Our Headline on the UNHRC explored the negotiations between majority, minorities, and the international community. The UN film festival’s Friday screening of The Negotiators — How to Make Peace is timely.
At the Bawa Space, the Ways of Knowing exhibition looks at how we know what we know. It manifests in small, intimate forms: the Saturday Story Club for children, and, later that day, a guided walk through Victoria Park, exploring the city’s trees as a living archive of memory and meaning.
Saturday is not only for the epistemically inclined. Anushiya Sundaralingam speaks about migration and movement in the morning, and performs it in the evening. Both at Saskia Fernando Gallery’s 138 Galle Road space. More on movement, this time of resting while moving variety; from Mayun Kalutantri’s zine launch at Barefoot. Also tomorrow morning. Wrap all this off with the Grand Tamil DJ Night at the City of Dreams.
On Tuesday and Thursday, the Ceylon Chamber has some useful seminars; on foreign exchange controls and the tumultuous SVAT. Muragala discusses the impact of aid cuts.
What to read
Living in Sri Lanka we’ve seen more war photography than we ought to. Yet Vindhya Buthpitiya’s (photo)essay on Trincomalee — and the militarisation of leisure — offers a fresh angle. It echoes this piece on the lives of Royal Navy nurses in wartime Ceylon.
The World Bank’s public finance review reminds us that the burden of stabilisation has fallen hardest on the poor: “over 75 percent of the adjustment has come from indirect taxes, which are regressive and have disproportionately affected the poor”. The bank urges better tax administration to raise more in income tax. IPS suggests that higher cigarette taxes do not drive smuggling. They also find, considering inflation, cigarettes have become more affordable. Shahar Hameiri and Umesh Moramudali, meanwhile, explore the interactive and complimentary links between Sri Lanka’s borrowing from international bond markets and its borrowing from China.
On the rights front, Alan Keenan, in his UNHRC scene-setter argues the NPP must seize the opportunity to “build a case for how all communities can benefit from a broader process of truth seeking with justice”. And the Press Institute published an explainer on the Online Safety Act, while Meera Srinivasan filed a detailed report on Kathchatheevu (paywall).
Dinidu de Alwis updated his list of Sri Lanka’s underworld figures as the police unearth a crystal meth racket and apprehend gangsters in Indonesia.
PS The Central Bank’s annual economic and social statistics data release is out.
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