A midsummer night’s dream come true
Fourteen years ago, Hiran Abeysekera playing Alan Strang in that memorable 2007 production of Equus was discovered as a brilliant, uncanny, ‘sponge’ of an actor, and was flown to London on a scholarship to the highly prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts. That Cinderella moment augured well. Over the years Hiran’s career has been so [...]
St.Peter’s College about to hit a century
After the First World War, Very Rev. Fr. Maurice J. Legoc, an educationist par excellence and botanist of fame who was the Rector of St. Joseph’s College was wondering how he could share the knowledge, the experience, the resources, of St. Joseph’s College, Colombo 1. This led to the birth of several schools around the [...]
Letters to the Editor
Many unanswered questions over tragic death of Wishma in a detention cell in Japan The tragic death of Sri Lankan Wishma Rathnayake in a detention camp in Nagoya, Japan despite her repeated calls for hospitalization and medication has received publicity in the New York Times of May 18 and stirred up a hornets’ nest across [...]
Appreciations
He flew high wherever he went Jayanath Laksen Chandri Salgado The SLAF No. 2 intake of officer cadets consisted of nine, along with few other in-service inductions. Of the nine, four were Thomians and Jayanath Laksen Chandri Salgado of “Preetheum”, Moratuwa was one of them. Sala, as he was fondly called by his friends came [...]
Two journeys and a book
In 2014, Ameena Hussein was at a Silk Routes Conference in the Maldives organized by the University of Iowa. She had been a 2005 Fellow of the University’s International Writing Programme. This six-day conference brought together writers, teachers, literary organizers and cultural entrepreneurs from different countries. In between discussions, a name kept cropping up: Ibn [...]
How I discovered Dante
Of all the cities I’ve visited, Florence is my favourite. I’ve been there only once, way back in the mid-70s. But I fell in love with it instantly. The old city – with its rabbit warren of narrow streets and passages, churches, museums, shops, and restaurants, not to mention the River Arno flowing nonchalantly under [...]
A short history of the long trouser in Sri Lanka
My paternal grandfather was a betel-chewing Kandyan villager. He wore no trousers; his feet never saw a pair of shoes. From my grandfather’s days to mine, the story of the trouser mirrors the social transformation, and the hypocrisy, of the country. Hypocrisy? I’ll come to that later. To put a timeline to this history of [...]