Vraie Balthazar remembers thinking: “This can’t be normal.” Her periods had taken on a kind of life of their own. She would bleed not just three or four days, but seven days. Her sanitary napkins needed to be changed every two hours. She would layer them together, two-pads deep, to make a kind of adult … Continue reading
Barbara Sansoni was 11 years old when she met Maria Montessori. Having fled to India after being exiled by Mussolini during WWII, Maria’s school in the Olcott Garden Bungalow already had a small complement of students. Now, here was this child in need of her guidance. Barbara, enrolled close by in a boarding school in … Continue reading
Avinash Kumar treats the name B.L.O.T as part instruction manual, part personal philosophy. An acronym for Basic Love of Things, B.L.O.T is a two man audio-visual collective. Avinash’s friend and collaborator Gaurav Malaker is in charge of the music, while Avinash is the resident VJ. Having performed in Colombo before, Avinash was back to lead his … Continue reading
On Layn Baan St in Galle Fort, two exquisitely melancholy sea monsters are separated by a rusty gate. Stricken by grief, one wears a tower for a hat, the other towers above the lighthouse, rising above the fort with a ship bleeding oil cradled in its thin, long arms. The black ooze around their waists … Continue reading
Mika Tennekoon’s small living room is packed full of suitcases. That’s great because Mika is a girl going places, except in the strictly literal sense. It’s been over two years since she gave up her job in London to return home and it’s been a comfortably productive period in her life. Mika’s work – fanciful, … Continue reading
Isuri Dayaratne has been reading Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’ and she simply loves it. Martel’s strange but very precise description of one character in particular – Mr. Satish Kumar – got her hooked. ‘His construction was geometric: he looked like two triangles, a small one and a larger one, balanced on two parallel lines,’ … Continue reading
50 to 1: Those are the odds that a contestant will become Australia’s next Masterchef. As the season marches relentlessly on, the odds improve but the standards get tougher, the challenges increasingly impossible. The weak (or often the merely unlucky) are ruthlessly weeded out; amateur pastry chefs and makers of homemade pasta begin to disappear … Continue reading
‘Paper engineering’ is a good description of what Robert Crowther does. A maker of fantastical, quirky pop-up books, the artist’s favourite readers are the reluctant children who pick up a pop-up without really knowing what’s inside. In his bestselling ABC, kids could pull tabs and lift flaps ‘to make frogs leap, hens peck, koalas climb, … Continue reading
The Mahabharata – sometimes considered the fifth Vedda – is longer than the Odyssey and the Iliad combined, and its influence rivals that of the Bible and the Quran. Though ranked high among the world’s most ambitious and absorbing works of literature, it hasn’t always been among the most accessible. Yet, Devdutt Pattanaik’s ‘Jaya: An … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 