Two years ago, in a moment of panic, I rushed my young daughter to Colombo’s only children’s hospital. To be honest, I don’t normally turn to our overcrowded government hospitals for healthcare. But a doctor friend had recommended the Lady Ridgeway Hospital as the best place for administering the anti-rabies vaccine.

As with all government hospitals, they first wanted to record the patient’s basic bio data. Fair enough. I provided the child’s name, age and street address. For some reason, the form also asked for the patient’s religion. Before I could say anything, the nurse in charge wrote ‘Buddhist’.

Now, this was both incorrect and highly presumptuous. But when I objected, it sparked off an argument. The formidable woman insisted that …

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Ameena Hussein is one of Sri Lanka’s best known English authors. She is also one half of the Perera Hussein Publishing House, that since 2003 has published some of the best new English writing in the country. The Moon in the Water, Ameena’s first novel, was long-listed for the first Man Asian Literary Award in 2009. Zillij, a collection of short stories I reviewed four years ago, won the State Literary Prize in 2003.

Our discussion touched on Ameena’s tryst with cancer and how this influenced her writing and outlook on life. We also talked about English literature in …

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I have read and heard of W. Dahanayake travelling to Colombo from Galle in the morning “Ruhunu Kumari” train with all those other ordinary passengers, getting off at the Kollupitiya station to go to his ministry in Union Place, when he was Co-operative Minister in the J.R. Jayawardne government. That was in early 1980′s.

There were other MPs and Ministers too in the past, who used to travel by train to Colombo, to attend parliamentary sessions. Some even booked sleeping berths, for they travelled through night from Jaffna or Badulla, to be in parliament for the morning sessions. None of them then would have ever thought of themselves being elected representatives of the people, going about with armed security escorting them. …

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Mahinda Rajapaksa seems to be turning into his one-time enemies. During the reign of terror (bheeshanaya) in the late 1980s, which was started by J.R.Jayawardene and continued by R.Premadasa, around 60,000 Sinhalese were tortured, disappeared and killed by the state. At that time, Rajapaksa collected evidence of these crimes and took them to the international community, the UN. For doing this, he was called a ‘traitor’.

Now it is Rajapaksa’s own regime that is guilty of torture, disappearances and killings, of Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims. And he is the one who calls anyone offering to give evidence of these crimes to the international community ‘traitors’!

A more recent enemy of Rajapaksa was Prabakaran. He claimed to be the sole representative of Tamils …

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A solitary lamp perched on a desk top lights a room. A man scribbles feverishly on paper, hunched over the light as if he’s jealously guarding what little he has. His desk is cluttered with cartoons and drawings – some of a President, others of two small children. He holds down his paper with one hand and writes with the other, so violently that other loose papers and articles shuffle with his movements.

He is breathing hard, as if he’s run to his desk from sleep, taken by wild inspiration. He has forgotten to switch on the fan, and the heat of that December night hangs in the air, thickening like spoiling milk. Small explosions of sweat begin to burst from …

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Are we honestly serious in wanting democracy, our rights and human development, to live in Sri Lanka ? If we are, how are we seeing to it, that we do really enjoy such a luxury in this beleaguered nation ?

All what had been happening and allowed to happen, don’t in any way even hint that this country is at least serious about living by the day, leave alone democracy, rights and development for the future.

If the people were serious, this society would not be entertaining any of the rubbish that is doled out as politics and promises by political leaderships, blue, green or red, at every election for 62 years. If the people are serious, this country would not have …

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Sometimes words are used so often and so uncritically that they not only lose communicative value but those who utter them and those who hear them no longer know what they mean.  We really don’t know what ‘democracy’ means, do we?  Decency, anyone?  How about justice?  Love?  There are thousands of such words and terms including ‘people’,  ‘sustainability’, ‘development’ and ‘hegemony’, but I am thinking of a name, an acronym, a term, a phenomenon, a curse and an agent, all rolled into one.  NGO.

