High ranking Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie is arrested in Bolivia.

Björn Borg retires from tennis after winning 5 consecutive Wimbledon championships.

Six men walk underwater across the Sydney Harbor - 82.9 km in 48 hours.

Vanessa Lynn Williams becomes the first African-American to be crowned Miss America, in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

Pope John Paul II visits the man that tried to assassinate him, Mehmet Ali Ağca, in prison to forgive him.

U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill creating a federal holiday on the third Monday of every January to honor American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.

Michael Jackson’s world famous music video for “Thriller” is broadcast for the first time. It will become the most often repeated and famous music video of all time and increase his own popularity and the record sales of the album “Thriller”.

McDonald’s introduces the McNugget.

The Black July, a communal riot occurs in Sri Lanka. These anti Sri Lankan Tamil riots leaves over 1,000 Tamils massacred and millions of dollars worth of their property destroyed. This pogrom is the beginning of a deadly Sri Lankan civil war in Sri Lanka.

25 years ago, the lives of normal Sri Lankans turned upside down. 13 soldiers were killed in Jaffna, and in revenge, normal Sinhalese men united to create furious, violent mobs that destroyed, burned and killed. Houses went up in flames, people ran from their homes in fear, shops were looted, property destroyed, lives taken. The Sri Lankan people were always a hot, passionate people. But July 1983 will always serve as a reminder as to just how hot and just how passionate.

Every one of us knows at least one person affected by the riots of July 1983. They are poor people, who were forced to flee their homes, leave behind their humble belongings and never return. But they are also people that aren’t usually recognized as victims of these riots; they are people sitting in high ranking positions in big, corporate offices in Colombo today, who also suffered; who watched their homes burn to the ground, and returned to its charred, blackened remains to find that everything that had survived the mobs had been stolen by their neighbours. They are not only nameless, faceless people living in poverty in refugee camps; they are aunts, grandmothers, bosses, the family of a friend; people that you and I both know. And while there are the victims that we all know are victims, there are many victims that no one sees as victims; they hide behind a clever veneer of success and happiness.

25 years down the line, it has never happened again, and yet, violence still exists. And because it does not exist in such a grandiose, history-making scale, we tend to forget sometimes that it does, and that it is still very much real. A problem possibly bigger than even the war itself, corruption, looms over us and threatens to destroy everything.

While we must seek hope in the fact that it has never happened again, we must remind ourselves that even though it may not be making the headlines in international news, the people of Sri Lanka continue to live with a terrible reality. They are the brave, bold people that are witness every day to incredible injustice and suffering. And while our past is one that is painful to remember, our present is still miserable for many too.

May Black July never happen again. And as much as it may be difficult to remember, if we are to forget, then we are at the risk of it happening all over again.

Travelling with those that may never have travelled to that part of Sri Lanka before, I was made aware of how ignorant people can become of what lies just outside their door. Do people not know, or do they choose to ignore? Living in Colombo, it is very easy to become like frogs in a well. But I was shocked at how shocked they were by the people in Pottuvil. Sure they stared at us. Sure they stole from us. They tried to cause trouble and ripped us off at any given opportunity. They behaved as though they didn’t want us there. But is their behaviour really so difficult to understand? Wouldn’t you stare if you lived in a situation where electricity was a fickle luxury that could disappear at any moment, and a bunch of people turned up in a tourist coach, wore bikinis and danced to weird music for two days straight? Wouldn’t you be angry and bitter if you had a hard life, and some people turned up in your village, and had a party?

Arugam Bay is not Hikkaduwa. It is still very much a village. And it is for this very reason that it is so great for us; because it is so pristine and untouched, and not commercialized like Hikkaduwa. But for many it is just a place called home.
It is this ignorance that I fear will be the downfall of Sri Lanka. This refusal of the educated and the elite to understand the lifestyle of the average Sri Lankan. To see that this life we live in Colombo is very, very different from the life of other Sri Lankans, and that we make up only a tiny minority.

