Dilka samanmali biography templates
•
Lasantha’s daughter Ahimsa and his sister weeping beside his coffin at Kandewatte Terrace, January 2009
By Ahimsa Wickrematunge
I first came to know of the MiG Deal in August 2007. I was living in Canada with family when my father called me from Colombo. He told me that The Sunday Leader had reported on a shady military contract involving Gotabaya Rajapaksa and the Air Force. My father had just watched a television interview in which Rajapaksa had denied having any involvement in this “MiG deal”. My father rambled on with details about tender procedure, inter-Governmental contracts and credit letters, all of which flew well over my innocent little 16-year-old head, as I tried without success to move our conversation towards a more father-daughter wavelength. His eye was on the prize, however. All he could talk about was the follow up article he was planning.
A few days later, on Sunday, 2 September 2007, I logged on to The Sunday Leader website, as I often
•
Sunday Times 2
View(s):
I could not help musing this week about a famous leader who suffered a similar fate to what President Ranil Wickremesinghe did last weekend—the British general election of 1945 often being described as history’s greatest example of democratic ingratitude.
In 1940, Winston Churchill—not the most popular member of parliament at the time—accepted the role of prime minister when the holder of that office, Neville Chamberlain, was forced to resign. Before leaving office, Chamberlain first offered the brev to Lord Halifax. After Halifax declined, Churchill agreed to accept the task and invited the then-opposition leader, Clement Atlee, and the Labour Party’s deputy leader, Arthur Greenwood, to join his cabinet. As head of a coalition government, Churchill took on the difficult task of leading Britain when that nation was facing its darkest hour. It was a time when everyone expected Germany to invade and conquer England, just blitzing
•
Blogroll
The TV political chat show culture in Sri Lanka emerged as a trend in the mid 1990s. As I remember, TNL’s “Jana Hada” featuring Chamuditha Samarawickrama was a trend setter in this department; where, vibrant barrage (which, on occasions, surpassed all red lights of “Live TV” behaviour) was freely exchanged. Political chat shows, at that point, was a novel phenomenon to all concerned – viewers, marketers as well as to politicians themselves. For a time, until the ground was scouted and the essence of this “chat show space” was properly understood by political representatives, chat shows were relatively more spontaneous and banked on minimal self consciousness.
The discourse in question, however, became rapidly evolved through programmes in the caliber of “Rathu Ira” (Swarnavahini); and much later, “360” (TV Derana). To have their own chat show became a production specification for each TV channel. Even blatantly pro-governmental agents such as ITN came up with their