A Week in Sri Lanka

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Run for your lives
2007-02-28 16:27:00
The scene in Batticaloa is now over. Several diplomats injured, several statements made, what’s next? Has the incident left us anything new to contemplate about? The LTTE has initiated a slow death on itself, if anything at all, that’s what it is. Their true identity as a terrorist organization is now in the open and yesterdays attack has proven with enough evidence the manner in which they want the world to visualize them. Their time posing as the representatives of the tamil people is now over and as of today they stand as a fanatic terrorist organization committed to achieve the aims of its leadership. With the attack at the Batticaloa yesterday it is clear that the LTTE is trying desperately to fight back a war they seem to be loosing and in the process has made some more enemies as well. A little ironic to see that such an attack had to happen for the international community to come up with a forceful response to the claims we’ve been making so long. That is to tr...
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Sri Lankan Bloggers – the Community, the Present and the Prospects
2007-02-27 17:27:00
Just a little deviation from the normal course of topics I write about everyday. It’s more than tiring to write about the disparaging things going on in this country on a daily basis so I’m pondering about penning down something else – so here we go; the topic of interest today - the Sri Lanka n blog community. Now for a start, I’m not an expert in this area. I started blogging about a month ago and by virtue of time have been grabbing certain things of interest in the meantime. Primarily, all I’ve been doing with this regard is reading a lot on blogging and sweeping other blogs just to get an idea of the real use of blogging and at the same time making my voice heard about the things that interests me. Though the rest of this post would be commonplace for most Blog ger s in Sri Lanka who have been in this community for a while, I’ll just add some observations I’ve made during the past month. Though I’ve been a late comer to this arena compared with most of the ...
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Brothers in Battle
2007-02-26 17:39:00
The news of the recent clash between two student groups from the most closely related brotherly schools is now on the open. For more than a century, Ananda and Nalanda have been the most prestigious Buddhist colleges in Sri Lanka and their students have led the country in almost every occasion in every field of interest. But the school culture has been changing. The past decade has witnessed our school children, especially the teenagers and predominantly boys, sustaining wrath with their “rival� schools and several incidents were recorded recently of teenagers clashing with their brothers from a different school over a personal matter of one or two pupils. Being an Anandian, I’ve witnessed this issue gaining momentum during our days at school but even then the battles were among far related schools. (in our case it was either Zahira College, Asoka College, Royal College or even Isipathana at times; I’m not saying they were right, a clash is a clash, be it among any two group...
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Hon Ministers, Do you prefer BMWs or………..
2007-02-25 17:18:00
“Increasing the number of ministers in the government won’t have a considerable affect on the economy of the country� - Jeevan Kumaranathunga (Among many others, Soon after the reconstituting of the minister portfolios). I just wonder how these ministers are able to talk out of their a _ _ _ s and still get away from any serious accusations from the public. Don’t they have a tiny teeny bit of shame at all? God……. words have lost all meaning. The genuine function of ministering just cracked to the surface again as the rush for the luxury vehicles hit the discussion table earlier this week. According to the Sunday times, Treasury Secretary P. B. Jayasundera has called for a policy guideline circular on the allocation of new vehicles for the elected cabinet. Sunday Times further states that each of these bullet-proof BMWs will cost Rs.80million each and that four applications have already been submitted for consideration. That’s Rs.80million (8 plus 7 zeros ...
More About: Bmw , Mini , Ministers , Minister , Refer

