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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
