'Cause Pigs can Fly

Death has always been something distant to me. During my short twenty years alive, a few relatives, teachers, people I’ve known and a few people I’ve worked with have passed away. However, I managed to put this great distance between myself and the dead person and by doing so, I managed to not feel sad about their death. It sometimes hit me how these people are no longer alive, I suddenly miss one or two people, but besides that, their deaths haven’t affected me in anyway. I was happy with my way of dealing with death. I avoided funerals and I regarded death as an unavoidable thing. All those who are born, have to die. Deal with it. Then Rukshan passed away, and everything changed. Now I haven’t written a single blog post about Rukshan, and this isn’t because I didn’t love him or care about him. I did. I do. The reason I didn’t write about him is because I felt no word I could write would do justice to the person he is. As one of his relatives said, I didn’t know him f...

Yesterday was one of those busy days for Tweeps and this wasn't because someone had come up with a funny hashtag or because of some sort of incident we could all tweet about. No, yesterday was meet in real life day. TweetupSL is an amazing event organized each year and it is basically a gathering of tweeps with games, music, competitions and of course, an awards ceremony. I could still be considered a newbie 'cause I've been at just two Tweetups and mid-2013 I followed nearly no Sri Lankans and no one followed me. By mid-2014 though I had met so many tweeps and made many friends but not as many as so many other people have. I'm basically a nobody on Twitter and I'll say this now, this is my opinion and while you can have your own opinion about Twitter or TweetupSL, your insults won't really bother me. So if you don't agree with what I have to say, well, disagree/insult away. What I liked about it Tweeps I met and spoke to some really nice pe...

Walking on roads and pavements in Sri Lanka, especially Colombo, specifically (for me) Maradana, is similar to walking on a minefield. I have never walked on a land hiding mines that would tear my body apart when stepped on. I’ve been lucky (for now). But minefields seem a little less hazardous than our roads and pavements, if movies portray minefields as they really are. In movies, you’ll see how if you walk into a minefield, retracing your steps could get you back to safe land in one piece. However, retracing your steps on roads and pavements won’t work because by then, there would already be spit, shit, cigarette butts or garbage where there was none before. Question: why do you think the roads and pavements are garbage dumps? Thanks to the presidential election that is just a few weeks away, everyone is talking about the faults of politicians and accusing them of crime and corruption. We talk as if we are saints. And yet, how many of us feel no guilt or...

Published in Free, The Nation on December 7 nation.lk (AFP pic) “We lost… we lost,” she wails, api paraduna. The words build momentum from deep within this lady, who has lost her brother. She reminds everyone who is listening, how good a man her brother was. Each time it seems like she has emptied her heart of sorrow and has no more tears to shed, another wave of pain, realization, shock and even anger hits her. Those words, ‘api paraduna’ echo in that room, bouncing against the walls and settling between the curtain and the door-frame, the white cloth on the chairs and the tiled floor and the eyes that cry those tears and the tissue that soaks them up. It is obvious that a battle has been fought and lost. And yet, one wonders who she has lost to. Did we lose to life, death, humans, or nature? When did this battle begin; when life was breathed into us or when we realized all life would leave us someday? Did we give our consent or do we have no choice, but to fight th...