About Me

My name is Uditha Akalanka Devapriya. I hail from Piliyandala, a suburbia tucked away in a far corner of Colombo. Having been born to both Catholicism (through my father) and Buddhism (through my mother), I live in a twilight world, between rigidity and freethought.

My parents inculcated a love for writing in me. Unfortunately, the authors I relished in my early years wrote affectedly, and this impeded me for some time. I am yet to achieve a naked, austere, and lean prose style. My faith and this blog will, I hope, redeem me and push me.

I studied at Lyceum International School, Nugegoda, and did my A Levels in 2011. I am a freelance journalist (for Ceylon Today), a writer, a part-time tutor, and an unconditional lover of literature and cinema.

I also am an avid talker.

I do not like to rubbish everything local. Thus, I do not like to embrace the exotic for the sake of novelty.

I also do not like to move with the crowd and follow anything blindly.

To this end, I consider myself a rationalist, though not to the extent of ridiculing tradition. I am firmly opposed to theism and to the brainwashing that children are subjected to for the sake of an unseen deity. I think Bertrand Russell put my entire worldview on this pithily: "If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause."

I like to dabble in the political once in a way, but I do not take to conventional debate streams that easily. I also believe that subjecting one party to critique does not automatically absolve another. My political standpoints sometimes affect my views on art, but not to the point where they are adulterated.

That is why I write here. That is why I transcribe. That is why I write and transcribe in Fragments.