Happy birthday to the late Neelan Tiruchelvam, peacemaker, killed by the LTTE in 1999. He would have been 68 yesterday. His trust staged a performance of Ravanama by Maya Krishna Rao. It was… interesting?

My friend Shehan Karunatilake has won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature at the Jaipur Literary Festival. Damn well deserved. Chinaman a thoughtful and entertaining book about Sri Lanka, unlike the self-pitying war and araliya tripe many authors produce. Give it a like on Facebook, or better yet buy the thing. It’s fun, sad and strange – truly repping the country.

Bajaj is coming out with what they call a ‘four-wheeler’. Under the narrowest description (four wheels, doors) it’s a car, but it’s really more of a trishaw (rickshaw, tuk-tuk, or three-wheeler, if you prefer). I guess it’s kinda a hybrid. Potentially priced at under $3,000, the thing should be competitive with the (underselling) Nano, but it still looks a lot less sophisticated.

The Ugly Indian is a website and a sort of movement. The site itself is a nice old-school bit of hypertext story telling. Reminds me a bit of HyperCard. The movement seems like shramadana, or people cleaning their own neighborhoods up (as opposed to waiting for politicians or NGOs). They start from a premise that it’s not external factors that are the problem, it’s the Ugly Indian.

I think the next killer app will be the political network, when governments (IDs, licenses, businesses) get online, and when democracy gets online as well (voting, right to information, etc). After the personal computer and social network, it seems the logical next step. Modern governments, however, seem more interested in killing that last app than building the next one.

Consider this an info-layout. This shows the size of India’s Internet population, how many are on mobile, Facebook, and a map showing electrification for color.

This starts off quite normally, until they start eating lightbulbs, smashing bricks on their heads and getting run over by Tata Nanos. It is literally like watching a street riot on stage. It just gets crazier and crazier until the judges are covering their eyes and screaming. The image of a young boy waving an Indian flag on top of three men on three bed-o-nails is terrifying.

At about 0:30, well, just watch it. I can give you the sound effect. SLAP! ‘A man slapped a senior Indian minister in New Delhi on Thursday, shouting “All are thieves, I will kill them all,” while brandishing a ceremonial dagger.’ (NYTimes). What I loved was Anna Hazare’s response: “He was slapped only once?”

Sri Lanka today gets most of its foreign financing as loans from China. This graph shows that China has given 38% of financing this year, overtaking Japan (2012 FMR). Compare that to 2004, when they gave only 0.5% (2006 Annual Report).

According to the Economist, there are 1.6 million Indian migrants in Sri Lanka, making us the third destination behind the US and Malaysia. I’m pretty sure this is wrong. I think they’re referring to historical migrants but even then, Indian Tamils make up less than a million people (860,000, or 4.6%). That’s 2001 data, but I don’t think they’ve, like, doubled since then, nor do I think there has been more recent migration.