Scientists in Sri Lanka have developed mobile weather stations capable of capturing and transmitting near real-time rainfall data.

Equipped with atomic clocks for precise time and date readings the devices log on to global positioning satellites (GPS) automatically. The devices are based on open-source technology and rely on local materials — at US$250, they are far cheaper than standard, WHO-certified versions that can cost upwards of US$10,000.

Sri Lanka has high rainfall variability over short distances which make accurate predictions difficult, says Yann Chemin, designer of the device and scientist with the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Colombo.

Each station is powered by a single solar panel and three of them are already active in the north of the country. IWMI will produce 10 more in partnership with the Lanka Rain Water Harvesting Forum, says Tanuja Ariyananda, the forum’s director.

The devices give farmers the reliable, up-to-date data they need to adapt to unpredictable weather, improve rainwater harvesting — a source of clean water in the country’s dry zone — or alert the authorities to drain out reservoirs in anticipation of heavy rains.

Floods caused by excessive rain are a serious natural hazard in Sri Lanka. Between 2004 and 2014 over 500 lives were lost and nine million people affected by rising waters.

P.K.S Mahanama, professor of town and country planning at the faculty of architecture, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka, says that the devices could work to sensitise farmers to climate change and the need for adaptation.

Ariyananda and Mahanama call for the devices to be installed in schools to raise awareness among students as well as prepare the buildings to double up as emergency shelters.

Chemin hopes to connect the devices to Sri Lanka’s mobile phone networks, allowing for mobile text alerts to be sent directly to farmers and government officials. “What is essential is to create a ‘community of learning’ through making the designs open-source,” Chemin said.
– See more at: http://www.scidev.net/south-asia/agriculture/news/sri-lanka-develops-cheap-device-to-forecast-rainfall.html#sthash.tNwrHgM1.dpuf

Published in SciDev.Net on April 11, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Yann Chemin.

\All week, the 2015 Zee Jaipur Literary Festival has been churning out headlines – from the announcement that Amish Tripathi’s much anticipated new book The Scion of Ikshavaku will be about Lord Ram, to the cordial meeting of the once bitterly-estranged writers Paul Theroux and VS Naipaul.

The last drew some of the biggest crowds at the festival. At a well-attended afternoon session, an unabashedly emotional Naipaul declared “I had a great faith in myself and my talent and I felt too that if I wasn’t true to my talent and I wasn’t true to myself that would be the end of me as a person.”

Meanwhile, the 29 year old author of The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton spoke of the trust fund for aspiring writers she intends to set up with her winnings from the Man Booker Prize; a conversation between the iconic actress Waheeda Rehman and her biographer, the filmmaker Nasreen Munni Kabir, was punctuated with outbursts of thunderous applause from a full house, and the enfant terrible of British letters Will Self elicited mixed responses with his declaration “I no Je Suis Charlie.”

In an inspiring talk at Ford’s Samvad, India’s 11{+t}{+h} President, Dr APJ Abdul Kalam discussed how to achieve greatness and how he realised his lifelong ambition to take to the skies.

Prose points

Rain and cold tested the cheerfulness of attendees, but the world’s largest free literary festival maintained its momentum. Held at the historic Diggi Palace in the fabled Pink City, the eighth edition of JLF featured the likes of acclaimed novelists Hanif Kureishi, Sarah Waters, Neel Mukherjee, Kamila Shamsie and Jeet Thayil.

Legends of the silver screen Naseeruddin Shah and Shabana Azmi brought glamour to the events, leaving attendees routinely spoiled for choice, with up to six parallel sessions running every hour.

The festival reaffirmed its dedication to championing regional language literature, showcasing the works of people like the Marathi Dalit writer Urmila Pawar, Hindi writer Vinod Kumar Shukla and the living legend that is Girish Karnad.

Verses aplenty

Poetry proved an obsession, beginning with the keynote The Poetic Imagination on the front lawn delivered by the impressive trinity of acclaimed writer and translator Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Sahitya Akademi Award winner Ashok Vajpeyi and Pulitzer Prize winner Vijay Seshadri. Subsequent sessions continued to explore the subject, with audiences hanging on a rhyme through a discussion between Jeet Thayil, Vijay Seshadri, Neil Rennie, Ashok Vajpeyi and Ruth Padel on 52 ways to look at a poem.

The panel concluded with the announcement of the first Khushwant Singh Memorial Prize for Poetry, the honour going to – Arundhathi Subramaniam. Accepting the prize, she said: “Poets can sometimes end up feeling a little inconsequential and unheard…an award like this is far more affirming than one might imagine.”

Another prize winner was Jhumpa Lahiri who was awarded the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature in absentia with The Lowland, beating out Bilal Tanweer for The Scatter Here is Too Great, Kamila Shamsie for A God in Every Stone, Romesh Gunesekera for Noontide Toll, and Shamsur Rahman Faruqi for The Mirror of Beauty.

Girl power

Elsewhere, women were left uninterrupted in the second round of the popular series which debuted last year. Supported by UN Women to mark the 20th anniversary of the Beijing Conference on Gender, Women Uninterrupted sessions featured reporter and anchor Amrita Tripathi, Bangladeshi authors Maria Chaudhuri and Sangeeta Bandyopadhyay among others.

Though rain on the second day forced organisers to trim sessions into disappointing 30 minute slots, the 2015 edition seems to have only built on JLF’s reputation as an event unlike any other – egalitarian at heart, it celebrates literature’s ability to bridge all that might otherwise divide us, and speak to some of the most pressing issues of our times.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on January 25, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Jaipur Literary Festival. 

How do you find lesbians in 19th-century London? For her first book Tipping the Velvet, three-time Man Booker Prize nominee Sarah Waters went looking for women cross-dressers in police and prison records. There was other evidence too: medical histories, love letters, records of women living together as long-term companions, all of which provided rich fodder. For her latest novel The Paying Guests, Waters tells me that she read transcripts of court cases, tracked newspaper headlines, looked at advertisements for kitchen gadgets and waded through histories of bathrooms, all in the service of her story.

Waters has made a career out of unearthing facts in unusual places, and then filling in the gaps with a novelist’s imagination. Her diverse interests have ranged from prisons, spiritualism and the Victorian era (Affinity, 1999) to orphans, conmen and erotica (Fingersmith, 2002). Her sentences are masterpieces of lyricism, subtle yet potent; her plots corkscrew into ever-deepening tension as they imagine the effects of sudden violence on ordinary lives, and the worlds she creates are built with a craftsmanship that ensures historical detail immerses rather than intrudes. The Welsh writer’s books have been thrice adapted by the BBC, and have won her critical acclaim with favourable comparisons to iconic writers like Charles Dickens and Daphne du Maurier.

Visiting India for the first time, for the Jaipur Literature Festival, Waters, a petite blonde with a predilection for suits, is discovering her books speak to a fair number of Indian fans. She is often asked if it takes courage to embrace her lesbian identity, both in literature and in the media spotlight. She says: “I’ve never been a brave person, I could only do it because other people have been brave before me.” Nevertheless, Waters is among only a handful of modern authors to tackle the subject, who have garnered an audience that spans the spectrum from homosexual to heterosexual and everyone in between.

Ironically, she accomplished this in part by writing fabulously, and often, about sex. “Sex can be exciting and erotic, funny and uncomfortable all at the same time, or it moves from one thing to another very easily,” says the author, explaining that she strives to capture that very complexity. Back home in the UK, she sees “sex on the telly all the time,” and finds it boring and dishonest because “it’s always perfect, it’s always successful.” For Waters, reality is untidier and much more interesting than that. “Sex is in here, really,” she says pointing to her head, “rather than down there. For me, it’s about paying attention to that — not so much to what your characters are doing but what role that moment plays in the story. It’s capturing the emotion.”

Her latest offering The Paying Guests is set in 1922, a time of great transition post-World War I. During her research, Waters found herself pausing over the infamous Bywaters murder case. Edith Thompson, her husband and a young man named Fredrick Bywaters formed the three points of a love triangle. Edith flirted with the idea of killing her husband and by all accounts encouraged Freddie to do it for her. When the case went to court, she was charged with incitement, found guilty and hanged. Waters saw it as ‘The’ crime of the period, incorporating as it did gender, class, media frenzy and the politics of the suburbs.

Reading the transcripts she began to wonder, “‘What if the lovers were female?’ How would that affect aspects of the case?” Waters suspected that being lesbian would both expose her characters to danger as well as shield them from suspicion.

Waters has already sold the rights of the book, and is looking forward to seeing it adapted on film. It’s likely to only boost the author’s reputation — after all it was the salty, audacious BBC adaptation ofTipping the Velvet that first catapulted her to fame in 2002. Before that she was a humble academic, who had just completed her PhD thesis on lesbian and gay historical fiction from the late Victorian period onwards. She has since written five very successful books, finding the transition to novelist a “joyous” one.

Waters’ personal life and her choices have become politicised, a part of the wider conversation about gay rights. The author who describes herself as ‘serial monogamist’ wears a simple gold wedding band. She and her partner, copy editor Lucy Vaughan, have been together for over a decade. With typical British understatement, she describes the escalating attention as having been “quite alarming” at times. However, as she speaks of being comfortably middle-aged, it is clear she has made her peace with fame.

Now, in 2015 there are some things we can bet comfortably on: a Waters’ book will win more than one literary accolade. An adaptation will be considered (she’s seen three BBC adaptations, one by ITV and the rights for her latest have already been bought) and will earn her a Man Booker Prize nomination. In fact, we’ll soon know if The Paying Guests will make the 2015 shortlist and her fourth nomination, but few would argue she doesn’t deserve to take this one home.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on January 30, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Jaipur Literary Festival. 

Bettany Hughes was once described as the ‘Nigella Lawson of History’. Ask her about it now, and she bursts out laughing. In that moment, the similarities between the two women could not be more obvious — vivacious, uninhibited and good looking, both exert a magnetic pull on TV viewers across the world. However, the focus on Hughes’ appearance is not always intended to flatter.

She remembers one reviewer posing the question ‘Is Bettany Hughes a real historian?’ as he imagined her standing by ancient ruins, ‘her hair streaming in the wind’. “He was reviewing a radio programme, so clearly this was all in his mind,” she says, and adds with a grin, “As for Nigella, I think she is a beautiful, successful woman, who is very good at what she does. I’ll take the compliment.”

Hughes has an intimate understanding of sexism, not least because she was the first female historian to be invited by the BBC to host her own series (Breaking the Seal, 2000). Chatting with a BBC producer in the ’90s, she remembers her excitement as she pitched idea after idea. The response she received was less than enthusiastic. The producer told her: ‘One, no one is interested in history anymore. Two, no one watches history programmes on television. And three, no one wants to be lectured by a woman!’

She has since proved him wrong on all three counts, and has even added a fourth category that is likely to have only engendered greater ire in the erstwhile producer: history programmes about women, narrated by a woman for television.

In fact, the last time Hughes was in India, it was to film a series on divine women, which included segments dedicated to the goddess Durga in Bengal and Muti, who is venerated as the Great Mother in Rajasthan. Hughes likes to point out that while women may account for around 50 per cent of the population, they’ve never had a proportional representation in the history books. (It’s why she takes such pleasure in noting that “97 per cent of the deities of wisdom are women”.)

This void is only more marked when it comes to one of the most famous women to have ever walked the earth — Helen of Troy. Hughes admits being obsessed with the beautiful queen for over a decade. “From the moment she entered the written record in book two of Homer’s Iliad, for the next 2,700 years she never once left the human radar,” she says. When Hughes wrote her book Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore, she set out to unravel the woman whom she identified as the ‘embodiment of absolute female beauty and a reminder of the terrible power that beauty can wield’.

With a historian’s eye, she imagined Helen’s life as a historical figure of the late Bronze Age, using current research to recreate what life would have been like for a Mycenaean princess of the time. What it would have meant to grow up in Sparta, what she would have worn and even what she would have seen as she stepped out of the ship and into the bustling port at Troy. Though she falls short of delivering a verdict on whether Helen was ultimately a goddess, princess or whore, Hughes does find the woman behind the fantasy, allowing us glimpses of the people Helen walked among, the palaces she inhabited, and her fate after the Trojan War.

Hughes adopted the same techniques when she tackled her next subject, the Athenian philosopher Socrates. She recalls her dismay when a fellow writer pointed out that she had chosen a “doughnut subject”, a fascinating, rich story with “a big hole right in the middle, where the main character should be”. Socrates, famously wary of the written word, never put pen to paper himself, forcing us to rely on the reports of his three contemporaries — his devoted pupils Plato and Xenophon, and the parodist Aristophanes.

Hughes looks for verification of their accounts in the archaeological record, but also uses what we know of Athenian history to recreate a “dirty, electric” city whose streets would have been redolent with the scent of frying fish and the clamour of foundries churning out exquisite statues. Socrates would wake to a view of the Parthenon every morning, but in a time when the region had experienced bloody strife “it would have been mutilated and blackened by the heat of Persian fires”.

Socrates is often best remembered by the world for the manner in which he left it — as the title of Hughes’ book (The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life) confirms. Hughes chooses to highlight how in a world pulled apart by plague, civil war and invasion, Socrates looked for his inspiration all around and prized the pursuit of happiness. “I think he has utter and direct relevance to all of us, because he sees us coming as a civilisation, as a society. He asks: ‘What is the point of walls and warships and glittering statues if the men who build them are not happy?’”

Hughes’ great gift and her true passion seem to lie in how she brings history alive, and finds its relevance in modern life. Speaking at the Jaipur Literature Festival, she hailed the Greek philosopher’s dedication to living ‘the examined life’ and charged her audience with doing the same. Standing up, she had the whole audience shout “philosophy!” as they posed for her camera. Smiling back at her, they seemed to provide confirmation that her own work resonates with the times.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on March 6, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Jaipur Literary Festival. 

Simon Singh is immediately recognisable in a crowd — his dramatic haircut riffs on a Mohawk and his oval, gold-rimmed glasses glint in the light. One of Britain’s leading science communicators, Singh left Cambridge with a PhD in particle physics and followed that with a stint at CERN. He then joined the BBC as a producer and director working on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. His documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem won him a BAFTA award and an Emmy nomination. He is also the author of five books, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, but it’s the title of his fourth book, published in 2008, that prompts me to ask him about his opinion of homeopathy.

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial showcases Singh’s penchant for speaking his mind, which he seems more than happy to do again. “All the evidence we have tells us that homeopathy doesn’t work, for any condition at all,” he says emphatically. Describing a lecture he gave the day before at an university, he reveals that in an impromptu poll of his audience, 49 per cent said they thought it effective, albeit less effective than modern medicine, and a mere one per cent said it doesn’t work.

