Monthly Archives: May 2011

“One of the best books published by an Australian this year has nothing to do with the Sydney Writers’ Festival. It is The Cage by Gordon Weiss, about Sri Lanka’s civil war. Sri Lanka! Who cares, some knockers may ask? … Continue reading →

MAY 19TH is the second anniversary of the Sri Lankan government’s announcement that its forces had killed Velupillai Prabhakaran, leader of the rebel Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. It marked the government’s definitive victory in a bloody 26-year civil war—one, moreover, … Continue reading →

One lovely day in India, as a young man, I was robbed of everything I then possessed. It was in the mid-1980s. I had just crossed the border by bus from Nepal, where I had been walking in the mountains. … Continue reading →

Osama Bin Laden was the sun of a Sowdi squillionaire who blew his mind on qat one Friday, and became a global mastermind – more than any other global mastermind ever in the past two centuries (the last century being … Continue reading →