Enter Homo Extremum?
Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s maiden speech as the SLPP’s Presidential candidate was a masterpiece in banality. It didn’t contain a single memorable sentence or one inspiring idea. That absence was no accident. The speech…
Author: Tisaranee Gunasekara
The Naked Saviours
Mythic Inflation is a concept introduced by American mythologist Joseph Campbell to explain the emergence of a new kind of ruler, the secular king who is also the divinely mandated saviour of…
The Malaise Affecting Buddhism
In the run up to the 2014 Aluthgama riot, the rabble-rousing monk Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara coined the term Aba Saranai, a battle-cry of hate totally at variance with the teachings of the…
The Blanket of the Dark
Photo by President’s Media Division (PMD) “From now on, people and monks will govern this country from the streets” Aturaliye Ratana Thero (Lankadeepa – 28.5.2019) A man in a suit defending the…
Secularism or Barbarism
The blue, red, yellow, orange and white lights are on, as are the makeshift stalls selling lanterns. Yet few pause to see, haggle, buy. Vesak, so near chronologically, had never seemed so…
Massacre of the Innocents: Whereto from here
Photo by JEWEL SAMAD / AFP/GETTY IMAGES via KCUR. “Unmindful are the walking dead The known way is an impasse.” Heraclitus (The Fragments) We have been here before. This blooded precipice is…
Roads not taken and their destinations
On the night of January 2nd, 2006, five students were killed in Trincomalee. Shanmugarajah Gajendran, Lohitharaja Rohan, Thangathurai Sivanantha, Yogarajah Hemachandran and Manoharan Rajihar, all of them either engaged in or about…
Regaining Paradise with Gotabaya Rajapaksa
Featured image courtesy The Star “If they harm me, it is the country they harm.” The beautification of Gotabaya Rajapaksa is on full throttle. The names of his front organisations are indicative…
What the coup taught us
Four years ago, a majority of Lankans elected Maithripala Sirisena as the country’s executive president. A year from now, the country will be asked to elect its next executive president. Can the…
Crisis as Second Chance?
Time will say nothing but I told you so…” WH Auden (If I Could Tell You) Ravindra Wijegunaratne, Admiral and Chief of Defence Staff, epitomised impunity as he swaggered into Fort Magistrate…
Deranged
Image via Al Jazeera One man created chaos out of order and plunged an entire country into a seemingly bottomless crisis. Just one ordinary man, in a fortnight. Would Maithripala Sirisena have…
What Is At Stake Is Democracy Itself
What is at stake today is not the future of Ranil Wickremesinghe or the UNP. What is at stake is democracy itself, and its necessary pillars, inviolability of the constitution, rule of…
Learning from Sisyphus?
The ‘journalist who fell foul of his country’s ruling dynasty’ – that was the title of , Mr. Khashoggi said that freedom of expression was what the Arab World needs most. His…
On Shifting Sands
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) doesn’t always get it right. In May 2018, it predicted that Nawaz Sharif’s party, PML-N, will win Pakistani elections scheduled for July. That was wrong. In April…
Politics in Make-believe Realities
Politicians everywhere are amnesiacs, to various degrees. The condition probably comes with the territory, a necessary facilitator for such in stock-in-trade as lies and hypocrisy. But total amnesia, forgetting everything one has…