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Beyond the monsoon |
Economy can recover in 2010 if…. |
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Left exposed yet again |
Nothing Vedic about this village |
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Colombo at the crossroads |
A poster on the streets of Colombo showing President Mahinda Rajapaksa embracing his younger brother, Defence Secretary Gotabhaya Rajapaksa, after he escaped an assassination attempt by an LTTE suicide bomber and the real architect of the war victory says it all. National euphoria over defeating the LTTE and the myth of its invincibility pervades the air. Rejecting calls from the West for restraint during the closing phase of the war, Mr Mahinda Rajapaksa said, “We have shown how to defeat terrorism: We are no stooges of the West.” |
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In loveless Lanka, Eelam lives! |
Stone walls do not a prison make / Nor iron bars a cage / Minds innocent and quiet take / That for an hermitage” . These lines by Richard Lovelace have not rusted since the 17th century and had a fresh recall when Colombo High Court sentenced journalist Jayaprakash Sittampalam Tissainayagam to 20 years of rigorous imprisonment. Condemned to 20 years of incarceration for two ‘seditious’ articles cited, it presages the shape of things to come in Sri Lanka. Mercifully, Tissainayagam’s sentence has not been denied by Colombo unlike the carnage of 20,000 Tamils at the last stages of Eelam War IV, or making light of the bound-and-shot execution video! |