Me and my life

There comes a time when you have to stand up for yourself and say enough is enough. You go through life trying to please people and be nice because that’s how you’ve always been and also how you’ve been raised. But you’re no stupid individual so you realize how every now and then people take advantage of you. It is not a ‘quid pro quo’ kind of situation but rather a one direction only. You happily lend a hand and are available when needed unless major forces make that impossible for you to do it so. Then there comes not only a day, but day after day after day, that you need something out of someone else and they just make up excuses and you end up alone trying to figure out a huge mess it is a tad too big for an individual to handle. Let’s take it down a notch, shall we? Say they call you to go grab a coffee and you are there on time and everything goes smoothly. Then you spend months and months suggesting you could go to that Irish pub that has live music every Thursday and...

"Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance ineffable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill." - Gitanjali Love is the theme for all the poets, story tellers, writers, painters, movie makers etc. If the element of love is taken out of all those art works, what would remain are just pieces of papers, canvases, reels and costumes. It is the life blood for all the artists. Yes, they have made love a valuable thing. They have aspired us to find love. They have created a successful economy around love from Valentine's Day to greeting cards, flowers, chocolates. But...

There was a time when people rose against oppression in rebellion There was a time when people took risk to inform the public the truth Now is the time people take photos of things and post on Facebook They are our Facebook Heroes Giving voice to the injustice in the society by sharing statuses Of which they know nothing of Sometimes a false information Sometimes a twisted truth Sometimes harassing a religion, a community, a race. All they want to do is create havoc. Provoked by the insecurity in them. Social media was not supposed to be this It made Arab Spring possible It made citizens report to the world Our Facebook Heroes living in a virtual world Using it to spread mistrust and false

I don't have any problems with alcoholics or with any person who drinks alcohol but not an alcoholic. They don't need my approval to drink and I am well aware of that. I will never obstruct from their drinking pattern or wishes. But what I can't bear up with is when they prioritize a bottle of beer before their friends and it hurts deep. They would go to any extent to have that drink even though it will hurt their friends. They also demand that their friends should bear up with them being drunken and assist them in hiding the truth to their families. When they are drunken, in a state of intoxication, the words they tell, the actions they do are too hilarious but I restrain myself from getting angry or laughing at them because I think both getting angry and laughing will positively reinforce them to further similar behaviours and they are still my friends and me laughing at them in their state of intoxication makes me a bad person. But the most difficult for me is guessi...

There are two moments in my life, in which I was ashamed of being born in this country due to events occurring in my lifetime. The first is on 19th of May, 2009, the first of post-war days, in which people were celebrating the victory of the bloody war in the streets, amidst thousands of fellow citizens were stranded homeless affected by war. No one cared to remember the civilian casualties and at least pray for them, nor the political leaders claimed to care about those people both dead and alive. That was the first moment, I strongly felt that Tamils were alienated from this country, though during war times, Tamils had to be searched for a long time at check points. The second moment is on 9th of January, 2015, the day the Presidential elections were released and the social media were flooded with those statuses yet again separating the minorities from the country. All the hopes, I had for this country got shattered when I saw some of my friends had shared those statuses. It reinfo...

The day the election results were released, on 9th of January, racist/hate posts started to appear that the "country has been betrayed, Sri Lanka is going to be destroyed, Tamils and Muslims voted out the Mahinda Rajapaksha, Sinhalese are going to be extinct in this country, Tamils and Muslims are taking revenge". I am disgusted, distressed and worried of these posts on social media. I hoped there would be a new beginning for the ethnic minorities with the new president but we are compelled to fight these racist ideas even though it is in social media. Even when Tamils and Muslims are taking the most possible democratic way to express their opinion, these racist posts are appearing on social media. They voted as Sri Lankans, for the leader of unified Sri Lanka. They voted MR out because he failed in reconciliation in the past 5 years not because MS had addressed the ethnic issue adequately in his election manifesto. I would say Tamils and Muslims are taking a leap of faith ...

November 27th is the Maaveerar Day or Heroes' Day observed by Tamil people to remember the militants died in fighting to ensure the dignity and the rights of the Tamils living in this island. This day in the post war Sri Lanka brings a nostalgic feeling and I feel very difficult to swallow this reality. The reality I mean is where the cemeteries of the militants were destroyed by the government and the government is on active surveillance to prevent people observing this remembrance day. As Tamils living in this island, we started to fight for our dignity but after the war we have lost our right to remember the dead/ fallen under this  government. The chronicles say King Dutugemunu built a tomb for the ashes of Ellara and made people to pay respect to this tomb but this government has gone to a new low by destroying the cemeteries of the LTTE militants and banning the remembrance. To them the militants may be terrorists who killed innocent lives but prohibiting the people to...