Part V: Purrsonality disorder When you come home from work, it doesn’t matter how bad your day has been when your baby doggo greets you at the door, wagging and whining and panting furiously, bursting with excitement at your return. It’s like the world melts away and you regain the energy to take another stab at life. I wish Dukie ...
Part IV: Our Family – putting the fun in dysfunctional Our nuclear family consists of myself, Ema, Dukie and Eddie. Ema is a stereotypical dad. She doesn’t do any of the actual child-rearing like bathing, doctor’s visits, etc. Instead, she comes home from work with treats for Dukie and Eddie and wins their affection through her purchasing power. Dukie is ...
Part III: Rejection Dukie is the greatest unrequited love story of my life. I cannot communicate to you how much my happiness depends on the love of a dog. While I was overseas, missing my pets, I would fawn after dogs in public, savouring the few times I got to pat the doggos while pretending to be interested in their ...
I know people mean well when they ask these questions at a funeral. I know it’s a weird combination of genuine concern, not knowing what to say but needing to express care somehow, that ends up in a cocktail of awkwardness and discomfort for everyone. But really, it’s harder being on the other side of the question, the receiving end. ...
The Distance between the Wendt and University: A Review of Jehan Aloysius’s Rag … ලයනල් වෙන්ට් රඟහලේ සිට සරසවියට ඇති දුර: ජෙහාන් ඇලොය්සියස් ගේ ‘රැග්’ ගීත නාට්යය This review of Rag: the Musical is absolutely brilliant and articulates spectacularly (and bilingually) the poor treatment of ragging culture in the musical. Only issue is that it fails to address the absolutely cringey ...
Part II: How to name a dog Duke is the dog every affectionate family dreams of having. Loving and obedient to his owners, ferocious – despite his diminutive size – to outside threats, and soft and cuddly to boot. He had eyes that you could read and communicate with. When he was afraid, I’d hold his little face in my ...
Part I: How to name a cat. My cat’s name is Eddie. This is Eddie trying to wear my pants Eddie is a rescue cat: he wandered into our garden to hide from the cruel world outside and found us instead. He decided to stay after some coaxing from my patient, loving housemate, Ema. We rewarded his trust with multiple ...
A while ago I wrote an ineloquent rant about a British article that portrayed Sri Lankan cuisine and its people as curious objects of the tropics, the latter of which didn’t understand what a national treasure our hoppers/aappa/appam were and needed a white woman to ‘discover’ it for international/British consumption. A few weeks ago, while eating said aappa at home ...
Demons in the plural Demons in Paradise is neither the only creative work that provides a critical introspection of the Tamil community, nor the only one that constructs the image of the perpetrators of violence as otherworldly ‘demons’. In 2014, Neervai Ponnaiyan, a veteran Sri Lankan Tamil writer, published a collection of short stories called Devils and Demons. The stories ...
On the dirt road from Wellawaya to Buttala, there stood two little shacks in a small expanse of garden. One would often spot an elderly gentleman there dressed in a sarong and simple baniyan. Peering out at the world from his characteristically oversized glasses, Fr. Mike, as he was referred to affectionately, seemed like any other villager from Buttala, an ...
(pix courtesy Malaka Premasiri) On April 1, the crowd at the Lionel Wendt gallery kept buzzing, ‘What do you think it meant?’ They had been captivated by Mesh Academy of Dance’s Deconstruct the Embody but were struggling to make head or tail of it. Different ideas floated amongst people: some believed the dance had a storyline about escape, others ...
Article published on YourCommonwealth.org To quote its preamble, the Act aims to ‘to foster a culture of transparency and accountability’ and to ‘thereby promote a society in which the people of Sri Lanka would be able to more fully participate in public life’. On going live, there was a frenzy of activity with some high profile cases. It is an ...
This article was published by Roar.lk. Full article here: http://roar.lk/features/of-dynasty-and-double-standards-women-leaders-in-south-asia/ While the U.S. has arguably shown the world that it would rather have a leader that grabs pussies than has one, in South Asia only the Maldives and Bhutan (which is a patrilineal monarchy in any case) have not had a female head of state. Political scientists have been fascinated by ...
I used to have a nuanced view about the problems around employing foreign-educated graduates in Sri Lanka vs. encouraging locally-educated graduates. The protests by university student unions, medical students, and a host of other youth who had bought into the free education rainbow only to find no pot of golden jobs at the end – I sympathized with them and ...
I compiled this bibliography for The School of Oriental and African Studies where I was a Chevening Scholar completing my Masters in 2015-2016. My major was in the Politics of Culture and my research focused primarily on the nexus between arts, culture, and politics in 20th and 21st century Sri Lanka. Contents are as follows: Politics and History: Civil War, ...
(This article was originally carried by the Daily Financial Times as a guest column.) On the 16th of July, a clash happened between students at Jaffna University over the inclusion of Sinhalese cultural spectacles in the welcome event. Below is a brief of the events but a more in-depth report of the goings-on can be found on DBS Jeyaraj’s blog.[i] ...
The hurt of love is a warm shroud two inches from my skin A layer that holds me gently in ways loose cotton covers won’t. A hot hurtness-anger that hovers and cradles me to sleep Comforting, like the slowly heated water surrounding the oblivious frog.
Here’s to those who choose to and do not choose to become mothers to those who are trying to or trying not to to those who can and those who can’t or who still wonder whether to to those who know they don’t want to to those who are but didn’t choose to be to those who are but didn’t ...
The town crier announces tallest Buddhas in the world and villages named after president-Kings landmarking an island drowning out quiet pleas for peace of mind at home, and a landscape whose pride we all might share in. http://www.dailymirror.lk/108556/Asia-s-tallest-Buddha-statue-declared-open-in-Mathugama http://www.dailymirror.lk/108461/Village-to-be-built-in-MR-s-name-Minister-Premadasa