Singh isn’t feigning his dismay when he reports that asking for evidence from the crowd only drew anecdotes. “I think it’s really important that people use evidence rather than personal experience. Personal experience is a good starting point but our personal experience can mislead us. Our personal experience told us that bloodletting was good, our personal experience told us that astrology was good. Our personal experience tells us all sorts of things. In fact,” he says, peering over the terrace where we’re sitting, “the world looks pretty flat from here.”

Singh’s fierce commitment to science runs deep and strong, it’s what saw him through a harrowing five-year battle with Britain’s antiquated libel law. It all began with a 2008 blog published on The Guardianwebsite in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming that chiropractors could treat childhood conditions such as colic and asthma. The organisation promptly responded by suing him for libel under Britain’s famously sympathetic laws.

Singh refused to back down, spending tens of thousands of pounds defending himself in court, but the trial galvanised libel reform campaigners and is said to have contributed significantly to the movement that culminated in the passing of the Defamation Act 2013. He and likeminded colleagues have since set up the Good Thinking Society ‘to encourage curiosity and promote rational thinking’. Looking back at the time, Singh savours his victory: “So many people were being threatened and that was ridiculous. We were writing in public interest, and if we can’t write what we want to write, that means that other people don’t hear what they ought to be hearing.”

When pressed for why he’s willing to go out on a limb, Singh lists his many advantages — a wife, Anita Anand, who is a journalist; a steady income from his books; their ownership of their home; the powerful allies they have been able to call on. But later admits ruefully, “I get so angry, I get so frustrated when I see people being ripped off, people being taken advantage of, when I see people saying things are scientific, when they’re pseudoscientific. Those make me so angry and annoyed that it’s easier for me to do something than to just live with that pent-up aggression.”

It seems an uncharacteristic admission from an otherwise even-tempered man, and so it’s perhaps fortuitous that Singh often finds his attention drawn to more playful subjects. His latest book — The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets — celebrates the iconic American TV show’s history of embedding complex theorems and equations into unlikely places: the blackboard in Bart’s classroom or the scoreboard at Duff Stadium in Springfield. (Singh’s favourite episode, in case you are curious, is ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.) To write the book he watched endless repeats of the show, quizzed the writing team composed of an astonishing percentage of math geeks and pored over commentaries and behind-the-scenes reports.

By following this and other obsessions, the author, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1950s, is giving his son a very different childhood from his own. In March, the family is looking forward to seeing a full solar eclipse from the Faroe Islands — the last one visible in Europe till 2026. In the meantime at home, he and Hari are discovering science together. They conduct experiments where they put soap in the microwave, sprinkle different substances on the gas oven to see what colours result and test the effect acid has on seeds. Singh says he definitely hasn’t set his hopes on his boy growing up to be a scientist, but instead wants them to just enjoy their time together. “He understands what an experiment is,” he says, explaining that the five-year-old is already a proponent of the scientific method. In the process, Hari is already absorbing some of his father’s most profound convictions, not least of which is seeing is not always believing.

Simon Singh is immediately recognisable in a crowd — his dramatic haircut riffs on a Mohawk and his oval, gold-rimmed glasses glint in the light. One of Britain’s leading science communicators, Singh left Cambridge with a PhD in particle physics and followed that with a stint at CERN. He then joined the BBC as a producer and director working on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. His documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem won him a BAFTA award and an Emmy nomination. He is also the author of five books, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, but it’s the title of his fourth book, published in 2008, that prompts me to ask him about his opinion of homeopathy.

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial showcases Singh’s penchant for speaking his mind, which he seems more than happy to do again. “All the evidence we have tells us that homeopathy doesn’t work, for any condition at all,” he says emphatically. Describing a lecture he gave the day before at an university, he reveals that in an impromptu poll of his audience, 49 per cent said they thought it effective, albeit less effective than modern medicine, and a mere one per cent said it doesn’t work.

Singh isn’t feigning his dismay when he reports that asking for evidence from the crowd only drew anecdotes. “I think it’s really important that people use evidence rather than personal experience. Personal experience is a good starting point but our personal experience can mislead us. Our personal experience told us that bloodletting was good, our personal experience told us that astrology was good. Our personal experience tells us all sorts of things. In fact,” he says, peering over the terrace where we’re sitting, “the world looks pretty flat from here.”

Singh’s fierce commitment to science runs deep and strong, it’s what saw him through a harrowing five-year battle with Britain’s antiquated libel law. It all began with a 2008 blog published on The Guardianwebsite in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming that chiropractors could treat childhood conditions such as colic and asthma. The organisation promptly responded by suing him for libel under Britain’s famously sympathetic laws.

Singh refused to back down, spending tens of thousands of pounds defending himself in court, but the trial galvanised libel reform campaigners and is said to have contributed significantly to the movement that culminated in the passing of the Defamation Act 2013. He and likeminded colleagues have since set up the Good Thinking Society ‘to encourage curiosity and promote rational thinking’. Looking back at the time, Singh savours his victory: “So many people were being threatened and that was ridiculous. We were writing in public interest, and if we can’t write what we want to write, that means that other people don’t hear what they ought to be hearing.”

When pressed for why he’s willing to go out on a limb, Singh lists his many advantages — a wife, Anita Anand, who is a journalist; a steady income from his books; their ownership of their home; the powerful allies they have been able to call on. But later admits ruefully, “I get so angry, I get so frustrated when I see people being ripped off, people being taken advantage of, when I see people saying things are scientific, when they’re pseudoscientific. Those make me so angry and annoyed that it’s easier for me to do something than to just live with that pent-up aggression.”

It seems an uncharacteristic admission from an otherwise even-tempered man, and so it’s perhaps fortuitous that Singh often finds his attention drawn to more playful subjects. His latest book — The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets — celebrates the iconic American TV show’s history of embedding complex theorems and equations into unlikely places: the blackboard in Bart’s classroom or the scoreboard at Duff Stadium in Springfield. (Singh’s favourite episode, in case you are curious, is ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.) To write the book he watched endless repeats of the show, quizzed the writing team composed of an astonishing percentage of math geeks and pored over commentaries and behind-the-scenes reports.

By following this and other obsessions, the author, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1950s, is giving his son a very different childhood from his own. In March, the family is looking forward to seeing a full solar eclipse from the Faroe Islands — the last one visible in Europe till 2026. In the meantime at home, he and Hari are discovering science together. They conduct experiments where they put soap in the microwave, sprinkle different substances on the gas oven to see what colours result and test the effect acid has on seeds. Singh says he definitely hasn’t set his hopes on his boy growing up to be a scientist, but instead wants them to just enjoy their time together. “He understands what an experiment is,” he says, explaining that the five-year-old is already a proponent of the scientific method. In the process, Hari is already absorbing some of his father’s most profound convictions, not least of which is seeing is not always believing.

Simon Singh is immediately recognisable in a crowd — his dramatic haircut riffs on a Mohawk and his oval, gold-rimmed glasses glint in the light. One of Britain’s leading science communicators, Singh left Cambridge with a PhD in particle physics and followed that with a stint at CERN. He then joined the BBC as a producer and director working on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. His documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem won him a BAFTA award and an Emmy nomination. He is also the author of five books, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, but it’s the title of his fourth book, published in 2008, that prompts me to ask him about his opinion of homeopathy.

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial showcases Singh’s penchant for speaking his mind, which he seems more than happy to do again. “All the evidence we have tells us that homeopathy doesn’t work, for any condition at all,” he says emphatically. Describing a lecture he gave the day before at an university, he reveals that in an impromptu poll of his audience, 49 per cent said they thought it effective, albeit less effective than modern medicine, and a mere one per cent said it doesn’t work.

Singh isn’t feigning his dismay when he reports that asking for evidence from the crowd only drew anecdotes. “I think it’s really important that people use evidence rather than personal experience. Personal experience is a good starting point but our personal experience can mislead us. Our personal experience told us that bloodletting was good, our personal experience told us that astrology was good. Our personal experience tells us all sorts of things. In fact,” he says, peering over the terrace where we’re sitting, “the world looks pretty flat from here.”

Singh’s fierce commitment to science runs deep and strong, it’s what saw him through a harrowing five-year battle with Britain’s antiquated libel law. It all began with a 2008 blog published on The Guardianwebsite in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming that chiropractors could treat childhood conditions such as colic and asthma. The organisation promptly responded by suing him for libel under Britain’s famously sympathetic laws.

Singh refused to back down, spending tens of thousands of pounds defending himself in court, but the trial galvanised libel reform campaigners and is said to have contributed significantly to the movement that culminated in the passing of the Defamation Act 2013. He and likeminded colleagues have since set up the Good Thinking Society ‘to encourage curiosity and promote rational thinking’. Looking back at the time, Singh savours his victory: “So many people were being threatened and that was ridiculous. We were writing in public interest, and if we can’t write what we want to write, that means that other people don’t hear what they ought to be hearing.”

When pressed for why he’s willing to go out on a limb, Singh lists his many advantages — a wife, Anita Anand, who is a journalist; a steady income from his books; their ownership of their home; the powerful allies they have been able to call on. But later admits ruefully, “I get so angry, I get so frustrated when I see people being ripped off, people being taken advantage of, when I see people saying things are scientific, when they’re pseudoscientific. Those make me so angry and annoyed that it’s easier for me to do something than to just live with that pent-up aggression.”

It seems an uncharacteristic admission from an otherwise even-tempered man, and so it’s perhaps fortuitous that Singh often finds his attention drawn to more playful subjects. His latest book — The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets — celebrates the iconic American TV show’s history of embedding complex theorems and equations into unlikely places: the blackboard in Bart’s classroom or the scoreboard at Duff Stadium in Springfield. (Singh’s favourite episode, in case you are curious, is ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.) To write the book he watched endless repeats of the show, quizzed the writing team composed of an astonishing percentage of math geeks and pored over commentaries and behind-the-scenes reports.

By following this and other obsessions, the author, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1950s, is giving his son a very different childhood from his own. In March, the family is looking forward to seeing a full solar eclipse from the Faroe Islands — the last one visible in Europe till 2026. In the meantime at home, he and Hari are discovering science together. They conduct experiments where they put soap in the microwave, sprinkle different substances on the gas oven to see what colours result and test the effect acid has on seeds. Singh says he definitely hasn’t set his hopes on his boy growing up to be a scientist, but instead wants them to just enjoy their time together. “He understands what an experiment is,” he says, explaining that the five-year-old is already a proponent of the scientific method. In the process, Hari is already absorbing some of his father’s most profound convictions, not least of which is seeing is not always believing.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on January 30, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Jaipur Literary Festival. 

Anuradha Roy’s opening line in Sleeping on Jupiter soon proves itself a lie. Her protagonist, Nomita tells us: “The year the war came closer, I was six or seven and it did not matter to me.” But the reader knows better than the little girl — the proximity of conflict always matters. Nomi lives in a kind of paradise, from which she is soon to face eviction, though she doesn’t know that yet. Cast on the mercy of the world, she will find it has little to spare for her.

Roy’s third book, I should tell you right away, is almost relentlessly grim. Her characters, who are complicated and conflicted, are a result of a world underpinned with loss and suffering. Nomi is ostensibly the linchpin on which the story turns. We meet her first, catch glimpses of her journey into adulthood and then return with her to India. By then she is Nomi Frederiksen, daughter to a mother who abandoned her, adopted by another whom she rejects.

In the fictional seaside town of Jarmuli, famous for its temples and ashrams, Nomi’s story arc converges with a small horde of other characters. It is immediately evident that Roy has an enviable sense of place. She imagines into being a temple city crowded with pilgrims, tourists and those who would make a living there. Here, the scent of incense mingles with that of fish — fresh, fried and rotting.

Down by the water, you can dig your toes into the sand, but beware this treacherous coast. The Bay of Bengal stretches as far as the eye can see, its surface ravaged by monsoon winds, its depths offering forgetfulness for a price. It is here that Suraj — ostensibly the fixer for Nomi’s documentary project — goes to swim, and here that Badal, the temple guide, comes to look for Raghu, who he is desperately in love with.

It is here that Latika dreams of simply sitting by the sea and drinking coconut water while on her first real — and likely last — holiday with her friends Gouri and Vidya. These three quickly become my favourites.

Gouri nurtures a deep spirituality, and her warmth and humour provide a kind of tragic counterpoint to her ongoing, inexorable loss of memory; Vidya’s “forty years in the bureaucracy” are paired with a “preoccupied self-importance”; but burgundy-haired Latika is still capable of surprising us all. She is (relatively) sprightly, innately irreverent and about to get drunk for the very first time.

Roy sketches these women with pragmatic compassion and real insight. As an author, this is indisputably her gift, a willingness to pause long enough to provide even the most minor character with a backstory that lends their presence depth and weight. A perfect example of this is the mysterious Johnny Toppo, the tea-seller who sings hauntingly lovely folk songs, as he serves up tea spiced with ginger and cardamom. Out of the likes of Toppo, Roy weaves a bold, sprawling tapestry of emotion and human interaction.

Roy’s other gift is an ability to write in a way that is acutely pleasing to the senses. Her words allow her readers to see, smell, taste. She is so potent that at the end of the book, I still remember a simple description from her first page — of Nomi’s brother cutting down a grapefruit from their family’s tree. The fruit is pale yellow and heavy with juice, its skin is stippled but its flesh is a tender pink, the scent of it is tart and fresh.

However, while Roy writes with assurance and skill, I find that her plot choices sometimes stretch the limits of my appetite for tragedy and reinforce clichés. The same descriptive gift which leaves me with a mild craving for a grapefruit, makes a long series of violently abusive encounters difficult to read: a murder by machete that leaves a father squealing like pigs at the slaughter, the sale and rape of a young girl, the snapping of a man’s sanity and his battery of an animal… and all this just in the first half of the novel.

Even when the book is not exploding into violence, there is a steady undertow of disquiet and grief. What balance exists I find only around Vidya, Latika and Gouri. (I catch myself wishing that I could shed the other characters for the honest, interesting company of just these three.)

But there are other compensations for reading Sleeping on Jupiter, such as its structure. Roy plays with time and place, switching between first person and third person; between five days in the present and a lifetime in the past. Her choice of whose thoughts we are privy to, and whose we are not, are deliberate and clever. Through them, we see a man undone by his deep love for a boy, yet are denied insight into another predator who systematically rapes and abuses his young charges. By choosing when we are inside Nomi’s head, Roy makes her past as real as her present, and allows us to see the unfurling of her courage.

