Nirmal Jayasinghe

Personally, I like the Sun. I like shining days. Rainy, gloomy days make me so, well, feel bad. But I hate the midday sun as well. It scorches you atleast in these parts. What I need is a bit of shade, but that is the thing I kind of don’t find in the Capital city these days.

Colombo may not be green, but it has green parts. The Victoria park is a big asset. Lucky still we’ve got a green patch like that in the middle of the city rather than selling it up to build apartment blocks or supermarkets or carparks. Although it is pretty under-maintained I like the place. I can remember I always wanted to go there when I was a child but was taken there so rarely. Only now I can see the reason. Pity.

Other parts with alot of shade are University of Colombo suburbs, Rajakeeya Mawatha, and parts like Gregory’s Rd. One can walk these parts without thinking about the tropical sun shining above the canopy at all. Actually what can make an effect are treelined streets. Especially for a place like our city it’s important. The thing is that other than the abovemention ancient greenery, Colombo has almost no new greenery coming up. When those oldies are gone, we’ll be scorching all right.

If the CMC could come up with a ruling to make a certain percentage of the city to remain parkland, the prob may get solved. But maintained. We should be able to take out our sandwich there occasionally rather than gulping it down pathetically within glass and steel breathing canned air. If they can’t do it [yeah I know it's pretty far-fetched], they can line the streets with trees. Not just putting some cages with plants in them but maintain them til they can look after themselves. I think the first option is the best. I would make the city less congested and more green. What will happen is it would expand.

But I doubt whether any of these would be realities. In places like here where admin is also just doing a day-job, well it’s pretty hard. But I’d like to see Colombo a greener place. Less congested, expanded maybe. Don’t know whether things would improvise or worsen with time, but still, there’s hope.

We’ll be needing it more and more with every passing day.

So I went to the Zoo, trying to get away. I think even I didn’t know I was. For some time I worked with the YZA. So here I was, looking down at the bears’ den at two North American Brown Bears. They were huge. And had really nice brown coats [considering SL's heaty weather, too]. I liked them. I used to watch them a long long time. So he must’ve understood that I was havin trouble. So one day the bear comes along, breaking out of his continuous pacing, and sits on the concrete slab right below me. It was a fine morning and no one was around. The sun shone with blazing brilliance in the eastern sky. This is the abstract of our heart-to-heart equivalent:

Bear: What are you doing here?

Me: Oh, just watching.

Bear: Now whom do you think you’re kiddin?

Me: Er.. You, Mr Bear?

Bear: Very funny. I’m an ould bear and have seen many a spring pig like you come and go. (pause…) Now what are you running away from?

So I tell him. Already I’ve gone through it and I know somewhat about what I’m talking about. Already the black jaguar and the camel know, I think.

Bear: Now look heere, young man. You can’t run away from this. Or anything. You must go back and face it, boy. Personally I’m also kinda fed up seeing yeh so often.

He told me another thing or two as well. Anyway I couldn’t keep up the visits cause life started and I had to go.

But what he said helped. A lot. I couldn’t go see them and tell them of the outcome. I hope to do so soon.

Chinese Ministry of  Public Security

One thing Sri Lanka is not short of is government ministers. “.. I’ve got plenty ‘o them!”, as Spongebob would say. Today I saw on a popular morning TV show that ” ..the biggest party in parliament is that of the cabinet, non-cabinet and deputy ministers”.

This stems from the fact that party leaders in power pay by ministries. Their currency is ministerships. For MPs who did a lot to come to power, okay give him a ministry. This guy crossing over from the opposition, ok give ‘em ministries. Doesn’t matter whether there are enough subjects to create ministries even. Springing up entirely new ministries, and even splitting up existing ministries, can be good ideas when you run out of ministries to give. Some administrations even assigned ministers with no special subject. This shows how corrupt our public representation has become.

There’s a reason why there’s such a high demand for ministries. They get huge government benefits. They make me laugh when they step up MP salaries. I don’t think ministers care a damn about the salary they get: about Rs. 50 000. Who cares? They’re far more concerned about the power they get. After becoming a minister in the government, public law practically doesn’t apply to them. They are escorted by armed guard in armored and unstoppable motorcades: doesn’t matter whether he’s a target or not. They can assign personal staff and get them paid by the government. They can get huge benefits from big businessmen who need the legislation a bit bent to do the country some service. They get paid by the government for travel, fuel, housing, staff, duty-for-cars and.. you name it. But the main fact is the power a government minister holds. That may be official or non-official. It may become vast according to how close he is to the big seat. It is the root of all evil that stems from there.

The thing is, all these have to be paid by public money. And Sri Lanka doesn’t have much of that, it is soft and a lot of it is borrowed. It could be justified if we were some country so developed that we didn’t have anything to do with our money: which is clearly not the case. And worse, there’s a war going on and we spend a lofty sum there as well. There are a lot of slots in healthcare, transport and education sectors where money on favor ministries can be spent fruitfully.

Fixed number of ministries?

If the government could make it national policy that the country would have a set number of ministries no matter who came to power, it would be great. It can put a stop to assigning ministries for personal benefit. Of course a small country like ours do not need something like 50 ministries. Education, defense, interior, health, commerce, energy, foreign, science, public admin .. At most 20? If they’re for getting stuff done, then the number is disappointingly small. I think that would suffice: perhaps would be too much even. Most of the subjects are trivial and routine. The thing is now we’re like having ministries for what usually gets done by public departments.

“So what am I going to tell them?”

Good question. Nowadays what MPs say is that they cross over to help the government serve the country better. That provides the most number of ministers. How sweet. Suddenly they’ve seen heavenly good in the policies they loathed a few months back, maybe cause my present leader is not happy with me or just because my friend just crossed over and is now being driven in a fancy BMW. So what they say is they’ve taken up the ministership to serve. Why can’t they do so in parliamentary committees? Actually it isn’t the case that they really want to do the country something by being a minister, it’s just that the more people join it, the more better for the ruling party, so the spurious ministry comes as part of the package. It’s hard to think that every new guy has such a lot of ideas that cannot be implemented without a ministry to his name. Ministries have become not a way of getting things done on the country, but only a way to pay up petty politicians, by the politicians, of the politicians, for the politicians something or the other.

I hope someday soon they’ll find something better and less harmful for the country as a medium of exchange.

At last we’ve got Internet Explorer Version 7 installed in our labs. Thank goodness for the lab personnel. Usually I open around 5 internet pages simultaneously on average, and previous versions of IE gave the headache of struggling with a stack of windows on the taskbar. And if taskbar real estate got a bit scarce, it did the extra help of stacking all IE windows into one stack. Excellent. So easy. Nothing could be more helpful.

Actually I use IE only when I’m presented with no choice. My personal favorite is Mozilla Firefox. Unfortunately you don’t find it on every computer. The main attraction was tabbed browsing [outside] and safety [at home].

But now that luxury and convenience is home with everybody’s browser. If you’ve got Windows, got IE. Well atleast with XP. Tower of Babel. Simple. IE7 is really a good job, I think. There are a number of catches, though. I used it for a whole morning thinking the developers forgot to put in Stop Loading and Reload buttons. Finally I found them tucked together at the end of the address bar. Firefox got them more decently. And everytime a tab is opened, a small page pops up saying “You’ve opened a new tab!” blah blah and with little tipsies on what’s a tab and how to use them.

Hurray! Yeah!! May heaven be praised. IE has found a tab at last.