Non-Governmental Organization.  I first heard it in May 1988 at the Marga Institute, while engaged in a study of development assistance, its sources and destinations.  It didn’t take long for acronym to comfortably replace term.  And so …

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There is a joke that has been floating for a while with regard to the value added by lawyers to our daily existence.

It asks the question whether you know the difference between a lawyer and a catfish.

If you are interested, the answer is; one is a fish and the other is a bottom dwelling scum sucker.

In fairness to the lawyer fraternity, it should be noted that the above only applies to a miniscule number among them. Most are honorable men and women who ply their trade according to the laws of the land and obviously the implied negativity does not apply to them.

Unfortunately, the few bad apples among the law fraternity have a tendency to ascend to positions of power …

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Mr. Gomin Dayasiri’s article, titled ‘Tamil Grievances – Untouched & Unattended’ (Daily Mirror, 16 February 2010) reveals the Sinhala nationalist perspective concerning the kind of solution necessary for the resolution of the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. It is an important piece, written by a respected senior lawyer, a nationalist. The author points to some valuable propositions. But there are certain aspects of it which are disturbing. The fundamental appeal made by Mr. Dayasiri reflects, to a large extent, a kind of home-grown version of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘white man’s burden’.

Mr. Dayasiri argues that the ‘government had failed to attend to the legitimate grievances of the Tamils’ and reminds us that if it continues to fail in this regard, …

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Groundviews was able to obtain an audio recording of an exchange between Swiss journalist Karin Wenger and a well-known, senior journalist now part of the Presidential Media Unit (PMU). Karin’s visa and media accreditation to cover the Sri Lankan presidential election was revoked after she asked several questions from government representatives at an official press briefing. As reported by Deutsche Welle,

“I asked two questions,” Wenger says. “Why were there so many troops in front of opposition candidate Fonseka’s hotel? And the second referred to rumours we kept hearing: Was it true that the president’s brother Basil Rajapaksa was inside the election commission’s office?” An official stopped her after the press conference and started shouting at her: “I won’t …

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“All my life I have been a gentleman to my adversaries, even in war situations surrounded by death. I’ve never humiliated, offended nor wreaked revenge on a single prisoner, not even in the case of the Bay of Pigs while my comrades lay mortally wounded or dead around me…One must be honourable.”

- Fidel Castro ( May 1st speech, 2002)

I leave the country for scholarly reflection and writing for (at least) two years, with a heavy heart.  I am proud to have supported President Rajapakse at the 2005 and 2010 elections and I think he is the best leader the country can have at this point of time.  However, the practice of political cannibalism must cease! A balance must …

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A visibly shaken wife in tears, Anoma Fonseka told the media “this is the gift my husband got for finishing a 30 year war”. Gen Sarath Fonseka was arrested, or detained, or taken into custody or may have been even abducted by a military group late in the evening on Monday from his office, in Colombo. What ever label one gives for such exercises, they eventually end up as legal arrests in Sri Lanka, as was earlier proved in the case of Uthayan and Sudar Oli editor N. Vidyadaran’s abduction, on 26 February, 2009 while the war was on and Gen Fonseka was the army commander.

Apparently the end of the war has not changed it to be any better. As …

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For residents and visitors

The giant leafy mango
tree in the back garden
has been cut down
screamed the poet,

Scar and the hyenas
are in charge, the stomach
queasy, revolted,
Il Duce megaphoned

War is Peace;
in the exhaust fumes
of a white van a soul
flits about then vanishes,

betrayal on 4 million
tongues, the State is Me
yet some of me is afraid
to return, to stay, paralysed

while State police black shirts
twirling clubs pulp Lasantha
to welcome in the year
that ends with Sarath abducted,

the State afraid will cover
all tracks, Defense is Offense,
Minister draws sap
at Duttu’s right hand,

while his boys play cricket
for the nation and liberals
cower before the impressive
exertion of force and law

to suppress dissent, under …

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The Sri Lankan crisis continues, sourced in and stemming from two major flaws/factors:

(i) There is no comprehension that “justice must not only be done, but be seen to be done” and that what is legal in the narrowest sense may not be perceived as legitimate or ethical in the broader sense. The consequences for institutions, the long term health of the body politic and the larger national ethos are never considered.

