Today’s pictures are of societies at Oxford, beginning with the Vile Bodies – dinners over the years and three pictures of the day we went to Calais for lunch, Philip Green descending at dawn from the top of All Souls to join us, in a Chinese dressing gown and a feather boa. These are followed by a picture after dinner. ...
Mr Speaker, I welcome this opportunity to speak on an Adjourment Motion that seeks to strengthen the Rule of Law in Sri Lanka. This is an admirable aim, and I will give the mover of this motion the benefit of the doubt, and treat that as his principal aim. It would be a pity then if we allowed ourselves to ...
Today’s pictures are from a trip to Karnataka which I made in 2013, after a conference in Chandigarh. I had been before, but had not had a camera then. This time I travelled on my own so could see many places and linger to my heart’s content – the Hoysala Temples of Halebid and Belur, the earlier Chalukyan shrines of ...
Today being Friday I will not concentrate on a country, but instead look at a range of religious iconography. The three Greek Gods are Praxiteles’ Hermes in Olympia, possibly the most beautiful of statues, Apollo from the Cyprus museum, and a stunning Greek River God Olganos up in Greek Macedonia, not heard of previously, whom I saw by chance in ...
Another mark of increasing age, though I suppose I should be pleased at this one, was a request to deliver a memorial lecture. The topic given to me was ‘The March of Folly’, which led me to look up the origin of the phrase. I knew it was the title of a book by the popular American historian Barbara Tuchman, ...
Today’s pictures are from Lithuania, the first country in the Baltics that I visited in my tour of the region in 2013. The first eleven pictures are from the capital Vilnius, including of the university where a convocation was taking place; and the next nine are from the little historic city of Trakai nearby.
In response to a request from Dianne Silva of the Daily Mirror – Sri Lanka [express your views on the statement by David Cameron, threatening to withhold aid from countries which have anti-gay legislation. The full story can be found here http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-15511081 ] David Cameron - CHOGM 2011 I suspect the report is an exaggerated version of what Mr Cameron ...
Today’s pictures are from the Philippines, taken during two visits in 2012 for Climate Change workshops run by the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats, of which I was chair in the first few months of that year. The first twelve pictures are from Palawan, the furthest west of the big islands, extending downward to Indonesia. We had a wonderful ...
A couple of years back one of the more thoughtful of our career Foreign Ministry officials tried to put together a book on Sri Lanka’s international relations. This was an excellent idea in a context in which we do not reflect or conceptualize when dealing with other countries. However it turned out that hardly any Foreign Ministry officials were ...
Today’s pictures are from the place which first developed my love of travel. Unfortunately I have no pictures of that wonderful trip to Madras in 1968 when I was just fourteen, but explored happily on my own while my mother went on to Bombay for a conference. It is described in the first travel narrative on my Facebook, on the ...
Text of lecture at a workshop at the Kotelawala Defence University - January 20th 2013 Let me now quickly run through measures I would suggest to maximize the impact of aid interventions. Request all agencies to work in selected areas and build up close working relationships with government officials in those areas. This means they can plan outputs in terms ...
The National Action Plan for the Protection and Promotion of Human Rights 2011 – 2016 as well as the full series of Sri Lanka Rights Watch are available at the Peace & Reconciliation Website. I was sorry last week to miss the Nandadasa Kodagoda Memorial Oration for two reasons. One was because of great assistance rendered by his son Yasantha Kodagoda to Dayan Jayatilleka ...
Today’s thematic pictures in fact go beyond rivers and lakes, for I begin with two waterholes in Yala, seen on my last trip there in June last year. Then there are six from India, the last two from Assam, then two from Angola from the central area and then the Kwanza River just before it reaches the sea. Two rivers ...
The Island 9 June 2011 – http://www.island.lk/index.php?page_cat=article-details&page=article-details&code_title=27310 In looking at the Middle East in terms of the attitudes and actions of the range of countries that are involved in patronage, assistance and intrigues in the area, there is an element that needs to be addressed seriously, but never will be so long as American politics continues to blend populist democracy ...
When I got back to Colombo from Uzbekistan, the Central Bank Bond issue was hotting up. Ranil had tried to suppress the report his own lawyers had produced, which made it clear that chicanery had taken place. They had I think been asked to protect Arjuna Mahendran, and this they did with a dogmatic claim regarding his innocence, which the ...
Coincidentally, shortly after I began work on suggesting new ways of working in the Public Sector, I was asked to contribute to a workshop on ways in which to develop the capacity of Members of Parliament. This was a request from the Organization of Professional Associations, which I recall contributing significantly to public policy several years ago. It seems recently ...
In the month after my extended 60th birthday celebrations, I travelled extensively. This was not however to any new countries, so I remained stuck on 89 for a few months more. But I was able to get to fascinating places in countries I had been to previously. In India this was to the North East, which had until a few ...
In one respect I believe things are better now than they were in the darkening days of 2013. I refer to Trinity College, which I had got involved with at the end of 2004, when the then Bishop of Kurunagala, Kumara Illangasinghe, asked me to serve on the Board of Governors as one of his nominees. He had to select ...
I was able to finish everything I had to do in London in three days, and still had five days before I had to be in Oxford for the celebrations for my Tutor, which began on October 31st. So I went to Malta, largely I should note in pursuit of my quest to visit 100 countries. But the place turned ...
After 20 posts of travels in Sri Lanka during my Peace Secretariat days, I go back in time for variety, to pictures relating to my Oxford days. It is almost 49 years since I first went to Oxford, on October 6th 1971, but I have already posted letters from that year. So I resume here with the first letter ...