Sometimes I am very, very afraid of how little we know, and how much we can so easily forget.

i’m somewhat old fashioned in this respect; i love the masters of the renaissance, i envision them passing each other in the street in florence, working together, being friends. all the world’s most precious thinkers and creators living together in the same time, in the same place. i have stood before vermeer’s ‘the girl with the pearl earring’ crying, and just looking at da vinci and michaelangelo on the glossy pages of art books can give me goosebumps. i see the perfect figures, the expressions on their faces, the hands, so delicate and fine, clothes so perfectly defined you can feel the breeze, the landscapes, the thought that must have gone into it. and not only are they pretty to look at. no, these paintings are all cunning and clever. god, they say, is in the details. and so it pisses me off when someone can, say, line up cereal boxes and call it art. i love salvador dali and frida kahlo, but perhaps that’s as modern as i can get.

not to say that the new world hasn’t produced great artists; i’ve seen the evidence that proves that the one thing our time is not lacking, perhaps, is great art. great, thought provoking, beautiful art. but does all art have to be beautiful? maybe not. but if the experience is visual, then i can’t imagine that it’s ok for it to be be crap to look at either. perhaps finding the balance between integrity and aesthetic quality is the trick, a way to stimulate intellect and satisfy the eye.

so trust me, when i heard about guillermo vargas’ alleged ‘dog exhibit’, i was quick to condemn it.

however, it seems that the facts were misconstrued by the press that leapt into action, taking the few facts that they did know and assuming the rest. it’s so natural; people hear about a dog being taken off the streets and displayed in a gallery, which in itself seems inhumane, and then sit around forming conspiracy theories and signing petitions.

many sites on the internet now state that the facts have been renewed and that many reliable sources have confirmed that a) the dog was not starved, it was supposed to appear so for the purposes of the exhibition which lasted three hours, before and after which it was fed by the artist himself. it looked thin and sick, because it was a stray and was probably starving anyway. b) the dog did not die, it had escaped the gallery one night.

i’m not justifying the artist taking the dog into a gallery and tying it up in the first place, which seems somewhat strange to me anyway, nor can i see the artistic value in this exhibit. however, the artist is quoted as having said that the point of the exhibition was to highlight the hypocrisy of people; they make a starving stray dog the center of their attention in an art gallery, but would ignore hundreds like itself were they to see it on the street. i think that’s interesting.

what was also interesting was how easily people get riled up about all the wrong things. the mass hype being created on sites and in groups on networking sites like facebook was phenomenal. normal folk were turned into bleeding-heart activists, penning line after line about the inhumanity of starving and killing the dog. oh the cruelty of it all. i wondered if these same people would be as motivated to act if they were called upon to care for someone with HIV, clean the beach, stop taking their shopping in plastic bags, spend a day playing with a child affected by both the war and the tsunami, or as a matter of fact take in a stray cat or dog from the street and make a pet of it. people were angry about this artist and his exhibition; they were furious, enraged and therefore rendered both inarticulate and blind to the facts, swept up by the emotional and dramatic hysteria that came with believing the more scandalous story. the untrue one. the slightly exaggerated one.

sometimes it’s boring to be right.

all in one night.

can you handle the absolutely exciting, utterly wicked, thoroughly enjoyable evening that you are about to get?

the faces seen below will all be onstage one night or the other. the 25th-30th march at the british council garden.

An ancient Japanese city is crumbling; there is no food, its people are dying on the streets in hunger. Then, in a sudden stroke of luck, a magical sword that grants you anything you desire is presented to this city by a mysterious hero; a young boy who has travelled bravely and encountered many challenges to bring this Golden Samurai Sword to those that need it. The citizens vow to return it in a year, so that others can benefit from it as they have. The city flourishes; the crops grow, the rain falls, and the impoverished people of the city start to live happy, comfortable lives. However, their needs quickly go from being simple to complex, humble to extravagant. But when the boy returns to fulfill his promise and take away the sword, chaos reigns as four bumbling citizens, driven by sheer greed, plot to stop the boy from honouring his duty. Ultimately, even they are surprised by just how far they will go…

call 0772 82 88 77 now for ticket bookings, or get them at the gate on the days of the performance. 25th-30th march, at the british council garden.

