I am not surprised. Sri Lanka shares a lot of culture and history with India. Afterall one of the origin stories of sri lanka is king Vijaya was banished from India and sailed to Sri Lanka where he met the locals then and established the kingdom that later became Sri Lanka.
When I am working abroad and miss home food and I can't find a Sri Lankan shop, I often substitute it with Kerala food, which I believe some of our main dishes are inspired from. Both Kerala food and Sri Lankan food makes heavy use of coconut milk in preparing their dishes.
Yes and no. The civil war that waged in Sri Lanka was something really complicated, where at one point it was hard to choose who was right or wrong in the conflict.
As far as I know the Sinhalese started the whole civil war but the LTTE escalated the situation where they were committing atrocities I cannon't write on a forum like this. And mind you, both sides committed some pretty messed up atrocities.
After the war ended despite what's been told in international media, as a Sri Lankan who represent an ethnic minority there I can say I feel safer now, people have seem to forgotten about the war to some extend and there's a lot of healing that is being done (no thanks to the government though) personally I remember a time when we took different buses to school/work even if we were all heading in the same direction incase one of the busses were attacked by the terrorists we wont lose both parents in the family. There was a lot of mistrust and a lot of divide among everyone even in school you had different ethnic groups hanging out with their own ethnicity. But now we have a more diverse groups of friends we have businessmen, politicians and other elites in society that represent different ethnic groups.
There's a lot of improvements to be made, but I think we as a nation have done really well to rebuild after being enemies for over 30 years.
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and as for the parallels I haven't heard of stories where the ltte or the army forcing sons to rape their mothers after salting the earth of an entire town like the way the British did. What the British did was wipe out our culture, our history and basically taking away what made Sri Lankan's unique.
As a Sri Lankan it breaks my heart whenever this type of topic is brought up, the amount of damage colonizers including the British did to my country, my culture is just heart wrenching.
How the British and other colonizers go unpunished for all what they have done not just to my country, but to so many other countries in the past is just unbelievable.
But on a more positive side, more and more Sri Lankans are starting to realize what's missing and are actively trying to bring back some of the knowledge and wisdom that was lost all those many years back.
When I am working abroad and miss home food and I can't find a Sri Lankan shop, I often substitute it with Kerala food, which I believe some of our main dishes are inspired from. Both Kerala food and Sri Lankan food makes heavy use of coconut milk in preparing their dishes.