“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 ...
The seventies and eighties clearly were tumultuous decades for our cinema. Most commentators, in their rush to inject political relevance to our cultural history, tend to see in them the flowering of a political cinema. True. That does not, however, belittle the other precedents, landmarks, and revolutions which our directors, actors, and scriptwriters wrought. It was in the seventies, for ...
At the end of Akkara Paha, the film of the Madawala Ratnayake novel, we see the protagonist, Sena, and his lover, Sandawathi, run off to catch sight of his sister, who has just married. The two of them look on, from one side, as they wave at the newlyweds on the other, and contemplate on their own lives; Sena, the ...
Some people are vilified. They are in the majority. Others have their lives commemorated every year. They are rare. It is because of this perhaps that we remember them. No one is perfect, of course, which means that no one can really claim an "icon" status without adjusting for his/her frailties. Occasionally, however, they manage to transcend those frailties and ...
Chitrasena did not pass on 10 years ago. He was not taken out or marginalised after death for the simple reason that he can't be. This is not (only) because people love and continue to love him. Not only because what he left behind sticks to collective memory so brilliantly. This is also because there are those who will continue ...
Premakeerthi de Alwis was murdered on July 31, 1989. His assailants were more or less ordinary people, like you or me, fixated on their ideology so much that they disregarded everything which made their victim the man he was. His crime? Announcing at a Gam Udawa concert, the flagship project of a government those who sponsored the murder were hell-bent ...
Thomas Friedman, writing to the New York Times, calls it a "good bad deal". Barack Obama begs to differ. He sees it differently. Not how his critics see it. Not how those who spot out the realpolitik under it see it. The president doesn't call it a game-changer. He calls it "better than the alternative."And so we have a deal ...
There’s a story about a teacher and some children that offers a fitting metaphor for our political landscape. This teacher had drawn a circle. He had asked his assistant to describe it. “A circle, of course!” was that assistant’s reply. He had then asked the children to describe it. Three replies had followed: that it was a lima bean, a ...
A reply of sorts to Mr Suren Raghavan.There are two versions of Golu Hadawatha that I have seen until now. The first, broadcast on television, ends with Sugath returning to his sister-in-law, Champa, after reaching a reconciliation of sorts with his lover-turned-tormentor, Dhammi. This final sequence, which brings about a happy ending for Sugath, was to me contrived, and for ...
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 ...
About a decade or two ago, the entire area spanning from Boralesgamuwa to Piliyandala was a virtual wasteland. It looked, all in all, more a village situated on the outskirts of Colombo than the historically and culturally significant region it was. Then the roads opened up, people moved in, and the inevitable drives at urbanisation followed. The road from Boralesgamuwa ...
Review of IdeaCouch's "The Garage Show About Celebrating this Season", staged at Diyawanna Gardens, Nawala on December 16 and 17Christmas is associated with a great many things. Bazaars. Bargains. Families. Festivities. Drunk drivers. Plunging bank balances. And pointless small talk. That’s putting it too harshly, but harsh, straight talk is often what it takes to unveil the underside to a ...
The most intriguing point about Vaishnavee, Sumitra Peries’ latest movie, is that it subtly tricks you into believing there’s something intriguing. It’s a rare work of art, at a time when art is being compelled to bring out a largely nonexistent feeling of profundity. There’s nothing profound about it – it isn’t an existential tract on urban angst or an ...
Thomas Gray and Shakespeare probably knew more about the human condition than (m)any of their counterparts back in the day. They attacked the larger than life and championed the essence of humanity, bringing it down to that much sought after but hard to find quality, solitude. Gray thus exemplified in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” what Shakespeare wrote ...
The first thing that struck you about him was his voice. Polished, elegant, and not a little jarring, it helped explained his figure, which was at once filled with resolve and fear. It was these two qualities, perhaps, that explained how self-contradictory the man was: a scion of the elite, yet fighting against the same values that same elite fought ...
She has been called, among other things, a "poetess" of our film industry. Professor Carlo Fonseka lays out a more nuanced description: the "Mother of the Father" of Sinhala cinema. Both go some way in grasping her pithily, but there's something that seems to elude commentators here, something she herself has held back from them. I am of course not ...
Once in a while you come across amazing statements made by politicians and members of civil society that you just can’t pass up. Or let go. Just the other day, Chairman of the Northern Provincial Council (NPC) C. V. K. Sivagnanam is reported to have said at a news conference that it is futile and meaningless to continue with the ...
My friend Dhanuka Bandara, currently studying in the United States, sent me a comment the other day: “The decline of a reading culture is a serious problem, rather acute in America. I’ve even concluded that this has caused the current crisis in Western civilisation.” I was and still am not qualified to argue on the latter point, but I agreed ...
I watched AnandaDrama’s Dracula at the Wendt about a year ago. I had strayed in about an hour or so earlier, to peruse an Exhibition that was in play at the Harold Peiris Gallery (Kumar de Silva’s “Nostalgie05”, which I had visited on its opening night but which I wanted to see again without the crowd). I had time, I ...
Chandana Aluthge is a meticulous man. He knows what to say at any given moment and knows how to keep to a point. He is ever careful not to trip, understands the necessity of explaining everything to the last dot, and is patient with what he does. He is not a playwright only, he is a theatre practitioner. Words come ...