On the 25th, 27th and 29th the cast will be as follows:
(in order of appearance)
Sharaku - Wasaam Ismail
Nishimura - Ruvin de Silva
Buncho - Nuzreth Jalaldeen
Utamaro - Brandon Ingram
Yuki - Jehan Gunasekera
The Empress - Subha Wijesiriwardena
The Royal Proclamation Reader - Sulochana Perera
Kung, the Bandit - Ryan Holsinger

On the 26th, 28th, and 30th the cast will be as follows:
(in order of appearance)
Sharaku - Mihiri Warnasuriya
Nishimura - Jehan Mendis
Buncho - Anush de Costa
Utamaro - Brandon Ingram
Yuki - Aavon Fernando
The Empress - Mahina Bongso
The Royal Proclamation Reader - Sulochana Perera
Kung, the Bandit - Ryan Holsinger

if you are someone that is truly a fan of english literature, if you’ve ever been moved by salman rushdie or set free by george orwell, if you’ve ever been disturbed by anthony burgess or addicted to hunter s. thompson, if you ever laughed with jane austen or loved with william shakespeare, if you ever saw life through the eyes of virginia woolf, then despite all odds, the galle literary festival would have been for you. for all those that didn’t come or came and refused to enjoy it just to make a statement, you either lost a lot, or you aren’t truly a lover of literature. sure, everyone reads; but have you ever really felt? do you remember crying throughout most of ‘the time traveler’s wife’? do you remember losing faith at the end of ‘nineteen eighty four’? do you remember your heart breaking for ‘the hours’? do you remember holding your stomach as you laughed to ‘good omens’?

to smile casually at the writer that once sat down and wrote ‘a suitable boy’, to have heard the man that once found the courage, the audacity to write ‘the city and the pillar’ call george bush ‘dumb-dumb’, to have been told the simplest, greatest secrets of creative writing by the man that made himself a not only a gay icon, but a literary landmark by writing’funny boy’; it was a pleasure that i, for one, would not have missed for the world.

i didn’t get to have lunch with tim severin, nor dinner with william dalrymple, i could not afford this. but it was ok; it would have been ok to have just been there, inside the fort, if just to see them, feel them walk past you, humbly, quietly, shyly.

so, yes, it may have been somewhat exclusive, but anyone that claims that a festival of english literature can be open to everyone is an idealistic, unrealistic fool. english literature is esoteric, it appeals only to a minority rather than the masses. it is for those that can not only read and write english, but for those that can do it well enough to appreciate not just words, but literature written in it. literature isn’t just books, my friend. it isn’t just words. sydney sheldon is not literature. john lennon is. dan brown isn’t, c.s. lewis is. we cannot be so politically correct as to forget that clear distinction.

not to say that the festival itself was perfect. organizationally, it has a long way to go and many lessons to learn. but if i were to downplay the immensity of the experience it offered to me just because of it’s own imperfections, well then i would be silly and ungrateful. i was not there for the fancy jazz shows or the cocktails, the expensive lunches or dinners. no, i was there for them; to see them, to hear them, to get to know them. and i did. and for this, i am elated.

you cannot take that from me. i saw them, spoke to them, learnt from them; and that, for everyone, should have been the most important thing about the galle literary festival 2008.

samurai - by geoffrey case

a darkly comic tale set in ancient japan, where the citizens of a small town have been benefiting enormously from the presence of a magic sword. this is the story of what happens once they realise the sword has to be returned…

the production will incorporate elements of traditional Noh theatre, which include mime, mask and martial arts-based movement.

audition date: 27 january 2008

venue: the wendy whatmore academy

5, 13th lane, colombo 3.

time: 4pm

requirements:

participants must perform one dramatic monologue from memory. improvised monologues also permitted.

experience in martial arts or any other performance art (dance, mime etc) considered an advantage

ALL ARE WELCOME.