Page 4 - Uditha Devapriya News Today

By Uditha Devapriya Prasanna Vithanage’s Gaadi takes place in the last year of the Kandyan Kingdom. It begins with an encounter between Ehelepola Adigar and John D’Oyly, and moves on to scenes of the two of them negotiating the transfer of power in Kandy and the deposal of the king, Sri Vikrama Rajasinghe. In the […]

By Uditha Devapriya “Their much-awaited economic policy statement turned out to be nothing. The main problem with the NPP is there is no real analysis of the problem nor a cohesive plan of action. Anura Kumara Dissanayake is a Putin-by-day and Biden-by-night. What he says to the business community is not what he tells the […]

By Uditha Devapriya \Although the Colombo Film Society would become Asia’s oldest such group, Colombo lay a world or two away from the rest of Sri Lanka. The urban middle-classes encountered the best of regional and Western cinema before their counterparts in Bombay and Calcutta did, but they remained cut off from a vast multitude […]

By Uditha Devapriya The recent visits of India’s External Affairs Minister and a delegation from the Communist Party of China (CPC) reveal Sri Lanka’s geopolitical complexities, as well as its foreign policy failures. Even if Sri Lanka has not appreciated it enough, its two most powerful neighbours still prioritise us in their scheme of things. […]

By Uditha Devapriya My Lunches with Orson is the title of a collection of interviews that Henry Jaglom, a US avant-garde filmmaker, did with Orson Welles, over a period of two years (1983-1985). It is at once insightful, refreshing, provocative, and compelling, and it shows Welles at his best. At the time, Jaglom was around […]

By Uditha Devapriya One of the most important debates to emerge from the history of the Left movement in Sri Lanka – by which I include the Old and the New Left – is whether they were correct to ally with formations that were anything but socialist. Be it the LSSP’s decision to join forces […]

By Uditha Devapriya I first encountered T. M. Jayaratne through the films of K. A. W. Perera. Most of them were scored by Premasiri Khemadasa, who, in more than one sense, introduced Jayaratne to popular audiences. Together with Sanath Nandasiri, Sunil Edirisinghe, Mervin Perera, and of course Victor Ratnayake, Jayaratne belongs to a third generation, […]

By Uditha Devapriya By now we know that the government’s prescription for the economic crisis is greater austerity. The regime has outright rejected welfare measures or state intervention, and is heavily promoting the neoliberal agenda of privatisation, deregulation, and tax hikes. While economic think-tanks in Colombo have effectively welcomed these proposals, trade unions and Left […]

By Uditha Devapriya Mahagama Sekara died on January 14, 1976. On January 15, 2023, at 6.30 pm, Bandula Nanayakkarawasam will be presenting the latest “Rae Ira Pana” show at the New-Fangled Auditorium of Holy Cross College, Gampaha. Featuring Sunil Edirisinghe, Uresha Ravihari, Shashika Nisansala, Rohana Siriwardena, Raveen Kanishka, and Sarath de Alwis, it will be […]

By Uditha Devapriya Somewhere in early 2015, I took the bus from Maradana to Nugegoda, the 176. It was, by all accounts, an ordinary weekday morning, and people were going about and shuttling from one workplace to another. Normally, the 176 bus can be a long ride, but on this occasion, it wasn’t. Having left […]