From time to time, someone trots out an invidious comparison/contrast between Sri Lanka and the South Asian City State created and managed by Lee Kwan Yew and his successors. Let me, this Sunday, make a similar effort. Sri Lanka emerged out of World War II, with its foreign exchange coffers brimming with hard currency reserves [...]
The title of this week’s column is one that has been front and centre in my mind for a very long time and well you might say, “Given the Sri Lankan reality, absolutely no surprise there!” The “Houses” I refer to are the political parties and other entities that pretend to provide a voice for [...]
When the news of my being threatened with dire consequences for “writing against the President” reached them, several of my “I-told-you-so” friends did exactly that, told me that they had told me so and reiterated the advice they have been giving me without a break for a long time now: “Mind your own business, keep [...]
Nicholas D. Kristof, who is a regular contributor to the Op-Ed columns of the New York Times and a frequent visitor to North Korea over the past dozen years, had the following comment to make about the passing of Kim Jong-il and the paroxysms of grief with which the people of that country responded to [...]
It is that time of year when one is permitted to take a trip down memory lane to 2011. Just a few days ago, a friend sat me down and insisted that I had been remiss in not exploring and analyzing the fact that our government, which never tires of telling us poor plebes how [...]
Sitting at a computer with headphones conveying music of one’s choice is a simple pleasure that “modern times” brings to a returnee to his South Asian home after many years in northern climes. “Strange Fruit” is, for even the most superficial students of popular North American music, a landmark in the canon of that music [...]
The recent turmoil, country wide, associated with the attempt to impose a new mode of transportation on perishable fruits and vegetables caught many self-appointed political observers and pundits flat-footed. Here they were - just having proclaimed the Rajapaksa Hegemony for, at least, their lifetime – faced with riots on the roads of rural Sri Lanka [...]
The true essence of a dictatorship is in fact not its regularity but its unpredictability and caprice; those who live under it must never be able to relax, must never be quite sure if they have followed the rules correctly or not (The only rule of thumb: whatever is not compulsory is forbidden.)” Christopher Hitchens [...]
The other day, I heard an intelligent and decent human being say that the head of this country was surrounded by crooks and charlatans and therein lay the entire problem for the Sri Lankan nation. This pronouncement sought to place the blame for the colossal corruption that covers the land from coast to coast entirely [...]
I have in previous columns made passing reference to those whose well-remunerated task it is to defend the status quo in this country. Let me, on this occasion, make the attempt to differentiate between them and the tasks that they appear to shoulder for a government that sorely needs defenders of various kinds, given the [...]
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