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…
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…
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…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
The news was sensational, yet it was downplayed. The chief incumbent of a temple in Ratnapura strangled a police sergeant to death. The monk has been absconding after being charged with sexual…
Featured image courtesy dbsjeyaraj.com This June marks four years since Aluthgama and three months since Kandy. The perpetrators of Aluthgama were never prosecuted. Some perpetrators of Kandy are under arrest, though not…
Donald Trump first became a household name in the US for a book he claimed as his own but didn’t write – The Art of the Deal. Recently he learned a real…
Photo courtesy Siddhartha Gautama, The Buddha (Alawaka Sutta, Samyutta Nikaya, Sutta Pitakaya) restarted the writing-life of Nobel laureate Jose Saramago. The semi-autobiographical novel uses the trials and travails of a single family…
Photo courtesy Asian Mirror Even as I write these words, Kandy is burning. Muslims, their homes and their properties are being targeted in the name of Buddhism, within shouting distance of the…
Featured image courtesy TimeSriLanka Basics first: the UNP and the SLFP lost a local government election, not a Presidential election, not a Parliamentary election, not even a Provincial Council election. A local…