In the writing, I realise it is this courage that keeps me reading through to the end. It is not just Nomi’s; while her courage is perhaps the most considerable, it is also the least interesting. Instead, valour infuses and elevates nearly every character.

Overarching all this is Roy’s own fearlessness as a writer — she is all raw feeling, and vivid life.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on June 5, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

I have always loved the story of how my grandparents fell in love.

Thatha was cycling down a street in Chennai, on his way to work, when he passed by Pattima’s house. She was on the balcony, brushing her beautiful long hair. They locked eyes and smiled shyly at each other. The rest – a marriage that lasted 52 years and produced three children and five grandchildren – is history.

Modern Romance, as Aziz Ansari will tell you, is an altogether different beast. In the age of Tinder, my grandparents may have locked eyes for the first time on a computer screen. Would they have both swiped right? Would their banter have been promising enough to make a meeting worthwhile? Would Pattima, in the end, have decided to go with the buff guy further down the street because he had a better grasp of punctuation?

It might feel like every contemporary American comedian has beaten Ansari to the punch. By the point Modern Romance hit shelves this year, Mindy Kaling had already spent three years wondering Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Tina Fey had been a Bossypants for even longer than that, and though she was a little late to the party, Amy Poehler had said Yes, Please – in 2014, the same year Neil Patrick Harris instructed his fans to Choose Your Own Autobiography and Lena Dunham assured us all that she was Not That Kind of Girl.

But Ansari – the Indian-American stand-up comedian best known for playing Tom Haverford in the late, great series Parks and Rec – does something more interesting to justify his 3.5 million dollar advance from Penguin. Intensely personal, yet immediately universal, his new book tackles a seemingly exhausted topic yet, somehow, manages to deliver a quirky, surprisingly smart but above all practical guide to Modern Romance. (One, you’ll be pleased to hear, is also available in e-book and audiobook formats)

In his introduction, Ansari pinpoints the book’s inspiration as being the moment when he realised his phone went from trusted communication device to the receptacle of a ‘tornado of panic and hurt and anger’.  When a message inviting a girl he likes to a concert is ignored by the recipient (his phone helpfully marks it ‘read’), Ansari spends many, many torturous hours trying to make sense of the failure of his one-way text.

’I’m so stupid!’ he writes. ’I should have typed “Hey” with two y’s, not just one!’ The passage of 24 hours of silence only produces more angst: ‘Did Tanya’s phone fall into a river/trash compactor/volcano? Did Tanya fall into a river/trash compactor/volcano?? Oh no, Tanya has died, and I’m selfishly worried about our date.’ (Tanya, you’ll be glad to know is alive and well, just preoccupied.)

We’ve all been there – as Ansari discovered when he incorporated the incident into a well-received stand-up routine. That realisation kicked off an exploration of the intersections of love and technology in the modern world which spanned several months.

Written in collaboration with NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, Modern Romance is an irreverent, informative read for the smartphone generation. There’s plenty of fascinating new data, mined from a forum on Reddit to in-person interviews and focus groups in locations as diverse as Qatar and Argentina. Klinenberg delivers on the analysis of behavioural data and surveys, and a host of experts like anthropologist Helen Fisher and Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing, pitch in with their insights.

Ansari functions as a guide to this universe, paving the way with personal anecdotes, irreverent patter (sometimes annoying, most often not), heavy facts and plenty of agony aunt-style advice on finding and keeping love. He is so committed to the process that at one point he even masturbates into a Tenga – a Japanese egg-shaped sex toy – so you never have to. (‘It felt like I was masturbating with a thick, cold condom on…’)

The result of all this is an enjoyable hybrid of an anthropological treatise (‘For women in this era [1960s], it seemed that marriage was the easiest way of acquiring the freedoms of adulthood‘); irreverent geo-social commentary (‘If Tokyo is the capital of the “herbivore man”, then Buenos Aires must surely be the capital of the “rib eye-eating maniac”’); hard-core census data (‘France is the country with the highest rates of infidelity: 55 percent for men and 32 percent for women’); and the very latest scientific advice on how to take a selfie most likely to appeal to the opposite sex (‘If you are a woman, take a high angle selfie, with cleavage, while underwater near some buried treasure. If you are a guy, take a shot of yourself holding a puppy while both of you are spelunking’).

Ansari concludes, ’Technology hasn’t just changed how we find romance, it’s also put a new spin on the timeless challenges we face once we are in a relationship’: the agonies of online dating, whether there’s someone better out there for you, how to keep the passion alive, whether to have that affair or to risk a sext, to snoop or not to snoop on your partner, and crucially, how to breakup.

Modern Romance also succeeds as a variation on the celebrity memoir, with just enough about Ansari himself to whet your appetite. One thing is certain, Tanya really missed out when she ignored that text.

Published in Open on July 19, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

Jan Ramesh De Saram uses his phone as a torch, casting a small circle of light at his feet as he walks down the corridor. The passage ends in darkness, where bats squeak and flap their wings. A row of abandoned rooms are occupied only by an upturned chair or two, lonely rejects from the cinemas below. Above us, the Rio Hotel continues its ascent, seven stories up.

We take the stairs and, as we clear the rooflines of the surrounding buildings, light floods the structure.

At the top a brisk wind breaks on our faces as we look out onto a city in the throes of transformation. On one side, a cluster of dark asbestos roofs, then the ugly sprawl of a construction site. Beyond that, the blue of the Indian Ocean under a midday sun.

On the other side are more homes punctuated by the ornate gopuram of the Sri Subramaniya Kovil; dwarfed, in its turn, by the Lotus Tower, a controversial, unfinished construction project begun by a previous government. We are in the heart of Colombo, furious new development all around.

Jan recognises the inevitability of encroachment:

“Every time I’m here, I think this building will be here for another five years, it might even be here for another 10, but I think it will eventually be replaced by something big,” he says. Since he first rediscovered the space in 2012, Jan has been one of its most determined champions.  As the Cultural Affairs Coordinator at the Goethe-Institut in Colombo, he’s nudged theatre companies, art and music festivals in the direction of the Rio complex. Organisers have had their pick of two theatres (one abandoned, one not) and a derelict hotel with 60 rooms.

There is something about this place that affects Jan, but he finds not everyone shares his enthusiasm for it. When they invited artists to come and explore it as a possible exhibition space, one said it looked more like a spot where junkies would go to shoot up. Last year, when Pettah Interchange brought a host of DJs into the city for a party here, a guest asked to be taken home. She said she saw ghostly figures wandering among the revellers, and felt afraid.

Tuk-tuk drivers do a double take when you ask to be dropped off here – the Rio Cinema is itself infamous as the host of adult films, all outdated and on an endless rota of reruns. The adjoining Navah Cinema is gutted, the storage depot for a bottle shop out back. We peek in through a gap in a boarded up door, but Jan’s feeble torch cannot illuminate the interior of the vast space.

It’s hard to believe this complex was once amongst the area’s best known landmarks. When the Rio opened its doors in 1965, it was to offer Sri Lankans their first sight of a 70mm TODD-AO projection system. In the audience on the opening night was a man only a month away from his fourth – and longest – stint as Prime Minister (Dudley Senanayake) and a young girl who would go on to become Sri Lanka’s President (Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga), 29 years later.

A journalist from the Ceylon Daily News waxed lyrical about the venue, writing: ‘As for being an average theatre, the Rio is not…The seats are unobstructed, large and comfortable, upholstered in foam rubber and creamy-beige rexine, with satin wood arms…the movie vertically operated screen is a beauty.’

In the years since, the complex has come close to demolition more than once.  The family that owns it cannot decide what to do with it. Jan, on the other hand, is full of ideas. He imagined the space being turned into ‘a cultural entertainment initiative’ – part café, part gallery and part nightclub venue – and submitted this as a proposal to the owners. However, earlier today he was told they could not rent him the space.

He’s philosophical about it. Now, standing in what used to be the Eagle’s Nest nightclub, he says: “What I like about it is it’s not some kind of master architect’s plan but Thambi’s father’s patchwork construction…things just got added, there’s a door which connects the theatre with the hotel, or even doors that lead nowhere. It’s not a perfectly planned-out space but very organically grown. I feel the character of the mysterious old Mr. Navaratnam is very present in it.”

This Mr Navaratnam’s son is the man I meet, in a room behind the box office downstairs.  His name is Ratnarajah Navaratnam, known to all as Thambi (meaning little brother, as he was the youngest of his siblings) and he was in Colombo in the July of 1983. His parents Navaratnam and Rukmani were in India, and he is glad they were not here when the mob came.

He tells me his is a family with respectable antecedents. (On his mother’s side, his great-grandfather Sangarapillai was the founder of the Manipay Hindu College in Jaffna.) But his parents themselves were not rich to begin with. Thambi’s father, Navaratnam, lost his own father very young.  His father had been a soldier in the British army and, when he died, Navaratnam was forced to leave school to support his family. He began to work in Colombo with his uncle Thambyah, the successful owner of the city’s first colour printing press.

Navaratnam was by all accounts a remarkably enterprising and hardworking man. He made a success of the business, multiplied his investments and raised loans until he was able to build the Navah Cinema, whose construction he oversaw himself, without the help of an architect. It was a process he would repeat with both the Rio Cinema and Hotel.

Navaratnam eventually became so experienced that he could, by instinct alone, instruct the builders on the proportions of sand, cement and water that had to go into the concrete mix. On nights when the builders worked all night, he stayed with them till sunrise.

His children remember their father as pious and stern – “a traditional Jaffna father” – but being the sons of a successful cinema owner had its benefits. People affectionately dubbed the Rio the R-10, and for a while that was also what Thambi’s friends called him. He would write them little notes guaranteeing them free entrance into the theatre, but never so many that his father would notice.

If Navaratnam had an obvious soft spot, it was for the surrounding area. In English it is known as Slave Island, a name that many signboards still carry. But in Sinhala and Tamil it is Kompannaveediya/Kompani Theru or Company Street. The Beira Lake once encircled this space completely, and it was home to African slaves of the Dutch and Portuguese colonisers. Later it became a hub for traders and businesses and, to date, remains a pocket of incredible diversity within the city. Temples, churches and mosques are separated by the narrowest of streets, and the neighbourhood is thick with Sri Lankan Moor, Malay, Tamil and Sinhalese families, with the odd Dutch Burgher in the mix. (It is one of the few places in town you can buy an authentic Malay pastol, a traditional pastry stuffed with meat.)

Growing up, Thambi remembers his father’s deep emotional investment in the surrounding communities. It was a rare cause to which Navaratnam did not generously contribute, he says, and he was even-handed with people of every faith. His car was always available on loan to locals when they needed it for a celebration or a funeral. According to Thambi, when the family asked him to move to a more genteel part of town, his father always refused. “He would tell us, ‘This is the area I grew up in, this is the area that I support, this is the area that I stand by and this is the area I want to grow old in.’”

It seemed a space somehow protected from the rising ethnic tensions in other parts of the country.

In 1956, less than a decade after Sri Lanka won its independence, Parliament passed what is commonly known as The Sinhala Only Act.  Many argue that this Act, which made Sinhala the only language of administration, was a nationalistic act of revenge for British colonial ‘divide and rule’ policies. It had many repercussions, notably forcing thousands of Tamil civil servants to resign because they could not work in the Sinhala language. Island-wide ethnic riots broke out for the first time in 1958. Tamil lives and property became the targets of Sinhalese mobs in the South and there were occasional retaliatory attacks on Sinhalese targets in the north and east. As a precaution during that time, Navaratnam uprooted his young family and moved back to the relative safety of Jaffna (a traditionally Tamil majority area) for two months. When they returned, everything seemed as before.

Acknowledging his father’s “tremendous political connections,” Thambi says there still seemed no need to call on them. “My father was a very stubborn, very proud man. He believed one had to work, to earn something. He would never ask for political favours.”

In any case, when something did happen, there was no political protection to be had.

The first Thambi heard of it was that the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had ambushed and killed 13 soldiers in the north of the country. The very next day, a heated controversy around the return of the soldiers’ bodies sparked a week of deadly rioting around the country and particularly in Colombo.  Mainly Sinhalese mobs began to operate, seeking out Tamil homes and businesses to attack.

Not long after that, the mob arrived at the doors of the Rio.

Premadasa’s is the Rio’s oldest employee, and though he now works at another cinema in the city, he still has a space to live on the premises with his family.  Premadasa’s home is accessible through the parking garage at the Rio. He is, as he always was, the consummate odd job man. He can turn his hand to many things, from running the box office to cleaning the popcorn machine, even managing basic accounts when called upon.

Premadasa’s assessment of Navaratnam is quite similar to that of Navaratnam’s children – that he was strict but fair. Now 63, Premadasa was a young man when he first entered Navaratnam’s service, earning some five rupees a day for the film posters he would paste in various parts of the city. He was soon promoted to being a hall attendant, responsible for seating 600 people at a time. He remembers the Rio was among the most successful cinemas in the city – many shows were sold out, even the balcony where a ticket cost Rs 3.20.

On the day of the riot, Premadasa was on the property. He recalls that the rioters who came to the Rio were a mixed group, of Sinhalese people and Tamil-speaking Muslims as well. The mob was intent on stripping the property bare: they spent much of the day robbing the luxurious hotel of its furnishings and equipment and then, around sundown, set what remained on fire.

Thambi and his family had taken shelter at an upscale hotel close by, hoping the presence of tourists would give the authorities the motivation to fight off any mob. But they could see the smoke spiral into the sky from where the cinema stood.

Premadasa himself hid in the Navah, where he says the looters found him and stole his savings – some three to four hundred rupees. His life itself was likely spared because, as the son of a Tamil father and a Sinhala mother, he could speak both languages fluently.

Across the rest of the city, the attacks devastated homes, businesses and lives. Victims would say later that the organised mobs that arrived at their doorsteps were directed there by sheets of electoral registers. Among the Sinhala majority, conscience dictated choices – some were marauders, but friends and neighbours also stepped in to hide and defend their Tamil compatriots. Some 150,000 people are believed to have been made homeless, and the death count is disputed – various estimates place it anywhere between 400 and 3000 people.

Black July, as it would later be known, is taken to mark the beginning of a civil war between Tamil militants and the government of Sri Lanka that lasted nearly 30 years. It also drove an exodus, as a great number of Tamils left Sri Lanka for the shores of other countries.

Premadasa remembers old Mr. Navaratnam’s return from India a few days later: on seeing what had happened to his life’s work, he broke down and cried bitterly. Soon after that, he fell ill.

