HT Home / Blogs Home >
BlogWatch / Blogosphere / Lankan rapper and A.R. Rahman collaborator, M.I.A., lashes out against “genocide”
Lankan rapper and A.R. Rahman collaborator, M.I.A., lashes out against “genocide”
Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, better known as the 31-year-old, UK-based Sri Lankan rapper, M.I.A., is the daughter of Arul Pragasam, a Tamil activist and one-time co-founder of the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS). Although Arul Pragasam (a.k.a. Arular) is believed to have once been close to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), he is reportedly no longer active politically.
Yet, in a recent interview to (click here to read it) The Daily Beast blog, M.I.A. has lashed out against the Sri Lankan establishment, terming what is happening on the island as “systematic genocide, ethnic cleansing”. M.I.A. is in the news currently–her song Paper Planes been nominated for a Grammy and, better still, her collaboration with A. R. Rahman on Slumdog Millionaire’s soundtrack is also nominated for the Academy Awards. Here’s O…Saya, the song that M.I.A. or Maya collaborated with Rahman on. Incidentally, Paper Planes is also on the soundtrack of the film. If you didn’t quite catch the lyrics of that big blast of a song, check it out here.
(6 votes, average: 3.83 out of 5)
Loading ...Posted by Sanjoy Narayan on Monday, February 2, 2009 at 1:11 am
Filed under Blogosphere · Tagged Lankan, LTTE, Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, MIA, Tamil activist
There is an extra-territorial loyalty among some sections in INdia also with LTTE, which is objectionable. The LTTE has been responsible for the first fidayeen attack on Indian soil that had caused the death of our Prime Minister.
[Reply]
renuka Reply:
February 14th, 2009 at 8:40 pm
Do read ‘Love Marriage’, a novel by Vasugi Ganeshananthan, an expat Jaffna girl who went to Harvard, edited their mag, Crimson and is now a journo in the US. Nobody had any business to kill our prime minister. Wish he hadn’t sent the IPKF into Lanka, though…it’s like his mother set up Bhindranwale…and what the PPP is now experiencing with the monster of their making, the Taliban (Benazir’s Interior MInister, Nasrullah Babar set them up, imagine): ‘Sow the wind and reap the whirlwind’ as the Bible says.
No way does Vasugi’s book champion LTTE violence. But it’s a very well-written picture of what happened in Lanka and the regular lives turned upside down by bigger forces.
[Reply]