Category: Features
A Point of View: How to get your own back on your critics
(Srilankamirror) – Most authors dread unfavourable reviews from the critics – but there is an effective way to deal with detractors, explains Adam Gopnik. Every morning when I turn to the Guardian or Daily Telegraph website, I seem to encounter one writer or another offering his or her view of what the modern crisis is [...]
Fifty words for rain
(Srilankamirror) – If Eskimos really have 50 words for snow, why don’t British people have 50 words for rain… or at least more words than the few they normally employ, asks Kevin Connolly. As Britain splashes and squelches its way through what’s turning into the wettest June on record, the most surprising news of the [...]
Jacqueline Fernandez’s fitness tricks
(Srilankamirror) – To say that the ridiculously pretty Jacqueline Fernandez is chirpy and a powerhouse of energy is an understatement that doesn’t do justice to the 26-year-old former beauty queen. It’s 4 pm on a balmy Monday evening in Mumbai; after half a dozen wardrobe changes for the Women’s Health cover shoot and laughing that [...]
Superflattery: The art of getting what you want
(Srilankamirror) – How do you get someone to do something they definitely DO NOT want to do? Lucy Kellaway, of the Financial Times, finds out how flattery will get you (almost) anywhere. “The other day I got an email asking me to go to Scotland to give a speech for charity. There were three powerful [...]
Iqbal Athas breaks silence to reveal his ordeals under different govts
(Srilankamirror) – One night in February 1998, a group of well-built men, all clutching Browning automatic pistols, forced their way into my house at Wijerama in Nugegoda. One of them stormed into my bedroom in the second floor, cocked his pistol and placed it on my left temple. My wife Anoma and daughter Jasmin, then [...]
The rise and rise of new Bollywood
(Srilankamirror) – Colourful and often predictable, hit Bollywood movies tend to follow a formula for success. But a new crop of directors is challenging that convention. A film about sperm donation and infertility, with unknown actors in the lead roles, is not what you would traditionally expect from Bollywood. Vicky Donor, which is showing in [...]
Sri Lanka’s Fast-track to Post-war Development: Remember the Mahaweli’s Costly Lessons!
(Srilankamirror) – Systems ecologist Ranil Senanayake in conversation with science writer Nalaka Gunawardene. Dr Ranil Senanayake is a rare public intellectual in Sri Lanka. He is extremely well informed, analytical, multidisciplinary — and courageous enough to speak his mind on matters of public interest in a land where many academics and professionals choose silence, or [...]
Lucid dreaming: Rise of a nocturnal hobby
(Srilankamirror) – A slew of apps promise to encourage “lucid dreaming”. So why is there such enthusiasm around the idea of controlling dreams, asks Sam Judah. “You’re only bound by gravity if you believe in it,” says Rory Mac Sweeney, impatiently. He is explaining the logic of a dream world which he not only visits [...]
SEC new rule, not market friendly
(Srilankamirror) – The one best performed stock exchange – the Colombo stock exchange has been dealt with a huge blow with an introduction of market unfriendly rules.
Vienna: The city that loves to grumble
(Srilankamirror) – For a number of years Vienna has scored top marks in international surveys for safety, cleanliness and public services, but while many Viennese are fiercely proud of their city, there is also an unexpectedly strong tradition of discontent and complaint.
Stock market – post mortem
Srilankamirror – In retrospect, Ms. Indrani Sugathadasa, the then Chairman of the SEC, used to sum up the circumstance that led to tightening of regulations saying – ‘don’t kill the rooster that lays the golden eggs, intending to take all eggs at once’.
The Not-So-Ugly Truth of the NSB Saga
(Srilankamirror) – There are always two sides to every story.
Why climbers continue to feel Mount Everest’s allure?
(Srilankamirror) – The world’s tallest mountain has claimed four more lives but such tragedies make no dent in the increasing number of people attempting its ascent. The enormously powerful winds that blast Mount Everest relent for just a few weeks every spring. They are precious weeks that provide climbers with a chance to claim the [...]
Tidal power gets a stormy birth off coast of Scotland
(Srilankamirror) – On paper, it looks like a blindingly obvious idea: take a version of a wind turbine and plant it on the seabed so that its blades spin in the flow of the tides and so generate electricity. Unlike wind, the tides are totally predictable for decades ahead. The turbines, well below the waves, [...]
Extreme breastfeeding: Should children be nursed for years?
(Srilankamirror) – The latest cover of Time magazine has caused outrage. Under the headline “Are you mom enough?”, a young woman is pictured having her left breast suckled by a boy who appears way beyond usual breastfeeding age. The woman, it turns out, is Jamie Lynne Grumet, a 26-year old mother from Los Angeles, and [...]
“Fair Games ? Human Rights of Workers in Olympic 2012 Supplier factories”
(Srilankamirror) – This report is published by the Play Fair Campaign. Play Fair is a global campaign coordinated by international trade union federations and NGOs; namely the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC),
‘We are fighting to save the 2,300 year old Buddhist Heritage that is ours’
(Srilankamirror) – Ven. Inamaluwe Sumangala Thero, the Chief Priest at the Rangiri Dambulla Viharaya was in the forefront in recent times leading a protest at Dambulla to relocate a mosque which was within the sacred Vihara land, disputed by the Muslim fraternity.
MY STORY – Waiting for re-union
(Srilankamirror) – It was a dull and a gloomy morning. Curfew was lifted early at 04.30 am for the first time after it was clamped from “six to six” following a delayed 48 hour initial curfew.
The State and Religion in South Asia
(Srilankamirror) – Secularism implies the relationship between Religion and Politics, more specifically between Religion and the State. The concept of secularism has drawn its sources from the philosophy that Humans can order their lives and their societies without recourse to transcendant or supra natural powers, and hence they could also organize and manage the State [...]
Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash
(Srilankamirror) – It’s not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn’t always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world. Black-Scholes was [...]
