“What have they planned for us?” the boy next to me asked, bewildered, as the van we all were in drove up past the gates. He got the answer immediately: a procession of students lined up before a budu madura, boys on one side, girls on the other. It was charming, but perhaps a little too much to take ...
දොර ඇරලා බලපන්පායයි තව මොහොතින් නව රැස්ඉර සේවය කරමින්සිරිපා කඳු මුදුනින්සිවනදි පාදංපාරාදීසයභාවා ආදම් මලෙයි— Mahagama Sekara, “Mak Nisada Yath”The earliest recorded engagement of a Muslim with Samantakuta, according to Senerath Paranavitana, occurs in 851 CE in a travel account by an Arab merchant called Soleyman. However, Soleyman does not refer to it as aadam malayi, the name we see in ...
D. B. S. Jeyaraj, writing on the meeting between Mahinda Rajapaksa and Maithripala Sirisena held around three weeks ago, suggests that in the coming weeks, G. L. Peiris, the de jure leader of the Joint Opposition, will hand over power to Rajapaksa, the de facto leader. This will, he further opines, give the man enough clout to negotiate and, presumably, ...
I missed SPARK. Sure, I missed and continue to miss a whole lot of plays, films, and other events and this due to the fact that I hardly find the time and what little time I get tends to be spent (or wasted) doing nothing. And yet, SPARK was special. At a time when the government is emphasising on ...
A partial review of Robert Tombs's The English and Their History.History is version. I remembered this as I read through three books: Orlando Figes's A People's Tragedy, Peter Conradi's Who Lost Russia, and Robert Tombs's The English and Their History. The first two made me realise that, when it comes to the Russian Revolution and Russia in general, Western scholars ...
Not every talker is a debater and not every debater is a talker, I've noticed. Talk is cheap. Debating, on the other hand, is a completely different kettle of fish. While the one and the other do meet in and enter everyday conversations and tournaments, they are not the same, because debating is a craft, an art in fact, which ...
My friend Hiruna, who is studying for his A Levels, yet somehow finds the time to write the most beautiful Sinhala poetry I have ever read from someone his age, is something of a rarity. Not because he writes poetry (don't we all, at some point?) but because his preferred cultural icons are so far removed from the Sanukas and ...
Garasarapa, Jayantha Chandrasiri's latest, was given a special screening at the Tharangani Hall at the National Film Corporation on Friday, the 22nd of June.Dewnaka Porage, in one sense the hero of Garasarapa, is the definitive younger face of Kamal Addaraarachchi, who plays his character as a psychology lecturer when he grows older. Everything is there - the frown, the firm ...
Jayantha Chandrasiri likes to talk, I have always noticed. And how. He can explain and rationalise something that appears to be so portentous and heavy that once he stops talking you are left telling yourself, "Damn, why didn't I think of that before?" At times, though, he can get mysterious, offering explanations for something none of which make sense or ...
Anagarika Dharmapala is the worst thing that happened to Sri Lankan history. He was a racist, a political pamphleteer, a propagandist who, at the end of the day, served the interests of the bourgeoisie by providing an antidote to the proletariat. He was a betrayer, a peddler of myths, and a demagogue. He was hence the definitive ancestor to S. ...
“With apologies for generalising, I would say that despite decades of free education Sri Lankans are still lazy thinkers; a most gullible lot. Astrologers abound and it is easy to spread a false story. Divine intervention is still widely believed and sought after and clever Kattadiyas make good money. Political leaders shamelessly dash coconuts asking for divine curses on enemies. ...
The history of the Buddhist clergy, in this country, has largely been a history of schisms, splits, and amalgamations. Over the decades and centuries, several important points have been inferred with respect to this (at one level) inevitable historical process. First and foremost among them, that the breakdown of Buddhist sects in response to growing caste militancy was a consequence, ...
Not too many years ago, before I found a job, I was involved with tracking down, calling, and interviewing veterans from various cultural fields who had contributed something substantive to Sri Lanka. I would summarise their lives and work and try to fit those into the (horrendously meagre) space of a 1,500 or 2,500 word article (which would sometimes be ...
In his memoirs Pin Athi Sarasavi Waramak Denna, Ediriweera Sarachchandra dwells on the intricate link between a cultural resurgence and the identities of those who take part in and eventually get to lead that resurgence. Taking a rather puritanical stance, he contends that while the Japanese cinema gave birth to Akira Kurosawa and the Bengali cinema gave birth to Satyajit ...
Movies, the most sensual of all arts, are also the most misunderstood. Critics try to rationalise them, to make them conform to their standards of propriety, and more often than not, they fail abysmally. They assume that audiences react to them basely, but that’s because many of them, if not most of them, visit the theatres as invitees, and therefore ...
A careful perusal of history indicates that racism begins with the economic as opposed to the religious or communal. When food prices are rising, when it’s difficult to earn a proper income, especially under a barrage of taxes, and when living through today is the credo you wake up to every day, it’s difficult and painfully so to affirm unity ...
The young who take to Sanuka, and do not take to Amaradeva, and the old who take to the latter and not to the former, are at the end of the day the one and the same. The rift between these two demographics goes beyond just age differences. But how do you separate the one from the other? By the ...
Human beings love being reminded of what awaits them after they die. Heaven or hell, earth or purgatory, they want to know. And by knowing, they either work to make their afterlife a reality or do their best to change that afterlife. We all want to ascend to paradise, after all, and even if we don’t, we want to be ...
“One and the same civilization produces simultaneously two such different things as a poem by T. S. Eliot and a Tin Pan Alley song, or a painting by Braque and a Saturday Evening Post cover. All four are on the order of culture, and ostensibly, parts of the same culture and products of the same society. Here, however, their connection ...
“Why is today so special?” the driver of the van I was in asked me, and I was stumped. A second later I checked myself; Sri Lankans seem to forget so easily that forgetting the commemoration of the (military) end of the Civil War seems a trivial omission in comparison. (After all we have representatives of popular culture who don’t ...
