It’s been a busy week in Sri Lanka: we’ve pelted the Pakistani cricket team with stones, ranted about how shitty that act was, and watched Mahinda Rajapaksa do a Facebook Q&A. Perhaps the old bear has gotten smarter after his recent licking, and perhaps the Old Guard is finally catching on to what the Younger Generation can really do to ...
This is a bullet. It doesn’t matter who fired it. Or what. Uzi, Glock, AK-47, T-56 – doesn’t matter. The point is, it’s a little metal ball of pain hurling towards you. At the other end is a man (or woman) who really, really does not like you. It flies away from him (or her) […]
Picture a dark alley. Then picture something smaller, but with the same atmosphere, for it would be an exaggeration to call this this place an alley. On one side is a town’s largest junction. Three roads meet and dissolve into one another with snakelike ease. The sides are lined by the fruits of Sri Lankan small enterprise: bookshops, fish stalls, ...
*This article of mine was originally published in the Sunday Leader a week ago. We know a lot about Kumar Sangakkara. For starters, we know the trivial thing – he’s almost 38, was born in Matale, and studied law before he broke into cricket. We know the important things – that Sangakkara is one of the influential cricketers in the ...
Wednesday. 8th March, 2015. I was hungry, so I walked into a restaurant and bought food. It was a salad and it cost me 400 rupees. It tasted terrible. “Well, shit,” I thought. 400 bucks for a mass of green and a few shreds of chicken. It was about as tasty as a traffic accident. The accompanying milkshake was another 300 ...
The guy next door is 22. My age, basically. Like most of the neighborhood, he has a decent PC and internet access. What does he use it for? Porn. I know ICT penetration is a watchword, but what are we measuring, really?
I take the train to work. Like a lot of people, I wake up every morning and cast a bleary eye on the clock. There’s a train at 8:10. Good. I can reach the station at 7:50 AM, enough time to buy a ticket and realize that there’s nowhere for me to sit. All is normal. Sri Lankan trains are ...
“I’M GETTING A TATOO,” I SAID OVER THE PHONE. The average response of the average Sri Lankan mother is to recoil in horror. Tattoos are bad. Tattoos are unclean. Tattoos belong on drug addicts, ministers, and those old men who function as the default odd-job men for any village. Honestly, I don’t mind being lumped in with the Mahathung s, as the ...
Is there anyone from Google out there? Anyone? Good. If there is, know that you – and the company you work for – are now part of Sri Lanka’s many political campaigns. Let me explain. I’m looking at a copy of the DailyFT. On the front page is a photo of Muhunthan Canagey shaking hands with Mike Cassidy, VP at ...
When a white man comes to Sri Lanka, people tend to stand up and take notice. Especially if, as in this case, this white man is German and has four wheels and is in the papers a lot. I’m talking about Volkswagen, of course. Volkswagen is an interesting company: not just because of its pedigree, not just because it’s the ...
Find your Juliet. Marry her. Collect the dowry. Get her pregnant. Done. It doesn't even need to be in that specific order. All things considered, being a parent isn't hard. A lobotomized corpse could pull it off. But being a good parent is difficult. It's a lifetime achievement. A child is a strange thing, you see. It starts out like ...
Chaaya Village is an interesting place. They say Cinnamon Lodge – which is almost next door – is the fancier of the two, which I can’t comment on – this is the first time I’ve been anywhere in the vicinity of Habarana, let alone the hotels here. Right now, if I look out of the […]
My candle burns at both ends It will not last the night But ah, my foes and oh my friends It gives a lovely light. That poem was written by Edna Millay, whose life spanned the 18th and the 19th centuries. While her original context might have been lost, the poem applies to something we all go through: that ‘night’ ...
As the Star Wars premiere (December 26th) draws closer, more and more people ask me in puzzlement: “Why do you people like Star Wars so much?” Let me try and explain. (This may turn out to be an unsatisfactory explanation, so if you’ve got a better one, please comment). Sri Lanka, where I (and the majority of my readers) come from, ...
Picture this: 1) Your internet connection stop working suddenly, as it does every month 2) You dial 1212 and call SLT and work your way through the prompt. 3) You get treated to 10 minutes of advertisements and a message saying all customer agents are busy. 4) You try again. Same message. 5) You try […]
Yesterday was historic. The US Supreme Court legalized gay marriage, the Dutch sued their government and ordered it to cut down on carbon emissions, and President Maithripala Sirisena dissolved the 14th Sri Lankan Parliament. And I, with great personal strength, managed to say no to a piece of chocolate cake. Those are three amazing things. The first two have world-changing implications; the ...
Democracy: “A system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives.” – Oxford English Dictionary “Government of the people, by the people, for the people.” – Abraham Lincoln Around 500 years before the birth of Christ, Greece – the same Greece that’s making news right now – changed the world. In a ...
The Yarl Devi was a train. A hulking pile of metal on wheels, just like any other train. It began its run around 1956; neither the first train to make the trip to the North of Sri Lanka, nor the only train to operate along the Northern Line, but definitely the most iconic. Like most […]
Problem: a corrupt administration, an Executive Presidency that basically constitutes of a legal dictatorship, a Rajapakse dynasty with dominance over every major branch of government Solution: Maithripala Sirisena? Until a few days ago, my Facebook was filled with the usual pro-and-anto-feminist rants, pictures of far-off lands and the occasional raging Dota 2 player. Nobody gave […]
If you’re on Facebook, chances are high you’ll have seen at least one CEPA-related post by now. What started out as an argument by a few high-level commentators has now evolved into video campaigns, a Facebook group with 21,000 members and actual physical protests. There’s even a profile picture template. It’s all over the Sri Lankan Internet. The backstory behind CEPA ...
