Essay

Ranil Wickremesinghe’s chances of winning Sri Lanka’s 2024 presidential vote are slim. But the election is set to be the country’s most free, fair and non-violent one in living memory thanks in the main to constitutional and legal changes that Wickremesinghe effected.
After decades as a political flop, Wickremesinghe engineered a nascent economic recovery and quietly depleted the once-mighty Rajapaksas. Has his presidency, for all its flaws, given Sri Lanka a chan ...
Afghan refugees’ stories of food – and home
By
Taran N Khan
Sharing narratives about food and belonging for a writing workshop, Afghans living in Delhi preserve and construct ideas of home – both the remembered home lost to war in Afghanistan, and the home of ...
The ancient human remains found and stored at Samdzong, in Mustang, should be a forensic archaeologist’s delight. Instead, their neglect is testimony to a collective amnesia about the deep history of human settlement in the Himalaya.
In Mustang, in the Nepali Himalaya, archaeological finds offer staggering insight into the pre-Buddhist history of human civilisation in the Himalaya – yet this past is being obliterated by neglect an ...
A statue of S W R D Bandaranaike blindfolded in protest during mass demonstrations in Sri Lanka in 2022. Bandaranaike founded the Sinhala Maha Sabha in 1937, and in 1956 passed the Sinhala Only Act, which marginalised Tamils and eventually led to targeted anti-Tamil violence.
With mainstream Sri Lankan parties feeling compelled to pander to Sinhala Buddhist voters, Tamil-led parties have been pushed to take more hardline positions to address Tamil voters’ frustrations - hi ...
Why the legendary cartoonist Abu Abraham still matters
By
S Harikrishnan
A retrospective in his native Kerala displays Abu Abraham’s many creative tensions – as cartoonist and parliamentarian, patriot and cosmopolitan – and reveals his humanist lens on Indian and global po ...
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