When the People’s Alliance Government took over, the much harassed bus travelling public expected measures of quick relief from the new regime. The chaotic system needs changes which do not involve money so much as an appreciation of the needs of the travelling public. No attempt has been made nor any steps been taken by the Janatha Service adminstration in the Kandy District. For instance on Kandy-Ampitiya route there were CTB buses plying between the Kandy Town and the 3rd Mile Post, a distance of three miles. Fifteen years ago when there were no private buses, CTB buses ran every 20 minutes. After the break up of the CTB, only one bus is engaged and 21 private buses have taken over the route. Several complaints were lodged at the CTB Janatha Depot, but without any success. For more than two and a half years under the new adminstration, the Central Province Transport Ministry of the Central Government had not taken any interest in the welfare of the commuters on this route.
The Oxford Dictionary defines the word “conservation” as the act of keeping away from change, decay and destruction. Environmental conservation is, therefore, keeping our environment free of any change, decay or destruction.
The most threatening challenge levelled against our environment today is its pollution or the destruction of the purity of it. As such, environmental pollution has become the hot topic of discussion not only in the developed, but also in the developing and underdeveloped countries of the world. Innumerable industries set up for the production of the day to day needs of man have, in turn, increased their effluences manifold.
The other most important aspect of environmental conservation is the prevention of the destruction of our natural forests. Although much propaganda is being carried out to stress the importance of planting trees, man is unscrupulously engaged in the illicit felling of our valuable trees. These clandestine fellers make easy money by selling them to traders dealing in timber. In certain instances the illicit traders themselves hire men to do the illicit felling. The nearby dwellers also destroy our forests by felling trees of various sizes for firewood. If the present rate of felling of our trees from our reserves are not controlled, our forests will very soon, be rid of their trees. Our rainfall will be very badly affected thereby causing unexpected long spells of drought.
Sri Lanka, the Pearl of the Indian Ocean, is blessed with a very beautiful and rich coastal belt almost sorrounding it. Not far from its coast are stretches of natural coral reefs. Millions and millions of multi-coloured and edible fish feed and live on these reefs.
But our coastal dwellers, who are as unscrupulous as our illicit fellers of valuable trees, break coral reefs for two reasons. The first is to convert them as lime. The second is to sell pieces of the coral to the tourists and the local crowd as souvenirs. These ignorant and illiterate coastal dwellers have no foresight to understand that by their ignorance, they are promoting sea erosion.
It is, therefore, high time that man takes serious notice of all the unforeseen hazards affecting the environment and adopt undelayed preventive measures to avert a complete annihilation of the human race from this earth.
Do undertakings done at auspicious times yield results? The Sri Lankan mind-set is glued to auspicious times for every important event in their lives. However, this age-old ritual has no scientific basis. Hundreds of people who crack the jackpot at lottery draws never purchase their lottery tickets at auspicious times. They become millionaires over-night.
Success in life depends on sustained hard work and motivation to improve oneself. It is by far much better to ponder on the words of Shakespeare, “there is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune”.
I bought a bar of chocolate last week at a nearby grocery store. It was manufactured on November 21, 1996, and could be edible till November 1997 according to its manufacturers.
When I tore up the wrapper I noticed that it was wholly infested with wriggling worms! It was very disgusting! It is so pitiable to know that this chocolate company is one of the most spohisticated companies in the world!
Advertisements do persuade consumers that it’s made of ‘natural’ ingredients. It makes me wonder what the manufacturers mean when they utter “natural”. Where on earth did scientists discover that worms helped people to be healthy?
Sri Lanka is a third world country but that does not mean we Sri Lankans are third rate people to eat anything that toads eat!
I have no intention of defaming the company nor its agents in Sri Lanka. All I want to say is that they should be careful when introducing their products to the market.
Australia, they told me, is a land of opportunity. More opportunity probably, they said, than any other country in the world can give. What would have been the chances for their children if they had remained in the land of their birth, they asked. Many of them live in good houses, some in very good houses, nearly everyone has a washing machine, a microwave oven, a car, usually a large one, even a BMW or a Mercedes, some with one car for the mother, a second for the father and a third and a fourth for the children.
