Pri's blog

  I have been watching the Perahera, year after year as a child.  It was the highlight of the August holidays when we went to see our grandparents in Kandy.  Anglophile, Christian and Central Bankers, my family used to secure seats at the Hatton National Bank where us kids watched the perahera from the balcony with wondrous eyes while the adults made it a social event with buffet,  alcohol and the company of the others.  Coloniality at its best. For us it was the spectacle, the dancers, the drummers, the fire lanterns, the smell, the noise, the colour.. and the elephants, always the elephants…Later I watched the Perahera as a Peradeniya undergraduate sitting with batchmates on the street, a very different view.  The embarrassing coloniality was shed, and it was all about being part of the crowd, belonging….Not till anthropological and historical curiosity got the better of me  many years later did I know anything about the significance of the Perahera ...

] photo by PANAP   The article by Buddhima Padmasiri -Structural Adjustment of Women’s Labour in Agriculture in Sri Lanka in Polity, January 17, 2023 unearthed some very early memories.  Buddhima uses a case study from the Moneragala District  to illustrate the exploitation and commodification of women’s labour in agriculture.    I was working for the Lanka Mahila Samiti in the early 1980s as a Project Coordinator for their Small Enterprise Development Programme for Rural Women (SEDP) funded by USAID, and was charged with developing revolving fund schemes in all of the districts in which we were working, and encouraging the women members of the Samiti to use the funds to engage in income generating projects. With hindsight, I can see the many, many shortcomings of that project, but it was my first ever ‘development’ job and I was terribly keen and  learning by doing (reading, attending conferences, talking to people etc).  To our credit we were n...

  I really couldn’t understand in the first reading what was so extraordinarily remarkable about the Social Institutions and Gender Index (SIGI) of the OECD.  The website   tells us that it is one of official data sources for monitoring SDG Indicator 5.1.1 on “Whether or not legal frameworks are in place to promote, enforce and monitor gender equality and women’s empowerment”, together with UN Women and the World Bank Group’s Women Business and the Law .  Well and good.  As an advocate for human rights in general, and women’s human rights in particular, I welcome the increase in  the body of quantitative data available in areas that are key to holding states accountable for fulfilling their obligations under CEDAW (especially) and other treaty bodies .  It’s exciting too to learn that SIGI's second dimension, related to #physicalintegrity of women, has spurred the development of mechanisms to enable access to justice for victims of sexual abuse, promo...

  (above) Daily Mirror photo; (below)  https://liturgy.co.nz/passion-palm-sunday-holy-week-2023 In the midst of a flood of social media messaging about a false prophet and a fallen angel a deep conversation with Shantha Premawardene helped me regain my sanity and restore some clear thinking.  Part of our conversation focused on Holy Week and that other Aragalaya, Palm Sunday, when Jesus rode in on a donkey to Jerusalem along with the masses, challenging the oppressive Roman government.  In 2022 Galle Face, they shouted #GoHomeGota, expressing Sri Lankans’ desire to be free of an incompetent and corrupt leader, elected no doubt, but who had driven the country to bankruptcy.  Palestinians chant Allahu Akbar! invoking the greatness of their God to free them from oppressive Israeli occupation; the masses that gathered round Jesus,  waved palm branches and shouted Hosanna! meaning Help!, help to be liberated from the rule of Caesar.    Capitalism and...