The Political Logjam
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…
Author: Tisaranee Gunasekara
The Lure of ‘Alternative Facts’ and The Danger of Democratic Deconsolidation
President Donald Trump’s senior counsellor Kellyanne Convey came up with a superb Orwellian term when she dubbed Presidential spokesman Sean Spencer’s outright lies about inauguration crowds as ‘alternative facts’. ‘Alternative facts’ are…
The Regressive Second Year
Photograph via On January 8th 2015, Lankans voted not only to elect a new president but also to transform governance. The mandate Maithripala Sirisena received two years ago was not a personal…
Fidel and the Rock of Resistance
Photo courtesy Miami Herald According to an ancient Chinese musical treatise (written in the second century BCE), when any of the five notes in the Chinese pentatonic scale turns disharmonious, disorder results…
Ten Years: Remembering the Past, Planning for the Future
Photograph courtesy Joanna Eckersley 2006: The Seeding Year Sri Lanka entered 2006 on the cusp between a failed peace process and a looming war. The year began with a murder. The killing…
Regaining Paradise with Donald Trump
Donald Trump’s victory is a beacon of hope to extremists of every stripe, from the Ku Klux Klan to Marine Le Pen, from Islamic extremists and Hindu nationalists to our very own…
Losing the Narrative
Photo credit NewsIn.Asia In the myth, hero-king becomes a tyrant when he turns his back on the source of his power. In the myth, the source of that power is divine, god/gods,…
Avoiding Superstitious Cures, Defeating Dictatorial Solutions
Photo courtesy OnLanka 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 recently concluded symposium,…
A Year of Political Rights and Economic Wrongs
Photo courtesy International Business Times One year after winning the parliamentary election of August 2015, the government is on track politically. One year after winning the parliamentary election of August 2015, the…
Keeping the Lunatic Fringe in the Fringe
Photo courtesy July 2016 could have become a very small-scale reproduction of July 1983, attacks and counterattacks, panicky actions and fear-filled reactions, hysteria, mayhem and some murder. It didn’t because this July…
Ghosts from the Past
Photograph courtesy Business Today ‘The sleep of reason produces monsters.’ Goya (The title of the 43rd etching of Los Caprichos) Post-Rajapaksa Sri Lanka is being haunted by the ghost of the Rajapaksa…
Reflections on paths not taken
ISAAC KASAMANI/AFP/Getty Images via IB Times Former President Mahinda Rajapaksa is unlikely to know the poem or the poet, but the sentiments would have been his as he watched Uganda’s Yoweri…
From Panama Papers to Child Marriage: Food for Thought, Battles to Wage
Image courtesy CNN “To walk our way and keep our eyes fixed on it Is mankind’s first and foremost obligation.” Iphigenia in Tauris (Goethe) It is a lie, beloved by the powerful,…
Economic Justice and Democratic Survival
Featured image courtesy IndiaTimes In ‘’, his long piece on the Obama Presidency, Jeffery Goldberg writes that Mr. Obama, reflecting on his failures in the Middle East, privately laments, “if only everyone could…
Sinha Le Politics and Socio-cultural Persecution
The Independence Day celebrations commenced with the national anthem sung in Sinhala and concluded with the national anthem sung in Tamil. It was a first and a good first, a gesture of…