Next President Of Sri Lanka
Bertie Ranaweerage
After the elections in the Southern and Western Provinces in March, it is believed that the government is going to dissolve the Uva Provincial Council and hold elections there before the end of 2014. There is no doubt the President wants to test the water. If the government manages to win all the elections in the Western, Southern and Uva provinces comfortably, we can expect the Presidential election within the first 3 months of 2015 and the Parliamentary elections soon after.
The billion dollar question for the Opposition and other ant-government forces is who can pose a serious challenge or defeat the incumbent President.
If one wants to defeat the present President at the next election she or he has to study how and why he was able to win people before and after he was elected to the Office of President.
An old acquaintance of mine, who was close to Mr. Mahinda Rajapaksa when he was the MP for Beliatta electorate, said to me that Mahinda used to invite everybody who visited him at his Beliatta home for a meal, breakfast, lunch or dinner.
It is public knowledge that after he became the President he served food to more than one hundred thousand people who attended Temple Trees for official and unofficial matters .
Just before the last Presidential election he held hundreds of meeting at Temple trees and nobody was sent home in hunger. It is true that he had to meet people at Temple Trees as the LTTE was waiting in the street to assassinate him. Read More
The Story Of An Identity Being Born
By Mahesan Niranjan -January 24, 2014
Prof. Mahesan Niranjan
Last
JSunday evening, my friends and I were out drinking. I had with me two of my countrymen from Sri Lanka. One was Polgahawela Aarachchige Don Soloman Rathmana Thanthiriya Bandarawela, of Sinhala ethnicity, and the other was Sivapuranam Thevaram, a Tamil guy. My Sinhala friend’s name is too long, so we will call him Pol, and the other uses only one name for all purposes: “Mr Thevaram” and “machan (buddy) Thevaram”. We had a special guest that day, whose name is Grr Gllk Kllk, an anthropologist from the planet Mars. Such complicated names these Martians have, no? The Martian claimed to be doing an internship at the local university, but this is just a cover for his mission to carry out an independent interplanetary investigation into happenings in our tiny little country. “aney aiyO (oh dear)!” I hear you exclaim.
To make our guest feel welcome, we went to a pub that the Martian’s ancestor had established. They also have the habit of travelling to faraway places and setting up kiosks of trade, just like we Sri Lankans do. For example, it is said that entrepreneurs from the Northern village of Karainagar are very good at travelling all over the Island and setting up surudduk kadai (cigar/corner shops), just as our countrymen from the Southern town of Matara are known for bath kade (rice eateries). And when you visit a strange place, it is customary for your host to take you to a joint where you might feel homely, which is precisely what we were doing with Grr Gllk Kllk in the pub.
