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Pure pleasure with David Bowie

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Pure pleasure with David Bowie Denzil Jayasinghe 4 min read · 1 hour ago D avid Bowie is 24, shimmering with possibility, and he has slipped quietly out of the Sydney night into your small house, still carrying the electricity of the concert on his skin. Press enter or click to view image in full size He shrugs off his jacket and you see the full glory of his Hunky Dory self: long, flowing hair falling over his cheeks, wide–leg, high‑waisted bell‑bottoms, a fitted waistcoat that catches the light, and boots that make a soft, certain thud on your floor. He looks both casual and impossibly composed, as if this outfit is just something he happened to throw on before changing the direction of popular music. You apologise for the simplicity of the meal, and he waves it away with a small, amused tilt of the head, as if to say that paratta and lentils are as good a reason to live as any encore. At the table, the two of you sit close enough to smell the faint mix of sweat, cologne and cigarett...

Denzil Reviews Singlish

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Denzil Reviews Singlish (From a Safe Distance and a Return Ticket) Denzil Jayasinghe 2 min read · 13 hours ago D enzil has lived abroad long enough to pronounce his T’s aggressively and say “schedule” as though he personally invented it. But every December — and August, because nostalgia apparently comes in instalments — he returns to Sri Lanka and to Singlish: that elastic dialect of agreement, ambiguity and strategic delay. Not the famous Singapore version — this is the island remix. His fieldwork begins at the airport. The Uber driver beams. “Traffic very bad today, no?” Denzil nods obediently. The “no?” is not a question. It is a conscription. You are being enrolled in consensus.. Resistance is futile. At his friend’s house, inspection commences. “You have put on weight, no?” He inhales to defend himself. Later, Denzil attempts to fix the Wi-Fi, armed with foreign confidence and YouTube tutorials. “Not like that one,” a worker says, watching him as though he is defusing a bomb inco...

It is not work. It is life

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It is not work. It is life Some lives are lived in chapters. Mine moved across continents – from a childhood in Sri Lanka shaped by a father’s ironed shirts and a mother’s careful arithmetic, through the gleaming transience of Dubai, to the quieter demands of fatherhood in Sydney. I did not set out to write about work. I set out to understand what I had mistaken it for. This is what I found. Denzil Jayasinghe 5 min read · 7 hours ago My father’s shirts hung on the back of a wooden chair, ironed the night before with care that bordered on ritual. He believed in preparation. The morning began not with haste but with deliberation. A man did not rush into duty; he approached it properly dressed. He was not a man of loud speeches. Yet his habits instructed more firmly than any sermon. He would examine his ledger at home, recalculating columns he had already checked yesterday. It was not mistrust of his calculations. It was mistrust of error. To err through carelessness was, to him, a kind o...