Death in the Andes

Read Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa's Death in the Andes this weekend. Besides some chapters from Carlos Castaneda's The Teachings of Don Juan, this was the first Peruvian novel that I read. So, it was with great anticipation that I started the book. If I read the book through to its end without letting many days pass, it means that I am enjoying either the writing style, the story or both. I read this book in two days and yes, I find the writing style engaging. However, the story is dark.. ancient, cannibalistic rituals and belief that are carried on in the present day - in varying forms, the militia, the civil guards, the dark potion brewers and the rest of the people who played into their hands. A story of a decaying society carried forth by people sacrificing other people's blood to prolong their existence conveyed through Corporal Lituma as the main protagonist trying to make sense of what was happening around him. The only light shining through the darkness is a tender love story narrated by one of the key protagonists - Tomasito Carreno, which reaches its happy conclusion - a ray of hope amongst the enveloping darkness.

While I didn't find the book thought provoking, it is an interesting read for someone who is starting to read South American literature. I kind of find it intriguing that both books that I read from that continent and particularly Peru, by two renowned writers, were very much focused on spirits and belief in communicating with and appeasing spirits.

Shatranj Ke Khilari

I watched this 1977 Satyajit Ray movie today. Using the game of chess as a metaphor, it focuses on the ineptitude of the ruler and wealthier citizens of Awad to protect their land from the company and colonization. From the friendship treaty signed by the British with the Nawab's ancestors for providing human resources, money and land to expand the company conquests in India, the movie focuses on each move of the British until the check-mate point with the Nawab symbolically handing over his crown to avoid blood shedding of his people.

While the main theme is the game of chess played by the British and the rulers of India's various states, the story is taken along through two wealthy landowners of Awad - Mir Ali and Mirza Ali - who have become addicted literally to the game of chess to the extent that they are blind to what happens around them - they are indifferent to what is happening in their country, their state, their village and even their own home. This last point is pushed home by the glimpses of failed marriages in the lives of the two men due to their addiction to chess. While Shabana Azmi and Farida Jalal acted well their parts, it is a pity that an actress like Shabana Azmi was only provided a very small role but then again, the film did not have much room for women to act as it obsessively focused on the games of chess played by the two men as well as the larger game played by the colonizers and the rulers.

Overall, Shatranj Ke Khilari is a beautifully filmed movie by Satyajit Ray.

Tom Stoppard and Tropical Amsterdam

This has become a tradition of sorts... my mother and I visiting the Galle Fort annually on a day trip during the Galle Literary festival. I choose the day and the key session that we will be visiting and perhaps, another fringe event and we are off at 6a.m. on the Colombo-Galle bus. Until our particular session time, we enjoy walking around the Galle Fort though the amount and distance we walk and explore has been on a decline in par with my mother's health.

This time I worried whether my mother would be physically fit to go on a full day's trip which included more than six hours on a bus trip (both ways inclusive) and sitting in hour-long sessions, her resolute nature was keen to continue this mother-daughter ritual and that she could make it through. So, we headed off yesterday - my mother in her neck collar that she has been wearing over the past year due to her ear imbalance issue as well as some neck/spine issues.

We reached Galle Fort a little before 10a.m. and as we had missed the bulk of the first session - a Galle literary festival panel with Dr. Izzeldin Abulaish, Dr. Pakiasothy Saravanamuttu, Dr. Stewart Motha, Ingo Shulze on 'Forgiveness, Peace and Responsibility in Literature', we skipped it and walked across the street we had been dropped at - Church Street and visited the 19th century Anglican church built by the English before visiting Pedlar's Inn for some coffee. We then visited the 18th century Dutch Reformed Church (the oldest Dutch built church in the country) but dropped the idea of walking along the ramparts as we usually did as it was very sunny and returned to the main venue area around Halle De Galle where the garden chairs and the stalls had been set up. It was nice sitting under the shade of the trees and simply resting. Cargills Magic ice-cream had set up tables with 'make a mark' activity where they had placed ice-cream sticks and paints for anyone to paint their book-mark and take it with them. As the next session we were interested in was at 12.30pm. followed by our main session at 2.30p.m., we decided to have a quick lunch of sandwiches at the Heritage cafe (formerly, the Old Bakery).