The Art of Protesting – Learn from the Gurus
2007-02-23 18:07:00
Seeing a public rally yesterday organized by the JVP at the Hyde Park to object the acceptance of the cease fire agreement by some factions of the country till its fifth anniversary, thought of venturing a little into the culture of protests, strikes and public rallies here in Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan peoples’ inclination to these extreme measures for winning their claims and their battles seems to have outdone those of any other country in the modern world. The present Sri Lanka has reached a place where it is inevitable that a protest, a strike or a public rally will break out at the earliest light of a dispute between those who govern and those who are being governed.If any credit should be awarded to any particular group for promoting this sort of culture in Sri Lanka, the JVP sure would rank at the top. Undoubtedly they are the masters of rallies, the gurus of strikes and the pioneers of protests. Though it would be harsh to label them as the founders of this sort of rebelli...
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Norway, it’s time for you to go back
2007-02-22 16:31:00
Another futile statement of commitment came yesterday from the Norwegian ambassador calling the Sri Lankan government and the LTTE to make efforts towards keeping the peace process continuing and the cease fire agreement alive. The Norwegians have been an imperative party in the peace process which turned out to be a failure and still they are in the process of finding a foundation where the conflicting two parties can come into terms for a concrete solution for the ethnic crisis even after five years of their first involvement here.What’s wrong with these people? Don’t they ever give-up? What are they? Some kind of peace-obsessed, no-work-to-be-done-at-home kind of people who have no other interest but to see every country in the world becoming a utopia? Enough is enough. They have had their chance here in Sri Lanka. If anything was done with their intervention to the peace process here, it should be appreciated. At least they had given two years of “relative� peace throug...
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Typeinternational & Alpha Holdings (pvt) Ltd, Another money scam in Sri
2007-02-21 18:13:00
Even after about a decade since the introduction of the internet to Sri Lanka, the awareness among the general public with relevance to the threats and opportunities lurking in the web seems to be growing at a very low pace. This lack of understanding about prospects and pitfalls in the internet has made the general public of Sri Lanka potential targets for various financial scams devised by dodgy yet masterminded personnel who prosper at the interest of the ignorance of the general public. The establishment of a positive attitude to the new technological measurements the world is making at present is still to be implanted on the majority of the people in the country, primarily from the rural and sub-urban areas. The bulk of the general public is still not aware of the differences between the legitimate earning opportunities provided in the web and the various scams, making them vulnerable to these traps. The biggest scene that took place recently in this cunning lineage was the â...
More About: International , National , Money , Inter , Other

Dispute strikes at Moragahakanda
2007-02-20 17:45:00
In a dispute over the recently designed Mora gahakanda reservoir, residents of the Padaviya area in the North Central province have launched a civil movement claiming that they have been deprived of water supply which was originally agreed for at the beginning of the project. According to the head of the movement, Ven.Karambankulame Siridamma thera, the original plan was to distribute water supply through the North Central canals to Medawachchiya, Kebithigollewa, Waahalkada, Padaviya through Welioya though this has been altered by the former Mahaweli irrigation development minister who had devised plans to distribute water from the reservoir to the districts of Trincomalee and Polonnaruwa, depriving the water supply to some ten thousand hectares of land in the Padaviya area. The water supplied by the Moragahakanda reservoir, according to the present arrangement, fills only the Huruluwewa, the Kalawewa and the Mahakanadarawa tank. The objections raised by the residents of the...
More About: Anda , Strike , Dispute

Good Luck Jaffna
2007-02-19 18:29:00
Good news after sometime. The six months break is over and it’s time to start studying again. The Jaffna University was reopened after six months of closure due to the battles between the LTTE and the Sri Lankan armed forces. The University had been a prominent institute for higher studies in Sri Lanka ever since it was established in 1974. The university put hold to its functions last august when the LTTE and the Sri Lankan army had initiated battles in the region and ultimately led to the closure of the university. Vice chancellor of the university officially declared the opening of the university for academic activities where he stated that they don’t need to loose anymore valuable time. This action by the people involved seems to be an act of boldness since one of the students of the very university was murdered the day before. In spite of the violence, the determination of the students to recommence their academic activities should be greatly appreciated. Howev...
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Getting ‘Super Star’ back on track
2007-02-18 19:11:00
The Sirasa TV and its sister channels owned by the Maharaja group have recently been the leading group of television media that’s responsible for introducing a large number of alien matters to the present Sri Lankan community. Though a considerable number of these innovations carry with them excess commercialization and bring about detrimental issues to the society, we should not ignore the conceptually beneficent items they have introduced to the Sri Lankan community. I stress the word “conceptually� since they have pretty much all the time messed up when putting these potential good deeds in to practice. The “Sirasa Super Star �, the Sri Lankan version of the “American Idol�, stands at the top of the list; a program which I thought could have produced great social results to the country had Sirasa got their motives right. This post does not came into existence as a continuation of one of the previous posts I wrote about Sirasa’s teledramas in my other blog Ãyub...
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Join hands to salvage Sri Lankan music
2007-02-17 17:24:00
Music is by all means one of the prime avenues the human being has linked to his life to express himself, to enjoy life and to relieve the pressure of ever escalating troubles of existence. To me it is the path to heaven at disturbing times and no other remedy appeases me more than a soothing oldie listened within a placid environment. A review on world music is way out of my reach since I’m no expert on music or any other art format for that matter. Nor this is the place for me to extract such thing even if I was an astute critic on art. But fairly enough, someone should spring up some conversation on the current Sri Lanka n trend in emerging music and especially about the culture of songs, both Sinhalese and English, that’s been taking a hazardous turn in Sri Lankan music arena. Being Sri Lankans we have our own identity, though I won’t be able to prove what it is with factual elements, anyone who’s Sri Lankan and who has been on this island for a considerable time...
More About: Music , Join , Hands , Hand

