For a small island, Sri Lanka has acquired a lot of names - Serendib, Ceylon, Teardrop of India, Resplendent Isle, Island of Dharma, Pearl of the Orient - an accumulation which reveals its richness and beauty, and the intensity of affection which it has evoked in visitors. For centuries it seduced travelers, who returned home with enchanting images of a languorous tropical isle of such deep spirituality and serenity that it entered the Western imagination as a Tahiti of the East. This, sadly, is the same island which, for the past 15 years, has been traumatized by a ferocious ethnic and religious conflict that has punctured the most willful exoticism and burned Sri Lanka into Western minds as the Northern Ireland of the Indian Ocean.
