augeas’ divine cattle. Many believed that the aragalaya would have…
This week marked the 14th anniversary of the ending of the long Eelam War. This week also saw the re-emergence of BBS head-honcho Galgoda Aththe Gnanasara to save the nation from that enterprising…
In Sri Lanka terror means Tamil or Muslim. When the J.R. Jayewardene government responded to the ethnic problem not with the promised political reforms but with repression and the PTA was born,…
“Homo Sapiens is prone to orgies of stupidity, brutality, and destruction.” Martin Wolf (The crisis of democratic capitalism) So back in the Chalk Circle but this time play ends in Act 2….
Sri Lanka’s poorest of the poor, their lives devastated by economic collapse, may face a killer blow soon: a crippling of the public health system. That GMOA is planning to paralyse the…
During Black July, marauding mobs, when uncertain about the ethnic identity of a potential victim, would order him/her to recite the five precepts in Pali or the chant , a composite which…
“A tangle within, a tangle without…” Jata Sutta – Samyutta Nikaya In July 2020, Indika Rathnayake, a non-theistic online activist, was summoned to the Organised Crimes Prevention Police Division and questioned for three…
