Must Be Looking For A Bride, No? runs Friday through Sunday, for anyone whose relatives have started asking. “Bring your friends. We’ll bring the benefits” claims Coco’’s 90s Chicago Warehouse party. Baila boogie with SARIGAMA at the Havelock Sports Ground.
On Saturday not so Secret Events surfaces — a pool pit party x rave in Colombo. The History Collective remembers how to make zines. Akurugraphy tour and font-making for the kids, and, for grown-ups who enjoy manual labour dressed as heritage, a wood-type cleaning day. Caffeinate through a coffee workshop at Kai, though beware; if you end-up knowing more about coffee than tea you cease to be a patriot. They also try their hand at standup. Build a shrine to Bordeaux vines at La Maison, or show off your Saraswati powers at South Asian quiz night. Putrid Arrival’s death metal is unapologetically acoustically pungent.
Deshal de Mel, of Operation Locate Sarong fame, talks on Sunday about why governments similarly lose their promises as soon as they enter office. Boundary bending music curated by MusicMatters, the History Collective on whether Buddhism is mind-on-memory or memory-on-mind. Take your brand into your own hands with this Design Collective workshop.
Or hand it over to the experts on Tuesday, at Hatch.
SSA makes “the case for a Jaffna slave society”, probably not what the title meant to convey. But don’t let that deter you: the learned Mark Balmforth reminds us that nearly a fifth of Jaffna’s population in the 19th century were slaves to Tobacco Rani, our answer to King Cotton. For lighter fare, a piano concert by Dilip Seneviratne, or, for the truly masochistic, the Chamber's seminar on the new insolvency act — corporate and personal (ruin comes in both sizes).
Last but by no means least, a retrospective on Batik Mistress Jezima Mohamed at the Curado - on all week.
Listen, rather than read today, in a farewell to Nanda Malini. Twenty years on from an LTTE assassin's bullet, Ahilan Kadirgamar returns to Kethesh Loganathan and his lost generation, the Tamil intellectual killed for pursuing one of his own “Lost Opportunities”.
The machinery is subtler now. Sanjana Hattotuwa warns seven new laws are interacting with each other to nefariously assemble a totalitarian digital super-state. One of them is a bill that allows the government to decide who is and isn’t a journalist, Aingkaran Kugathasan asks who made them the authority.
Harsha Aravinda reviews Neranjana and its sacrificial goat. And in the French Caribbean, colombo turns out to be not the city but a curry — indentured Tamil labour's residue, Sulakshana de Mel tracing it home.
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