A happy marriage of Kandyan and Baroque
No. 12 Flower Road was how Suresh Mudannayake, a.k.a. Ashok Ferrey, re-imagined a Kandyan townhouse of the 17th Century. It’s proof of the little-tapped potential of Suresh the polymath, better known for his writing. Those classy but quirky architectural sketches with which this flamboyant wit fills his short stories and novels spring to life in [...]
Zoom is the name of the game
“A blank page is both an exciting and a frightening thing,” said the playwright Harold Pinter. So is a blank computer screen, when you are the Master of Ceremonies (MC) for a synapse- rupturing academic conference. When the Open University of Sri Lanka (OUSL) abandoned the notion of its face-to-face annual research conference, known as [...]
Appreciations
The light he lit will shine bright even in years to come Dr. P.H.D.H. De Silva The nation lost one of its brilliant sons when Dr. P.H.D.H. De Silva left us last week at the age of 93. An outstanding scientist, he had committed himself to the preservation of our heritage and maintaining our ecosystem [...]
There are things you can learn even from a pandemic
Melony Mahaarachchi’s favourite question in her MBA application was one on failure and learning. She wrote about how one day, she got stuck in SpaceX’s Cargo Dragon COTS-2 spacecraft while trying to fix a mistake. Months later, the very spacecraft she was trapped in, made history as the first commercial spacecraft docked in the International [...]
Colonies of greed: The plague of outdated developers
If a forest is clear felled and the ground bulldozed, indeed it becomes a blank slate for development. But today, development with a prerequisite of a treeless landscape, is outdated. Trees are the currency of modern development. In this era, any development without an acceptable tree: land ratio is immediately termed ‘unsustainable’. As global societies [...]