May Day May Day (JVP Side)
May Day on Sri Saranankara.
May Day is International Workers Day, which has taken on a distinctly commie tint. In Sri Lanka the JVP traditionally goes all out on my street, but this year I noticed that the government had also bused a lot of people in to have their own demonstrations. I assume they always do that, I just noticed it. JVPers were mocking effigies of Mahinda in Dehiwela and people were wearing ‘Mahinda: Our Hero’ t-shirts near Town Hall. May Day floats are fun and I watched them go down my street. I’m not so happy about the government spending my money to have their own demonstrations, however.
Kid in a float.
The show down Saranankara befouls traffic, but it’s always entertaining. They had a big rally in Cow Patty Park and then proceeded down the street with marching bands, giant ships, kazoos, kids waving flags, people chanting slogans. Some of the ideas are nice, solidarity, unity, and a growing emphasis on Tamil language and issues. Some ideas are less nice, ie, support for the North Korean dictatorship, Iran, Syria.
Big boat.
Mahinda, where are our school uniforms?
I’ve always been struck by how anti-government these casual marches are. Mahinda is pilloried, usually as a stooge to Uncle Sam. I don’t agree with the JVP on too much, but I do agree on some things. They and the TNA are the only parties that actually offer any real opposition to the government anymore, unlike the UNP which has quite literally become the down side of the coin, under Ranil.
Then on the other side of town there’s the government marches. Both block up traffic and stuff, but for me were easy enough to get around. The government demonstrations, however, leave a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. At a time when government taxes and waste are upping the cost of petrol and transport and everything, they’re using public resources to bus in tons of people to put on a show. It’s a bunch of people in blue shirts and then yellow NFF (Wimal Weerawansa) guys with military security. I mean, it’s our money. It’s not a spontaneous demonstration by workers, it’s the government spending the workers money to prop themselves up. But let’s leave that for another post. Here are some photos of the JVP march today.
The TV show the Sopranos taught me a lot about Sri Lankan politics. I was very sad to hear that the lead actor James Gandolfini 
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 
Looks like they (JVP) want to be like Mahinda, at least with scarf and potbelly
[...] Day bikers on Horton Place. Yesterday I wrote about the opposition JVP May Day rallies. These are some photos from marches on the other side of town, near Town Hall, led by the [...]
[...] city is devoted to lights, the assorted Royal/Thomian school marches, May Day (both government and JVP representations), oh my God, too much HTML code, I forgot where I am. There’s a lot of [...]