In 1984, the family emigrated to Australia. Navaratnam never returned to Kompannaveediya or to Sri Lanka. As he lay dying, Thambi says his father seemed immensely vulnerable. So distant before, he would now ask his children to sit by his side and simply hold his hand.

Today, the future of the Rio, indeed of the whole of Kompannaveediya, is uncertain. Much of the area was marked for a controversial ‘beautification’ drive under the recent Rajapaksa government, who brought the Urban Development Authority (UDA) under the purview of the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Three rounds of evictions had already been carried out in the area, but after elections in January made Maithripala Sirisena President, the UDA was de-linked from the MoD and all its development projects put under review.

It’s easy to see why this space is so contested. It is in a high security zone, bordered by luxurious hotel properties and government sites critical to national security – both the Ministry of Defence and the Air Force Headquarters are here. This is also one of the closest residential neighbourhoods to the bustling financial centre of the Fort.

Just across the road from the Rio is the Sri Subramaniya Kovil, a major Hindu temple, and a few doors down from there you will find Aslam Othman at the Federation of Kompannaveediya Masjids (FKM), where he serves as a Propaganda Secretary.  The group have taken the fight against evictions to Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court more than once, and wait with some trepidation to see what the area’s fate will be. In the meantime, there is much confusion over deeds, financial compensation and the allocation of new housing.

According to a report by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) published in April 2014, the number of families to be relocated over the next few years under the city’s Urban Regeneration Project is between 70, 000 and 135, 000 – again estimates vary widely.

Military backed evictions have been brutal and swift – one was carried out in 2010 by armed soldiers who, Aslam says, turned the area into a “warzone” and forced some 33 families to leave their homes with only a few days’ written notice. A case study of that incident in the CPA report reads: ‘Residents were left destitute, with many of their belongings destroyed, and for 3-4 days were housed and provided daily meals at the mosque by the Federation of Kompannaveediya Masjids (FKM), until they found alternative accommodation with relatives or elsewhere.’

Authorities promised that the families would be provided with new homes. In the meantime the State has offered them a sum for monthly rent but no compensation for their lost possessions, homes or businesses. In mid-2015, these families are yet to receive the alternate housing they were promised. “Development should happen,” concedes Aslam, but he says it needs to be better planned, follow democratic process and in general be “people friendly.”

Aslam’s family have lived in this area for a hundred years. To him the place is a microcosm of Sri Lankan secularity. “We have 10 mosques here …four Buddhist temples, a Hindu kovil beautiful enough to be a tourist attraction and many other individual Hindu statues located in this area.” This neighbourhood, with its dense little labyrinth of streets is full of homes built on a single perch (about 25m²) of land. Some of these now host two or three families in an incredibly confined space. Yet, this contributes to a strong feeling of community, as much socialising is accomplished on the streets and on the stoops of homes.

The land that was cleared of houses is now in the process of being built up. One space in particular, the enormous Cinnamon Life project, has the potential to dramatically alter the view from the Rio. When it is complete, the Indian Ocean will no longer be visible from the Eagle’s Nest.

In August 2015, a festival called ColomboScope will be the latest to make use of the Rio. Curators have planned an ambitious exhibition. ‘Shadow Scenes’ will allocate hotel rooms to a group of local and international artists for installations and exhibitions. The project is a reflection of Jan’s original inspiration – as a teenager growing up in Berlin, he remembers a movement that saw artists and intellectuals find new uses for the decrepit and abandoned buildings of East Germany.  Now, the hotel is being made as structurally sound as possible, but organisers nevertheless intend to restrict the number of people who enter and where they can wander.

There are also plans for a film that will touch on the history of the area and the cinema. Consequently, Premadasa has been approached more than once by people asking to hear his story. He cannot entirely fathom the recent interest in the theatre and the hotel as they are now, stripped of the grandeur he remembers so well. He is sad when he thinks about the past, but philosophical about what the future holds for the Rio. “Everything is like this in the world,” he says, “it comes and it goes.

On my last visit, Thambi is at the back of the cinema, meeting with suppliers of air-conditioning – as the city sweats in the throes of a heat wave, he thinks it’s about time to reinstall it at the Rio. He confesses that his heart is not with the hotel but with the cinema. He was born the year his father opened the doors of the Navah and has loved movies all his life.

Although Thambi has spent much of his life living and working in Sri Lanka, accepting the risks that came with it, his children are still abroad. His son dreams of coming back here to work, and Thambi hopes they will be able to do something with the property. “My hope for him is to do a huge complex here. Otherwise he would be bored, running a cinema is not such a time consuming job.” But Thambi’s eye is also on the past. “My father loved this place so much. I would like to see something standing here, in memory of him.”

Published on Commonwealth Writers on July 15, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Suda Shanmugaraja.

I find Laki Senanayake perched among his sculptures in the Barefoot gallery, laughing as he talks with the staff. He’s bare-chested, dressed in a bright orange sarong, his modesty preserved by a shawl in bright pink, red and orange slung over his shoulders. He has a red lighter tucked into the fold of fabric at his waist. He is 78 years old.

The abundance Laki contains within himself has not faded with age. His irrepressible vitality manifests itself in a portfolio of work that is so large, and so diverse, that it seems impossible to keep track of, even for the artist himself. Today, he cannot recall when he last had an exhibition dedicated predominantly to sculptures – instead there have been several collections of his paintings, a book cataloguing his long obsession with owls, articles in the press about his work with landscapes, his endless capacity for innovation.

There is a simple explanation for this. When it comes to sculptures, he usually works on the basis of commissions, and his metal creations go straight from his open air studio in Diyabubula to their new homes, without a pause in a gallery along the way. But sometimes, he will have his two baasunnes work on a new sculpture just to keep them busy.While he decides what to do with the finished pieces, the sculptures must bide their time in his water gardens in Dambulla; the boar and its piglet screech to a halt at the edge of the pond, the owl perches on the highest point of his roof, an elaborate chandelier hangs from a nearby tree, spinning slowly in the breeze.

The garden has always seemed a more natural setting for Laki’s creations than the gallery – not least because so many are inspired by the natural world.

His earliest memories of sculpting are from Lunuganga, where he remembers working with a tinker who came to make the gutters for Geoffrey Bawa’s beautiful home there. Laki never had any formal training, which he does not consider necessary. “Most people don’t bother to simply sit and look at things. You just have to break the animal’s shape down geometrically,” he says of design, as for the technical skills needed, various basunnes have taught him all he knows.

Over the years that followed that first attempt, he would make over 40 sculptures for Bawa –Laki estimates he was only ever paid for two, but the assurance that the figures would be displayed to perfection and be well cared for was, at the time, all the incentive he needed.

Laki’s collaboration with Bawa, and with the man’s successors, acclaimed architects like Anjalendran and Channa Daswatte, have created an enduring demand for his sculptures. Perhaps his most accessible work is the famed staircase at the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle. Bawa initially requested a painting that would follow the curving walls but with only six months till the hotel’s launch, Laki suggested using statues instead. The architect imagined these would be as tall as the balustrade, some three feet high, instead what he received was a magnificent, life-sized battle: the Portuguese in their armour, with their spears and horses, advance up the stairs,only to be met by the fierce Sinhala army, bearing weapons of their own. At the very pinnacle, over 15 feet up, sits a flute playing Sinhala king, whom Laki immodestly admits he modelled on himself.

There were other grand projects with Bawa – a 40-foot Bo leaf with a dense pattern of Buddhist symbols for the 1984 expo in Osaka, the peacock in the Bentota Beach Hotel, the palm at the Neptune Hotel. But for every sculpture accessible to the public, there must be five confined to private homes. A small selection of these are represented in the exhibition in the form of photographs, among which are two examples of Laki’s chandeliers. Standing before one, he confesses he abhors the direct glare of an unshaded bulb. Instead, his vine-inspired creation has the lights embedded within it, so that it produces a mysterious luminescence.

Laki does not produce these sculptures alone. The design comes from him, and it is he who makes the base wireframe. But the cutting and beating of the sheet metal, and the welding of the sharp edges is done by others under his supervision. He works mostly with brass sheet and copper, but the ‘Silver Owl’ in this collection is made with paper pulp. (Once he used to work with lead, a material he abandoned abruptly when he realised the only thing that had spared him severe poisoning from the fumes was that he was outdoors the whole time. He has worked with sheet metal ever since.)

Laki might start with a sketch, but in keeping with his restless mind he never looks at his painting once he has begun work on the actual sculpture itself –“then you get fixed to an idea, you are copying yourself. Then it’s not really interesting.” Amazingly, considering this relaxed approach, he has never had to discard a sculpture that he has started.

Aside from the gleam of brass and copper, there are sculptures in this collection delineated with red paint, and touched with silver and gold. Laki does this with an eye to their aging. “Brass gradually oxidises and goes dark and you can’t polish many of these sculptures.” The additions Laki has painted on will help retain colour and character in years to come.

A few of the sculptures collected here have an interesting history. The design for ‘Rhinoceros’ dates back to 1515 and is based on a woodcut by the German painter Albrecht Dürer. “It was called the Pope’s rhinoceros, because it was being sent to the Pope. But when it got to the Mediterranean coast of Africa, the animal died. And so Dürer rushed there – not many had seen or heard of such an animal then – and he made this woodcut.” Another piece, titled ‘Escutcheon for a Tyrant’ is a celebration of Laki’s love of medieval weaponry. (He has no patience with guns.) Laki has done several along this theme – ‘Altar for a Tyrant’ and ‘Throne for a Tyrant’ complete the set.

We have walked the room once, and Laki is tired of standing. His spondylosis is painful today but his good humour is undimmed. Family commitments mean he cannot return to Diyabubula in a hurry and so he is resigned to the city. As always, he is painting -casually, inventively, constantly– and he carries a set of small watercolours as gifts around in a brown envelope. He hands these out with easy generosity, smiling at the pleasure of each recepient. When he is finished, he goes looking for a fan and a table in the shade.

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on August 16, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Indika Handuwala. 

Naresh Fernandes arrives for his session at Cinnamon Colomboscope covered in sweat. It’s a hot day but Fernandes has been on a brisk walk around Slave Island. He is fascinated with the parallels he sees between this city and his own – the frenetic development, the deepening class divide,and the contradictions inherent in democracies that can conduct elections smoothly only to have their liberal institutions fail their citizens. He is filing all this and more away, some to inform his sessions, some for the stories he will commission about Sri Lanka but mostly, one gets the sense, to satisfy his own curiosity.

A well-known Indian journalist and editor, Fernandes has made a career of keeping his finger on the pulse of Mumbai – except he prefers to call it by its old name, Bombay. His two books – Taj Mahal Foxtrot and City Adrift – are both about this place. One is a history of how the Taj Hotel in Bombay hosted a remarkable jazz scene, and how pioneers like Leon Abbey (who brought the first African-American jazz band to Bombay in 1935) and Teddy Weatherford(Louis Armstrong’s pianist),would inspire the Goan musicians who accompanied them. The result would be a sound whose influence would stretch as far as the cinemas of Bollywood.

Then there is his other book, City Adrift, a slender yet ambitious biography of Bombay for which the author draws on histories both personal and national. He writes of how the linking of the islands, though representing a great logistical challenge, helped transform a ‘malarial swamp into a global city.’ It would grow into a cosmopolitan metropolis – which Mahatma Gandhi called the “hope of my dreams” –robust enough to resist the communal tensions that accompanied Independence and Partition. But Bombay is no longer the city it was, and Fernandes is clear-eyed about the tensions that have threatened it in recent decades.

City Adrift is one of a series of such biographies about Indian cities, and Fernandes said he was left to make up his own mind about how he would tackle the project. “I’m that kind of strange paradox in which one part of my family are insiders in a city in which almost everybody is an outsider, but my father’s side of the family came in 1947. So we have these two parallel stories going, the Bombay story of the migrant and the Bombay story of the settler and we know how often in Bombay history those two sides are at war.”

Fernandes is already at work on another book that will also explore Bombay’s past and present, but this he says is hopelessly delayed due to the demands on his time placed by Scroll.in. Launched in 2014, the digital daily of which he is an editor, has rapidly gained a wide readership in India. “It’s been astonishing how quickly you can reach vast numbers of readers – if we had to physically distribute we’d never be at the numbers we are at,” says Fernandes, adding that being online has had other rewards.

“Traditionally people have said that Indian readers are interested in three things, the ABC: astrology, Bollywood and cricket.” However, the thing about digital media the team found, was that a seemingly inexhaustible flow of reader metrics was always pouring in – and these figures were revealing that people were interested in much more than the ABC. “We found that people will read a challenging piece on the rural employment guarantee scheme in Chhattisgarh at 3,000 words, just as long as it was a well-written story and well told. We are astonished constantly at the things that people are reading and delighted and encouraged by this.”

They chose to focus more on reportage rather than opinion pieces, and found readers approved. For one of their earliest successes, Fernandes’ colleague Supriya Sharma chose to get on a train prior to the 2014 elections and travel some 2,500 km. She would cross seven states, filing stories regularly as she went. The idea, says Fernandes, was not to talk about the politicians but how people saw politics, what government meant to them and how the system had supported or failed them. “We wanted to shift the focus from the big institutions to seeing how it plays out on the ground.”

Fernandes, who has worked in newspapers, wire services, T.V. and magazines, says the goal for the 12-member team that produces Scroll.in is to work at the pace of a wire service with the context of a magazine. “Some days we achieve it, some days we don’t.”

Though Fernandes is putting in 16-hour work days to feed the beast, he describes the end result as “astonishingly satisfying.” In 2015, the team was recognized as the ‘News Start-up of the Year’ at the Red Ink Journalism Awards. And for a relatively young publication, Scroll.in does punch above its weight. “Last week for instance a minister in Mizoram (Lal Thanzara) resigned because of a story we broke,” says Fernandes, adding with a grin,“Ok, it’s a small state, but still it means something.”

As the interview wraps up, he says such successes remind him of his early days in journalism. “My first job was at the Times of India during the Bombay riots (of the early 90s), and that was a really remarkable period for me, for even as my city was going through so much trauma, you saw that when you wrote something the government and the administration took action almost immediately…that when you had these vast numbers of readers behind a publication, people in power were forced to listen, that the power of the press was not a cliché,” he pauses, “I have sometimes thought over the 20 years or so since, that we had lost that.” That he was proved wrong is a comfort both to Fernandes and to his readers.

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on August 30, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Naresh Fernandes. 

Somewhere, halfway through Yasmin Khan’s wonderful new book, I go looking for a picture of Aruna Asaf Ali, née Ganguli. I have only the vaguest recollection of her, but the woman Khan describes is entirely fascinating. When we first meet her, Aruna, the wife of Congress party member Asaf Ali, is “more noted for her saris than her political views”. But then her husband, along with much of the national leadership of Congress, is imprisoned in 1942. Though she is not among those arrested, she will shortly make the British government wish she had been.