(ii) None of the major political players have a correct grasp of the problem of evolving/constructing a broad, truly Sri Lankan national identity.

President Rajapakse had it right on the issue of the Tamil Tigers; the issue of fascist separatist-terrorism. He had it more correct than all his predecessors and his …

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I interviewed recently Rohan Edrisinha, who lectures at the Law Faculty, University of Colombo. Along with a number of other issues related to prospects of meaningful constitutional reform in Sri Lanka during Mahinda Rajapaksa’s second term in office, Rohan addressed the farrago of approaches by the Rajapakse administration towards the implementation of the 17th and 13th Amendments in particular and the fate of the APRC, now largely forgotten in the mêlée of presidential and parliamentary elections.

We also spoke in general about the nature of constitution making in Sri Lanka, as an exercise that does not involve the input of citizens and is often seen as used as an instrument of partisan politics….

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The unemployment rate in Sri Lanka is not exceptional when compared with other countries in the world. In fact, it might seem relatively low. On a list of countries ranked in order of their rate of unemployment in the World Factbook produced by the US Central Intelligence Agency, Sri Lanka ranks 62nd with a comparatively low unemployment rate of 5.2%, a figure that concurs with that in the Central Bank report of 2008.

However, for Kosala Perera (name changed) this is no comfort. After graduating from the University of Sri Jayewardenepura with a second upper in a Bachelor of Business Administration, Kosala enthusiastically embarked on finding a job that would pay back the loans he had taken from relatives in …

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The TNA, the remnant of old politics in the Tamil community has entered a new era. The post LTTE politics has made it possible to create conditions for a democratic culture in the North and East. But the defeat of the LTTE alone will not make it possible to create a genuine democratic culture. The Sinhalese political leadership should show its sensitivity and empathy towards a community of people who have suffered nearly three decades of the most destructive and the brutal war the country had ever seen. The IDPs are becoming almost a forgotten human tragedy. Some of them are still languishing in camps. The most important and crucial input should come from the Sinhalese political leadership in their …

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This article is inspired by a programme called Justice Everywhere – an exhibition and events with Martin Luther King III, son of US Civil Rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. presiding held in Colombo and other parts of Sri Lanka in January 2010.

A young TV journalist asked me whether Martin Luther Kings’ philosophy of non-violence will work in bringing true peace to Sri Lanka ?

I cannot remember how I answered it facing the camera, but I hope I would have said something like this.

Martin Luther King Jr. paid the ultimate price violently driving a non violent campaign to win freedom for African American people who gained their official freedom 100 years earlier.   In my eyes, Martin Luther King Jr. …

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Note from author: For someone who is not in the least interested in politics – and is more often than not bored by it – my reaction to the 2010 Presidential Elections was surprising, even to me. Strangely enough though, I found that a lot of people felt much the same way. We were repulsed by constant news of violence; inescapable hoardings with their proclamations that our politicians loved us; posters that made the city walls disappear beneath them; partisan media stuffing propaganda down our unwilling throats; the promises of candidates that we knew to be false.

Yet, despite all this, we cared – albeit, rather reluctantly and in spite of ourselves. We still wanted to be in the know; we …

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there was a lovely tree in the yard at the back of our house. a lovely sinewy and tall mango tree.             
one day in the morning we were woken to the sound of a thousand parrots in uproar.
they were hawing the tree down. we watched the whatever you call it uproot the tree. the roots we’re pulled out.

the parrots displaced.

we wondered about why they cut the tree down. the parrots found another home.

this morning we woke up to the sound of a humming drill. a shed with an asbestos cover
stood in its place.

my old school had a bicycle shed like that.