Tropical Amsterdam was screened at Halle De Galle. Shyam Selvadurai, the curator of the Litfest presented the documentary. Stephen Labrooy, one of the key people interviewed in the documentary, responded to questions at the end of the screening. Tropical Amsterdam is a well filmed documentary from the perspective of some of the well-known elderly Burghers in Sri Lanka. The director's view that the future of the Burghers in Sri Lanka is bleak and that soon they will have no separate identity is mirrored through the witty takes of the interviewees on the colonial period, the traditions and customs of the Burghers, the mass-scale emigration in the 50s - 80s period, the feeling of discrimination(as Stephen Labrooy says about his buying property within the Galle fort, "I have had to prove over and over again that I am Sri Lankan despite the fact that I speak Sinhala. I finally had to go over to the authorities and say, 'Look, my ancestors built this fort 300 years ago. I have a right to purchase land here'", and the resignation that soon there will be no "Burgher" identity left in Sri Lanka. One of the interviewees in the documentary, a tea planter sums up why he chose not to emigrate when all their relatives have emigrated to Australia "It is better to reign in hell than rot in heaven". Overall, a very interesting, well-filmed documentary. It would have been great to include the younger generations' views as well because the documentary has a very resigned view - an air of having given up and it would have been good to see whether the younger generations feel that way as well.

During the short break in between the film screening and the session that we went all the way to Galle for, we decided to have a cup of Dilmah tea. Dilmah had set up a nice tea stall and the staff were making lovely, hot cups of Dilmah tea which was great to have at that time listening to some vibrant music being played in the garden. I later found that the musician was Dr. Eugene Draw, a Canadian electric violinist here in Sri Lanka for a performance at the Park Street Mews.

At 2.30p.m, the main session 'In conversation with Tom Stoppard on his life and art' started again with a brief introduction by Shyam Selvadurai who introduced both Stoppard and the moderator, Tracy Holsinger. Two plays that I fell in love with during my contemporary drama classes at university were Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. For me, when a drama script engages me, I simply have to direct the drama and bring what I visualize in the words to life. I managed to direct Copenhagen but not Arcadia as I did not have enough cast members. What I admire most about Tom Stoppard's works are his witty play of words and how easily he manages to slip into the lives of the famous real-life characters he often brings into his plays and explores their views, by making the key protagonist a fictional character like Thomasina Coverly (supposedly based on Ada Lovelace) in Arcadia or an overlooked real life character like Henry Carr in Travesties. This is his unique style. While some plays may resemble other famous plays at a distance, like 'Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead' and 'Waiting for Godot', 'Travesties' and 'Copenhagen', their content is so vastly different and has Stoppard's trademark wittiness and story flow.

Here, at the Galle Literary Festival, he read passages of Bellinksy from his epic play 'Coast of Utopia', which I have neither seen or read and somehow was not too encouraged to experience, from the brief reading. What I liked more about the conversation was Stoppard rambling on about some of his experiences, responding to questions etc. He mentioned that he had received an invitation to do a reading in Australia in December and to Sri Lanka in January and that 'as it is best for divorced fathers to stay away from home during Christmas', he decided to take up both the readings. He also mentioned that as he landed in Sri Lanka, he received news that Havel had died and he had thought about going back for the funeral but decided that he would stay on in Sri Lanka.

A lot of questions from both the moderator and the audience was around Havel and his birth country, rather than his art and life as a playwright. The moderator also irked me a bit as she seemed too absorbed in sharing her own views and would take a lot of the brief time of the session in framing her views and questions.

At one point, Stoppard remarked to the effect that 'I don't ever write plays thinking of the academic point of view. I don't think of the message. Art cannot operate at that level. It needs to go beyond'. He also rhetorically questioned the audience, 'And you, bless your hearts, why are you here to listen to a playwright?', 'Drama cannot be learnt from texts, it has to be experienced' and he illustrated it with an example from a play where an actor runs off across the water where lights had been installed to respond to the touch and as he ran off, it slowly illuminated the scene and ended with fireworks as he disappeared in the distance and that the script in the play simply said 'Exit Ariel'.

At the end of the hour, I went and stood at the book signing queue, with my mother, to get my old copy of 'Travesties' and 'The Real Inspector Hound' signed by him. This was the second time that I have solicited writer autographs. The first was to get my copy of Copenhagen signed by Michael Frayn, also at the Galle Literary Festival a year or two ago.

