Originally published on Groundviews on January 12th, 2015. So you see, democracy is not just a system, a structure; it is also a feeling. It is a feeling within each one of us; a desire to be led, a desire to be led by the things we believe in and the people we see those… Read More It’s Personal; It Should Be To Us All
A young, educated, privileged, white woman-celebrity gets appointed a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador six months ago (UN Women is the United Nations organisation that works with women’s rights and issues). At the UN General Assembly, to launch a UN Women campaign on gender equality, this celebrity spokesperson, the Goodwill Ambassador, is asked to make a… Read More Emma Watson’s Unexceptional, Somewhat Ignorant Speech
I am very skeptical about testimonial-based works of art, particularly performances. I haven’t seen or read many testimonial-based plays or ‘verbatim’ shows that haven’t left me squirming and cringing in their wake — usually because they are melodramatic, over-acted, full of unmitigated angst and hardly ever provide any real interpretation or analysis. Lately, I have… Read More ‘Nirbhaya: The Play’ and the Simple Power of Stories Being Told
On Sunday night (March 16) Ruki Fernando and Fr Praveen, prominent Sri Lankan human rights defenders, were taken into detention in Kilinochchi under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. This followed the arrest of Jeyakumari Balendran and her young daughter on March 14; Balendran, the mother of a disappeared former LTTE cadre, has been outspoken about… Read More Detention of Ruki Fernando and Fr Praveen
It’s been three months today since my mother died. Her death has been everything like her life: big, tremendously powerful, changing everything, moving everyone within its reach to powerful and exciting revelations about their own lives, their own existences, their own choices. This was her; allowing choices to define who we are, allowing these definitions… Read More Three Months.
I’d forgotten that most people don’t know as much about Sri Lanka as one always expects, in India People raise their eyebrows, intrigued, suspicious; ‘Why do you know so much about India? Indian politics?’ They don’t know the first thing about Sri Lanka ‘There was a war? Really?’ ‘Do you have your own language? Does… Read More In India: Take Two
What happened in 1983, I wasn’t there to see it – but of course, I, like many others of my generation who came after, are privy to a collective memory, an experience felt by association, by default; the muscle memory of our parents, relatives, their friends and their relatives, passed on through stories, recollections, little… Read More Remembering; Forgetting; Apologising; Forgiving
Yesterday morning the young 23 year old woman who was raped and beaten in Delhi on December 16th, succumbed to her injuries, giving up the harrowing fight for her life in Singapore – far from her home, and removed, I presume, from many of her loved ones. While she was removed from her home, the… Read More We Will Never Know Her Name
Originally published on Groundviews. When I heard that the large, beautiful trees that pave Reid Avenue in Colombo were being felled, my heart broke. I was so stirred inside – and it was hard to explain to anyone else why this particular incident had moved me so much. When I came to Bangalore, my first thought… Read More The Felling of a Tree
Within minutes, you know you’re in a big city – the real thing, I mean. No pale imitation, no wannabe, no fading erstwhile glory. A real, live, breathing, thumping, bumping big city. The kind of big city – they exist all around the world – that takes your breath away, the kind we all want… Read More Bombay
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