Shehan Karunatilaka On GMSL (Video)

Shehan is an old friend of mine who’s really done good. His book Chinaman, The Legend Of Pradeep Mathew has been blowing up. In Sri Lanka yes, but it’s now gone through an Indian edition and is now being released in the US. They’re changing the name there, it’s just the Legend Of Pradeep Mathew. You can read my review of he first edition here, it’s really quite excellent, and editing has made it better. Embedded above is a Skype interview with Shehan from today’s Good Morning Sri Lanka.

As a note, the Skype video gets stuck and you end up staring down Shehan’s craw for, like, minutes on end. And there’s weird Zelda music in the background, but he’s saying interesting stuff.

What I dig about Chinaman is it got over the melancholy, maudlin tone of a lot of Sri Lankan literature (all about the war and araliya flowers) and showed the innate humor and joy of the island, out of which you also get the bittersweet. In his story the war is most definitely there, but it’s not the life of the characters, as it has never been the whole life of this island.

He’s gotten awards, most recently the Commonwealth Prize and DSC Prize in India. The real proof is in the pudding though. It’s a good book. Pick it up.

Posted on Thursday, June 21st, 2012 in Books, Sri Lanka, Video.

RSS feed | Trackback URI

Comments »

No comments yet.

email indi AT indi.ca.

Recent Comments

Monolithic Islam (2)

tastyjujubes: A Muslim is someone who follows Islam, yes? Islam teaches that all non-Muslims will burn in hell for eternity yes? So if one were to say that Muslims believe that all non-Muslims will burn in hell for eternity, would that be wrong?

Gorogoro: Yes there is diversity, but unfortunately the extremists and the fundamentalists among the Muslims seem to have a free reign. You can certainly make some generalizations when the ideology being followed is one and the same and is based...

40 Under 40 (1)

sharanga: Congratulations !

Anti-Social Marketing (Nibras Bawa) (19)

David Blacker: Who cares, man? you’re still moaning on about a fight you lost months ago. It’s like the kid who gets his ass kicked then talk big later. You lost, you ran away like a whiney ponneya, and now you’re actually...

sharanga: A more accurate description would be I had my penis up your because you were refusing to answer a simple question. Now the fact that you thought I was not just Heshan, but also meechum just shows that you are stupid, and therefore your...

David Blacker: Come, come, you ran away from that debate with tail tucked in your panties. Too late late to be a hero now, man. Why don’t you make up a few more “facts 221;? As for you being Heshan, etc, well, can you blame me? All...

Chi Chi Hits The Scene, And A Referee (5)

sack: Indiz post about Gotabhaya had much more comments. http://indi.ca/ 2012/07/gotas-p uppy-hate/

Liberal One: He he, the article with the least number of comments out of Indi’s recent ones. Looks like no body wants to put their lives at risk by commenting on the wrong article. I’m off as well.

max: Every family should have a Fredo

The Arrest Of Azath Salley (21)

tastyjujubes: Well Nafi, why are you worried about the Jews and Israel and the US and western culture? Simple fact is that a lot of people do not want Sri Lanka to be an Islamic country or another Saudi Arabia. Sri Lanka has a long tradition of...

Monolithic Islam

Mohsin Hamid, author of How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia, has a nice op-ed in the Guardian. Money quote for me was ‘Individuals are undeniably real. Groups, on the other hand, are assertions of opinion’. If you go buy news reports Muslims or Jews or Sri Lankans or any number of groups can appear monolithic and uniform. When you meet people, however, you find that they’re not. If you meet enough people you hopefully become aware of that tendency and judge people less by group identity in advance. Muslims, however, are quite publicly tarred with the same brush these days, and it really isn’t fair. Or accurate.

40 Under 40

I’m happy to be featured in Echelon magazine’s 40 Under 40 feature, profiling young people who contribute to the economy in some way, mainly in business but also in terms of innovation and thought leadership. It’s an interesting article not just in that I’m in it (mainly for work on indi.ca and Kottu but also YAMU) but also in that the magazine takes a bit of a critical stance. It’s worth reading the editorial (which I can only find in print) where they describe that only a few women are included and that all of the 40 are from middle to upper middle class backgrounds.

Chi Chi Hits The Scene, And A Referee

I won’t add too much commentary, but just read I guess. The youngest Rajapaksa, Rohitha (Chi Chi) has given an amazing interview to the Daily Mirror Life section, which is well worth a read. In other news, he also recently slapped a referee around in full public view at a rugby match. At least it seems that his elder brother restrained him.

Anti-Social Marketing (Nibras Bawa)

In 2009 this strange character appeared on the Sri Lankan Internet scene, getting angry, flaming, trolling whatever. Then he started naming anonymous bloggers, posting comments as people’s kids, nasty stuff, for which I removed him from Kottu. He also published some plagiarized stuff on Groundviews. He flamed out a bit more then disappeared. Until now. Now he’s back hosting a rather expensive social media event in Colombo, which is a bit ironic, seeing as he was known for being the most anti-social person the blogosphere had seen at the time.