Tehelka is one of India’s leading independent English language news magazines. It’s an award-winning publication now well-known for its top-quality reportage of politics and news in South Asia and for its daring ventures in investigative reporting. I have been an ardent admirer and reader for many years, and now I’ve been published in it for the first time. My piece ...
Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) and its supporters at a rally in Maharagama, Sri Lanka.Photo courtesy of AFP. Published originally on Groundviews and subsequently on Firstpost. The growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Sri Lanka is pushing us to respond in numerous ways: we are talking, flustered, hopeless and helpless, shouting in outrage (when no one will listen), holding our knees to chests, ...
Photograph via Colombo Telegraph. There is video evidence of a recent attack in Colombo, Sri Lanka where a Buddhist monk leads a mob in attacking a Muslim-owned establishment. Hear that crowd cheer. This is the beautiful tropical island paradise we want to promote to tourists and spend our days waxing lyrical about? This is the suddenly booming economy we’re so ...
Nallur Kovil, Jaffna (2013) The only thing apart from a small makeshift shrine in this room is a cot; a good, old-fashioned baby’s cot made from sturdy wood. The cot is stuffed with photographs; mostly black and white photographs, presumably old photographs, in their frames. The cot is almost overflowing with these photographs, artefacts from the life and history of ...
The famous image was used to promote feminism in the 1980s but was originally drawn to be used as WWII propaganda. I watched an episode of Oprah Winfrey once about dolphin conservation; she said saving dolphins was important because dolphins had been known to rescue humans. It made me so angry, and was another brick in the wall of my ...
One Billion Rising, 14 February, Colombo. Photo courtesy of Tehani Ariyaratne. We are rising to end violence against women on Valentine’s Day, 2013. Rising because we can; we must. Because we as a society are responsible for what happens to our women. Because it’s important for our sons to know what we know, that they learn what we have learned. ...
Thousands take to the streets in Delhi to demand justice. Yesterday morning the young 23 year old woman who was raped and beaten in Delhi on December 16th, succumbed to her injuries, giving up the harrowing fight for her life in Singapore – far from her home, and removed, I presume, from many of her loved ones. While she was ...
The Reid Avenue trees. (Colombo, November 2012) Originally published on Groundviews. When I heard that the large, beautiful trees that pave Reid Avenue in Colombo were being felled, my heart broke. I was so stirred inside – and it was hard to explain to anyone else why this particular incident had moved me so much. When I came to Bangalore, my ...
The Taj Hotel through Gateway of India. Within minutes, you know you’re in a big city – the real thing, I mean. No pale imitation, no wannabe, no fading erstwhile glory. A real, live, breathing, thumping, bumping big city. The kind of big city – they exist all around the world – that takes your breath away, the kind we ...
Malala Yousafzai On the 9th of October, just two days ago, Malala Yousafzai, 14 years old, was shot in the head by the Taliban in Pakistan. Even when she was as young as 11 years old, she was an outspoken critic of the Taliban, with brave, smart and articulate views expressed clearly in a diary she wrote for BBC Urdu. She ...
Summer Evening (1947, Edward Hopper) To know you is a thing that makes my life what it is - the reason I am special, lucky, the reason I am myself. To have become who I am today with you, because of you, is among the things that I know for certain are true and real. To have passed through the phases ...
‘Muslim Rage’: Newsweek’s cover story Following the wave of violent protests that swept through the Middle-East and much of the ‘Muslim’ world earlier this month, where many lives were lost and irreparable damage was done, Newsweek’s cover-story was about ‘Muslim Rage’, a term so broad, crude and rude that it caused even more rage. However, you can be sure that ...
Sri Lanka’s education system, particularly the higher-education system, our great socialist dream, is perhaps one of the very few things we got right – at least to some extent. It remains a fact of pride for us that any student in Sri Lanka who qualifies for University entrance can attend University and receive higher-education of a very good quality, regardless of ...
Who pins the fall of a sari, To the back of your sari blouse, Or zips up your dress, when the zipper is at the back? Cleaning up is a two-person job; Who spots that line of ants going into the cereal box when you’ve missed it? Who shuts the fridge door that you’ve accidentally left open, Or takes on ...
An ocean between what we know, What we want to believe and what we need to have inside us, To go on. Vast. And I am here, now But if I stop telling myself that – even just for a second, Then I am overcome, Overcome. I am here, now. All that has changed, and that which hasn’t Is all we ...
Two major incidents lately – one in the international news, and one in Sri Lankan/Indian news – have flagged the age-old debate about Freedom of Expression, Capital F, Capital E. The first is the explosion of violence, taking place in several parts of the Muslim world, targeted mostly at embassies of countries in the West, in protest of an ‘anti-Islam’ ...
Barack Obama People keep asking me why I still care about Obama – they say ‘still’ as though they all cared at one point, every one in the world, but it is simply not in fashion anymore (‘Why do you still wear those ghastly hot-pink tights that you wore in the ’80s?’). Why do I still care if Obama wins ...
Akram Khan Company, Gnosis There still exist some myths, particularly in the classical dance circles in our region that contemporary dance has no substance and contemporary dance artists can’t really dance. This is perhaps mainly due to the fact that in our part of the world, what we see as ‘contemporary dance’ is not really contemporary dance at all, leave ...
Happy Birthday, Ammi. Thank you for Pedro Almodovar. Thank you for T.S Elliot and Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer. Thank you for that time you woke us up at 2 AM in order to watch the sun rise over Konark, in Orissa. Thank you for always believing that life is worth living, that it is beautiful and fun and interesting ...
