Word: sri
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...these ghostly materials Michael Ondaatje has fashioned a magic carpet of a novel that soars across worlds and times. Ondaatje, a Sri Lankan poet who lives in Toronto, has gained considerable acclaim before, most notably for his one-of-a-kind memoir of colonial Ceylon, Running in the Family. He has also established himself as one of the most inspired chroniclers, and exemplars, of the new cross-cultural mix taking shape all around us, able to light up Salman Rushdie-land with a visual daring that must have moviemakers salivating. Two weeks ago, The English Patient won England's prestigious...
...never got along with each other. Jockeying among varied ethnic-religious groups for pieces of the old imperial turf has been igniting secessionist wars ever since. Possibly the deadliest one within the past decade has been the insurrection of Hindu Tamil groups against the Buddhist Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. The Washington-based Carnegie Endowment for International Peace counts, among many others, six separate conflicts in India and three each in Burma and Indonesia in which guerrilla groups are seeking independence...
State's figures, however, do not include incidents staged by terrorists who operate within one country with little or no foreign state sponsorship, such as the Irish Republican Army, the Shining Path guerrillas of Peru and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka. Even the more conventional Middle East-based terrorists retain a dangerous capacity for bloodshed, as evidenced by the mid- March bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires and assaults by Kurdish separatists who last week machine-gunned a bus in Istanbul and attacked policemen and police stations in five cities throughout Turkey...
...longer get cricks in their necks (from craning to watch a TV) and elbows (from manipulating long-handled instruments of awkward design). A few dream of operating by remote control, their heads encased in virtual-reality helmets. Don't laugh, they chide skeptics. On the drawing boards at SRI International is an inkling of just such a system, one that might someday allow a surgeon in St. Louis to operate on an astronaut in low earth orbit. Even better may be novel ways of destroying diseased organs -- through heat, perhaps -- without cutting into the body...
...that the Bible prescribes as the mortal life-span. Its passing should free our "striving spirit" to concentrate on all sorts of other challenges, such as the growing conflict between the haves and the have-nots and the need to refine liberal democracy, not just in places like Sri Lanka but in the developed world as well. So Fukuyama can cheer up. The continuation of history will be plenty interesting...