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
The Old Railway is housed in what used to be an electrician’s shop. Upstairs, a pretty little café overlooks the canal but it is the workshop downstairs that Catherine Rawson really considers her domain. There are clothes everywhere you look and interspersed among them are an eclectic selection of books and jewellery, bags and handicrafts. … Continue reading
In Asgi Akbarally’s family, a car is never just a car. Sitting in his office off Darley Road, Asgi tells us each car has a story. A collector and connoisseur, he is behind a beautiful new coffee table book titled ‘Classic and Vintage Automobiles of Ceylon’. He and his sons Hussain and Shiraz together selected … Continue reading
Darshi Keerthisena is that rare hybrid – an astute businesswoman and the head of her own company on one hand and on the other a master designer with an enviable body of work to her credit. Where you might see an item of clothing, Darshi sees a canvas and way to reinvent an old and … Continue reading
In late 2011, a 28 year old Sohan Dharmaraja was just wrapping up his PhD thesis in Computational Mathematics at Stanford. With a Masters from MIT in the subject already under his belt, his current interest was in how excruciatingly accurate high fidelity real world simulations could be played out on computers – if you crashed a Prius into a … Continue reading
For Joanna Luloff, the author of ‘The Beach at Galle Road,’ travelling had to be about more than just tourism. As a student, she had worked at a local prison, tutoring the inmates in English and after she graduated joining the Peace Corp seemed like the best way to merge her interest in teaching, volunteer … Continue reading
Enter Mahen Chanmugam’s house and you will find it impossible to escape the scrutiny of Lord Ganesh. Lord of Beginnings and Remover of Obstacles, the elephant-headed son of Parvathi is everywhere: a dozen tiny Lords cast in metal observe you from their spot on the dining table and another one sits wreathed in incense by … Continue reading
Ravibandu Vidyapathi dances alongside the ghost of his father. Their shadows follow the two dancers as they leap and twist and then fold into each other. A little later, when Somabandu Vidyapathi’s sketches are projected onto the large screen at the Punchi theatre, they fill the space with dancers dressed in glorious costumes, frozen as … Continue reading
Prof. Gehan Amaratunga is fond of quoting the Irish statesman and philosopher Edmund Burke in his classes at Cambridge University: “Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.” In Prof. Amaratunga’s field of nanotechnology, however, little is littler than Burke could have ever conceived. Prof. Amaratunga … Continue reading
Among the Zoroastrians, a small community united in their faith in the God Ahura Mazda, it is traditional to adopt one’s profession as a family name. This was why when Jimmy, the eldest son of a prominent Pakistani Parsi family, decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and study engineering, his surname was decided for … Continue reading
Smriti Daniel 