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…
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…
“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…
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…
‘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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Image courtesy This month, the populist wave suffered two critical defeats. In France outsider-candidate Emmanuel Macron beat Marine Le Pen. In Iran, reformist president Hassan Rouhani trounced Ebrahim Raisi, a religious hardliner…
Photograph courtesy SBS Australia The first omens of the Meetotamulla tragedy appeared in 2011, when several houses became compromised. In January 2013, part of the dump collapsed onto the Sri Rahula Primary…
Photograph courtesy President’s Media Division, In a recent article on Donald Trump, commentator Adam Gopnik reminds his readers that while crazy lovers are pitiful or pathetic, crazy politicians are not. The shenanigans…
