To celebrate World Design Day we’ve decided to do a series on Sri Lanka’s Young Illustrators. We started with Rommel Arumugam and next up is Irushi. Irushi Tennekoon’s illustrations are for children; or for the child at heart. They are playful, of bright luminous colours, and have the potential to whisk you off your feet and into a magical world of ...
“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” So went the now iconic New Yorker cartoon in 1993. The artwork, a little ahead of its time when it was first published over 20 years ago, long before the term web 2.0 was even coined, was a humorous allusion to the relative anonymity provided by the then fledgling World Wide Web ...
The Colombo Port City has been the topic of many table discussions on what this extra piece of land will mean to Sri Lanka. With the plans for high-rise buildings, shopping arenas, water sports, a mini golf course, hotels and, not surprisingly, a Formula1 track, the Colombo Port City is promising to be quite the utopia. At an estimated 15 ...
‘Devika’ is a street cleaner. Clad in an orange-coloured t-shirt, she is a foot soldier in the small army employed by a big conglomerate to clean up after around 647,000 citizens. They work night and day, in the merciless heat and the unforgiving monsoon, keeping our streets and neighbourhoods clean. In this sprawling Megapolis-to-be, there is a shop front where ...
Two decades ago, while walking through the streets of Colombo, you wouldn’t have had any trouble spotting beautiful hand-painted signs hanging over shops. The signs, in various typographic fonts and with shadow effects, were so precise and flawless, that at first sight you wouldn’t believe they were painted by hand. The Blue Crab looks menacing, but tasty. Today, these signs ...
Most people are neither aware nor fond of the term hackathon. To many it brings an image of pro-70’s hipster-type beard-ridden, sandal-wearing people sitting together in a dark room, usually underfed, typically over-enthusiastic and speaking in incomprehensible lingo about unfamiliar concepts. That’s all I could think about when I was asked to attend Code4GoodLK, a showdown of local tech-talent that ...
Almost two weeks into the holy month of Ramadan, Instagram is teeming with great pictures of the festivities and religious observances around the island. The pictures are also a wonderful way of seeing how Muslims experience the month long fast – such as young boys playing cricket in their white t-shirt, sarong and cap to pass time. We have ...
Gathered from across the North and East, around 250 protesters travelled overnight to Colombo yesterday (February 28) to protest military occupied lands in front of the Presidential Secretariat during a Cabinet meeting. Police officers initially objected to protesters attempts to rally outside the Presidential Secretariat, trying to disperse crowds with warnings that the area was a high-security zone – despite ...
The World Health Organisation (WHO) recognises tuberculosis as the eighth deadliest disease in the world. Although Sri Lanka is a low-prevalence country, recent statistics show an increase in the number of TB reports, particularly in Colombo. Due to our country’s high BCG vaccination coverage, the odds may seem to be in our favour. However, according to recent reports and the ...
Although events on social media may suggest otherwise, Sri Lanka ushered in the New Year with relatively less drama and tension than we did at the end of 2014. The same can’t be said for the rest of the world however, where terror alerts, fires and mining accidents got in the way of New Year’s celebrations. Here’s this week in ...
With COVID-19 curfew finally lifted, the once deserted streets of Colombo are brimming with life again. The cacophony of the crowds in public spaces is only rivalled by the blare of bus horns and the tooting of tuks. It is clear, people are glad to be out and about, despite lingering health concerns.
We don’t have to go all the way to the Great Barrier Reef in Australia to marvel at the wonders of coral reefs. Some of Sri Lanka’s major reefs can be found off the Jaffna Peninsula, the Gulf of Mannar, Hikkaduwa, Galle, Yala, Pasikudah and Trincomalee. Important recorded coral reef areas in Sri Lanka. Source: NARA; Rajasuriya and White 1995, ...
Sri Lankans are not entirely unfamiliar with the word “defamation”. You do hear, for instance, news of one politician suing another for millions of rupees over something that was said by the latter politician, which the former found offensive or unpalatable. Most Sri Lankans are therefore aware that “defamation” is some kind of limitation on the freedom of speech of ...
The Yarl Geek Challenge (YGC), an annual hackathon and highly anticipated event in the country’s tech and startup calendar, is about to go down in the Jaffna Peninsula for the fourth year running. According to Dhananjeyan Balaretnaraja of the Yarl IT Hub, the organisers of YGC, this year’s event will see the participation of about 25 teams from all parts ...
