God Is Amazing
Dr. Arjuna Parakrama
Forgiving us our filth, She’s even found some use for CHOGM now, for
Colombo’s rat-addled graves have come alive,
Fooling fossorials that there’s fresh flesh galore to feast on.
But even worms are said to turn at times, not us, this Lankan (supper) middle class.
The grandest graves look grander now, the small are tiny, all fittingly piled high with decay,
Chuck is due, the dead must be on show: Trees are chopped, walls painted, gates fixed.
He’s visiting white men killed in their old wars; we’ve seen more, and don’t discriminate so much.
Note, this dressing up’s on the surface, stuff goes on below, and that’s unchanged,
Since we’re only rats and mice here, and, of course, lemming thinkalikes.
God or Charles who cares, give old Caesar his due: Our departed
Sleep happier, now the Army has cleaned them up.
Not so for the Wanni’s ungrateful dead. So what? Let corpses burden the living there,
Serves them right for dying like flies for rotten terrorist causes. Embarrassing us, machan.
The deities do not forsake lightly, but when they do it’s murderous, and eternal.
“Beyond A Reasonable Doubt” Vs “The Balance Of Probabilities”
By Emil van der Poorten -November 3, 2013
Emil van der Poorten
It seems like what used to be the yardsticks in allocating guilt in criminal and civil law respectively have now begun to play an increasingly important part in general public discourse with, it seems, an increasingly polarized Sri Lankan public choosing to use one or the other of those yardsticks as is convenient to them at any given point.
What has lent a significant element of irrationality to the use of the two terms has been the dearth of hard information in the public domain due to the deliberate suppression of information that might not project the Rajapaksa Regime as being one of absolute perfection. This has been achieved by two primary means: literally buying over the media or inveigling the decision-makers in that sector into unquestioning allegiance by threat or bribe.
There appear now to be two streams of public expression – the “bought and paid for press” and the elements under threat, on one hand and the “underground” media, “underground” for Sri Lanka, that is. Typically, the government has sought, with varying degrees of success, to block the latter which the public hitherto had free access to via the internet. Typically, the suppression of normal avenues of discussion and debate has led to information, sometimes wildly speculative and often times deliberately mischievous, reaching not only epidemic proportions but achieving a degree of hitherto-unprecedented credibility. To someone of my vintage, this comes as no surprise. In the days of Sirimavo Bandaranaike’s efforts to crush dissent of any and every description during the first JVP uprising of the very early ‘seventies,’ something very similar occurred and the wildest of wild rumours achieved gospel-like credibility, bolstered by occurrences unheard of before then such as the disposal of piles of bodies under burning motor vehicle tyres. There was then also, for a time, the blocking of “trunk telephone calls” and the impact of this could be imagined in a day and age when a call to anyone outside a radius of a few miles had to go through an operator. For instance if I needed to call anyone outside the immediate Galagedera area, I had to call the “Kandy Exchange” and (hopefully!) have the operator connect me with whoever I was trying to reach. The modern equivalent of this was the attempt made to register every mobile phone to facilitate the easier interception of people’s private telephonic communications. I will desist from naming the individual who succeeded in having this done for the reason that it would be redundant!
