I met Sanjeeva Pushpakumara last year in a little art cinema off the Champs Elysees at the showing of Ashoka Handagama’s Ini Avan. It
seemed he knew me from his days as a student or a journalist. A pleasant, articulate yet understated young man, of less taciturn intensity than Handagama, he debated Ini Avan with me. […]

“When you’ve told someone that you’ve left them a legacy the only decent thing to do is to die at once.”
~Samuel Butler
Politics refers to achieving and exercising positions of governance — organized control over a human community, particularly a state. Once you achieve the position of governance, how you manage it, governance, to the best […]

Gaslighting a Nation
“All the gang of those who rule us,
Hope our quarrels never stop.
Helping them to split and fool us,
So they can remain on top.”
Brecht (Solidarity Song)
The practice has been around for millennia, but the term was born in 1944, out of a movie. In ‘Gaslight’ , a man uses a series of manipulative tricks […]

I am white and female, like the almost-white jury that acquitted Zimmerman of murdering Trayvon Martin. But I am also an anti-racist
feminist. My head spins. I grew up in a family dedicated to civil rights and lived in communities that ostracized us because my father taught at Black Atlanta University, or when my mother worked […]

[Speech delivered at the conference on ‘South Asia Economic Integration: A Strategic and Economic Appraisal’ co-organized by the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), the Institute of Policy Studies (IPS), and the Regional Program SAARC of the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS) in Colombo, Sri Lanka, June 10-12, 2013.]
I want to set out four ideas in […]

The government’s determination to show progress in regard to a political solution and to improving its human rights image is evident in recent developments. During his recent visit, the Indian National Security Advisor Shivshankar Menon is reported to have urged government leaders to keep its promises to India. The Indian government’s position that
the government should […]

Does anyone know who made the decision to dabble with nuclear power sources and if that weren’t enough, attempt a tie up with a chemical and biological research institute? To put it more plainly, who even introduced the words nuclear, chemical and biological into the Sri Lankan policy agenda? Why, at a moment when we […]

“If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.”
~Unknown author
Pundits argue and debate. Constitutional lawyers ponder and deliberate. Newsmen report and sometimes distort beyond recognition; but the decision to implement the Thirteenth Amendment in full, both in chapter and verse and in spirit, is not a legal or a constitutional one;
nor is it an academic exercise; […]

“It was in the basement of the Sri Lankan Criminal Investigation Department… we sat and listened as a group of senior police officers took us through the case. My stomach churned as we learned of the sickening and horrific details of the completely unprovoked attack that Khuram and his partner had been subjected to”
– British […]

“Where are the people of character, courage, conviction, competence and commonsense?”
Lee Iaccoca (Where Have All the Leaders Gone?)
The quest for a leader
‘The Conference of Birds’ is a peerless jewel in the crown of Islamic literature. Written in the 12th Century by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din
Attar, this epic poem tells of an avian Odyssey in […]