The Flood
Man wearing hard hat to deflect the rain
I’m assuming this is not the flood, but it certainly is heavy. Last night the electricity kicked off and it started thundering, raining and pouring down. Sheets even, it sounded serious. Wake up and it’s still raining, go back to sleep. Wake up some more and hear news that everything in Colombo is flooded, houses in Nawala are under feet of water, and cars are stalled out in the street. If it rains for thirty minutes in Colombo, the main junctions flood. After a night of rains, it’s carnage. I heard it’s the heaviest rainfall since 1992. The traffic is snarled and houses are under so people aren’t really going to work. It’s a rain day for school. This is all fun unless your house or car is submerged, or unless the rains go on. I hear that over 5,000 people are displaced and the Navy has been deployed. I do hope everyone is OK. Tell me if you’ve got any stories, or email any photos.
The canal before the flood
The canal after
Not to quote Ice Cube, but the Sri Lankan police are hardly beloved. A 
I just gave a talk at the University Of Sri Jayawardenapura along with Reeza Zarook of Anything.lk and Rohan Jayaweera of Google. These are my notes: Devin Jayasundara asked me for a subject for this talk and I told him Internet property. But I talked to my fiancé Shru and she had a better idea. Startups aren’t about creating property at all, not really. They’re about creating territory, about creating land.
I haven’t been blogging much, I know. It’s partly because we’ve been doing a lot of work on YAMU, especially shipping 1.0.1 of the Android app today. It’s on the 
I met an old-timer who said they used to drop acid and sleep atop Sigiriya, but the place has taken on a more commercial and quasi-spiritual role now. It was built by a king as a sort of retreat and used as a monastery. Now it’s a prime tourist and cultural destination. Hence it’s a bit odd to see a Japanese beer commercial shot up there. There’s a bunch of people eating, um, deep fried cream filled coconuts and then drinking some bracing beer. I hear the whole thing cost Rs. 25,000 (I’m presuming they used stock images).
i was sound asleep. Lol, my dogs got so scared they all curled into one giant ball. I wish I had taken photos. Darn!
You should have! I love mine too but never do that :) but they are fur balls on their own.
I meant they never curl in to one giant ball! :)
Just imagine a black german shepherd & two golden retrievers curled up into one ball.
Aw, that’s cute :)
It didn’t rain that hard around our place (approx. 12 km from the city by road, much less as the crow flies) though I heard false reports on the news this morning that the area was flooded. Last night from my bedroom window I watched the display of distant lightning from the general direction of Colombo. It was spectacular.
Some schools have closed and most school vans couldn’t make it anyway, and kids are back home. Outside it looks lovely and the air smells fresh after the rain, makes me want to take the water colours out, or just sit and watch with a hot cup of tea.
The people from the shanties around the Kelaniya bridge must be badly affected though, as usual. Sad.
Well, we have the fish from the nearby marsh swimming in around two feet of water in the garden. Considering that the Water Supply and Drainage Board filled in the marsh behind the house upto a foot higher than our land, not only do we get stuck with the water from the neighbourhood, but the water from the marsh as well.
All in all, a day for hot chocolate and books. Once we drain the lobby and have the water recede from downstairs.
[...] neighbours stepped in and saved the day. Elsewhere other relative were getting lifts from the Navy. Indi has a few snaps from ground [...]
Ack! This looks like a civil engineers’ nightmare.. a city built without a drainage plan. Marshes act like sponges to soak up the surface runoff, hence why they should not be filled. :-(