lalith manage, who is co—director of an arts "you cannot talk about weerasinghe�*s "work without talkinghe history of the land." but can you only create your best art through that terrible lived experience of sri lanka? what about using the power of the imagination to create positive works of art? you know what? you see, i'm a buddhist, sri lankan, born and bred here, went to a buddhist school and my parents were buddhist and we lived, grew up with buddhist temples. then in 1983, when the southern sri lankans, mostly buddhists, began to attack innocent tamils in the country, and i saw it happening right in front of my eyes. i could not make sense of it. you know, what i was experiencing, what i was seeing was so horrible, i had no words to understand it. because i'm part of that problem — you know, these are the buddhists, these are the sinhalese, of my group, my community, attacking these tamils. so that was the turning point. and i realised that we justified those attacks, that violence, by way of a particular past and a particular history and the idea of the religion. it is the 1983 b

we kind of buttressed ourselves in this artist collective called theertha, which lalith manage, thatto, was part of it. so we made our own world, you know, to deal with this. and lalith manage says about the arts collective that you, and i quote, "wanted to drive home the point that the political "and the religious connection is problematic "and undesirable to the nation." yes. what do you mean by that? you know, we are supposed to be a democratic society. we are supposed to believe in consensus, building agreements, you know, all these things, but when you bring in religion, and history in a particular way, into contemporary politics, it always ends up giving rise to divisions and violence. by way of religion and the past, you justify violence in the contemporary, in the moment you live. that is what i was attacking all the time. so this is what i mean by that. you know, violence is always divine and celestial. we have a very celestial reason, or for the sake of the motherland or this island, which buddha visited three times — you are doing all this to preserve and protect that isla