Aruna, now a friend to revolutionaries, goes underground to evade arrest, popping up all over the country to ferment rebellion against the Raj. Eventually her fame and popularity eclipses her husband’s. Behind bars, he frets for her safety and agonises over his own, much less militant politics; he notes in his diary that his wife, 21 years younger, is “now an overzealous stranger,” bobbing her hair short and using unknown pseudonyms. Their marriage survives India’s eventual independence in name only. The crucible of the war years and the long struggle for independence has exposed and exacerbated every disagreement, every divergence in ideology between this man and wife. On a much grander scale, it will do the same for the Raj and its colony.

On the eve of World War II, the literacy rate in India was 12.5 per cent and life expectancy was 26. In the years that followed, Khan notes that “The war flattened out pretensions of empire… It mobilised women, workers and the urban middle classes in radical new ways. It heightened nationalism, both in India and in Britain…” The war, she concludes, left the Raj “in debt, morally redundant and staffed by exhausted administrators”. Certainly, World War II made the British Raj untenable in India. Jinnah himself would note: “The war which nobody welcomed proved to be a blessing in disguise.”

Khan is an associate Professor of History at the University of Oxford and no stranger to this period in South Asia — her first publication, The Great Partition: The Making of India and Pakistan, won the Gladstone Prize in 2007. In The Raj at War, Khan makes the assertion that “Britain did not fight the Second World War, the British Empire did”. There is an aspect to this that is well known — after all the Indian Army accounted for a significant portion of Britain’s forces, and men from this country fought and died in the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe. By 1940, about 2 lakh soldiers were enlisting a month and by 1945, the force would number well over 2 million — the largest volunteer army the world had ever seen.

But Khan’s book expands its remit to embrace those who tend to disappear into the background in most military histories: she writes of the mothers who sent their sons to war, the merchants who made their fortunes off supplying armies, and the peasants who saw their fields of paddy razed to make runways. In fact there are so many narrative threads in this ambitious, dense book that the author never seems to rest. Instead, she casts a dancing spotlight, its intimate circle illuminating lives through fragments of letters, memoirs, official reports and even popular folk songs.

As a result, this book contains within it multitude of other books, each compressed to a chapter or just a few paragraphs. For a reader, the absence of a central, strong narrative arc can be disorienting, but it is in the end a rewarding experience. Khan is an intelligent, compassionate guide to this moment in time, bringing depth and nuance not just to the events that we study in our history books but seeking beyond to those that are neglected such as the Bengal famine.

There is a telling moment at the end of this book where the Congress Minister in Madras, Raghavan Menon is approached by British writer Compton Mackenzie about a volume the latter is writing on the Indian experience of the war. Menon’s response leaves Mackenzie surprised: “He said at once that he was not interested in the book because he and his party had not considered it their war.”

It is an argument that seems to have lingered in India’s consciousness, for to acknowledge it in all its complexity would be to threaten the supremacy of chauvinistic, patriarchal national narratives. In Britain, Khan writes, remembering would be equally inconvenient for a country intent on celebrating a “story of plucky small-island British heroism”. The latter explains why it took till 2002 for the Commonwealth to install a memorial in London to honour India’s war dead.

In this context, The Raj at War is a very welcome addition to the historical canon. Khan produces stories that fascinate, that startle and that bring us to a point of confrontation with what she dubs the “terrible decisions, strange juxtapositions and unforeseen consequences,” of a long and devastating conflict — but at least now we have the option of acknowledging them all.

Published in the Hindu BusinessLine on September 11, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

[Colombo] In the run-up to critical parliamentary elections on 17 August, Manthri.lk, a parliamentary performance monitoring website, is providing unprecedented insight into the workings of Sri Lanka’s government.

Asoka Obeyesekere, leader of the Manthri.lk team, says the site was created to bridge the information gap “between the parliament and the public.” The site is run by Verité, a non-partisan Colombo-based think tank in partnership with Saberion, a transnational web and mobile technology provider. It is accessible in Sinhala, Tamil and English and aims to promote transparency and good governance.

Billed as an ‘MP monitoring scorecard,’ the site ranks Sri Lanka’s 225 MPs on productive time spent. The impartial classification coding system is based on data collected from a comprehensive analysis of the Hansard, a verbatim record of parliamentary proceedings. MPs who are active and contribute to Parliamentary proceedings in a procedurally correct manner are rewarded, while those who disrupt Parliament and impede its functions are penalised. The system is entirely non-partisan.

Obeyesekere explains that each minister is assigned a number within the system, allowing for a record of every contribution he or she makes in Parliament. Statements are qualified by methods of contribution, topic, type of debate and the language that the contribution is submitted in.

The site’s new ‘Election Hub’ allows visitors to see how MPs voted on key pieces of legislation, and offers additional rankings based on the minutes of the influential consultative committees. There is also a comprehensive list of candidate names and numbers which are otherwise hard to find in one place.

Obeyesekere stresses that Manthri.lk’s rankings are not definitive, as an MP’s value to his or her constituents might be determined by grassroots work undertaken outside Parliament. Information is also lacking, with MPs educational qualifications, Parliament attendance, and assets records not available in the public domain. “We have to rethink these arcane secrecy provisions that stop people from disseminating this vital information,” says Obeyesekere.

Policy Analyst Rohan Samarajiva says the site’s most important contribution is that it has given mainstream media information to work with but that the format may still be “a little too techy” for the average user.

Sanjana Hattotuwa, editor of the citizen journalism website Groundviews, agrees that the site is yet to see wide usage, which he says is unfortunate: “The value of such a site is that it allows that citizens to keeps tabs on who they have elected into public office and parliament and to see if their representatives have lived up to their promises.”

Published on SciDev.Net on August 15, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Sven Torfinn / Panos.

[COLOMBO] High spatial resolution images captured by drones are bettering those generated by satellites, and enabling researchers in Sri Lanka to study crop health and irrigation in greater detail.

A team of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI) has been testing the Swiss-manufactured eBee, or Electronic Bee in the skies above the Anuradhapura district, this month (September). “Usually, the clear sky window doesn’t coincide with a satellite pass,” says Salman Siddiqui, head of the organisation’s geographic information systems.

“With a near infrared sensor on board, the eBee can help us or farmers identify stress in a crop 10 days before it actually shows up physically,” says Siddiqui. Multiple images taken by a drone can be stitched together to produce a digital surface or elevation model in virtual 3D. These can, for example, help identify areas vulnerable to flooding.

The 16 megapixel camera on-board the eBee boasts a spatial resolution of up to three centimetres which is significantly more detailed than images generated, for instance, by Google Earth which clocks in at five metres.

The drone also allows scientists to determine the frequency with which images are updated. In contrast, satellites data is usually refreshed only every 15 days or so. “Of course another major factor is the cost of satellite images, particularly when the area has to be covered several times,” says Siddiqui.

The eBee can spend up to 45 minutes in the air on a single charge of its batteries. Its sensors keep it stable through shifting winds and allow it to avoid other objects that might be sharing its airspace. On completion of mission, the eBee lands automatically, guided by its artificial intelligence module and the global positioning system.

P.M.P. Udayakantha, Sri Lanka’s surveyor general, expects that the eBee will come in useful in developing a national cadastre and doing strip surveys along road traces, canals and highways. “We are planning to do a survey of Badulla town with the UAV — this can expedite most of the work,” he tells SciDev.Net.

32 years after the riots of Black July engulfed Colombo, there is perhaps only one place in the city where you can still see traces of the fires that were set that day. But that is not the reason why tuk-tuk drivers will throw you an assessing look if you ask to be dropped off at the Rio in Slave Island. For most part, the once luxurious, 60-room hotel is forgotten, as is the adjoining Navah Cinema. It is the third member of that complex – an adult film cinema, also called the Rio – that has earned the venue its notoriety. But today, walk past the box office (unless you would like a ticket to watch Pussy Cat), take a right, brave a dark corridor and you will find yourself at the threshold of the city’s most unusual art exhibition.

From August 21, a festival called Cinnamon Colomboscope has brought visitors pouring into the once abandoned hotel for the exhibition Shadow Scenes. About 40 local and international artists have created 51 pieces for the show, which occupies all seven of the hotel’s floors and is on view till August 30.

Natasha Ginwala, who curated the show with Menika Van Der Poorten, said that the building itself was one of the reasons she was drawn to the project. Born and raised in Ahmedabad, Ginwala moved to Europe five years ago. For this project, she found her memories of the Gujarat riots of 2002 influencing her response to the space. “It became quite personal. I had to think about this as a living ruin and an archive that had endured this kind of history.”

The history she’s referring to is the anti-Tamil pogrom in Sri Lanka that was launched in July 1983 after an ambush by the terrorist group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam claimed the lives of 13 soldiers in the Sri Lankan army. Mainly Sinhalese mobs led a week of rioting that left some 150,000 people homeless and anywhere between 400 and 3,000 people dead. The numbers remain disputed.

Today, the area around the Rio is also contested, but for a different reason. The neighbourhood of Slave Island, known in Sinhala as Kompannaveediya and in Tamil as Kompani Theru, both meaning Company Street, was marked for a beautification drive under former President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s government. In a controversial move, some 582 families were evicted two years ago to make way for a $429.5 million development project in the area by Tata Housing.

Now, work there has been suspended while Tata Housing negotiates with President Maithripala Sirisena’s new government. Meanwhile, the affected families wait in an uneasy limbo.

The first floor of the Rio and the opening of the exhibition attempts to introduce viewers to this context with a series of photographs of the communities affected by the beautification drive. In subsequent levels, artists have been assigned rooms in which to create individual scenes.

The approach has paid off, with diverse responses across a range of media, including film, photography, sculpture, audio and paintings. Room has also been made for foreign perspectives, from the quiet sophistication of Indian artist Rathin Barman’s brick dust and ink in Documentation of Architectural Reconciliation to the Karachi-II series, Pakistani artist Bani Abidi’s meditation on the cinemas of Lahore.

Bani Abidi: Funland, Karachi Series II, 2013-14, film and photographic prints. 

At the very top, in what once housed the nightclub Eagles’ Nest, an audio installation by Colombian artist Pedro Gómez-Egaña, and a panoramic view of the numerous development projects dotting the city greets visitors. “From up there you can hypothesise what future can be composed from the present of the city,” said Ginwala, “while in the interior you move through the past, shuttering across time and temporalities.”

Pedro Gómez-Egaña: The Vimana Kiranaavarta Observatory, 2015;  sound installation. 

Preparing the decrepit building for this exhibition has presented its own set of challenges. Jan Ramesh De Saram, cultural affairs coordinator at the Goethe-Institut in Colombo, says the entire structure first had to have electricity put in. Sections with broken roofs, which were open to the elements and frequently flooded, had to be repaired, he added. Undaunted, artists Mahen Perera and Janananda Laksiri actually took advantage of the stagnant water in their rooms to create a reflective surface for suspended, site responsive installations.

Mahen Perera: Things, 2015; site-responsive sculptures.

Taken together, the 51 exhibits have in common an approach that emphasises participatory, research-based, highly personal and socially responsive works, said Van Der Poorten. She took particular care to include pieces by artists such as Pakkiyarajah Pushpakanthan, Thavarasa Thajendran, Mariya Thevathas Vijitharan and Thujiba Vijayalayan, who live and work in Jaffna. The region felt the full brunt of the war, and as a consequence has been traditionally underrepresented in the country’s art scene.

Among the participating artists are those who have been internally displaced or imprisoned both during the war and in violent insurrections such as those staged by Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna in 1971 and again in 1987. The artwork that arises from this lived experience is powerful and emotive.

In T Shanaathanan’s Nation for instance, a barricade of traditional sand bags is interspersed with sacks made from lavish wedding sarees – the last resort of people who had run out of other materials from which to build their defences. The barricade is circular, and the space around it, representing civil society, is narrow and cramped.

T Shanaathanan: Nation, 2015; installation.

Prominent artist Chandraguptha Thenuwara is one of those whose works are on display. Since 1997, Thenuwara has staged a brave annual one-man exhibition in memory of Black July. Until 2009, when the conflict was brought to a brutal conclusion, his works were determinedly anti-war but in the post-war years he took to grappling with contemporary issues related to ethnic divisions in the country.

Since a change in government in January, there is a sense that there is now more room for national introspection. Thenuwara is pleased to see something on the scale of Shadow Scenes take place. “This might be the only space remaining that is related to the 1983 riots; beautification and development have erased a lot of memories,” he said of the Rio.

Chandragupta Thenuwara: Lotus Zone, 2015; drawings and installation. 

Some of the young artists engaging with these issues weren’t even born in 1983, but Ginwala said the curators made a determined effort to ensure the exhibition wasn’t mired in the history it was grappling with. “For us it was not about looking back and being immobilised,” she said, “but saying, this happened and now what can we do from here.”

A few other works from the exhibition.

Kavan Balasurya: Capital Complex, 2015; acrylic, graphite and pastel on paper.

Pradeep Chandrasiri: Inside the Charcoal Mountain, 2015;
installation with charcoal wall drawing. 

Agnieszka Polska: The leisure time of a firearm, 2015; mixed media. Photo courtesy of artist and Żak | Branicka Galerie, Berlin.

(Above and below) Pala Pothupitiye: Borakakul & Borakakul, 2004; installation.

Published on Scroll.in on August 27, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Ruvin de Silva. 

Simon Singh is immediately recognisable in a crowd — his dramatic haircut riffs on a Mohawk and his oval, gold-rimmed glasses glint in the light. One of Britain’s leading science communicators, Singh left Cambridge with a PhD in particle physics and followed that with a stint at CERN. He then joined the BBC as a producer and director working on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. His documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem won him a BAFTA award and an Emmy nomination. He is also the author of five books, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, but it’s the title of his fourth book, published in 2008, that prompts me to ask him about his opinion of homeopathy.

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial showcases Singh’s penchant for speaking his mind, which he seems more than happy to do again. “All the evidence we have tells us that homeopathy doesn’t work, for any condition at all,” he says emphatically. Describing a lecture he gave the day before at an university, he reveals that in an impromptu poll of his audience, 49 per cent said they thought it effective, albeit less effective than modern medicine, and a mere one per cent said it doesn’t work.