Setting up a business - the basics

For a year, I had been contemplating starting up my own venture and initiating the dream of self-employment. I finally decided to take some concrete steps and gave my notice at my workplace. From January 1st 2012, I was free to start up my own venture. While I knew what I wanted to do and I had experience doing what I wanted to do, I was not familiar with the protocol of setting up a business nor was I aware of the options. I had to read up a bit, go to various departments, talking to people before I got a sense of what needed to be done. As there is no information on these basics on the web, I thought of posting this for anyone who may be thinking of starting up a business in Sri Lanka. Hope this helps! : )

The very first step is to be clear about what you want to do and to be confident that you have the skills and can do what you want to do. From there on, it is basically the paperwork that needs to be in order.

Once you are clear about what your business is going to be, think through whether you need staff to carry out the work or can you manage on your own initially. Also, do you want your initial business investment to be small? Are you willing to take full liability or would you prefer there is a board of directors etc? These questions will help you decide whether you want to start up a sole proprietor business or a company.

As my business was providing research and consultancy services and undertaking social entrepreneurship projects and I wanted to start small, with minimal investment and gradually evolving as well as having the flexibility to take up full time jobs with other agencies, I decided to go for the sole proprietor option.

This is the easiest option to start off a business. Simply go to the Provincial council office of your respective province to the office for registration of business name and collect your form to register as an individual. You will need to pay LKR 1500 when you submit the form with the details of the name of your business, nature of business, postal address, contact number. Your business registration certificate will be ready for you in a day's time. Simple as that.

One hitch with the business registration certificate is that even if you submit the form in English, they give you the certificate in Sinhala or Tamil based on where your provincial office is. So, it is best to have it translated into English by a certified translator if you plan to work with organizations or companies where the working language is English.

Now that you have the business certificate, you can start working. : )

It is good to next look into the other basics:
While tax is only applicable once you reach a certain profit limit, it is good to have your tax file opened. For this, one needs to go to the Municipal council and fill out a form requesting a tax file to be opened. While the staff are not very helpful in explaining the process, what I gathered was that once the form is submitted, an assessment will take place before a recommendation for the file to be opened is given.

You will also need to have a bank account for whatever earnings you make and to be able to pay for any purchases you make under the business. This account needs to be in the name of the business and generally, business accounts are opened as a current account. Just remember that to open a current account in Sri Lanka, you will need to have another current account holder sign in certain places of the form as well as you will need to have a proprietor seal. This seal is specific in its design with the name of the business on the first line, space on the second line for your signature, followed by the words 'Sole Proprietor' on the third line. This seal will need to be small enough to fit the signature box on your bank form.

Now that you have your business registration, tax file, account, you may want to think about having a website particularly if you do not have an office presence. There is a wide range of options out there which can be quite confusing and I am still figuring my way around. Weebly.com offers a free website that you can set up yourself using their drag and drop editor. However, this service comes with a weebly.com suffix similar to the blogspot suffix so you may not want it for your business website. You could buy your own '.com' domain through weebly but it costs nearly USD 70/ year and is around the same price as other leading hosting sites which include the weebly editor.

The first thing you need to know about setting up a website is that you need to have a domain. You will need to purchase your domain which will be around USD 10 per year. The domain is what gives you your unique website address with a '.com' or a '.org' or a '.net' suffix. If you are good at creating websites, then all you need to do is purchase a domain name and then go about setting up your website directly. If you are like me and need help, then you can read through the various hosting options. I went through so many reviews and websites for various hosting plans before shortlisting three hosting sites - fatcow (referred to as a very popular site for several years), InMotion hosting (referred to as the premier business hosting site) and Hostmonster. Just be aware that the total cost of going with any plan does not stop with the amount cited by the company. There are usually add-ons that are offered at the time of registering and these are not stuff that you can ignore - particularly as they mention 'domain privacy', 'spam filters' etc. - and each adding another USD 10/year to your bill. I did decide to go ahead and experiment with a hosting site plan than hire a web designer which would cost more. Particularly as my requirement at this point is to share basic information about my business than to have a top-notch site or electronic payment facility embedded which will require a higher level of security access. You will need to play around the self-create buttons and experiment with your website. Help/ feedback from web-designer friends at this stage might be useful.

Finally, just so that you have a complete foundation laid - get yourself your business letterhead, business card, receipt books, some files to maintain your business documentation.

With that you have the basics covered and from there on, you can always upscale.

Good Luck!

GLF time again

This year's festival has some interesting writers visiting. The one main session that I will be going for this time around will be the session of another of my favourite playwrights - Tom Stoppard. My favourite plays of his are Arcadia followed by Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Wanted to direct Arcadia some years back but did not get sufficient cast members.

