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Sri Lanka is an island that everyone loves at some level inside themselves. A very special island that travellers, from Sinbad to Marco Polo, dreamed about. A place where the contours of the land itself forms a kind of sinewy poetry.

On a personal level, I think the political situation in Sri Lanka is very much on the mind of Sri Lankans in Canada. They have family here and family back home, and it's possible they've lost members in any one of those tremendous, unbearable events there.

An economically peaceful and prosperous Sri Lanka is the dream of youth of the nation. My message for the youth is to collectively work for an inclusively developed Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankans of every kind, overwhelmingly the poorest, have been bombed by one side or the other for decades.

Sri Lanka is a part of my background: it's not where I live, but it's what I want to explore. And I find it works very well to explore through fiction.

Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people. We don't even have an army. So it's sort of like an all-around good, innocent place.

When I was growing up, I don't think I knew any other child who had been out of Sri Lanka.

Be careful about Burma. Most people cannot remember whether it was Siam and has become Thailand, or whether it is now part of Malaysia and should be called Sri Lanka.

I have a restaurant in Sri Lanka, and I feel keen to open up something here in Mumbai and bring Sri Lankan food here in India. I feel we have so much in common, but we have a different cuisine, and I am sure people will enjoy here.

I consider myself a brown American or a man of color before I would say Sri Lankan, to be honest. I didn't grow up there. There was a pretty brutal civil war there from 1983 until 2009. So we weren't able to go back very much. I've gone back as an adult. But I grew up in Pennsylvania.