The comment thread under a YouTube video featuring Pankaj Mishra tends to get crowded quickly. The Indian novelist, essayist, literary critic, lecturer, and reporter has that effect on people – perhaps never more so than with his latest book, Age of Anger. Come 2018, Mishra has participated in more than his fair share of debates … Continue reading
YOU CIRCLE THIS exhibition as you might a sacred site. The layout is such that one artwork leads you to another in a ring. The Red Dot Gallery in Colombo is so small that every work in ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ seems close enough to speak to its neighbour. They murmur to each other … Continue reading
When Ahilan Arulanantham heard that the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation had named him a recipient of the $625,000 “Genius Grant,” one of the first things he thought about was how much he would like to spend some of it on supporting human rights work in Sri Lanka. Since the announcement was made … Continue reading
Sitting among the members of a displaced community in Puttalam a few years ago, Dr. Chesmal Siriwardhana found himself thinking about the ethical problems around health research. To get to this point – where he was able to meet people who had been driven out of their homes by the LTTE, had been displaced for … Continue reading
Asha de Vos knew what to expect before the big announcement. “The hardest part was keeping it secret,” she tells The Sunday Times. The only Sri Lankan so far to have a Ph.D. in marine-mammal-related research, de Vos was named an Emerging Explorer by the National Geographic Society in May this year. Subsequently featured … Continue reading
The ethnic riots of 1983 were not the first in Sri Lanka. Nor were they the last. But Black July was indisputably a seismic event in this country’s history. Its echoes are everywhere, but some of my most meaningful encounters with it have been through the island’s literature. From the warmth and innocence of Funny … Continue reading
Seran Sivananthamoorthy is only 25 years old which is why his knowledge of the Jaffna Public Library is limited to memory and anecdote. The library with some 95,000 volumes including the only original copy of the Yalpana Vaipavamalai or the History of the Kingdom of Jaffna was set alight by a mob in 1981 as … Continue reading
