Seven Amused Bloggers

In the mid 1960s, the Sri Lankan government initiated the Mahaweli Development Project with the aim of using the water of the Mahaweli river for irrigation and hydraulic power generation. As part of the project, farmers were given lands for cultivation in the North Central province of the country. This is their story who went up north to conquer the wild. It was the end of August, 1985. The August sky was clear and blue, and faded at the outline of a long range of mountains. The patches of land stripped naked by the big bull dozers cracked under the feet when walked over because the sun was not easy on the freshly upturned earth. Newly made sandy roads ran through the plains in one straight line towards the far north like one big white snake. Those patches were meant to be paddy fields in the near future. If not for the plots of bare land, the whole plains would be an infinite mesh of thorny bushes and tall big trees. Kohomba, Diwul, Palu and Weera trees stood like tall, skinn...

  As women, we’d be lying if we said that we didn’t have a contentious relationship with our bodies. We’d be lying if we said that we have never, not even once, wished we could change some part of our body; that we haven’t compared ourselves to one Instagram model or another; that we haven’t starved ourselves in the name of dieting; over-exercised; or in some extreme cases checked how much it costs to get liposuction, all in order to look and feel ‘beautiful’ (note the inverted commas). This is inevitable given the one-dimensional nature of the beauty standards that are generally propagated through popular culture. We are exposed to a plethora of –what are regarded as- flawless bodies on films, social media and other forms of popular cultural transmission. Various solutions to eliminate body dissatisfaction have been suggested, with curating our social media feeds and Netflix libraries in such a way that we can avoid having to look at these bodies being one of the most common recom...

Keeping up with the Kardashians Olympians Sigh, as much as I hate to admit it- I love Keeping Up with the Kardashians (KUWTK). Delving into the daily drama and frequent scandal that surrounds their lives is a guilty pleasure that allows me to escape the monotony of my daily life- at least for 20 minutes- and I cannot get enough of it! However, with that being said, I do believe that there is one more family out there that could easily give the Kardashians a run for their money, any day. I would watch a reality show based on their lives, over KUWTK, any day! I also have no doubt that it will run for longer than KUWTK - that’s how much goes on in their lives on a daily basis. Trust me when I tell you that keeping up with the Kardashians is not nearly as hard as keeping up with the goings-on of this family.  Sadly though, you and I will never live to see that become a reality because they do not inhabit the earthly realm; they are scattered between Mount Olympus, the Underworld and...

 Life in the 21 st century isn’t easy as it seems. People get distressed very easily as a result of the fast, modern lifestyle. Are people the only ones who get distressed when life gets uncomfortable? What about our furry friends at home, whom we leave behind every morning when we go to work? We do not get much time to see them or cuddle them during the weekdays since our heads are buried under huge piles of documents at our workplaces. As a solution to this issue most of the Companies worldwide have incorporated pet-friendly policies that benefit both the employers and employees and in addition, of course our four-legged fellows. According to the Human Resource Management survey in 2015 it has been found out that 8% of American workplaces have introduced pet-friendly policies and allowed the employees to bring their pets to work. Amongst these companies are Google, Amazon, Ben & Jerry’s, Etsy, Glassdoor and FabFitFun. Amazon reports that there are around 6000 pet dogs in t...

  Books Behind Bars: Censorship, The Path To A Utopia. Have you read any banned books? Wait. Let   me backtrack. Have you knowingly read any banned books? If you have read J.K Rowling’s    Harry Potter series, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale , Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series or Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner then you should be behind bars with your books … according to some people. These are just some of the books banned in various parts of the world! Can you believe that some of these books are locked in metal cages in places like California?! While there are advantages to censorship, an extreme form of censorship prevents growth and development in many spheres of life. Censorship is an old practice and has made its way into the media, fashion, pop culture and even literature. In fact, #cancelculture is perhaps the trendiest form of censorship on social media that has brought all powerful celebrities’ to their knees. Recently, one of the most...