Pri's blog

My former schoolmates are pre-ordering their copy of a coffee-table book entitled Through the Red Gates, a celebratory volume of 125 years of Ladies College, the school we attended on Flower Road, which celebrates this landmark event in 2025.   Some former schoolmates (and others) are also agonising at the possibility that the gates to the country’s governance might turn red with a Malimawa/NPP/Anura Kumara Dissanayake victory in the Presidential election next week.   The fear of a NPP/AKD victory takes several forms: it evokes the spectre of violence of the JVP (the main party in the NPP) forgetting that JVP are not the only perpetrators of terror. The political space, since 1 971 at least, has been seeped in violence - the JVP of the 1980s was particularly vicious, but s uccessive state regimes have unleashed state violence and given head to extra-judicial violent e lements that were equally virulent.   As Lionel Bopage has said in a recent interview , the violenc...

  A recent article in the Daily Mirror r eported on a press conference organised by the Women's Policy Action Network (WPAN) of the Advocata Institute, on the vexed topic of Women's Labour Force Participation. It really sounds like a broken record So here are a few random points that I can't help but put down First point - one that is repeatedly made but which economists, especially the neo-liberal kind, repeatedly ignore.  Contributing to economic growth should not be the reason for increasing women's labour force participation. Women (like men) have a right to work and have rights at work, and policymakers have an obligation to respect and protect these rights. The ILO sums up these rights as "decent work" - "i t involves opportunities for work that is productive and delivers a fair income, security in the workplace and social protection for all, better prospects for personal development and social integration, freedom for people to express their conce...

Last evening, that is on Sunday, June 9 th , the Lakmahal Feminist Book Club met at the Lakmahal Community Library to discuss V V Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night.   There has been much said and written about the book and ‘Sugi’ as the author is to people she knows well has given many interviews in Sri Lanka and overseas and has had many things written about the book.  You can find links to some of these reviews and interviews at the end of this post.  The discussion at the book club was led by Neloufer de Mel, who has just retired from her position as Chair Professor of English at the Colombo University,  was a former Chairperson of the Gratiaen Trust and who is known for her a feminist scholarship.  She takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on literary, cultural, gender and performance studies to examine Sri Lankan socio-political, cultural and literary life.  The participants were quite diverse – age, gender and ethnicity wise. The shared pe...