Singh isn’t feigning his dismay when he reports that asking for evidence from the crowd only drew anecdotes. “I think it’s really important that people use evidence rather than personal experience. Personal experience is a good starting point but our personal experience can mislead us. Our personal experience told us that bloodletting was good, our personal experience told us that astrology was good. Our personal experience tells us all sorts of things. In fact,” he says, peering over the terrace where we’re sitting, “the world looks pretty flat from here.”

Singh’s fierce commitment to science runs deep and strong, it’s what saw him through a harrowing five-year battle with Britain’s antiquated libel law. It all began with a 2008 blog published on The Guardianwebsite in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming that chiropractors could treat childhood conditions such as colic and asthma. The organisation promptly responded by suing him for libel under Britain’s famously sympathetic laws.

Singh refused to back down, spending tens of thousands of pounds defending himself in court, but the trial galvanised libel reform campaigners and is said to have contributed significantly to the movement that culminated in the passing of the Defamation Act 2013. He and likeminded colleagues have since set up the Good Thinking Society ‘to encourage curiosity and promote rational thinking’. Looking back at the time, Singh savours his victory: “So many people were being threatened and that was ridiculous. We were writing in public interest, and if we can’t write what we want to write, that means that other people don’t hear what they ought to be hearing.”

When pressed for why he’s willing to go out on a limb, Singh lists his many advantages — a wife, Anita Anand, who is a journalist; a steady income from his books; their ownership of their home; the powerful allies they have been able to call on. But later admits ruefully, “I get so angry, I get so frustrated when I see people being ripped off, people being taken advantage of, when I see people saying things are scientific, when they’re pseudoscientific. Those make me so angry and annoyed that it’s easier for me to do something than to just live with that pent-up aggression.”

It seems an uncharacteristic admission from an otherwise even-tempered man, and so it’s perhaps fortuitous that Singh often finds his attention drawn to more playful subjects. His latest book — The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets — celebrates the iconic American TV show’s history of embedding complex theorems and equations into unlikely places: the blackboard in Bart’s classroom or the scoreboard at Duff Stadium in Springfield. (Singh’s favourite episode, in case you are curious, is ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.) To write the book he watched endless repeats of the show, quizzed the writing team composed of an astonishing percentage of math geeks and pored over commentaries and behind-the-scenes reports.

By following this and other obsessions, the author, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1950s, is giving his son a very different childhood from his own. In March, the family is looking forward to seeing a full solar eclipse from the Faroe Islands — the last one visible in Europe till 2026. In the meantime at home, he and Hari are discovering science together. They conduct experiments where they put soap in the microwave, sprinkle different substances on the gas oven to see what colours result and test the effect acid has on seeds. Singh says he definitely hasn’t set his hopes on his boy growing up to be a scientist, but instead wants them to just enjoy their time together. “He understands what an experiment is,” he says, explaining that the five-year-old is already a proponent of the scientific method. In the process, Hari is already absorbing some of his father’s most profound convictions, not least of which is seeing is not always believing.

Simon Singh is immediately recognisable in a crowd — his dramatic haircut riffs on a Mohawk and his oval, gold-rimmed glasses glint in the light. One of Britain’s leading science communicators, Singh left Cambridge with a PhD in particle physics and followed that with a stint at CERN. He then joined the BBC as a producer and director working on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. His documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem won him a BAFTA award and an Emmy nomination. He is also the author of five books, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, but it’s the title of his fourth book, published in 2008, that prompts me to ask him about his opinion of homeopathy.

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial showcases Singh’s penchant for speaking his mind, which he seems more than happy to do again. “All the evidence we have tells us that homeopathy doesn’t work, for any condition at all,” he says emphatically. Describing a lecture he gave the day before at an university, he reveals that in an impromptu poll of his audience, 49 per cent said they thought it effective, albeit less effective than modern medicine, and a mere one per cent said it doesn’t work.

Singh isn’t feigning his dismay when he reports that asking for evidence from the crowd only drew anecdotes. “I think it’s really important that people use evidence rather than personal experience. Personal experience is a good starting point but our personal experience can mislead us. Our personal experience told us that bloodletting was good, our personal experience told us that astrology was good. Our personal experience tells us all sorts of things. In fact,” he says, peering over the terrace where we’re sitting, “the world looks pretty flat from here.”

Singh’s fierce commitment to science runs deep and strong, it’s what saw him through a harrowing five-year battle with Britain’s antiquated libel law. It all began with a 2008 blog published on The Guardianwebsite in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming that chiropractors could treat childhood conditions such as colic and asthma. The organisation promptly responded by suing him for libel under Britain’s famously sympathetic laws.

Singh refused to back down, spending tens of thousands of pounds defending himself in court, but the trial galvanised libel reform campaigners and is said to have contributed significantly to the movement that culminated in the passing of the Defamation Act 2013. He and likeminded colleagues have since set up the Good Thinking Society ‘to encourage curiosity and promote rational thinking’. Looking back at the time, Singh savours his victory: “So many people were being threatened and that was ridiculous. We were writing in public interest, and if we can’t write what we want to write, that means that other people don’t hear what they ought to be hearing.”

When pressed for why he’s willing to go out on a limb, Singh lists his many advantages — a wife, Anita Anand, who is a journalist; a steady income from his books; their ownership of their home; the powerful allies they have been able to call on. But later admits ruefully, “I get so angry, I get so frustrated when I see people being ripped off, people being taken advantage of, when I see people saying things are scientific, when they’re pseudoscientific. Those make me so angry and annoyed that it’s easier for me to do something than to just live with that pent-up aggression.”

It seems an uncharacteristic admission from an otherwise even-tempered man, and so it’s perhaps fortuitous that Singh often finds his attention drawn to more playful subjects. His latest book — The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets — celebrates the iconic American TV show’s history of embedding complex theorems and equations into unlikely places: the blackboard in Bart’s classroom or the scoreboard at Duff Stadium in Springfield. (Singh’s favourite episode, in case you are curious, is ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.) To write the book he watched endless repeats of the show, quizzed the writing team composed of an astonishing percentage of math geeks and pored over commentaries and behind-the-scenes reports.

By following this and other obsessions, the author, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1950s, is giving his son a very different childhood from his own. In March, the family is looking forward to seeing a full solar eclipse from the Faroe Islands — the last one visible in Europe till 2026. In the meantime at home, he and Hari are discovering science together. They conduct experiments where they put soap in the microwave, sprinkle different substances on the gas oven to see what colours result and test the effect acid has on seeds. Singh says he definitely hasn’t set his hopes on his boy growing up to be a scientist, but instead wants them to just enjoy their time together. “He understands what an experiment is,” he says, explaining that the five-year-old is already a proponent of the scientific method. In the process, Hari is already absorbing some of his father’s most profound convictions, not least of which is seeing is not always believing.

Simon Singh is immediately recognisable in a crowd — his dramatic haircut riffs on a Mohawk and his oval, gold-rimmed glasses glint in the light. One of Britain’s leading science communicators, Singh left Cambridge with a PhD in particle physics and followed that with a stint at CERN. He then joined the BBC as a producer and director working on programmes such as Tomorrow’s World and Horizon. His documentary about Fermat’s Last Theorem won him a BAFTA award and an Emmy nomination. He is also the author of five books, notably Fermat’s Last Theorem, The Code Book and The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, but it’s the title of his fourth book, published in 2008, that prompts me to ask him about his opinion of homeopathy.

Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial showcases Singh’s penchant for speaking his mind, which he seems more than happy to do again. “All the evidence we have tells us that homeopathy doesn’t work, for any condition at all,” he says emphatically. Describing a lecture he gave the day before at an university, he reveals that in an impromptu poll of his audience, 49 per cent said they thought it effective, albeit less effective than modern medicine, and a mere one per cent said it doesn’t work.

Singh isn’t feigning his dismay when he reports that asking for evidence from the crowd only drew anecdotes. “I think it’s really important that people use evidence rather than personal experience. Personal experience is a good starting point but our personal experience can mislead us. Our personal experience told us that bloodletting was good, our personal experience told us that astrology was good. Our personal experience tells us all sorts of things. In fact,” he says, peering over the terrace where we’re sitting, “the world looks pretty flat from here.”

Singh’s fierce commitment to science runs deep and strong, it’s what saw him through a harrowing five-year battle with Britain’s antiquated libel law. It all began with a 2008 blog published on The Guardianwebsite in which he criticised the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) for claiming that chiropractors could treat childhood conditions such as colic and asthma. The organisation promptly responded by suing him for libel under Britain’s famously sympathetic laws.

Singh refused to back down, spending tens of thousands of pounds defending himself in court, but the trial galvanised libel reform campaigners and is said to have contributed significantly to the movement that culminated in the passing of the Defamation Act 2013. He and likeminded colleagues have since set up the Good Thinking Society ‘to encourage curiosity and promote rational thinking’. Looking back at the time, Singh savours his victory: “So many people were being threatened and that was ridiculous. We were writing in public interest, and if we can’t write what we want to write, that means that other people don’t hear what they ought to be hearing.”

When pressed for why he’s willing to go out on a limb, Singh lists his many advantages — a wife, Anita Anand, who is a journalist; a steady income from his books; their ownership of their home; the powerful allies they have been able to call on. But later admits ruefully, “I get so angry, I get so frustrated when I see people being ripped off, people being taken advantage of, when I see people saying things are scientific, when they’re pseudoscientific. Those make me so angry and annoyed that it’s easier for me to do something than to just live with that pent-up aggression.”

It seems an uncharacteristic admission from an otherwise even-tempered man, and so it’s perhaps fortuitous that Singh often finds his attention drawn to more playful subjects. His latest book — The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets — celebrates the iconic American TV show’s history of embedding complex theorems and equations into unlikely places: the blackboard in Bart’s classroom or the scoreboard at Duff Stadium in Springfield. (Singh’s favourite episode, in case you are curious, is ‘Treehouse of Horror VI’.) To write the book he watched endless repeats of the show, quizzed the writing team composed of an astonishing percentage of math geeks and pored over commentaries and behind-the-scenes reports.

By following this and other obsessions, the author, whose parents emigrated from India in the 1950s, is giving his son a very different childhood from his own. In March, the family is looking forward to seeing a full solar eclipse from the Faroe Islands — the last one visible in Europe till 2026. In the meantime at home, he and Hari are discovering science together. They conduct experiments where they put soap in the microwave, sprinkle different substances on the gas oven to see what colours result and test the effect acid has on seeds. Singh says he definitely hasn’t set his hopes on his boy growing up to be a scientist, but instead wants them to just enjoy their time together. “He understands what an experiment is,” he says, explaining that the five-year-old is already a proponent of the scientific method. In the process, Hari is already absorbing some of his father’s most profound convictions, not least of which is seeing is not always believing.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on January 30, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Jaipur Literary Festival. 

Anuradha Roy’s opening line in Sleeping on Jupiter soon proves itself a lie. Her protagonist, Nomita tells us: “The year the war came closer, I was six or seven and it did not matter to me.” But the reader knows better than the little girl — the proximity of conflict always matters. Nomi lives in a kind of paradise, from which she is soon to face eviction, though she doesn’t know that yet. Cast on the mercy of the world, she will find it has little to spare for her.

Roy’s third book, I should tell you right away, is almost relentlessly grim. Her characters, who are complicated and conflicted, are a result of a world underpinned with loss and suffering. Nomi is ostensibly the linchpin on which the story turns. We meet her first, catch glimpses of her journey into adulthood and then return with her to India. By then she is Nomi Frederiksen, daughter to a mother who abandoned her, adopted by another whom she rejects.

In the fictional seaside town of Jarmuli, famous for its temples and ashrams, Nomi’s story arc converges with a small horde of other characters. It is immediately evident that Roy has an enviable sense of place. She imagines into being a temple city crowded with pilgrims, tourists and those who would make a living there. Here, the scent of incense mingles with that of fish — fresh, fried and rotting.

Down by the water, you can dig your toes into the sand, but beware this treacherous coast. The Bay of Bengal stretches as far as the eye can see, its surface ravaged by monsoon winds, its depths offering forgetfulness for a price. It is here that Suraj — ostensibly the fixer for Nomi’s documentary project — goes to swim, and here that Badal, the temple guide, comes to look for Raghu, who he is desperately in love with.

It is here that Latika dreams of simply sitting by the sea and drinking coconut water while on her first real — and likely last — holiday with her friends Gouri and Vidya. These three quickly become my favourites.

Gouri nurtures a deep spirituality, and her warmth and humour provide a kind of tragic counterpoint to her ongoing, inexorable loss of memory; Vidya’s “forty years in the bureaucracy” are paired with a “preoccupied self-importance”; but burgundy-haired Latika is still capable of surprising us all. She is (relatively) sprightly, innately irreverent and about to get drunk for the very first time.

Roy sketches these women with pragmatic compassion and real insight. As an author, this is indisputably her gift, a willingness to pause long enough to provide even the most minor character with a backstory that lends their presence depth and weight. A perfect example of this is the mysterious Johnny Toppo, the tea-seller who sings hauntingly lovely folk songs, as he serves up tea spiced with ginger and cardamom. Out of the likes of Toppo, Roy weaves a bold, sprawling tapestry of emotion and human interaction.

Roy’s other gift is an ability to write in a way that is acutely pleasing to the senses. Her words allow her readers to see, smell, taste. She is so potent that at the end of the book, I still remember a simple description from her first page — of Nomi’s brother cutting down a grapefruit from their family’s tree. The fruit is pale yellow and heavy with juice, its skin is stippled but its flesh is a tender pink, the scent of it is tart and fresh.

However, while Roy writes with assurance and skill, I find that her plot choices sometimes stretch the limits of my appetite for tragedy and reinforce clichés. The same descriptive gift which leaves me with a mild craving for a grapefruit, makes a long series of violently abusive encounters difficult to read: a murder by machete that leaves a father squealing like pigs at the slaughter, the sale and rape of a young girl, the snapping of a man’s sanity and his battery of an animal… and all this just in the first half of the novel.

Even when the book is not exploding into violence, there is a steady undertow of disquiet and grief. What balance exists I find only around Vidya, Latika and Gouri. (I catch myself wishing that I could shed the other characters for the honest, interesting company of just these three.)

But there are other compensations for reading Sleeping on Jupiter, such as its structure. Roy plays with time and place, switching between first person and third person; between five days in the present and a lifetime in the past. Her choice of whose thoughts we are privy to, and whose we are not, are deliberate and clever. Through them, we see a man undone by his deep love for a boy, yet are denied insight into another predator who systematically rapes and abuses his young charges. By choosing when we are inside Nomi’s head, Roy makes her past as real as her present, and allows us to see the unfurling of her courage.

