Clowns or Murderers: Our Hobson’s Choice
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…
Author: Tisaranee Gunasekara
In the Springtime of Tyrants
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…
Chinese Roulette in Paradise Isle
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…
Beyond No Confidence Motion, Is Sanity Possible?
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…
The Beast Rides Again
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…
From an Electoral Drubbing to a Manufactured Crisis
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…
The Government has failed us. Do we fail ourselves?
Photo courtesy Foreign Policy / Ishara S.KODIKARA/AFP/Getty Images “The travails of the mountains lie behind us. Before us lie the travails of the plains.” Brecht (Observation) Does a president’s responsibility to protect…
Killing Tuskers and Culling Hopes
“I just passed a polling place and it’s crowded. There’s no parking… There’s an electricity. It’s exciting.”[i] That was American activist Lecia Brooks (of the Southern Poverty Law Centre), referring to the…
The Budget and the Inequality Crisis
Gintota is a grim warning. The abyss is still with us. We remain a country where a private dispute can be interpreted as a religious issue and used to ignite a violent…
Remember? Remember!
‘Motherland is in danger,’ it is claimed, again. The words are familiar, echoes from the late 1980’s. Sixty-thousand died in the South, it is said, during that time. The dead were men…
Power, Religion and Impunity
I ordered, he says, as if those two words would suffice. Perhaps they do, in his eyes. ‘I’m the state,’ Louis XIV declared, according to Carlyle. Mahinda Rajapaksa sees himself as the…
The Monarch and the Hegemon: Tales of Suicidal Folly
Emma Lazarus’ poem, , became news recently when a poetry website carried it in response to Donald Trump’s immigration policy, and Mr. Trump responded with a characteristic twitter-barrage. Lazarus’ poem, written to…
Sirisena-Wickremesinghe Government: Taking Selfies on the Rail-track
Photo courtesy Post-Rajapaksa Sri Lanka suffers from a deadly absence. It has a democratic government, but no democratic opposition. Had Sri Lanka been a normal democracy – with a democratic government and…
A Repugnant and Lethal Betrayal in Sri Lanka
The monk Ashin Wirathu, center, was the guest of honor at the Buddhist Power Force convention in Colombo, held in 2014. Credit Lakruwan Wanniarachchi/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images, via The presidential election…
Avoiding Superstitious Cures, Defeating Dictatorial Solutions
Image courtesy University of Sri Jayawardenepura Sri Lanka, despite her soaring developmental ambitions, spends less than 1% of her national budget on research and development, an anomaly which was highlighted at the…