I’m writing this on the way back from Menik Farm. The roads are good. They’re digging new drains. There seems to be enough medicine. People are growing vegetables and sewing clothes. Behind that, however, there is a weariness in people’s eyes and a constant refrain on their lips. These people don’t want charity anymore. They want to be free.

I just woke up. This is the dream I just had. I suppose, a nightmare. We stopped in some Eurotrash bakery/bar. I was drinking a light arrack and soda. There was an empty bottle of Wild Turkey in sight. The music was absolutely blaring from the Eurotrash bakery just outside. As a benefit, however, they served warm chocolate chip cookies. They were round and lumpen more than flat, upon biting they seemed to reform into their original structural integrity.

Tracy Holsinger is directing ‘After Juliet’, a play which starts at the Lionel Wendt tonight. I believe tickets are on sale now at the Wendt and it runs till Sunday. After Juliet is a play written by Kiera Knightley’s mother (not that that has anything to do with anything). From what I’ve read it covers questions like “Do the dead live because an amnesty is called? And if they don’t live, can there be peace?” It’s set in a time after the death of Romeo and Juliet, but where the feuding (and internecine loving) continues apace. All of Tracy’s plays are interesting, and I don’t think this will be an exception. I recommend checking it out.

Low light is the holy grail of photography. The shot above, for example, was taken outside at 1:50 AM. This is only possible by keeping the camera still and shutter open for 20 seconds. The subjects have to sit still the whole time, like old timey photographs. It is also possible to use a high ISO setting (literally the same ISO standard for companies) to get greater sensitivity to light. That means you can keep the shutter open less and maybe even hold the camera in your hand. The Panasonic LX3 is OK for this, but the new Canon G11 may be better. The New York Times also profiles two more pocketable cameras which may be just as good.

Personally, I think an aid economy is often counter-productive. Many NGOs are as inefficient as government organizations, and at a much higher cost. They also encourage a donor-driven economy based on reports rather than a people-driven one based on results. NGOs, including stuff like the UN, do a lot of good work and I don’t mean to take away from that. But I think the model may be a bit off. Maybe we don’t need foreign project coordinators making 10-20,000 per day. Maybe you could supplement a local government official’s salary that much per month and incentivize efficiency and decrease corruption. Maybe that money could be available for business loans, repaid to the government.

This irritates me. On an average (American) questionnaire they have a standard race category. I inevitably click the Asian category. This annoys me because A) I’m not Chinese and B) Asian includes almost 40% of the world’s population. That click box amalgamates China and India (and everybody else) into one category based on some outdated Orientalism. I don’t mind being grouped with India demographically as we are both brown and enjoy curry. However, I don’t like being grouped with China, which is what Asian generally ‘means’ in the US. At least break Asian into ‘Paki’ and ‘Chink’, for courtesy’s sake.

The Galle Film Fest and US Embassy are conducting a children’s film camp for kids all over the island. It’s interesting because there are 40 kids from Jaffna, Trinco, Hatton, Hambantota, Puttalam, Moneragala, etc being mixed together. The films they make are quite cool, and they’re also meeting a lot of different people. I went to visit the camp at the Sarvodaya campus in Bandaragama (past Piliyandala). It was quite cool for me to meet kids from all over as well. They’re screening their films at the Punchi Theatre, Borella on Saturday the 22nd, 7 PM.

Robert Kaplan discussed Kandy in the latest issue of Atlantic magazine. He described how Sinhala kings took Tamil brides and Buddhist temples hold Hindu icons. ‘Only when Sri Lanka’s political leadership recognizes that legacy will communal peace be at hand,’ he said. Long ago that was the nature of our imagined community. Through royalty and religion, the races were bound. Today, however, I think the model is more Colombo than Kandy. Today our common imagination is defined more by economy than ritual. For peace today, Colombo may hold the key.

I’ve got this idea to do a print version of Kottu. Basically, take the top 10 or 15 posts each week and publish them (with basic editing). The Sunday Leader will distribute it and it’s fairly trivial to lay out (unless someone wants to do that). All the bloggers will be properly credited and paid, which may perhaps set an example for the papers randomly stealing stuff. Say, about Rs. 750 per full pager, perhaps less if it’s like a paragraph. The format would be a 16 page insert, like the Mirror Mag, tucked into the Sunday Leader. Let me know if youse think it’s a good idea.

Just saw an interesting short film about an alien spaceship that breaks down, leaving its inhabitants refugees in South Africa. This was embedded in a review trashing the feature length adaptation, but the short is great. It’s an interesting think piece on what might happen if aliens land here and turn out not to be conquerers but down on their luck. It opens with a Halo type fight scene, but the aliens basically run out of gas and end up huddled around trash can fires in hoodies.