In the writing, I realise it is this courage that keeps me reading through to the end. It is not just Nomi’s; while her courage is perhaps the most considerable, it is also the least interesting. Instead, valour infuses and elevates nearly every character.

Overarching all this is Roy’s own fearlessness as a writer — she is all raw feeling, and vivid life.

Published in The Hindu Businessline on June 5, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

I have always loved the story of how my grandparents fell in love.

Thatha was cycling down a street in Chennai, on his way to work, when he passed by Pattima’s house. She was on the balcony, brushing her beautiful long hair. They locked eyes and smiled shyly at each other. The rest – a marriage that lasted 52 years and produced three children and five grandchildren – is history.

Modern Romance, as Aziz Ansari will tell you, is an altogether different beast. In the age of Tinder, my grandparents may have locked eyes for the first time on a computer screen. Would they have both swiped right? Would their banter have been promising enough to make a meeting worthwhile? Would Pattima, in the end, have decided to go with the buff guy further down the street because he had a better grasp of punctuation?

It might feel like every contemporary American comedian has beaten Ansari to the punch. By the point Modern Romance hit shelves this year, Mindy Kaling had already spent three years wondering Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, Tina Fey had been a Bossypants for even longer than that, and though she was a little late to the party, Amy Poehler had said Yes, Please – in 2014, the same year Neil Patrick Harris instructed his fans to Choose Your Own Autobiography and Lena Dunham assured us all that she was Not That Kind of Girl.

But Ansari – the Indian-American stand-up comedian best known for playing Tom Haverford in the late, great series Parks and Rec – does something more interesting to justify his 3.5 million dollar advance from Penguin. Intensely personal, yet immediately universal, his new book tackles a seemingly exhausted topic yet, somehow, manages to deliver a quirky, surprisingly smart but above all practical guide to Modern Romance. (One, you’ll be pleased to hear, is also available in e-book and audiobook formats)

In his introduction, Ansari pinpoints the book’s inspiration as being the moment when he realised his phone went from trusted communication device to the receptacle of a ‘tornado of panic and hurt and anger’.  When a message inviting a girl he likes to a concert is ignored by the recipient (his phone helpfully marks it ‘read’), Ansari spends many, many torturous hours trying to make sense of the failure of his one-way text.

’I’m so stupid!’ he writes. ’I should have typed “Hey” with two y’s, not just one!’ The passage of 24 hours of silence only produces more angst: ‘Did Tanya’s phone fall into a river/trash compactor/volcano? Did Tanya fall into a river/trash compactor/volcano?? Oh no, Tanya has died, and I’m selfishly worried about our date.’ (Tanya, you’ll be glad to know is alive and well, just preoccupied.)

We’ve all been there – as Ansari discovered when he incorporated the incident into a well-received stand-up routine. That realisation kicked off an exploration of the intersections of love and technology in the modern world which spanned several months.

Written in collaboration with NYU sociology professor Eric Klinenberg, Modern Romance is an irreverent, informative read for the smartphone generation. There’s plenty of fascinating new data, mined from a forum on Reddit to in-person interviews and focus groups in locations as diverse as Qatar and Argentina. Klinenberg delivers on the analysis of behavioural data and surveys, and a host of experts like anthropologist Helen Fisher and Sheena Iyengar, author of The Art of Choosing, pitch in with their insights.

Ansari functions as a guide to this universe, paving the way with personal anecdotes, irreverent patter (sometimes annoying, most often not), heavy facts and plenty of agony aunt-style advice on finding and keeping love. He is so committed to the process that at one point he even masturbates into a Tenga – a Japanese egg-shaped sex toy – so you never have to. (‘It felt like I was masturbating with a thick, cold condom on…’)

The result of all this is an enjoyable hybrid of an anthropological treatise (‘For women in this era [1960s], it seemed that marriage was the easiest way of acquiring the freedoms of adulthood‘); irreverent geo-social commentary (‘If Tokyo is the capital of the “herbivore man”, then Buenos Aires must surely be the capital of the “rib eye-eating maniac”’); hard-core census data (‘France is the country with the highest rates of infidelity: 55 percent for men and 32 percent for women’); and the very latest scientific advice on how to take a selfie most likely to appeal to the opposite sex (‘If you are a woman, take a high angle selfie, with cleavage, while underwater near some buried treasure. If you are a guy, take a shot of yourself holding a puppy while both of you are spelunking’).

Ansari concludes, ’Technology hasn’t just changed how we find romance, it’s also put a new spin on the timeless challenges we face once we are in a relationship’: the agonies of online dating, whether there’s someone better out there for you, how to keep the passion alive, whether to have that affair or to risk a sext, to snoop or not to snoop on your partner, and crucially, how to breakup.

Modern Romance also succeeds as a variation on the celebrity memoir, with just enough about Ansari himself to whet your appetite. One thing is certain, Tanya really missed out when she ignored that text.

Published in Open on July 19, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. 

Jan Ramesh De Saram uses his phone as a torch, casting a small circle of light at his feet as he walks down the corridor. The passage ends in darkness, where bats squeak and flap their wings. A row of abandoned rooms are occupied only by an upturned chair or two, lonely rejects from the cinemas below. Above us, the Rio Hotel continues its ascent, seven stories up.

We take the stairs and, as we clear the rooflines of the surrounding buildings, light floods the structure.

At the top a brisk wind breaks on our faces as we look out onto a city in the throes of transformation. On one side, a cluster of dark asbestos roofs, then the ugly sprawl of a construction site. Beyond that, the blue of the Indian Ocean under a midday sun.

On the other side are more homes punctuated by the ornate gopuram of the Sri Subramaniya Kovil; dwarfed, in its turn, by the Lotus Tower, a controversial, unfinished construction project begun by a previous government. We are in the heart of Colombo, furious new development all around.

Jan recognises the inevitability of encroachment:

“Every time I’m here, I think this building will be here for another five years, it might even be here for another 10, but I think it will eventually be replaced by something big,” he says. Since he first rediscovered the space in 2012, Jan has been one of its most determined champions.  As the Cultural Affairs Coordinator at the Goethe-Institut in Colombo, he’s nudged theatre companies, art and music festivals in the direction of the Rio complex. Organisers have had their pick of two theatres (one abandoned, one not) and a derelict hotel with 60 rooms.

There is something about this place that affects Jan, but he finds not everyone shares his enthusiasm for it. When they invited artists to come and explore it as a possible exhibition space, one said it looked more like a spot where junkies would go to shoot up. Last year, when Pettah Interchange brought a host of DJs into the city for a party here, a guest asked to be taken home. She said she saw ghostly figures wandering among the revellers, and felt afraid.

Tuk-tuk drivers do a double take when you ask to be dropped off here – the Rio Cinema is itself infamous as the host of adult films, all outdated and on an endless rota of reruns. The adjoining Navah Cinema is gutted, the storage depot for a bottle shop out back. We peek in through a gap in a boarded up door, but Jan’s feeble torch cannot illuminate the interior of the vast space.

It’s hard to believe this complex was once amongst the area’s best known landmarks. When the Rio opened its doors in 1965, it was to offer Sri Lankans their first sight of a 70mm TODD-AO projection system. In the audience on the opening night was a man only a month away from his fourth – and longest – stint as Prime Minister (Dudley Senanayake) and a young girl who would go on to become Sri Lanka’s President (Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga), 29 years later.

A journalist from the Ceylon Daily News waxed lyrical about the venue, writing: ‘As for being an average theatre, the Rio is not…The seats are unobstructed, large and comfortable, upholstered in foam rubber and creamy-beige rexine, with satin wood arms…the movie vertically operated screen is a beauty.’

In the years since, the complex has come close to demolition more than once.  The family that owns it cannot decide what to do with it. Jan, on the other hand, is full of ideas. He imagined the space being turned into ‘a cultural entertainment initiative’ – part café, part gallery and part nightclub venue – and submitted this as a proposal to the owners. However, earlier today he was told they could not rent him the space.

He’s philosophical about it. Now, standing in what used to be the Eagle’s Nest nightclub, he says: “What I like about it is it’s not some kind of master architect’s plan but Thambi’s father’s patchwork construction…things just got added, there’s a door which connects the theatre with the hotel, or even doors that lead nowhere. It’s not a perfectly planned-out space but very organically grown. I feel the character of the mysterious old Mr. Navaratnam is very present in it.”

This Mr Navaratnam’s son is the man I meet, in a room behind the box office downstairs.  His name is Ratnarajah Navaratnam, known to all as Thambi (meaning little brother, as he was the youngest of his siblings) and he was in Colombo in the July of 1983. His parents Navaratnam and Rukmani were in India, and he is glad they were not here when the mob came.

He tells me his is a family with respectable antecedents. (On his mother’s side, his great-grandfather Sangarapillai was the founder of the Manipay Hindu College in Jaffna.) But his parents themselves were not rich to begin with. Thambi’s father, Navaratnam, lost his own father very young.  His father had been a soldier in the British army and, when he died, Navaratnam was forced to leave school to support his family. He began to work in Colombo with his uncle Thambyah, the successful owner of the city’s first colour printing press.

Navaratnam was by all accounts a remarkably enterprising and hardworking man. He made a success of the business, multiplied his investments and raised loans until he was able to build the Navah Cinema, whose construction he oversaw himself, without the help of an architect. It was a process he would repeat with both the Rio Cinema and Hotel.

Navaratnam eventually became so experienced that he could, by instinct alone, instruct the builders on the proportions of sand, cement and water that had to go into the concrete mix. On nights when the builders worked all night, he stayed with them till sunrise.

His children remember their father as pious and stern – “a traditional Jaffna father” – but being the sons of a successful cinema owner had its benefits. People affectionately dubbed the Rio the R-10, and for a while that was also what Thambi’s friends called him. He would write them little notes guaranteeing them free entrance into the theatre, but never so many that his father would notice.

If Navaratnam had an obvious soft spot, it was for the surrounding area. In English it is known as Slave Island, a name that many signboards still carry. But in Sinhala and Tamil it is Kompannaveediya/Kompani Theru or Company Street. The Beira Lake once encircled this space completely, and it was home to African slaves of the Dutch and Portuguese colonisers. Later it became a hub for traders and businesses and, to date, remains a pocket of incredible diversity within the city. Temples, churches and mosques are separated by the narrowest of streets, and the neighbourhood is thick with Sri Lankan Moor, Malay, Tamil and Sinhalese families, with the odd Dutch Burgher in the mix. (It is one of the few places in town you can buy an authentic Malay pastol, a traditional pastry stuffed with meat.)

Growing up, Thambi remembers his father’s deep emotional investment in the surrounding communities. It was a rare cause to which Navaratnam did not generously contribute, he says, and he was even-handed with people of every faith. His car was always available on loan to locals when they needed it for a celebration or a funeral. According to Thambi, when the family asked him to move to a more genteel part of town, his father always refused. “He would tell us, ‘This is the area I grew up in, this is the area that I support, this is the area that I stand by and this is the area I want to grow old in.’”

It seemed a space somehow protected from the rising ethnic tensions in other parts of the country.

In 1956, less than a decade after Sri Lanka won its independence, Parliament passed what is commonly known as The Sinhala Only Act.  Many argue that this Act, which made Sinhala the only language of administration, was a nationalistic act of revenge for British colonial ‘divide and rule’ policies. It had many repercussions, notably forcing thousands of Tamil civil servants to resign because they could not work in the Sinhala language. Island-wide ethnic riots broke out for the first time in 1958. Tamil lives and property became the targets of Sinhalese mobs in the South and there were occasional retaliatory attacks on Sinhalese targets in the north and east. As a precaution during that time, Navaratnam uprooted his young family and moved back to the relative safety of Jaffna (a traditionally Tamil majority area) for two months. When they returned, everything seemed as before.

Acknowledging his father’s “tremendous political connections,” Thambi says there still seemed no need to call on them. “My father was a very stubborn, very proud man. He believed one had to work, to earn something. He would never ask for political favours.”

In any case, when something did happen, there was no political protection to be had.

The first Thambi heard of it was that the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam had ambushed and killed 13 soldiers in the north of the country. The very next day, a heated controversy around the return of the soldiers’ bodies sparked a week of deadly rioting around the country and particularly in Colombo.  Mainly Sinhalese mobs began to operate, seeking out Tamil homes and businesses to attack.

Not long after that, the mob arrived at the doors of the Rio.

Premadasa’s is the Rio’s oldest employee, and though he now works at another cinema in the city, he still has a space to live on the premises with his family.  Premadasa’s home is accessible through the parking garage at the Rio. He is, as he always was, the consummate odd job man. He can turn his hand to many things, from running the box office to cleaning the popcorn machine, even managing basic accounts when called upon.

Premadasa’s assessment of Navaratnam is quite similar to that of Navaratnam’s children – that he was strict but fair. Now 63, Premadasa was a young man when he first entered Navaratnam’s service, earning some five rupees a day for the film posters he would paste in various parts of the city. He was soon promoted to being a hall attendant, responsible for seating 600 people at a time. He remembers the Rio was among the most successful cinemas in the city – many shows were sold out, even the balcony where a ticket cost Rs 3.20.

On the day of the riot, Premadasa was on the property. He recalls that the rioters who came to the Rio were a mixed group, of Sinhalese people and Tamil-speaking Muslims as well. The mob was intent on stripping the property bare: they spent much of the day robbing the luxurious hotel of its furnishings and equipment and then, around sundown, set what remained on fire.

Thambi and his family had taken shelter at an upscale hotel close by, hoping the presence of tourists would give the authorities the motivation to fight off any mob. But they could see the smoke spiral into the sky from where the cinema stood.

Premadasa himself hid in the Navah, where he says the looters found him and stole his savings – some three to four hundred rupees. His life itself was likely spared because, as the son of a Tamil father and a Sinhala mother, he could speak both languages fluently.

Across the rest of the city, the attacks devastated homes, businesses and lives. Victims would say later that the organised mobs that arrived at their doorsteps were directed there by sheets of electoral registers. Among the Sinhala majority, conscience dictated choices – some were marauders, but friends and neighbours also stepped in to hide and defend their Tamil compatriots. Some 150,000 people are believed to have been made homeless, and the death count is disputed – various estimates place it anywhere between 400 and 3000 people.

Black July, as it would later be known, is taken to mark the beginning of a civil war between Tamil militants and the government of Sri Lanka that lasted nearly 30 years. It also drove an exodus, as a great number of Tamils left Sri Lanka for the shores of other countries.

Premadasa remembers old Mr. Navaratnam’s return from India a few days later: on seeing what had happened to his life’s work, he broke down and cried bitterly. Soon after that, he fell ill.

