By Jekhan Aruliah
An appreciation on the retirement of a man who fled Sri
Lanka’s communal riots in 1984 to settle in Australia, and returned three
decades later in 2015 to setup Jaffna’s first luxury hotel. Devoting five years
of his life as the hands-on General Manager of Jetwing Jaffna.
Chris Ponnadurai
Chris was born in Colombo in 1951, the seventh of eight children. His father was a school inspector, who moved the family often as he was transferred around the country. Spending his early life in Jaffna, Batticaloa, and Ratnapura, Chris’ family then moved to Colombo where he finished his school career at the prestigious Isipathana College. From there he joined the Ceylon Hotel School.
BOOK REVIEW: HISTORY
COLLAGE: Sarah Anjum Bari
Humanity has always had an ambivalent relationship with knowledge. While the written word has changed from being recorded on papyrus to tablets, scrolls, ink-ridden bindings to printed books all the way to electronic screens, it has been handled apprehensively by power structures, if only for its impact on societies and individuals. Consequently, book burnings have featured recurrently in the discourses of nation-states and empires: Nazi burnings of texts written by un-German authors homosexuals, socialists, and of course Jewish writers in Germany are among the most infamous examples. Richard Ovenden s
Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge (Harvard University Press, 2020) is a vivid catalogue of the destruction of libraries and archives, purges of librarians and intellectuals, self-censorship, and the current threat posed to knowledge by a handful of big data firms.