In his post marking the 36th birth anniversary of the LTTE, DBS Jeyaraj said something striking – “Today the battered and shattered Sri Lankan Tamils reduced in numbers to being the fourth largest ethnicity in the Island are slowly struggling to pick up the pieces and get on with life.” I think what he’s saying here is that the races in Sri Lanka would now be Sinhalese, Muslims, Indian (Estate) Tamils, and then Sri Lankan Tamils. Which sounds crazy, but it may be true.

Some Indian census data is out, via The Hindu. It’s interesting. Indians are moving out of shared homes into nuclear families, but still shitting in the streets and fields. At the same time, most have electricity, banking facilities and phones. India’s not doing so bad, but the basics are persistently dire.

The Wiki page on Sri Lanka’s 14th Parliament doesn’t just list the party MPs are in, it lists what party they were elected under as well. There are so many crossovers, largely because the opposition is so deeply fractured. Traditionally, the UNP (despite also being involved in the 1983 riots) is the UNITED NATIONAL Party, ie, at election time, most minority parties come under their umbrella. Under seemingly permanent bad leadership, however, these parties have left the tent.

As a bit of a data geek, I found this hilarious. This graph from Businessweek shows examples where correlation (two trends that look similar) is not causation (trend A did not cause trend B). I’ve included the funniest one above, but there’s more.

As a follow up to a report on declining suicides in general, this is how Sri Lankans kill themselves. Sadly, pesticide and insecticide dominate. Why do they kill themselves? Basically, their family or spouse drive them to it. As the report says “Harrasment by the husband & family disputes” is the number one (reported reason) for suicides in Sri Lanka.

It’s an oft cited statistic that Sri Lanka has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. It’s not true, anymore. Suicides have decline dramatically from a peak in 1995 (47 per 100,000 people) to about 19 in 2009. The country that pioneered suicide bombing is no longer leading the world in any kind of suicide, which is a very good thing.

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).

1 out of 5 Sri Lankan children are underweight. In the estate sector (tea plantations) it’s 1 in 3. I find this shocking, but that’s what the Institute for Policy Studies has found in 2006 data. Despite Sri Lanka’s decent healthcare and education (by Asian/African standards), persistent inequality means that kids and mothers are still going hungry.

There were almost a billion tourists in 2010 (940 million). Where did they go? This infographic shows what it would look like if every tourist took the same plane, seated by destination.

My best guess is 2 million, or about 10%. If you look at connections along, you get about 1.3 million. Why round-up? Well, because multiple people use connections, people connect at work, and the 1.1 million Sri Lankans on Facebook hint at something more. This infographic is nothing fancy, but it shows you various measures compared to Sri Lanka’s population (about 20.6 million).