| by Tisaranee Gunasekara
“…government as a profitable monopoly and people as hereditary property”.
Paine (To the citizens of United States)
( April 15, 2012, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) A cake worth US$ 35 million is a stupendously obscene gesture in a country where 53 percent lack enough money to buy food and 46 percent struggle to find adequate shelter.
The economic statistics are from a new Gallup Poll, according to which at some point in 2011 “about one half of Sri Lankans lacked money for food and shelter…”. Last month’s warning from the Asian Development Bank that Sri Lanka’s poor “will suffer if prices of wheat and other commodities rise further” (Sri Lanka Mirror – 19.3.2012) further compounds the image of a divided country with an economically distressed majority.
So in this country, at this time, that gem-studded cake is more than an expensive offering to execrable taste. It is a dish made to the palate of Marie Antoinette, with crass vulgarity and moronic insensitivity as its basic psychological ingredients. It is symbolic of what Sri Lanka is becoming: a country in which the powerful and the rich see impunity as their birthright and parade their abuses and their excesses, shamelessly.
