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TIMES POSTCARD
Yesterday’s newspaper is today’s wrapping, but…
By Rajpal Abeynayake
A friend of mine visiting from America told me recently that this is an amazing country. Ten readers read each newspaper in Sri Lanka, he said. He said that kind of newspaper readership couldn’t be found in America or anywhere else in the world.

Then he told me that there is also an amazing statistic that he knows about.
Sri Lanka has the highest accident rate in the whole of the world. I was thinking right there, that this is a fine place. People seem to read all the papers around, get themselves highly educated, and then cause accidents.
It’s only logical to assume that it is because of what they read.

But what is it that is in Sri Lankan newspapers that causes drivers to toot their horns all the time? Every time you are at a red light the guy behind you keeps tooting his horn as if his engine will go out if he doesn’t go beep-peep.
Do our newspaper editorials contribute to this kind of behaviour??

I am also told that people read so many newspapers in this country because our literacy rate is so high. If they are so literate, read so many newspapers and cause a record number of accidents, then it must be that our literacy rate is a primary cause for our road users and vehicle drivers to behave as if they were Neanderthals.

Maybe if we want to bring our accident rate down we should bring our literacy rate down. Down with education - - and then at least we can say “down goes the accident rate.”

Anyway these are the days that newspapers are being blamed for things far more important than accidents. From time to time Minister Mangala Samaraweera says that newspapers are responsible for everything, and then some people go around burning newspaper offices and things like that.

I never believed this until I met one of my younger relations. She is a niece of mine, and a bit of a precocious one at that. Recently, she told me that she won her school’s award for Young Entrepreneur of the Year, beating some of the other older girls hollow -- including the head prefect of the school.

I was amazed. Small wonder she was walking around as if he had won both Miss World and Miss Universe all at the same time. In the school that she attends all girls learn to walk that way anyway -- but then this was something else.

I asked whether she can tell me how she won the award. She said “no probs’’, she will explain to me that novelty is the key to any great business idea. She sat me down there as if I was a four year old about to be given my first arithmetic lesson, and she told me everything about how she won the Young Entrepreneur of the Year award.

She took Sri Lankan newspapers, she said, one from most publishing houses.
Then she literally took them apart. She put the feature spread of one newspaper with the news spread of another newspaper. No, that’s not all, she told me almost blushing. She said she really made a fruit salad of it. She put the news from the papers from Beira House together with the news from the papers from a new publishing house, which is anything but Beria House.
She showed me how she did it. She spliced the pages at the fold, cut them, and put them all back together to make it look as if it’s all one new neat newspaper.

Then she sold these new mixed newspapers on the marketplace - - to her friends dads and mothers at the twice the price of the combined price of the papers she put together. At first the dads and moms laughed, and told her mother that their child must be autistic or something like that to do this kind of thing -- and that they are buying her “papers’’ only to make her feel good. But the next day company executive fathers were coming to her and asking for more papers. They told her “for the first time I am reading newspapers in this country which gives me the real thing.’’

“What’s the real thing?’’ I asked my niece. Simple, the dads and moms get the stories blackguarding Mahinda like a pickpocket while they also gets the stories blackguarding Ranil like a pickpocket, all in one paper. It was like Santa Claus come true after all, 45 years after childhood.

“You mean both are pickpockets then?’’ I asked. “If you read my paper they are,’’ she said. She even has a name for her paper, “the Salad Days’’. She was getting rich, and if she says both our candidates are like pickpockets, who the hell am I to argue with success, eh?

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