Yet the complex question to which there is no easy answer is whether there is more happiness there than here. There is, after all, as much difference between comfort and happiness as there would be between a motorway moving out of an Australian city with not one human being in sight for many a mile and a gravel road that takes chattering girls and boys from their home in the village to the village school.
The fact, however, is that many of our own people haven’t enough even to live an ordinary human life. And then, when stomachs are empty, clothes are difficult to come by, a pair of slippers costs as much as a full day’s food and an unscrupulous channel grabs with one imperious doctor’s prescription the whole of a householder’s weekly income, one simply cannot have happiness.
Yet there are a fair number in Australia who try to see below the surface and to look beyond today. The number is, I think, growing. A surprisingly large number in all the places I visited told me that, when they arrived in Australia twelve or fifteen years ago, they kept their doors unlocked when they went to the shopping centre or to church. Today, no longer. While I was there, one Sri Lankan home was burgled in the daytime when all were out and the inmates lost more than 20,000 Australian dollars or Rs 1 million. As here, the Police merely said, ‘Tell us who the burglars are and we’ll get them!’ There is growing violence, leading even to murder.
The fat panjandrums of the World Bank are at work in Australia as in our own land, recklessly promoting the money and profit culture, privatization, cost recovery (called more often in Australia ‘user pays’), ‘free’ enterprise. All these lead to unemployment through retrenchment and what they there call downsizing. .
Too easily, even by some Sri Lankans, is the blame laid at the door of aboriginals. If I remained in Australia, as I told a Third World-friendly Australian group, I would ask for a campaign to call them not Aboriginals, but the Originals, or the Primordials, for they are as ancient as - to quote what one of their own leading spokespersons told me - the land from which they sprung.
Today many western countries do not want economic migrants. Sri Lankan youth, even Sinhalese but especially Tamil, are humiliatingly screened in foreign visa offices to make sure that they are not seeking permanent economic migration. But what is wrong with economic migration? It has been a fact of history since Cain became a wanderer on the earth, Abraham left for the promised land, and Vijaya came to our shores.
Pauline Hanson, M.P. for Oxley, near Brisbane, once in Australian Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal Party, now an Independent, but intent on forming what she calls her One Nation Party, has begun in Australia what many even white Australians see as a dangerous rabble-rousing game calling effectively for a White Australia policy. In her first speech in Parliament on 10 September 1996 she made a blatantly white racist speech “...tell me how Aboriginals are disadvantaged when they can obtain three and five per cent housing loans denied to non-Aboriginals ... I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multi-culturalism abolished. I believe that we are in danger of being swamped by Asians ... If I can invite whom I want into my house, then I shall have the right to say who comes into my country ... A truly multi-cultural country can never be strong or united.”
What inflammatory rot and rubbish! Australia is and will have to remain a multicultural country. How can it survive as Australia when it has over seven million square kilometres of land and only 18 million people (Sri Lanka has 64,000 square kms. and over 18 million population) if it tries to maintain towards its densely populated Asian neighbours a policy of No Admittance.
Australia is certainly a great land, a land of freedom and opportunity. The kilometers upon kilometers of the great Nullarbor Plain between Perth and Adelaide seemed to me like the playfield of the infinite in an infinite universe. Australia is said to be the most secularized country in the contemporary world. Yet in it there is complete freedom for all religions, also the religions of the various immigrant groups; so did I visit and pray in a beautiful Buddhist monastery on the hills just outside Perth city.
The greatness of Australia has to continue to be built on the foundation of pluralism. To its greatness Sri Lankans are, I felt, prepared humbly to contribute. To quote a Sri Lankan who owns a Sports Centre in Sydney - complete with sports goods stores, a Don Bradman sanctuary, a cricket museum, a cricket academy with indoor coaching facilities, a lengthening export order book: we have to love this new land even as we continue to love the land from which we came. We are loyal to Australia and we prove it by giving it more than it gives us.
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