Walt Disney was primarily an entertainer. He knew what sold and he knew how animation entranced a cross-section of the population that had been alienated by the movies. Cartoons, he correctly realised, would appeal to children if they were based on stories they grew up on. It was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which established his subsequent career in ...

The inaugural Shelton Wirasinha Oration was held at Wesley College on Thursday, October 19 and was presided over by Kumar de Silva.Probably many people feel about the weather these days as I do: it’s bewildering. You can never tell where it’s headed to, whether it’s going to drizzle, pour, or simply overwhelm. What happens more often than not, therefore, is ...

Somewhere in my youth, I started reading Keats. I took to him and his poetry, his way of looking at life and his way of treating its vicissitudes with equanimity. There was something about his odes, his sonnets, and his paeans of love, anguish, and torment that enthralled the morbid adolescent in me, and so (for better or worse) I ...

Is the conflict between art and non-art, so much a staple of contemporary society, really beyond resolving today? To answer this question is to ask another: who decides on, and thereby sustains, the separation between art and non-art, and what are the yardsticks to be used when deciding on what is the one and what is the other? If one ...

Some days are special. They celebrate life. They record milestones. They ensure that we do not forget. Not all are special and not all record history, but they tend to be special nevertheless. Sure, we sometimes forget why, but just for once, if we can concentrate on the particularities of a date, we will find that there are more reasons ...

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 ...

Maithripala Sirisena. Ranil Wickremesinghe. Mahinda Rajapaksa. Commissions and commissions. Interparty rivalries. Intraparty rivalries. Floods. Droughts. Cyclones. Donald Trump. Jerusalem. Russia. What will 2017 be most remembered for in Sri Lanka? Not too difficult to answer, but that’s only if you have your preferences towards what you deem to be more newsworthy than everything else. For me, hence, it was none ...

The line between emotional authenticity and contrived melodrama has been so thin that even our best actors can’t resist crossing it. If it’s surprising to come across Ranjan Ramanayake in as atypical a performance as the youngest son in Awaragira, or the father to the Gautama Buddha in Siddhartha Gautama, it’s not because we doubt their ability in both the ...

When you see Geetha Kumarasinghe dancing away, her own way, dazzling us, you wonder whether this could be the same performer whose father, an editor of a conservative Sinhala Buddhist magazine, prohibited her and her siblings from going to the theatre. Then you realise that Geetha’s career, in the movies and also, to a considerable extent, in politics, has been ...

Old people fascinate me. So do young people, though for qualitatively different reasons. They fascinate me because they have stories to tell and these differ from age-category to age-category. For obvious reasons, old people have a lot to tell, far more than anything their younger counterparts can or ever will. This, however, is not a hard-and-fast rule. The truth is ...

For most of us, museums are connected with the past, reminding us that whatever the future holds will be determined by that which has gone by. They are a fixed point, on which everything is to be assessed. Gordon de Silva runs something I would call a museum.I have trouble calling him a curator or archivist though. He is much ...

I hated the idea of staying after school. For 12 years, I escaped (through some miracle, I now realise) the rule that every student had to engage in two extracurricular activities (or ECAs): one sport, one Club. Once in a while I did check into a Club or Society, only to get out after two, maybe three months. I don’t ...

Mrs Malathi, who taught Biology to A Level students at Lyceum, once lectured our parents on her subject. We were, I remember, in Grade Eight and waiting (with some apprehension, I now realise) for our baptism into Grade Nine and that as yet unknown terrain called the “Ordinary Level.” We were savages back then, unwary of the pressure we’d get ...

Just the other day I came across an amazing comment on Facebook. The commenter had argued that Sri Lankans, to be specific Sinhala Buddhists, were too apathetic to bother with economic issues and were busier with racist issues. In other words, “keeping their strength relative to other ethnic groups” was our overriding concern. It was a vicious circle that results ...

Not everyone can make you laugh. Not everyone possesses that rare gift called wit, which in lesser hands get thrown away, forgotten, or ignored. Not everyone can keep the audience waiting. Not everyone can evoke laughter in a way that’s both calculated and fresh. Those who can are rare. Those who can’t are, if they turn to comedy, pretenders at ...

The Debating Fraternity of Ananda College, Colombo won this year’s Sri Lanka Schools English Debating Championship, organised by the Law Faculty of the University of Colombo. This is a sketch of that Fraternity and its evolution.The Law Faculty Debating Championship, organised by the University of Colombo, is the biggest annual debating tournament held at present in Sri Lanka. It extends ...

A tribute to the first one hit wonder of our cinema.In 1968 and 1969 a series of films that went down as the most poignant love stories ever shot here was made, and released. Most were directed by those who were already established in the industry: G. D. L. Perera (Dahasak Sithuvili), Dayananda Gunawardena (Bakmaha Deege), and Lester James Peries ...

Gentle, suave, reassuring, and calm, Sumitra Peries is the almost perfect embodiment of the women she’s depicted onscreen, from her first film, Gehenu Lamayi, to her lastest, Vaishnavee. ESTEEM caught up with her to delve into her past lives as not just a director, but also ambassador, editor, voyager, and chess player. She is arguably the world’s oldest living active ...

I am by nature an agnostic, though that doesn’t prevent me from indulging in nostalgia, the past, and the cultural histories of whatever work of art I delve into.Once in a while, moreover, I love to meet priests and members of the clergy, whatever the denomination and in particular if they went beyond the pulpit and contributed to our cultural, ...

If there’s really nothing “new” to be “discerned” in the recent popular culture here, it’s not because the artists don’t want to try out something new, but because audiences are so easily captivated by the familiar details and the technical veneers of their work. In Sri Lanka, for the most that is, once you come up with something that directly ...