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 »
I have been wrestling with why, with all the resources available to us, this pandemic still rages, and now in Wave 2 (or is it Wave 3 – never mind, I’ve stopped counting) it is at its peak in terms of infections and deaths, even while a vaccine is making its way into our arms,
I wrote a novel twenty years ago in which the continent of North America was overrun by a giant flood, fragmenting it into smaller pockets of land. Upon these new “islands” lived people who had self-selected according to political ideology; they were either laissez-faire capitalists or holier-than-thou socialists. Today, I wonder whether I have walked
The Forces of Good and Evil Walk the Land Read More »
I remember wrestling with that age old conundrum called the Generation Gap when I was a teenager: we complained that our parents never understood us. I also recalled growing up in a developing country where we looked upon visitors from western countries with awe, unable to figure out how easy it was for them to