The 'Welcome Committee of British Royals'The Foreign Affairs Ministry and the British High Commission declared in a joint statement released on Friday (February 2, 2018) that a document offering ‘Royal Etiquette Guidelines’ circulated by an entity calling itself ‘Welcome Committee of British Royals’ is false. Both parties stated that neither had set up any such committee. It was headlined in ...
Ravi Shastri and Bharath Arun: physicians who will not heal themselves India is a cricketing superpower. It is the centre of the cricketing universe for reasons that are not only about cricket. India can play ‘Big Brother’ and not just to regional test playing countries. So when India is dismissive of the test series with Sri Lanka and talk about ...
Udena Wickramasooriya showed me a few lines he wrote. He had something to say about Clarence Wijewardena, whose twenty first death anniversary fell on Wednesday the 13th of December. In the silence since you leftI saw you at your best,This peace I leave undisturbed,To enjoy your song as you rest.As the sun setsOn another year Of you going away, It’s ...
History is version. This is true. And yet, certain versions have a greater degree of believability than others. Dominant narratives do bear upon the present and can get in the way of obtaining inter-communal resolve, but the solution is not to dump history altogether as some have proposed and others have tried in surreptitious ways. Dumping history is convenient for ...
When Maithripala Sirisena said bye-bye to the Sri Lanka Freedom Party (SLFP) and went against Mahinda Rajapaksa, there were wild cheers from those who supported the United National Party (UNP) and/or were against the Rajapaksas Regime. Sirisena was hero. He was poster-boy. Chandrika Kumaratunga even said that he was the only honest politician in the party she once led. ...
MAITHRI ERA BEGINS. That was the bold and single headline of a special issue of ‘The Nation’ on Friday the 9th of January, 2015. I had forgotten all about this special edition until that particular page, torn, was about to be used for some household purpose by my wife. Out of curiosity I read it. On the front page ...
White phosphorus raining on Gaza['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is the 246th article in the new series that began in December 2022. Links to previous articles are given below] There’s no one way to talk of horror, even ...
Dileepa Lawrence-Hewa, someone who occasionally sends me comments on articles and directs me to interesting articles and ideas, wrote to me this morning. He recommended a book, Wayne Dyer’s ‘The sky’s is the limit’. Dyer, he says, observes that life is by and large describable as conforming to others’ expectations. He calls it, Dileepa says, ‘being sucked into authoritarianism’.Now this ...
Years ago, at a preliminary round of a junior best-speaker contest, Suresh De Mel spoke of his ambition. He wanted to be an accountant. The reason was ‘fascination with numbers’. He went on to enter university after studying in the Mathematics stream and later re-invented himself as an economist. He was and I believe still is teaching in the Economics ...
‘They are such a perfect couple!’ This is an expression we’ve all heard at some point in our lives. Less heard is the sober observation, ‘things look perfect, but who can tell what’s really going on?’ People look good in photographs. In fact they stress and strain to look good for photographs. Off-camera, things are different. And it’s not just ...
[In a parallel universe called ‘Humility’...]I am taking a break. A tea break. Without milk. I have 15 minutes. Enough to write down some thoughts. Here goes. There are things I can say and things I can’t. I am a pediatrician, yes, bu I will not say, for example, whether or not I am a member of the Sri ...
One can get away with murder (as the USA has) when one is judge, jury and court reporter. Assistant Secretary of USA for South and Central Asia Nisha Desai Biswal, currently visiting Sri Lanka, has issued a warning. The lady, sent here by President Barack Obama, says ‘if Sri Lanka doesn’t make meaningful progress in addressing the accountability issues, ...
It is often held, erroneously, that all those who champion culture, heritage and especially language, which is the vehicle that carries these things across the troubled and uneven territories of time, are "traditionalists" or worse, chauvinists and racists. Such labels are of course applicable to demagogues and petty politicians who, lacking minds of their own and hampered by a manifest ...
