Jacqueline Fernandez
Jacqueline Fernandez

The first time I joined the gym was during the Miss Sri Lanka pageant in 2006. Then, I went for the Miss Universe contest where I was exposed to girls who were very fit for their age. They could have joined the Olympics. They were doing crazy exercises.

James Buchan
James Buchan

Suicidal violence is not the exclusive property of the Muslim world. Suicide bombings were a tactic of nationalist struggles in 19th-century Europe and Russia, the far east during the second world war and the Vietnam war, and in modern Sri Lanka.

Jonathan Agnew
Jonathan Agnew

I played in Sri Lanka, so I know how hard it is to come here and win. The weather is baking hot and the conditions are alien to English cricketers.

Julia Sawalha
Julia Sawalha

I love to travel with my family or my two best friends because I completely trust them. I forced my two best friends into learning to scuba dive with me in Sri Lanka - it was amazing but also hideous because we were learning in very difficult seas.

M.I.A.
M.I.A.

My giving birth was nothing when I think about all the people in Sri Lanka that have to give birth in a concentration camp.

M.I.A.
M.I.A.

Basically, when I went to school in Sri Lanka from age five onward, the classes there were sometimes sorted into a hierarchy of your skin tone. So the fairer-skinned kids sat at the front row, and the darker-skinned kids sat at the back by the poor ones who played out in the street all day long.

M.I.A.
M.I.A.

I'm just so grateful for the 10 years that I had in Sri Lanka when it was in the middle of a war and I was getting shot at, because now and again I remember glimpses of those times, and I just go, 'Wow, I'll never, ever see that again in my life. And I'm never gonna feel that, and I'm never gonna feel for a human being like that.'

M.I.A.
M.I.A.

Sri Lanka is an island off the coast of India. There's two ethnicities there; one the Sinhalese, which is the majority and the government, and the minority, who are the Tamils. That's where I'm from. And my lifetime sort of began there; I spent 10 years, and I was there during when the war started and fled as a refugee to England.

M.I.A.
M.I.A.

I was shot at for being a Tamil in Sri Lanka, and then, everyone was calling me a Paki in London, and I'm not even Pakistani.

Martin Jacques
Martin Jacques

The fact that television and tourism have made the whole world accessible has created the illusion that we enjoy intimate knowledge of other places, when we barely scratch their surface. For the vast majority, the knowledge of Thailand or Sri Lanka acquired through tourism consists of little more than the whereabouts of the beach.