A flicker of hope in a therapeutic journey
It is as the country prepared to celebrate the Sinhala and Tamil New Year after the Easter Sunday commemorations were over that we revisited the hapless town of Katuwapitiya on Monday. Next Wednesday (April 21) marks the harrowing second anniversary of the Easter Sunday bombings by Muslim extremists of three churches and three hotels. The [...]
Letters to the Editor
All of us should see to it that vaccines not approved by WHO are not used here The Government has decided to import COVID-19 vaccines that have not been approved by the WHO and administer it to people. In order to ensure that these are endorsed by the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA), the Government [...]
Appreciations
‘Mother Courage’, with apologies to Brecht Rita Perera There’s no one I can think of, who deserves the title ‘Mother Courage’ more than Rita Perera, who entered her eternal rest on April 6. She left a huge void in the lives of her sons, Hiran, Suren and Nalin, for whom she left the shores of [...]
Farmers get ‘bundled solutions’ to fight weather vagaries
Galenbindunuwewa was ripe with harvest. The golden paddy fields had been freshly reaped, and storks and egrets were picking about in immaculate flocks, as the occasional eagle, harrier or kite swooped down in a sharp dive for a quick meal of whirring insect or munia. Hidden was the fact that the guardians of these dry [...]
Crossing the Suez Canal on the SS Himalaya
It was on the return journey after an enjoyable six-month trip in the European sub-continent and the United Kingdom with my parents, brother, uncle and aunt that we faced a different kind of experience aboard the SS Himalaya. Leaving London On July 3, 1959, travelling by tube from London we reached dock 32 at Tilbury [...]
A city stood still for the golden parade of the Pharaohs
Respecting your dead Kings is important, but giving respect in a way that sent chills down the spines of millions of audiences across the world is a monumental task. Like the way they had built the jaw dropping Pyramids using unimaginable advanced technologies in the past, Egypt just did that on Saturday, April 3. It [...]
‘Odyssey’, a first for the artists of the 2020 Group
‘Odyssey’ is the first exhibition of the 2020 Group, a gathering of senior artists of different disciplines who have banded together to rekindle an appreciation for representational art. ‘Odyssey’ will be on at the Colombo Art Gallery in Stratford Avenue, Colombo 6 for four weeks, from April 25- May 30. Most young artists choose to [...]
A gentle but startling jolt to middle-class complacency
There is no doubt that Buddhadasa Galappatty’s Jeevana Susuma (Life’s Sigh) will be popular; it reads like a breeze, so swift active and enlivening – but it can also be a Duruthu breeze, piercing the skin of the readers who confine themselves to English newspapers and the wondrous volumes lavishly praised. I quote from the [...]
Life’s lessons from adventures of a street dog
Following the note I wrote about A Shot on the Beach, by the British philosopher David Coope who has been a frequent visitor to Sri Lanka, he kindly sent me another of his novels, Old Stripe. This was a sequel to his first novel about Sri Lanka, Street Dog, which as its name indicates is [...]