Michelle de Kretser was eight years old when her mother saw a ghost. It’s a story she tells with great relish, conjuring up for you a dry day in Jaffna and a family of six staying in King’s House. Her father, the Supreme Court judge O.L de Kretser and his wife Peggy had frequently … Continue reading
Category Archives: The Sunday Times
Prof. Ray Jayawardhana: The Search for Extra-Solar Earths
Prof. Ray Jayawardhanawas 27 years old when his first research paper made the cover of Newsweek. As a graduate student at Harvard, he led one of the two teams that discovered a dusty disk around an adolescent star.Their findings were published in a 1998 paper titled “A dust disk around the young A star HR … Continue reading
Fatima Bhutto: ‘This is not a political factory’
By the time Benazir Bhutto met her death at the hands of a suicide bomber in 2007, she and her niece Fatima hadn’t spoken in over a decade. Still, people loved to compare them. From the length of their noses to their western educations and even on to their shared love for sugared chestnuts and … Continue reading
Paul Schrader: On writing Taxi Driver and Raging Bull
I meet a very tired Paul Schrader on a rainy morning in the Galle Face Hotel. As the wind coming of the ocean bends the coconut trees, and slams rain drops against the closed windows, Paul talks about what inspired him to write the iconic film Taxi Driver, why he chose to rewrite Raging Bull … Continue reading
Uberto Pasolini and Ruwanthie de Chickera: On Making Machan
Machan Four years down the line, the disappearance of Sri Lanka’s one and only National Handball Team (SLNHT) in Bavaria has become the stuff of legend. Amazingly, those 23 men had no training and knew virtually nothing about handball. Despite this, they were audacious enough to postpone their escape and actually take part in three … Continue reading
Mary Wilson: Once a Supreme…
“Baby, baby, baby don’t leave me. Ooh, please don’t leave me, all by myself.” It’s the early part of the 1960s in America. Martin Luther King has had a dream; the Russians are the winners of the space race, Audrey Hepburn just ate Breakfast at Tiffany’s and The Supremes are on the radio. Their voices … Continue reading
Kiran Desai: The Inheritance of Loss
Currently, the best thing about winning the Booker Prize, as Kiran Desai would have it, is that it brought her here – to our tiny island in the Indian Ocean. “I anticipated my affection for Sri Lanka,” she says smiling. As the sun sinks past the horizon, and a dusky twilight cloaks Galle Fort, Kiran … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 