Death Penalty in Sri Lanka
2007-02-16 18:39:00
I was going through my mail and I found the Saddam execution video lying there in the inbox. The video made me think not about his execution or the justice behind this punishment which everyone claimed had a lot to do with the US influence. It made me wonder why the capital punishment has ceased to exist here in Sri Lanka . The death penalty has not been carried out here in Sri Lanka since 1977 and this is mainly due to the notion that the death penalty is not the answer to the prevention of crime in the country. Most humanitarians advocate on this grounds and primarily for this reason the capital punishment is not present in Sri Lanka anymore. If the capital punishment does not address the reduction of crimes of a country, then what does? People who are opposing the death penalty are justifying their view by saying that a process of rehabilitation is much more humanitarian than executing someone. But by all means, this is wrong and does not do good for a country like Sri Lan...
More About: Death , Death penalty , Penalty

University education and its future
2007-02-15 18:50:00
An article in the daily news today on the importance of universities being involved in the development process of a country has made me probe into this matter a little and explore a bit on the present productivity in Sri Lankan universities. The obvious reason that the university students are one of the most important sectors in a country where a great many brains converge makes it an important fact to discuss, especially at a time where this country needs the service of free thinkers. Having said that, are there any free thinkers in our universities at all? The answer to that lies in the procedure the universities are following with respect to the degree courses, the content and the way the students are made to react to these procedures. In my view, the Sri Lankan universities today rarely encourages free thinking amongst its student population and fails to serve the original purpose of a university. I myself am an undergraduate in the Univ ersity of Colombo and I have witnessed...
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Pictures of LTTE training civilians
2007-02-14 17:42:00
I posted an article yesterday on the issue of child solders being used by the LTTE and don’t know how, but I received an email with some interesting pictures on the training given by the LTTE to the civilians in the north and the east. These pictures couldn’t have arrived at a better time and I just thought I’ll share them with you.In addition to the above, there are some more on female LTTE cadres and some of them appear to be still very young at age.BTW: I started my second blog today. It's named Ãyubõwan. Check that out.
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Please Sir, the gun is too heavy
2007-02-13 18:20:00
Yesterday as I was surfing around a bit and checked out the web site of the Ministry of Defence and came across some of the atrocities made by the LTTE regarding the use of child solders during the years of its terrorist history and thought of sharing that with those of you who haven’t came across those articles, especially those who are away from Sri Lanka. Particularly, the LTTE’s approach in using children to run their battles had been widely looked down upon and the few articles listed below gives a great insight, with detailed examples, as to how this has taken place in reality. I don’t intend to comment on these articles and would like to leave the judgment to the readers since these articles carry with them an abundance of detail regarding the topic on discussion here. But, I’ll just pour in some thoughts on my own regarding this issue the way I see it. First of all, I should mention that with these war crimes and atrocities, the LTTE has ceased to become the...
More About: Please , Heavy , Lease , Ease , The G

The JVP role in Sri Lankan politics
2007-02-12 18:43:00
Ok, this might deviate a lot from the words I’ve made in my blog description of being an ‘Independent Observer’ because I cannot write this without being bias and pouring into it my prejudiced feelings about the most radical political party in Sri Lanka - the JVP. I’ll make a modest effort to be less biased and present an indifferent view about how they fit into the Sri Lankan political arena but the way to take it, is totally up to the readers. Though I’m not completely aware of the factual content behind the emergence of the JVP first as liberation and then as a political party during the early 90s, this is what I gather from my knowledge on politics. Ever since I could remember, the JVP came up front as the political party that will always hit the news by changing colors in the ever changing political environment. Earlier they used to act as an informal and scattered military group or a militia fighting against the ruling government for the benefit of the Sri Lanka...
More About: Politics , Role , Poli

Is Mahinda on the right track?
2007-02-11 17:14:00
I thought of digging into a little bit of the approach the government is taking in terms of resolving the ethnic conflict and in terms of handling the LTTE at present. Given the fact that the Sri Lankan forces are making extreme progress in the east (from what we gather through news and media), I think it should be taken into discussion as to why the Sri Lankan president is still following a hesitant approach to combat the LTTE. Ok, may be the word ‘hesitant’ is not the correct one to use to describe this. But still it baffles me to hear that the president is still encouraging peace talks with the LTTE though the history reveals that there’s very little chance of success in coming into an agreement with the LTTE. It’s always better to arrive at a peace agreement rather than engage in a brutal battle that’ll cost thousands of lives and would hamper the development of a country and thus I believe a political solution should be encouraged at all costs. But to me that’s ...
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