“Sri Lankan mothers from the “Dead and Missing Person’s Parents” organisation hold photographs as they takes part in a protest in Jaffna, some 400 kilometres (250 miles) north of Colombo. Photo: AFP” (International Commission on Missing Persons) Note: This piece was commissioned for and originally published in Options Magazine, 51 edition, in Sri Lanka, in 2016. The full magazine ...
This is the transcript for the short talk I delivered at the event South Asian Feminisms: A MEMORIAL FOR LALA RUKH, hosted by A Collective for Feminist Conversations and Women and Media Collective, in Colombo on 23 August 2017. The bulk of it includes an excerpt from an essay titled Forging a New Political Imaginary: Transnational Southasian Feminisms written by ...
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 ...
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, ...
The famous London landscape is the backdrop for ‘Gloriana’, the barge carrying the Olympic flame down the Thames. I was in London when they won the bid for the 2012 Olympic Games. I remember it vividly – well, it’s hard to forget Brits losing their cool and jumping into fountains fully-clothed. The delight was infectious. I have not often seen ...
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 ...
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’ ...
Bane represents a new breed of villain, and everything that defines this last installment of Nolan’s Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight Rises finally opened on the 20 July 2012, surrounded by much hype and expectation - it is the final installment of Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman trilogy. Does Nolan succeed in bringing to close the story of Gotham just as brilliantly ...
You know you have to start worrying when a lot of ‘free speech’ advocates look like this. (Image courtesy of cs.stanford.edu) We have been hearing a lot about ‘free speech’ recently – and not in the way that we in Sri Lanka are typically used to; not as a call to defend journalists and activists against persecution. For example: the ...
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 ...
Mind Adventures poses for a Company photo at Act Before You Think 2011 The Mind Adventures Theatre Company (founded in 1999) is an experimental English theatre company based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. They live by a mantra of sex, drugs and rock n’ roll and strive to make theatrically inventive, politically conscious theatre in the tropical heat of Sri Lanka ...
Below are some notes and observations about how, why and when we choose to speak and what we choose to say on social media – but also in general. This is about how we respond to injustice, and how we respond to those who respond to injustice – and while specifically about recent events, can also broadly be applied ...
Is this what a united Sri Lanka looks like? When the Armed Forces of the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) military defeated the LTTE in 2009, thus ending a 26 year long civil war in Sri Lanka, the President of Sri Lanka, also the Minister for Defence and the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, said this in his ...
(Written originally for and published in ShishtaLanka – DecentLanka – February 2017, in translation in Sinhala) What is the role, and what is the status, of women in Sri Lanka today? Where do we stand? These are the primary questions I asked of myself when I began writing this essay. It seemed a good moment, at the beginning of ...
Ada Lovelace (1815 — 1852), image courtesy of women.com: English mathematician and writer; known for her work on the Analytical Engine; first to recognise the machine’s potential beyond pure calculation and created the first algorithm to be carried out by the machine; now considered the first ‘computer programmer’ (Wikipedia) This was a short presentation I delivered (with a few ...
Note: In this piece, when I refer to ‘rape’, I refer more or less exclusively to heterosexual rape, as committed against women, by men. The omission of the discussion of other versions of sexual violence and rape is not exclusionary in intent, but because the piece attempts to discuss ‘rape’ as presented in the film ‘Silence in the Courts’, which ...
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 ...
Tom Hiddleston supports HeForShe. The din over Emma Watson’s speech at the United Nations General Assembly earlier this week has died; it moved some people very much indeed, while others saw it as hugely problematic. The speech was made to launch a new UN Women campaign, called HeForShe, which asks men to get involved in the struggle for gender equality, ...
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 ...
Originally published here. ———————————————————————————————– The Namal Rajapaksa Twitter fiasco: Sri Lanka, sexism & political correctness Subha Wijesiriwardena is a Sri Lankan blogger and theatre practitioner currently living in Bangalore, India. The Namal Rajapaksa Twitter fiasco of March 4th revealed to us a grea
