Author: Rohan Samarajiva

Apr.13 (LBO) – In the famous five classes that the JVP used for recruitment in the years before the first insurrection of 1971, a story was told about tea. It was mostly false, but it was a simple, good and persuasive story. The story was that the imperialists forcibly displaced upcountry Sinhala villagers to make […]

Mar. 28 (LBO) – I was at a meeting in Delhi in early March when I first heard the acronym KPO, of course without being spelled out. online pharmacy buy diflucan with best prices today in the USA From the context, I figured it meant knowledge process outsourcing and started using it immediately. One cannot […]

Mar. 16 (LBO) — The President has announced that Sri Lanka’s clocks are to follow Indian Standard Time (IST) with effect from April 13th, 2006. This means that Sri Lanka will henceforth be at Coordinated Universal Time +5:30 or UTC+5:30, instead of UTC+6 as we are now. UTC is the officially accepted term for what […]

Feb 21, 2006 (LBO) — In some discussions in 2002-04 when the government was interested in a bridge cum utility conduit over the Palk Strait (the now forgotten “Hanuman Bridge”), someone expressed concern that it would make illegal immigration to Sri Lanka easier. My reaction was that I wished that were true. In the 1960s, […]

Every time the telecom sector goes through a growth spurt in Sri Lanka, congestion becomes a topic of conversation. People begin to grouse that the companies are cheating the customers by giving them telephones but not the ability to make calls. Every time the telecom sector goes through a growth spurt in Sri Lanka, congestion […]

Beginning of December, I was invited to speak at Softexpo, a major software industry event in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The organizers transported me to the seminar location, the Bangladesh-China Friendship Conference Centre (their equivalent of the BMICH), in an ambulance. No, I was not sick. That day had been declared a general strike or hartal, by […]

R&D or housemaids? On December 8, Bill Gates announced that Microsoft will spend US$ 850 million on research and development in India over the next four years. A few days earlier, Intel, whose Chairman is also visiting the region (including Sri Lanka), announced plans to spend US$ 1 billion in R&D in India. Things are […]

The Nobel Laureate economist Robert Solow famously proclaimed that “you can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Along the same lines, one may say that the information age is present everywhere except in the political discourse of our time. There is no debate that productivity matters. Countries, regions within countries and […]

Jul 11, 2005 (LBO) – Water is free in Sri Lanka.  Anyone who says different will be pilloried.  I say different.  I say that we will pay in lives and devastation if we do not start charging the real costs of water. The lifetime of modern dams that use cement is between 50 to 100 years, […]

Ridding Year 1 school admissions of corruption and influence 1.0 Introduction Getting a child into Year 1 of school, government or private, has become a traumatic and unpleasant event. Principals are being arrested for taking bribes, court cases are being launched, parents stand in line through the night, and children are being coached to lie […]

April 20, 2005 (LBO) – Policy analysis must begin from a realistic assessment of where we are and what we are. We are a small island nation located within the region with the world’s largest concentration of poor people, South Asia. We are about the size of greater Mumbai, one city in India, in population and […]

One of the more interesting exchanges of the video news conference on a national all-hazards warning system for Sri Lanka held on the 10th of February was off the subject: a journalist asked the international participants (video linked from Hilo, Hawai’i and Vancouver, Canada) whether there were uniform 100 or 200 meter no-building zones in […]