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TIMES POSTCARD
Behind every successful answer there are twenty questions
By Rajpal Abeynayake
Someone called me last week and asked "do you think I should smack my child for something that she should not have done?''

For one moment, I thought of getting the statistics, and on deciding whether the caller's child has been a floating child or a block child.

I said something like "it depends on the results of the last poll……I mean the last time you smacked her.''
He said that there was no result from that.

At this time, I realized that this is a call about children, per se.
How was I to know?
The whole of previous week, people have been popping the question "do you think Mahinda will win or do you think Ranil will win?”

This week they have been asking "do you think so so will be in the cabinet?''
There has been such information overload, over the Internet and the media. But even more than the information overload, has been the questions overload.

Very soon there will be no more questions of that sort to ask.
So they will simply be asking "do you think there will be war or not?''
But that will be too mundane a query. What is war, when people have already considered the suspense of cabinet appointments -- and whether Anura Bandaranaike will be appointed to the cabinet, frown and all?

The other day, a foreign lady asked me a whole host of questions. Will the economy plummet? Did Mahinda Rajapakse win because of his father or his tailor? Is he a smart man??

I almost hope we are back to the good old days when the most complicated questions one had to answer were questions like "what does Chandrika do for seven hours before she arrives?''

These were simple questions but the ones that are asked now are so dicey that there should be a police regulation that nobody should answer any questions without wearing their helmets.

Now they ask you "would Ranil have won if the northeastern Tamils got a chance to vote again?'' If you say no to a UNPer, he scolds you like a pickpocket, and if you say yes to a SLFPer he scolds you like a pickpocket.
I'd rather be writing about babies and smacking.

How nice, to have an advice column on "how to put you baby to sleep" or something like that.
But then again, knowing the question overload these days, that question will also come loaded.

For example, people will ask you whether babies fed on a certain kind of milk food tend to sleep better than babies fed on a different kind of milk food. If I venture an opinion on that I am bound be scolded like a pickpocket, on the lines "so you are saying this because someone promoted this kind of milk food in his presidential campaign.''

What kind of advice can even paediatricians give under these circumstances?
Maybe they can say that it is not advisable to give your babies any milk food during elections.

There are more questions they are asking me these days about crossovers. Is so and so about to cross over?? I told one questioner that if all the people cross over Mahinda Rajapakse would not have a new Sri Lanka with all the old people in it.

"But what's new about an old Sri Lanka is that it has old people in a new government'' said my friend.

I know that answer is also a form of information overload -- he was sounding so garbled that he did not even make any sense. As a consolation I told him that personally all these old people in a new government will be a liability -- it's better not to have them around.

"You are a saboteur,'' he said. "You do not want our government to be strong with crossovers."

That's when I realized that he is a Mahinda supporter and not a Ranil supporter. By that time it was too late. Now I will not answer any questions at all. If my barber asked me whether I want a number 3 or a number 2 cut, I will merely say that I did no cast any preference votes. I only want to have my hair cut, not my neck cut.

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