In the past month Colombo has seen protests by students, teachers, nurses, midwives, trade unionists, political parties, investors, ministers and more. Almost every day I go out I see someone protesting something and, if not that, taking their Gods for a walk through the town. One day I drove past Vihara Maha Devi Park and saw some people protesting against an investment company. The next day I saw protestors again and stopped for some literature. I was quite confused to find a flyer for the bank in question. They’d gotten their own people to stage a counter-protest. Since the LTTE stopped bombing the streets it’s been an explosion of placards and slogans. This is a good thing, though it is an awful lot of it.

In the Ceylinco Life Insurance parking lot there is a small jail cell where the last King of Kandy was kept until he was deported to India by the British. One would not notice what appears to be a small shed if not for an inscription and a statue on the side. You can peer into the tiny chamber through bars and see paintings of King Vikrama Rajasinha, his wife, and the Brit who captured him. You can also see the last packet of Gold Leaf the King was allowed to smoke on Sri Lankan soil. It’s a rather strange place.

A friend told me that children almost demand a God. Or at least an explanation. Another friend told me that this was the easy way out and you could just ‘blind them with science’, but I’m not so sure. Children can generate a full natural language (a creole) out of a crude an incomplete way of communication (a pidgin). In one case deaf children put together and not taught sign language generated their own, with full grammatical forms. This has led to pretty dominant linguistic theory that at least part of human language is built in and can be created by children (in social situations). Seeing as kids as similar questions and accept a higher power easily, I wonder if the same thing is true of faith.

As Colombo gets further from war, one can explore further into Colombo. There is, for example, an undiscovered lighthouse at the end of Galle Face Green, in view of the port, a hovering stupa and a bunch of alien spindles. Undiscovered by me at least, and probably you. At the end of Galle Face green you can go right into hotel row or straight to the Central Bank. After the LTTE bombed the latter, that road became high security and a third road (heading left along the coast) became entirely closed. Now it is open. If you go left along the coast you get to a large lighthouse with a stunning view out onto the sea and the port.

My old friend is directing and a few friends are in a performance of Othello next weekend. Othello is actually one Shakespeare play I haven’t seen or read or really come in contact with. Which is strange. It’s an early play that deals explicitly with race, which should be interesting. I also hear that it’s long, but the actors assure me that the version they’re performing has been a bit edited. The play is runs from the 30th to the 1st at the Lionel Wendt. Here are a few photos, mostly of the official photographers legs.

There’s a slightly odd story on Ada Derana about a joint Army/Navy operation to rescue a beach ball some kids had lost at sea. It’s sweet that the Army guy swam after the ball and a Navy boat actually picked it up. It’s is, however, rather odd that there remains such a military presence that children are playing within distance of Army, Navy and perhaps Air Force. Foreign friends have found it a bit odd that there are so many armed soldiers, but I think many Sri Lankans find it reassuring. I actually do. The only security forces that weird me out are the Police. The military, however, has a generally good reputation and they are everywhere. This is not viewed as necessarily bad.

Ban Ki-moon has appointed a personal panel to investigate Sri Lanka that answers to him, circumventing the UN Security Council. This rather cynically exploits the shallowness of the media to make it look like the UN is investigating Sri Lanka when in fact it’s just Ban Ki-moon. Sri Lankan nationalists have blown this up by calling him a ‘farcical idiot’, among other things, but beneath the rudeness, they may have a point. Recently, the Under-Secretary General for Oversight issued a damning report saying that Ban Ki-moon has been undermined his own anti-corruption body by trying to set up his own competing unit and controlling appointments. In short, meddling.

Lately the cops are out in force, parked around corners and waving people down. This is not necessarily bad. They’re not on checkpoint duty and it would be better to enforce some better driving. In many cases, however, that’s not exactly what they’re doing. Take the Green Path checkpoint for example. They’re basically fishing for bribes. My revenue license was expired and I knew it. Whether they’re allowed to pull you over for nothing is one thing, but they do and I was doing something wrong. So I asked them for a ticket. The guy takes my stuff, hems and haws, talks about how I’ll need to go to magistrate’s court (I don’t) and how difficult it is (it isn’t). I just shrug and say that’s OK. He gets confused, hands me my stuff back and asks me for a ‘small favor’. I smile and drive off. It took me another week to get my revenue license, in the course of which I got asked for bribes about three times before finally getting a ticket.

The Daily Mirror Online is the gold standard for online news in Sri Lanka or, more accurately, the bronze standard in an age where everyone else is using sticks and voodoo. The Daily Mirror Online, however, is not actually good. Today, for example, they ran ‘Addicts behind slayings’, referring to the spate of beggar killings in Colombo. This conclusion, however, is sourced to exactly one beggar outside Town Hall, thus hardly a conclusion. In another article they said “In a shocking disclosure, which amounts to a massacre of the innocents, illegal abortion centers… are alleged to be carrying out more than 1,000 abortions daily.” On the Ban Ki-moon issue as well, they have mixed editorializing with news (badly) and to poor effect.

Mahinda’s proxy tilt at the UN has given him an external enemy, enabling him to consolidate power and push through his Constitutional changes. The ‘us/them’ narrative of the LTTE is gone, but no one particularly likes the arrogant United Nations. Even opposition MPs like Sajith Premadasa have opposed the UN’s meddling in Sri Lanka which is both pointless, extralegal and visibly driven by lobbying from an unaccountable diaspora, itself a rump of the LTTE. The UN has also cynically misled and tried to exploit ignorance in the media making the government’s own posturing look almost democratic. What everyone misses for the trees, however, is that this seemingly quixotic tilting at the UN solidifies Mahinda’s power at home and largely nullifies the growing protests on Constitutional changes and cost of living.