Galle Literary Festival 2011

The annual festival is back. This time round, my one day at the festival will be saturday, Jan 29th. The session I am most interested in participating is Orhan Pamuk's session as well as the session moderated by Ashok Ferrey 'More than just a laugh'.

In remembrance of J.D.Salinger

The first writing of J.D.Salinger I came across was the short story 'A perfect day for bananafish' which had me disturbed and thinking for days as did his other short stories.

I then came across Franny and Zooey and fell in love with the book and the characters in the book. It was also nice to connect the Glass family characters in the book to the short stories that I had read before. Then, I read 'Catcher in the rye'.

I searched for more books by J.D.Salinger whose writings had by then fascinated me a lot but didn't find anymore.

However, after his death last week, lots of articles have suggested the possibility of unpublished work.

While I strongly respect his decision and wish not to have any of his writings converted to movies, I hope that his unpublished writings, if any, will be published as they are gems that should not be lost to this world.

Gillian Slovo and Michael Frayn

This time around, I decided to just go for two sessions on the final day of the Galle Literary festival on my way back from the whale watching trip in Mirissa. It was pouring by the time we reached the Galle fort, tired and hungry after our 7 hour sea trip. The session had already started when we walked up the steps to the hall at the Maritime museum and found a few seats at the end of the hall.

Gillian Slovo's Conversations on Guantanamo turned out to be a very interesting session, especially as I had not read any of her writings before nor had I ever heard her name before. What she shared about her play 'Guantanamo' and the way she described reconstructing the lives of the prisoners from the letters they sent home to their families was really engaging and has spurred me to find out more about the writer and her work.

After Gillian Slovo's session, we rushed to Halle de Galle for our next session 'Noises on'. Hungry, we decided to quickly get ourselves a bite from one of the food tents in the adjoining lawn. I decided to get a couple of vegetable rotis and a cup of hot tea but was shocked to be informed that two tiny rotis would cost 400 rupees. When I asked again thinking that I had not heard properly, the volunteer cashiers laughed and said that the prices at the festival was generally pricey. Fundraising is one thing but to sell something for ten times its original price is a bit too much. Disappointed, I got myself a cup of tea only and walked into Michael Frayn's session.

Frayn's session was THE session that I had wanted to go to as I was a fan of his play 'Copenhagen'. I had done a reading of his play for my contemporary drama course back in university and had been so taken up with the play that I had wanted to direct it. I managed to convince three of my co-students in the course - Adnan, Jakob and Misha - to act in the play and staged it as an abbreviated one act play at the Rotunda at Stockholm University one fine May evening. Having lived in the play for 2-3 months, I was very keen on meeting the playwright and even dug up my old and yellowed copy of the play so that I could have it autographed by the writer.

A tall and healthy looking elderly man walked up the stage and sat in his chair and tested the mike and started with an annecdote of a talk he gave at a university in Tasmania. Then, he went on to say that he had been surprised to see the heading for his session as he had come under the impression that he was going to talk about his serious plays - Copenhagen and Democracy. And, he decided that irrespective of the title 'Noises on' he would go ahead and speak about Copenhagen. I was thrilled.

Michael Frayn gave a short introduction to the context of Copenhagen and about the three characters in the play, Niels Bohr and his wife Margrethe and Heisenberg rising from their graves to try and answer a question that had mystified contemporaries and continues to be argued about by historians - the reason for the 1941 visit of Heisenberg to Copenhagen and his meeting with Bohr.

I have not ever before wanted to meet a writer of any of the works that I have read and loved reading but this chance encounter with Michael Frayn and listening to him talk about the play and how he went about constructing it was so moving. It was like hearing again a much loved story through the lips of a friend who has experienced it with you and was the one instrumental in bringing that experience to you. When he told the audience, 'I look at you. You look at me. What goes on in your head? I do not know. What goes on in mine? You do not know. We look at each other.' This was like a deja vu from Copenhagen. I loved it.

While I very much wanted to continue being there in the session, my friends were exhausted and wanted to return to Colombo and faced with the choice of travelling alone by public transport in the rains and reaching home by midnight and of returning with my friends in a car, I decided to be sensible and give up the rest of my session. At least, I was able to hear him speak about Copenhagen for 15 minutes.

Fortunately, I spotted a friend who was volunteering at the festival and gave her my copy of Copenhagen and requested her if she could have it autographed by Michael Frayn at the end of his session. She did so and I am waiting eagerly to receive it next week.