Tag:Phnom Penh

Oh, Sri Lanka. My beautiful, complicated, post-crisis, tea-scented island. One minute you are flirting with the global “pink dollar,” the next you are blushing and backing away like a shy debutante who suddenly remembers the neighbors are watching. Let me say this clearly: LGBTQ tourism is not about glitter parades on every beach in Bentota. It is not about turning Sigiriya into a rainbow disco ball. It is about one simple thing — safety and dignity. If two men from Berlin want to hold hands at sunset in Galle, or...

I have spent enough nights in Southeast Asian cities to know that hotel lobbies are theatres of denial. Not hypocrisy — denial. The polite, air-conditioned kind. The kind with a marble counter, a discreet CCTV dome in the corner, and a ledger that records everything while claiming to judge nothing. Let’s talk about guest-friendly hotels. People hear the phrase and imagine decadence, scandal, sin in neon lights. In reality? It’s paperwork. It’s ID cards placed gently on reception desks. It’s a clerk who has seen it all and reacts to...

I remember the first time I bought sanitary pads. I wrapped them in another plastic bag, as if they were contraband. Not drugs. Not alcohol. Cotton and cellulose. But somehow more shameful. And now, decades later, we are still pretending that menstruation is a private embarrassment rather than a public policy issue. So when a young lawyer stands up and challenges the so-called tampon tax, Auntie pays attention. Because this is not just about rupees and receipts. It is about who gets to define what is “essential.” Milk? Essential. Medicine?...

I have sat on plastic chairs outside churches in the Gulf on a rare Friday afternoon and watched Sri Lankan women laugh like schoolgirls for exactly two hours before returning to houses where they are employees first and human beings second. If you want to understand migration, don’t start with remittance graphs. Start with that bench. Sri Lankan domestic workers in the Gulf are described in economic language: “foreign exchange earners,” “low-skilled migration,” “housemaids.” Such tidy labels. They hide the fact that these are women who once stood in their...

I was there on that first morning — not in a white dress (please, Auntie prefers red), but standing outside a district office at 8:30 a.m., watching two nervous brides fix each other’s hair before stepping inside. One year later, I still think about their hands. They were shaking. Not because they doubted each other. Because they understood history was opening a door — and they were walking through it. Marriage equality, my darlings, is a strange beast. It looks simple: a signature, a certificate, a photo for Instagram. But...