'Cause Pigs can Fly

Published in The Nation When you work with words and your job is mostly about article-writing, the act of unconsciously pressing Ctrl and S comes to you naturally. In fact, one of the first things you learn in the field is to save the document after each new sentence. And when you are battling writer’s block, you tend to save the document after each word. Saving is important, whether you are saving a document, money, or someone’s life. More often than not, we regret not saving before it’s too late. Imagine you are typing a long document. It could be something personal, may be about a recent breakup, epiphany or experience. You keep typing and pouring your heart out to this Word document. And then suddenly the power goes off and you realize you’ve lost everything. You regret not saving the document. Save but also delete. If you are lucky, you will find everything or most of what you typed saved by Word itself. However, there’s a chance the most important paragraph is lo...

If you know the right people on Twitter, then you are sure to be invited for a number of different events or meet ups. There’s TweetUpSL, the many mini TweetUps, there was GalleByRail and so many more. These events are planned, people are invited or asked to attend, the event is tweeted about and then life goes back to normal until another event is decided upon. However, not all of these events are about having fun. RanaViruMeetUp which will be happening on July 25 is bound to be less about the tweeps and more about the armed forces or war heroes. Usually, the armed forces are only remembered in May, when people argue over if the end of the armed conflict should be commemorated each year, while others suddenly remember their patriotism. Some opt to put up the national flag and share posts about the people who actually fought the war. Others can’t decide if they want to call it Remembrance Day or War Heroes Day. The men and women in uniform, dead or alive, who carried t...

You stand before a large door with an intricate design and gold mixing into the brown of wood. You are taken aback by the beauty of this door. This what it feels like reading the first page of Sureka Samarasena’s Me Kathawa. The cover and the first page of the story, white letters on black paper, makes you have great expectations about what’s in store for you. So you open the door and to your disappointment you find an ordinary house, the kind you won’t remember after you leave it. You walk through the house in hope of hidden treasures, but besides a small jar of emotion at the very end, you leave from the back door feeling empty. Me Kathawa isn’t a bad book. I tend to buy books I’ve never heard of and so I’ve read quite a number of crappy books. I wouldn’t put Me Kathawa to that category, but I wouldn’t call it a good book either. It’s entirely subjective if a book is good or not, so this is merely my opinion. When I saw the cover (it’s absolutely beautiful) and when ...