I read the Daily News cause it’s in the office in the morning. The headline is generally ‘EVERYTHING IS FINE’, but there are some new additions. Lately the paper and Mahinda have been going on and on about a ‘plot to discredit the government’ and a media ‘conspiracy’ to demoralize the armed forces. On the front page of yesterdays paper there’s a hysterical Bandula Jayasekera piece called ‘Go tell it to the LTTE’ accusing everyone who speaks up about human rights and disappearances of supporting the LTTE for money. How one gets paid for this I don’t know, but war hysteria is leading to a short-sighted ‘with us or against us’ mentality that slanders many moderate citizens and the stated …

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The Daily News is a state owned newspaper. What it publishes parrots and praises the party line and is usually taken with a grain of salt. Lately, however, it requires at least a kilo. The front page has a little box which for weeks has been attacking the Editor of the Sunday Leader personally, even alluding to potential tax investigations. This is chilling coming from a government entity to a private individual, whatever his editorial record.
More recently, this unjournalistic box has taken to echoing the JHU in alluding to people and media that oppose the government as LTTE supporters. This ‘With Us or Against Us’ mentality is both inaccurate and injust, and it’s a shame that it’s being espoused so …

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Dr Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin Saheb greeting AHM Aswer

In case you hadn’t noticed, Colombo has been full of men and women in head to toe cloth, white and colored respectively. Nice hats too. These people are obviously Muslim, but I did a bit of reading and they are part of a Shia sect called the Bohra. Their leader Dr. Syedna Mohammed Burhanuddin Saheb, has arrived in Colombo for a ten day ceremony called the Ashara Mubaraka. This influx has almost single-handedly boosted the Colombo tourism industry, filling hotels and guest houses. I’ve also seen Majestic City and Odel full of these guests.

The Prophet Mohammed’s temporal succession involved many schisms in Islam, the most notable being that between Sunni …

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Look into the taillight abyss long enough and the chaos looks into you. Find myself driving like a shitheel, cutting off Trishaws and poking lodgedly into impassable lanes. The traffic is bad, its always been bad. In the daytime getting around Colombo is impossible, dangerous, stressful. Lately, however, the city has made lanes one-way and no one has adapted. Will adapt, I wonder. Galle Road flows to the North and Duplication flows to the South, and it flows like butter. Frozen butter. The difficulty now is that simple point-to-point trips now involve kilometers of detour, clogging of traffic, and bottlenecks down narrow lanes. I can’t say if its worse, but it certainly sucks.

Uniflow is a convincing sounding word for traffic …

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