Kalani Kumarasinghe, in Daily Mirror, 8 March 2024 ……. where the headline runs; “Shavendra and Kamal villains in GR’s new book”
Rajapaksa recounts the dramatic circumstances which led to his ousting in 2022, describing it as a first-hand experience of an internationally-sponsored regime change operation. Filed under accountability, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, Colombo and Its Spaces, communal relations, foreign policy, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, Indian Ocean politics, island economy, legal issues, life stories, performance, politIcal discourse, power politics, Presidential elections, Rajapaksa regime, security, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, taking the piss, unusual people, vengeance, war crimes, world events & processes
Kelly Ng, in BBC News ………………. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-68421131… with highlighting emphasis imposed by The Editor, Thuppahi
An organiser of a “white party” in Sri Lanka has apologised after the event sparked a backlash online. The event’s advertisement specified a white dress code, but also had a line saying “Face control: White” – which was largely interpreted to mean the event was open only to white people.
Michael Roberts supplementing KK De Silva’s article with aid from Johnny De Silva in Melbourne (all three of us Aloysians who played cricket in the School XI in the mid-1950s)
“Michael Roberts, writes as follows on his initiation in an article titled ‘Aloysian Identity’ in the Aloysian Centenary Souvenir, 1895-1995: ‘A big cricket match meant cheering parties. Big cheering parties, and sometimes ‘bajau‘ afterwards. These cheering parties were boisterous, rumbustious, inspiring affairs — even when saddened at the end by our team’s effort.”
‘The doyen of cheer leaders in our time [my pre-16 junior days] was Royle Barthelot. And among us learning the trade which has made him famous was Percy Abeysekera, Pissu Percy, as he is lovingly (and not always lovingly), called. It could be truly said that he is one of the most widely known Aloysians of our time, leaving such luminaries as Dr Cyril Ponnamperuma in the shade!
He has also been a good ambassador as I can attest from Australian crowd responses in Adelaide — where I had the privilege of watching a one-day match where, facing an imposing target of over 300, we [the two us] watched Roshan Mahanama and Arjuna Ranatunga lead a magnificent fight back after an initial collapse in a game which we — that is Sri Lanka — lost nobly.
This just goes to show that being Aloysian has been a building block towards being Sri Lankan.’
Filed under accountability, art & allure bewitching, centre-periphery relations, cricket for amity, cricket selections, cultural transmission, education, ethnicity, heritage, landscape wondrous, life stories, patriotism, performance, self-reflexivity, Sri Lankan cricket, sri lankan society, taking the piss, tolerance, travelogue, unusual people
Michael Roberts the Thuppahiyaa
Dear MP for WAITE in South Australia, friends and countrymen
A =ISSUES with the MOBILE PHONE
This is a remarkable tale of TELSTRA failures amounting to persecution of a couple in their mid-eighties.
Filed under accountability, atrocities, Australian culture, australian media, centre-periphery relations, economic processes, governance, legal issues, life stories, modernity & modernization, politIcal discourse, power politics, self-reflexivity, taking the piss, terrorism, trauma, world events & processes
APPLENEWS conveying BBC Podcast = https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/alexei-navalny-the-death-of-putins-biggest-critic/id1715473158?i=1000645632931
Russia’s most significant opposition leader for the past decade, Alexei Navalny, has died in an Arctic Circle jail, the prison service has said. What does that mean for the future of Russia, its opposition movement and its leader, Vladimir Putin?
Filed under accountability, atrocities, authoritarian regimes, centre-periphery relations, disparagement, ethnicity, governance, historical interpretation, human rights, legal issues, life stories, politIcal discourse, power politics, press freedom & censorship, Responsibility to Protect or R2P, self-reflexivity, taking the piss, trauma, Ukraine & Its Ramifications, unusual people, vengeance
Item: https://www.adelaidenow.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=AAWEB_WRE
But the issue that’s reaching boiling point today is the Australia Day debate. Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins has added his voice to calls to change the date from January 26: “My personal opinion is I absolutely love Australia and think it is the best country in the world by a mile. I think we should have an Australia Day but I think we can probably find a more appropriate date to celebrate. Australia Day is meant to be a celebration of everything Australia in our history. I think we could choose a better date.”
Ismeth Raheem, in the Sunday Times, 24 December 2023, where the title reads “A Christmas sketch among the many 19th century social events captured by J.L.K. Van Dort” . … An Item conveyed to me by David Sansoni of Sydney and now sibject to my=highlighting emphasis (Editor, Thuppahi)
J.L.K. Van Dort who flourished in the latter half of the 19th century in Sri Lanka could well be described as the ‘Hogarth of Ceylon’. He was undoubtedly the best-known painter and illustrator working in the country at the time. From 1850 up till to his death in 1896, he recorded almost every social event of importance with his deft quick sketches, including religious festivals like Christmas.
Filed under art & allure bewitching, British colonialism, citizen journalism, communal relations, cultural transmission, economic processes, education, ethnicity, heritage, historical interpretation, landscape wondrous, life stories, literary achievements, patriotism, performance, photography & its history, politIcal discourse, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, taking the piss, theatre world, unusual people, working class conditions, world affairs
A Suffering Ignoramus
About half a century back I was driving with my wife to Bath when I found myself struggling to breathe. We drove immediately to the Bath hospital where I joined the Emergency queue. The same problem persisted: fit and well but couldn’t breathe! I quickly saw that the others in the queue were far worse off than I was. One had a deep gash in his neck; another a badly wounded arm, etc, etc. My non-breathing was trivial to everyone except myself!
Thilini Meegaswatta, … whose title is “Temporality of History: A Reading of the Contemporaneity of the Past in Post-war Sri Lanka” … an article presented in Proceedings of the Open University Research Sessions in 2020
This short article is a reflection on how temporality— that is ‘time’ insofar as it manifests itself in human existence (Hoy, 2009, cited in Bryant, 2009)— interacts with socio-political realities and behaviours of conflict-ridden societies in complex ways. I draw on recent political history in Sri Lanka — a South Asian island nation that had faced protracted warfare—in an attempt to demonstrate how each political moment, each configuration of political identity constitutes a melange of temporal signatures that distorts the notion of a linear time line. In other word,s the examples elaborated are expected to illustrate how the present is legible only in the view of the past and also anticipated/ imagined futures, and as such, bear inscriptions of other times. On the other hand, I also contend that the past is a shifting narrative—a construct mangled by the discursive conditions of the time of recall— which is nevertheless at the heart of the question of national identity and nation-state building (Thapar, 2014). The arguments and observations in this paper that are made in relation to Sri Lanka can nevertheless be applied to other conflict-ridden societies whose constant attempts to re/imagine a collective national identity and a consciousness is haunted by violent legacies and future anxieties.
Filed under accountability, communal relations, cultural transmission, economic processes, ethnicity, legal issues, life stories, modernity & modernization, performance, political demonstrations, politIcal discourse, power politics, security, self-reflexivity, sri lankan society, taking the piss, trauma, vengeance
thuppahi
