“….instead of looking for necessary and sufficient conditions of change we must train ourselves to be on the lookout for unusual historical developments, rare constellations of favourable events, narrow paths, partial advances that may conceivably be followed by others…. We must think of the possible rather than the probable”. – Albert Hirschman (New York Review of […]

“Everything is going to end in violence….and who knows what limits of madness will be reached?”
Georg Forster (Works XVII)
A Presidential offspring hammers a referee, in full view of hundreds of spectators.
An Appeal Court Judge has a temper tantrum in an international airport and throws a water bottle at another Judge.
Fellow referees do nothing either to […]

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?” – ‘The Second Coming’, WB Yeats (1919)
The Asath Sally saga
When Sri Lanka was nominated as host of the Non Aligned Conference and chair of the Non Aligned Movement under Madam Bandaranaike there wasn’t a single dissenting voice within that movement or […]

If Azad Salley is a terrorist in the making, a terrorist who has to be pre-empted by recourse to detention under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, or a promoter of fanatical, fundamentalist ethno-religious hatred, he comes with the strangest of profiles.
Far from being born into and raised in anything like a backward, fundamentalist, religiously fanatical […]

LAND GRABBING
The government has given notice of its plans to acquire lands belonging to private citizens in the North for public purposes that involve national security. The pasting of notices on trees in Valikamam North under section 2 of the Land Acquisition Act coincides with preparations for the Northern Provincial Council elections in September this […]

“You’re not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can’t face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it.”- Malcolm X (Advice to Youth of Mississippi – 1964)
Azath Salley has been arrested for fomenting religious disharmony by a regime which is providing succour to such proponents of brotherly love as […]

“I never will, by any word or act, bow to the shrine of intolerance or admit a right of inquiry into the religious opinions of others.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
The intentions, methodologies and strategies of the Bodhu Bala Sena (Army of Buddhist Power) have so far been most unBuddhistic and
bordering on the pagan and archaic.
The crude and […]

“It is not once nor twice but times without number that the same ideas make their appearance in the world.” ~ Aristotle quotes
The Government in general and the ruling family in particular, do not show any signs of learning any lesson from history. The local government elections concluded more than two and half years ago on […]

The mightiest rivers lose their force when split up into several streams -OVID Remedia Amoris (Disunity)
Last Saturday morning while relaxing on my armchair I heard a beautiful song played over the radio titled Kusumalatha Ramalingam written by the veteran lyricist Sunil T.Gamage which spoke about the plight of a young girl born to a Sinhala mother […]

“We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men”: George Orwell (The Adelphi – January 1939)
The murdered five
On January 2nd, 2006, five students were murdered in the Town of Trincomalee. The government initially claimed that these were LTTE cadres who died when the […]