The last two years of hibernation have taken their toll on everyone’s life. This forced change came at a time when lifestyle was going to change for me anyway, with another looming milestone: retirement. My concept of retirement was of “active retirement” – a lifestyle I had promoted to seniors ahead of me in the […]
I remember when I took my oath of citizenship thirty years ago. After searching for more than thirty years prior to that, I had finally arrived home, in a country I could be proud of, because I was being accepted – warts, accent, vocabulary, biases, and all – I was finally a Canadian. In the
I used to be a good Canadian – not anymore, it appears Read More »
As this year winds down, I am left wondering about some of the incongruent happenings in the world around me, some of which I have dealt with in full-length articles. Let me itemize them, in no particular order. Hopefully, if you see some meaning, or have faced similar questions in the past and can see
A year of incongruency – why? Read More »
This is possibly the last article I will be writing about the pandemic. For any others written from this point on can only be categorized under “the Endemic.” However, I thought I’d throw one more stone at this dreadful disease that upended the world from it’s cosy existence. Covid-19 changed many things for many people,
Is this Pandemic a Poor Person’s Disease? Read More »
At every election, like the one just passed, I begin to wonder about these guys, the UVs—the X factor that can swing an election from favourite to underdog, or vice versa. Why do we have so many of these Hamlets in our world, people who hold the balance of power in their hands by virtue
The Undecided Voter Read More »
(This article was previously published in the Sri Lankan Anchorman newspaper – July edition) I remember the slick reports in magazines like Macleans that first made me want to immigrate to this country. “Canada voted best country in the world to live in” said the United Nations Human Development Index and other global surveys throughout
The Best Country in the World to Live In? Read More »
The number of vaccinated are starting to outnumber those who are not sporting a punctured arm (or who refuse to get pricked). Very soon, if the science holds, we should see a diminishing number of outbreaks, waveless days, masks falling all over, ICU’s suddenly looking for business, and Covid becoming “yesterday’s guy.” But will it?
The Reopening – what happens now? Read More »
These days in retirement, I have idle talks with myself, and sometimes with famous literary personalities I wish I had met. This particular conversation was with a colonial and a futurist, someone I would love to have spoken to given our common backgrounds, except that he died six years before I was born: George Orwell.
Talking to Orwell about Book Reviewing Read More »
There’s an app for everything these days. For searching, shopping, information, books, car maintenance, home decoration, clothing, cooking, domestic help, medical care, even sex – you name it, there is one. So, what are we left to do, but say, “Alexa, get me…” It started with someone saying, “If a process can be diagrammed in
There’s an App for That – even for Fiction Read More »
Everyone is writing a pandemic journal, it seems. We all want to capture this lost time that will soon disappear (we hope) when the vaccine makes its way into our arms, when we forget face masks, and how to socially distance, and the acronyms PPE, PCR and RNA. We want to document all those mindless
The Seven Rs of Pandemic Writing Read More »