There is something to be said, as I’ve done before, for imagining a nation through death, without taking sides. Without trying to figure out, who was right and who was wrong, in an unending cycle of accusations and counter accusations. All we need to do is stretch our imaginations to encompass all those in our country who grieve.
(Photo by Chandragupta Amarasinghe) The modern history of Sri Lanka is punctuated by two massive events that we are yet to fully understand; the civilian led anti-Tamil violence of July 1983, and the armed forces led destruction of LTTE in May, 2009. Other events that might claim to be such ruptures in temporality, events that structure both time and ...
The Court of Appeal today issued an order on writ application C.A (writ) Application 411/2012, filed by attorneys of the Chief Justice, seeking writs of certiorari and prohibition to quash the findings of the PSC constituted to report on the articles of impeachment framed against her by members of the house of parliament. It has been widely been reported that ...
The pages of fiction, said Gunadasa Amarasekara at the launch of his new novel Rupantharanaya, are enabled by the sensitively lived life, and the hundreds who had gathered at the SLFI, to hear half dozen intellectuals speak on his writing seemed to agree. I do too; it is difficult think of any other writer who exemplifies this art, who ...
Virtue, then, being of two kinds, intellectual and moral, intellectual virtue in the main owes both its birth and its growth to teaching (for which reason it requires experience and time), while moral virtue comes about as a result of habit, whence also its name ethike is one that is formed by a slight variation from the word ethos (habit). ...
There is something to be said, as I’ve done before, for imagining a nation through death, without taking sides. Without trying to figure out, who was right and who was wrong, in an unending cycle of accusations and counter accusations. All we need to do is stretch our imaginations to encompass all those in our country who grieve.
On Thursday, my friend Ashan Abeyesundere, suggested that we go to Galle, have lunch and return. Such an idea would have been considered almost impossible until recently, but now the gleaming new expressway, E01, enabled it. It was forty minutes to the Kottawa interchange from Elibank Road, and from there only fifty minutes to the Pinnaduwa interchange, which allows an ...
Last weekend I spent a most stimulating day at a great institution, the University of Peradeniya. The occasion was an international conference on the social sciences and the humanities, and I was, to my great good fortune, invited to speak. There were many papers in parallel sessions throughout the second day (also the first, but I arrived only in time ...
“Police have opened investigations into an attack on a Buddhist centre in Wanduramba, Galle, where tear gas was used to control crowds on Sunday evening,” says a news report published in a National news paper website on Monday last, going on to tell us that, “[t]he protest was launched against a group alleged to be practising Buddhism against the ...
I never agreed with Neelan Tiruchelvam, all that very much. And that was from the very beginning, the very first time I met him in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in '84 or '85. He was visiting Harvard to give a lecture and was of course a renowned Tamil liberal intellectual of great stature. I, a lowly but angry undergraduate at MIT, ...
In any event, those who are investing in the North should understand the special responsibility placed on them; help build a real civil society in that province. Support fundamental rights; and make the possible suturing of economic growth to constitutional freedoms a strong one. This doesn’t take tub thumping or flag waving. It’s quiet work, and it needs to be done.
I think stakes of those who live outside Sri Lanka, and who are not citizens, who do not really contemplate returning to Sri Lanka to live here – and that’s some, not all of the Diaspora, of course – are better elaborated through an alliance with a person, group or community that’s in Sri Lanka, that lives here with the ...
While the fighting in Sri Lanka between Government and the LTTE has come to an end, it’s clear that the conflict broadly put, between “Sinhala” and “Tamil” nationalists have not ended. Claims and counter claims are traded each day, sometimes in Sri Lanka and often outside. How is an interested lay person to understand common arguments about the Sri ...
Dr. (Ms.) Sudarshini Fernandopulle, UPFA MP, and widow of slain senior UPFA minister Jeyaraj, has my deep sympathy for her loss, during the war. Her husband was blown up by a LTTE suicide bomber. Nevertheless, my sympathy extends also to all victims of the war, and I worry quite bit about her recent statement, “I must specifically mention I have ...
What about the beginning and middle, is my question, though simple in construction, grave and serious in its import. Surely, from the burning of the public library in Jaffna, to the massacre of pilgrims at the sacred Bo tree in Anuradhapura, to the massacre of women and children in Sathurukondan, to the killing of worshippers in the mosques in Kattankudy, ...
Minnesota, which is a Sioux word meaning ‘sky water,’ became the 32nd state of the United States of America, in the mid nineteenth century. The Mississippi river was central to commerce and transportation in those early days of European settlement; it was decades later that railways bisected the state. In 1899, as the railway extended south, a small new settlement ...
At the end of a long and enjoyable evening on Tuesday, I asked Gehan Talwatte, an old school friend who has founded, grown and then sold several quite valuable companies in the US and Europe over the last few years, whether he enjoyed his work. Of course, was his reply, so I pressed Ajith Fernando, also an entrepreneur of the ...
For example MIT poverty lab experiments have included asking questions as useful and yet unasked as, how absenteeism among school teachers could be reduced. It turns out that a controlled study proved that having a student photograph the teacher, with a time/date stamped digital camera, at the beginning and end of the school day, with a small financial incentive to ...
