A group calling itself the Mawbima Surakum has launched a house-to-house campaign to urge Sri Lankans to boycott all American products, including American wheat, the Sunday Times reported two weeks ago.
Spearheading the boycott is the 82-year-old professor and writer Gunadasa Amarasekera. A dentist by profession, he has now made it his life’s business to drill into the people’s collective nerve centre to say a resounding no to Uncle Sam’s myriad products.
Beating the drum with a gusto that defies his age and contradicts his Buddhist values, he proclaims patriotically, “Our aim is to create anti-American sentiments. We may not succeed at first, but in a few years we will.”
What then? An utopian land free of American wheat and thus without bread, without the Internet, without Microsoft Windows or Apple i-pods and i-pads and all the other technological benefits from American innovations and scientific advances.
And while the rest of the world enjoys a still higher standard of living and higher per capita income through free trade with the world’s biggest economy, Sri Lankans can continue to live in poverty and, in the name of patriotism, a cocooned cuckoo-land that the world has forgotten, and brimming with anti-American vitriol.
And while the good doctor is at it, he should go the whole hog and spend more of his time spreading the same message to Lankan industries, garment industries in particular, telling them not to export their products to the US.
Or better still, he could urge our local exporters not to export to any country that voted against Sri Lanka at the Geneva Summit, including India. After all, do we not have the world’s biggest exporter of garments, China, our mandarin friend, whose readymade market wilt embrace with open arms the influx of Lankan garments.
Dhammika Seneviratne,
Dehiwela
My resurrection
1) I was always self-confident
and self sufficient.
I needed no one – for I could cook, wash and iron my clothes, keep a
tidy house, domestic help I needed not, for really I could do it all better.
2) In the office I quickly mastered the art of business and using my initiative was soon a great success.
Everyone
came to me with their problems for I always solved them and soon I was in demand as an ace trouble shooter.
3) Socially I never relied on artificial stimulation, I needed no Dutch courage.
I depended on my own personality.
Then came the crisis, executives who feigned to be my good friends fabricated a case against me.
4) I then turned to the Lord
and changed my self-confidence
to Christ-confidence.
Like David I began to totally rely on God’s assurances on the Bible,
and suddenly all my fear left me.
5) The Bible revealed to me that anything that can happen to me
has happened to someone else
before, so I stopped feeling
sorry for myself and began
to peruse the Book of Life.
6) To my surprise I found
the same happening, the solution, the result and the repercussions
that followed were unmistakably found in the pages of the Holy Book written with God’s inspiration.
7) The first was, “Be still, and know that I am God.” (Ps 46.10) and like the stormy breakers of the sea I became calm. “Evil men testify against me
and accuse me of crimes I know nothing about.” (Ps. 35.11)
8) “Even my best friend, the one I trusted most, the one who shared my food, has turned against me.” (Ps. 41.9). “All those who hate me whisper to each other about me,
they imagine the worst about me” (Ps. 41.7). “I know that I will not be disgraced, for God is near, and he will prove me innocent.” (Is. 50.7,8).
9) “The Lord reached down from above
and took hold of me;
he pulled me out of the deep waters.
He rescued me from my powerful enemies and from all those who hate me.” (Ps. 18.16,17).
Then the awesome truth of God’s words came to pass.
10) “He keeps me from the grave
and blesses me with love and mercy.
He fills my life with good things,
so that I stay young and strong like an eagle.” (Ps. 103.4,5).
God then like he did David,
blessed me abundantly with this Amazing Grace.
Upatissa Attygalle,
Colombo 7
Housing solution: Two-bedroom homes for Rs. 3 m on instalment plan
The need of the hour is to provide a house for every Sri Lankan family. Landlords demand high rents and big advances, so renting a house is not a good thing. Land prices are also very high. Middle-class people cannot buy or build a house with what they get as monthly salaries.
Private companies advertise houses in the newspapers, but these are from Rs. 8 million to Rs. 15 million. Can a government servant or someone in the private sector buy one of these expensive houses? No, of course they cannot.
The Government should build two-bedroom houses, priced at Rs. 3 million each, and sell them on a hire-purchase scheme. This would help the middle-class families.
The late President Ranasinghe Premadasa launched several housing schemes and gave these on hire-purchase schemes so that families could have a house of their own. I appeal to the Housing Minister, Mr. Wimal Weerawansa, to follow Mr. Premadasa’s good example.
Mrs. Iranganie Jayatunga,
Raddolugama
How about some cheery
news – for a change?
Today I counted the news items in one of our dailies. For every 10 pieces of bad news (murder, robbery, scams, etc.), there were only two pieces of good news, and those two news were tucked away in Page 4, while Page 1 gloried in tales of murder and mayhem.
There are 20 million people in this country. Does it matter that a married woman’s lover was attacked by her husband? Is that national news? Why should the misdeeds of a few police constables be national news? What about the thousands of policemen who stand in the sun and rain day in day out to serve the country?
Why is it that the stupidity of our politicians gets front page coverage? If we ignore them, they will stop acting like clowns.
Some newspapers have dedicated a column to the crimes committed daily in the country. I never read this column because, first, it is depressing, and second, it covers only a fraction of what is happening in our blessed country. Why not have a parallel column about people who do good every day?
Let’s also read about people who return found money, the good acts of three-wheeler drivers, the community efforts of a village. Believe me, good things happen all the time, but no one bothers to report them.
Let us relegate the politicians who misbehave to the last page, and give prominence to the good acts that happen daily. Let the newspapers give us some happy and cheery news first thing in the morning.
Dr. Mrs. Mareena
Thaha Reffai,
Dehiwela
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