In 1984, the family emigrated to Australia. Navaratnam never returned to Kompannaveediya or to Sri Lanka. As he lay dying, Thambi says his father seemed immensely vulnerable. So distant before, he would now ask his children to sit by his side and simply hold his hand.

Today, the future of the Rio, indeed of the whole of Kompannaveediya, is uncertain. Much of the area was marked for a controversial ‘beautification’ drive under the recent Rajapaksa government, who brought the Urban Development Authority (UDA) under the purview of the Ministry of Defence (MoD). Three rounds of evictions had already been carried out in the area, but after elections in January made Maithripala Sirisena President, the UDA was de-linked from the MoD and all its development projects put under review.

It’s easy to see why this space is so contested. It is in a high security zone, bordered by luxurious hotel properties and government sites critical to national security – both the Ministry of Defence and the Air Force Headquarters are here. This is also one of the closest residential neighbourhoods to the bustling financial centre of the Fort.

Just across the road from the Rio is the Sri Subramaniya Kovil, a major Hindu temple, and a few doors down from there you will find Aslam Othman at the Federation of Kompannaveediya Masjids (FKM), where he serves as a Propaganda Secretary.  The group have taken the fight against evictions to Sri Lanka’s Supreme Court more than once, and wait with some trepidation to see what the area’s fate will be. In the meantime, there is much confusion over deeds, financial compensation and the allocation of new housing.

According to a report by the Centre for Policy Alternatives (CPA) published in April 2014, the number of families to be relocated over the next few years under the city’s Urban Regeneration Project is between 70, 000 and 135, 000 – again estimates vary widely.

Military backed evictions have been brutal and swift – one was carried out in 2010 by armed soldiers who, Aslam says, turned the area into a “warzone” and forced some 33 families to leave their homes with only a few days’ written notice. A case study of that incident in the CPA report reads: ‘Residents were left destitute, with many of their belongings destroyed, and for 3-4 days were housed and provided daily meals at the mosque by the Federation of Kompannaveediya Masjids (FKM), until they found alternative accommodation with relatives or elsewhere.’

Authorities promised that the families would be provided with new homes. In the meantime the State has offered them a sum for monthly rent but no compensation for their lost possessions, homes or businesses. In mid-2015, these families are yet to receive the alternate housing they were promised. “Development should happen,” concedes Aslam, but he says it needs to be better planned, follow democratic process and in general be “people friendly.”

Aslam’s family have lived in this area for a hundred years. To him the place is a microcosm of Sri Lankan secularity. “We have 10 mosques here …four Buddhist temples, a Hindu kovil beautiful enough to be a tourist attraction and many other individual Hindu statues located in this area.” This neighbourhood, with its dense little labyrinth of streets is full of homes built on a single perch (about 25m²) of land. Some of these now host two or three families in an incredibly confined space. Yet, this contributes to a strong feeling of community, as much socialising is accomplished on the streets and on the stoops of homes.

The land that was cleared of houses is now in the process of being built up. One space in particular, the enormous Cinnamon Life project, has the potential to dramatically alter the view from the Rio. When it is complete, the Indian Ocean will no longer be visible from the Eagle’s Nest.

In August 2015, a festival called ColomboScope will be the latest to make use of the Rio. Curators have planned an ambitious exhibition. ‘Shadow Scenes’ will allocate hotel rooms to a group of local and international artists for installations and exhibitions. The project is a reflection of Jan’s original inspiration – as a teenager growing up in Berlin, he remembers a movement that saw artists and intellectuals find new uses for the decrepit and abandoned buildings of East Germany.  Now, the hotel is being made as structurally sound as possible, but organisers nevertheless intend to restrict the number of people who enter and where they can wander.

There are also plans for a film that will touch on the history of the area and the cinema. Consequently, Premadasa has been approached more than once by people asking to hear his story. He cannot entirely fathom the recent interest in the theatre and the hotel as they are now, stripped of the grandeur he remembers so well. He is sad when he thinks about the past, but philosophical about what the future holds for the Rio. “Everything is like this in the world,” he says, “it comes and it goes.

On my last visit, Thambi is at the back of the cinema, meeting with suppliers of air-conditioning – as the city sweats in the throes of a heat wave, he thinks it’s about time to reinstall it at the Rio. He confesses that his heart is not with the hotel but with the cinema. He was born the year his father opened the doors of the Navah and has loved movies all his life.

Although Thambi has spent much of his life living and working in Sri Lanka, accepting the risks that came with it, his children are still abroad. His son dreams of coming back here to work, and Thambi hopes they will be able to do something with the property. “My hope for him is to do a huge complex here. Otherwise he would be bored, running a cinema is not such a time consuming job.” But Thambi’s eye is also on the past. “My father loved this place so much. I would like to see something standing here, in memory of him.”

Published on Commonwealth Writers on July 15, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Suda Shanmugaraja.

I find Laki Senanayake perched among his sculptures in the Barefoot gallery, laughing as he talks with the staff. He’s bare-chested, dressed in a bright orange sarong, his modesty preserved by a shawl in bright pink, red and orange slung over his shoulders. He has a red lighter tucked into the fold of fabric at his waist. He is 78 years old.

The abundance Laki contains within himself has not faded with age. His irrepressible vitality manifests itself in a portfolio of work that is so large, and so diverse, that it seems impossible to keep track of, even for the artist himself. Today, he cannot recall when he last had an exhibition dedicated predominantly to sculptures – instead there have been several collections of his paintings, a book cataloguing his long obsession with owls, articles in the press about his work with landscapes, his endless capacity for innovation.

There is a simple explanation for this. When it comes to sculptures, he usually works on the basis of commissions, and his metal creations go straight from his open air studio in Diyabubula to their new homes, without a pause in a gallery along the way. But sometimes, he will have his two baasunnes work on a new sculpture just to keep them busy.While he decides what to do with the finished pieces, the sculptures must bide their time in his water gardens in Dambulla; the boar and its piglet screech to a halt at the edge of the pond, the owl perches on the highest point of his roof, an elaborate chandelier hangs from a nearby tree, spinning slowly in the breeze.

The garden has always seemed a more natural setting for Laki’s creations than the gallery – not least because so many are inspired by the natural world.

His earliest memories of sculpting are from Lunuganga, where he remembers working with a tinker who came to make the gutters for Geoffrey Bawa’s beautiful home there. Laki never had any formal training, which he does not consider necessary. “Most people don’t bother to simply sit and look at things. You just have to break the animal’s shape down geometrically,” he says of design, as for the technical skills needed, various basunnes have taught him all he knows.

Over the years that followed that first attempt, he would make over 40 sculptures for Bawa –Laki estimates he was only ever paid for two, but the assurance that the figures would be displayed to perfection and be well cared for was, at the time, all the incentive he needed.

Laki’s collaboration with Bawa, and with the man’s successors, acclaimed architects like Anjalendran and Channa Daswatte, have created an enduring demand for his sculptures. Perhaps his most accessible work is the famed staircase at the Lighthouse Hotel in Galle. Bawa initially requested a painting that would follow the curving walls but with only six months till the hotel’s launch, Laki suggested using statues instead. The architect imagined these would be as tall as the balustrade, some three feet high, instead what he received was a magnificent, life-sized battle: the Portuguese in their armour, with their spears and horses, advance up the stairs,only to be met by the fierce Sinhala army, bearing weapons of their own. At the very pinnacle, over 15 feet up, sits a flute playing Sinhala king, whom Laki immodestly admits he modelled on himself.

There were other grand projects with Bawa – a 40-foot Bo leaf with a dense pattern of Buddhist symbols for the 1984 expo in Osaka, the peacock in the Bentota Beach Hotel, the palm at the Neptune Hotel. But for every sculpture accessible to the public, there must be five confined to private homes. A small selection of these are represented in the exhibition in the form of photographs, among which are two examples of Laki’s chandeliers. Standing before one, he confesses he abhors the direct glare of an unshaded bulb. Instead, his vine-inspired creation has the lights embedded within it, so that it produces a mysterious luminescence.

Laki does not produce these sculptures alone. The design comes from him, and it is he who makes the base wireframe. But the cutting and beating of the sheet metal, and the welding of the sharp edges is done by others under his supervision. He works mostly with brass sheet and copper, but the ‘Silver Owl’ in this collection is made with paper pulp. (Once he used to work with lead, a material he abandoned abruptly when he realised the only thing that had spared him severe poisoning from the fumes was that he was outdoors the whole time. He has worked with sheet metal ever since.)

Laki might start with a sketch, but in keeping with his restless mind he never looks at his painting once he has begun work on the actual sculpture itself –“then you get fixed to an idea, you are copying yourself. Then it’s not really interesting.” Amazingly, considering this relaxed approach, he has never had to discard a sculpture that he has started.

Aside from the gleam of brass and copper, there are sculptures in this collection delineated with red paint, and touched with silver and gold. Laki does this with an eye to their aging. “Brass gradually oxidises and goes dark and you can’t polish many of these sculptures.” The additions Laki has painted on will help retain colour and character in years to come.

A few of the sculptures collected here have an interesting history. The design for ‘Rhinoceros’ dates back to 1515 and is based on a woodcut by the German painter Albrecht Dürer. “It was called the Pope’s rhinoceros, because it was being sent to the Pope. But when it got to the Mediterranean coast of Africa, the animal died. And so Dürer rushed there – not many had seen or heard of such an animal then – and he made this woodcut.” Another piece, titled ‘Escutcheon for a Tyrant’ is a celebration of Laki’s love of medieval weaponry. (He has no patience with guns.) Laki has done several along this theme – ‘Altar for a Tyrant’ and ‘Throne for a Tyrant’ complete the set.

We have walked the room once, and Laki is tired of standing. His spondylosis is painful today but his good humour is undimmed. Family commitments mean he cannot return to Diyabubula in a hurry and so he is resigned to the city. As always, he is painting -casually, inventively, constantly– and he carries a set of small watercolours as gifts around in a brown envelope. He hands these out with easy generosity, smiling at the pleasure of each recepient. When he is finished, he goes looking for a fan and a table in the shade.

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on August 16, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix by Indika Handuwala. 

Naresh Fernandes arrives for his session at Cinnamon Colomboscope covered in sweat. It’s a hot day but Fernandes has been on a brisk walk around Slave Island. He is fascinated with the parallels he sees between this city and his own – the frenetic development, the deepening class divide,and the contradictions inherent in democracies that can conduct elections smoothly only to have their liberal institutions fail their citizens. He is filing all this and more away, some to inform his sessions, some for the stories he will commission about Sri Lanka but mostly, one gets the sense, to satisfy his own curiosity.

A well-known Indian journalist and editor, Fernandes has made a career of keeping his finger on the pulse of Mumbai – except he prefers to call it by its old name, Bombay. His two books – Taj Mahal Foxtrot and City Adrift – are both about this place. One is a history of how the Taj Hotel in Bombay hosted a remarkable jazz scene, and how pioneers like Leon Abbey (who brought the first African-American jazz band to Bombay in 1935) and Teddy Weatherford(Louis Armstrong’s pianist),would inspire the Goan musicians who accompanied them. The result would be a sound whose influence would stretch as far as the cinemas of Bollywood.

Then there is his other book, City Adrift, a slender yet ambitious biography of Bombay for which the author draws on histories both personal and national. He writes of how the linking of the islands, though representing a great logistical challenge, helped transform a ‘malarial swamp into a global city.’ It would grow into a cosmopolitan metropolis – which Mahatma Gandhi called the “hope of my dreams” –robust enough to resist the communal tensions that accompanied Independence and Partition. But Bombay is no longer the city it was, and Fernandes is clear-eyed about the tensions that have threatened it in recent decades.

City Adrift is one of a series of such biographies about Indian cities, and Fernandes said he was left to make up his own mind about how he would tackle the project. “I’m that kind of strange paradox in which one part of my family are insiders in a city in which almost everybody is an outsider, but my father’s side of the family came in 1947. So we have these two parallel stories going, the Bombay story of the migrant and the Bombay story of the settler and we know how often in Bombay history those two sides are at war.”

Fernandes is already at work on another book that will also explore Bombay’s past and present, but this he says is hopelessly delayed due to the demands on his time placed by Scroll.in. Launched in 2014, the digital daily of which he is an editor, has rapidly gained a wide readership in India. “It’s been astonishing how quickly you can reach vast numbers of readers – if we had to physically distribute we’d never be at the numbers we are at,” says Fernandes, adding that being online has had other rewards.

“Traditionally people have said that Indian readers are interested in three things, the ABC: astrology, Bollywood and cricket.” However, the thing about digital media the team found, was that a seemingly inexhaustible flow of reader metrics was always pouring in – and these figures were revealing that people were interested in much more than the ABC. “We found that people will read a challenging piece on the rural employment guarantee scheme in Chhattisgarh at 3,000 words, just as long as it was a well-written story and well told. We are astonished constantly at the things that people are reading and delighted and encouraged by this.”

They chose to focus more on reportage rather than opinion pieces, and found readers approved. For one of their earliest successes, Fernandes’ colleague Supriya Sharma chose to get on a train prior to the 2014 elections and travel some 2,500 km. She would cross seven states, filing stories regularly as she went. The idea, says Fernandes, was not to talk about the politicians but how people saw politics, what government meant to them and how the system had supported or failed them. “We wanted to shift the focus from the big institutions to seeing how it plays out on the ground.”

Fernandes, who has worked in newspapers, wire services, T.V. and magazines, says the goal for the 12-member team that produces Scroll.in is to work at the pace of a wire service with the context of a magazine. “Some days we achieve it, some days we don’t.”

Though Fernandes is putting in 16-hour work days to feed the beast, he describes the end result as “astonishingly satisfying.” In 2015, the team was recognized as the ‘News Start-up of the Year’ at the Red Ink Journalism Awards. And for a relatively young publication, Scroll.in does punch above its weight. “Last week for instance a minister in Mizoram (Lal Thanzara) resigned because of a story we broke,” says Fernandes, adding with a grin,“Ok, it’s a small state, but still it means something.”

As the interview wraps up, he says such successes remind him of his early days in journalism. “My first job was at the Times of India during the Bombay riots (of the early 90s), and that was a really remarkable period for me, for even as my city was going through so much trauma, you saw that when you wrote something the government and the administration took action almost immediately…that when you had these vast numbers of readers behind a publication, people in power were forced to listen, that the power of the press was not a cliché,” he pauses, “I have sometimes thought over the 20 years or so since, that we had lost that.” That he was proved wrong is a comfort both to Fernandes and to his readers.

Published in the Sunday Times, Sri Lanka on August 30, 2015. Words by Smriti Daniel. Pix courtesy Naresh Fernandes.