“The last time I was on stage, I ended up in the emergency room,” Delon Weerasinghe tells me. Pointing to a puckered brown spot on his palm, he says, deadpan, “this hole in my hand – it’s not the sign of the stigmata.” The scar dates back to the staging of Delon’s first play, ‘Thicker … Continue reading
We ring the bell and from behind the forbidding black gate a cacophony of barks rises to greet us. A smaller door swings open and Shyam Selvadurai pops out, all smiles. As we pass under the portico, I think that if Great Expectations had been set in Sri Lanka, Mrs. Havisham could have lived in … Continue reading
Philip Hoare is about to see his first blue whale. There, five miles out, the towering spout rises like a fountain in the middle of the undulating expanse. The height and width of this column of condensed breath (with traces of seawater and whale ‘snot’) is unique to this giant mammal. In a time when … Continue reading
If you grew up in a castle, and then had to write about it, you might find, as William Fiennes did, that your novel was a prime candidate for the genre of “a misery memoir”. Castles, after all, are high maintenance, and as William will tell you, very cold in the winters. Still, his book, … Continue reading
A single sentence on the back of Chandima Rajapatirana’s t-shirt reads ‘nothing is impossible’. As far as personal mottos go, this one suits its wearer to a tee. Diagnosed with autism and apraxia as a four- year- old, Chandima has defied the prediction of specialists. The man who they recommended should be institutionalised is today … Continue reading
Ananda S. Pilimatalavuva lives a quiet life in the same town where his distant ancestors were once known as ‘King Makers’. Under the Naayakkar (Vaduga) Kings of Kandy, four Pilimatalavuvas were appointed Maha Adikarams. The third held sway for two decades, and served as a Chief Adigar or Chief Minister to two kings. The story … 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
It’s a story Robin Sharma loves to tell, especially as it so neatly elucidates his own thinking: “When I was growing up my father took out a piece of paper and he translated a Sanskrit poem onto that piece of paper that I have never forgotten. He took that piece of paper and he taped … Continue reading
‘He was eleven years old that night,’ reads the excerpt in The New Yorker, ‘green as he could be about the world, when he climbed aboard the first and only ship of his life.’ The lines from ‘The Cat’s Table’ appear right on time – going by his usual publishing schedule, Michael Ondaatje is just … Continue reading
The New York Times dubbed Prof. Ramachandra Guha ‘perhaps the best among India’s non-fiction writers’; Time Magazine called him ‘Indian democracy’s pre-eminent chronicler’; In 2008, the Prospect (UK) and Foreign Policy (US) magazines listed him among the world’s 100 most influential intellectuals. But had it not been for an eccentric Englishman who died in 1964, … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 