A Sri Lankan is running for an election in United States

Sanje Sedera a Sri Lankan born, is running for the state legislature elections in Nevada, United States. He has moved to US in 1992 and now is a successful businessman in the gambling city, Las Vegas. It is needless to say he is the first Sri Lankan to run for an election in the united states. I don’t know what this State Legislature is. So i don’t know whether the election he’s running is a very important one. Anyway all my best for him to add some more diversity to the USA election map.

http://www.sedera4assembly.com/

My version of freedom

This is my version of freedom.

If a person can act in a way he or she prefers and doesn’t have to be concerned about being frowned upon or
being prosecuted, that person is free.

There are two aspects to this freedom.

First the socio-economic conditions in the society must be positive.
For example if a person is struck with poverty he can’t live the way he prefers. So it is very important, a society is prosperous and I think it could be called as the financial freedom.

Then the person should be able to act upon his will without worrying about the reactions of the society.

Now you must be asking, shouldn’t Rules and customs exist in a society? YES YES YES they should. But they should only exist to protect one group of the society from another. Not to burden the lives of people.

Knowing or not, freedom is the thing we value most. But we tend to take it as granted. We only realize the
value of it when we lose it.

When someone else’s believes or traditions effect our freedom we object immediately, but when our believes
or traditions effect another ones freedom we come up with varies excuses.

When shall we create a society where everyone can live the damned way they want?

Let me have one last say. This is something i really want to shout aloud, walking around. When it comes to
freedom never be content. No matter how you feel the society is free and perfect someone can be out there
with his freedom taken away.

Some are concerned about the size of the new Kenyan government

After the controversial polls and the riots that continued, which has resulted in more than 1000 deaths, the Kenyan president has formed a power sharing coalition government with a 41 member cabinet. It is said to be the largest cabinet the country has seen in their democratic history. Some are concerned about the inefficiency and huge costs that would result from the size of the new cabinet. Some are voicing their concern about the confusion that would result from the huge cabinet and about some ministries that doesn’t have a specific task assigned to it.
Please would someone tell these concerned citizens of this East Africa’s most successful country not to worry too much as we Sri Lankans are still surviving somehow with a 100+ cabinet? What about the ministries that don’t have any specific tasks? Need not to worry about that either, as we have plenty of them not one or two.

Why Wimal had to leave – His options

It was very obvious from sometime that there were two factions operating within the JVP. Nationalists represented by Wimal weerawansa and Marxists represented by Lal Kantha and Anura. But I thought Somawansa was also in the same group as wimal and I never ever thought that JVP would be split in this manner.

So why did the JVP have to take this next to unbelievable decision?

• Wimal weerawansa was becoming a serious liability to the party with his colombo7 type life style and his association with big businesses.
• His unconditional support for the Rajapaksa government.
• With his powerful oratory skills and his very appealing personality he was building a support base of his own. The JVP doesn’t have somawansa people or Lal Kantha people, it only has JVP people. But there are some wimal weerawansa people within the JVP.
• Backing the stances of the patriotic national movement that contradict the stances taken by the JVP (Pillayan drama was only the last one)

Wimal been the champion of conspiracy theories came up with the usual story. The western countries and their agents, with the aim of destroying sri lanka has hatched up a conspiracy to oust him from the JVP. Really either he must be believing that majority of sri lankans are dumb asses to believe such a comical theory or the poor guy must be living in a fantasy world. When you are a conspirator yourself, you tend to believe that everyone and everything is a conspiracy.

So what are his options now? He could declare that as a true patriot he would support the government in this critical situation and take up a ministerial post in our ever expanding, world record holding cabinet. But this is very unlikely. It is not his type. This man would aim at something bigger.

The next one and the obvious one is to start another political movement. He already has some support base from the patriotic national movement and the ‘Manel Mal’ movement. Maybe the professor of conspiracies who think that the war planes of the LTTE takes off from USA war ships could join him. That is something I’m very concerned about right now. The Tamil Nationalist movement has done enough damage to this country. Sri Lanka cannot afford another ultra right wing Sinhalese nationalist movement right now. It will only create a competition between JVP, JHU, Wimal, sections of the main political parties and drag us into our usual sorry state, where we fight each other distracting us away from our real social and economic problems.

All new Adobe AIR – Cool technology.

I have been playing with the newly released version 1.0 of Adobe AIR lately. To say the least it is really a cool technology. It could be used to build rich Internet applications that can be deployed to the desktop and run across different operating systems. To be more clear it is an environment which allows developers to build desktop applications that utilizes the client – server architecture.

One thing thats is a relief is AIR doesn’t have a new language(Another language to learn and i would have said goodbye to AIR). Rather it allows developers to use existing languages or technologies to build AIR applications. There are three options you could use to build AIR applications.

• 1) HTML/AJAX
• 2) Adobe Flex (another cool technology by Adobe)
• 3) Adobe Flash cs3

Here are some sample applications in the official Adobe site

And here are some rapidshare links to some video tutorials to get you started in AIR.

http://rapidshare.com/files/97286863/LC.Ad0be.A1r.part1.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/97291522/LC.Ad0be.A1r.part2.rar

http://rapidshare.com/files/97294946/LC.Ad0be.A1r.part3.rar

Speech by Sanal Edamaruku

Sanal Edamaruku is the founder-president of Rationalist International and the president of the Indian Rationalist Association. This is a speech delivered by him at the Centenary Conference of Rationalist Press Association (London) at the West Hill College, Birmingham, UK on 26th June 1999) .

I shall tell you a true story that happened in Kerala and that I used to hear from childhood. A Christian priesthood student came out from the church, attracted by the ideals of the rationalist movement. Reading broadened his horizon. He collected and read books from the Thinkers’ Library series of RPA. He married a lady from a Hindu family whom he knew for many years. Though inter-religious marriages were legal, such marriages happened rarely only. Especially since the young man’s family had priests and bishops and he himself was a priesthood student earlier, the marriage was not taken kindly. Both of them were thrown out of their homes. They settled in a nearby town and started their life. They were young and financially unsettled, with many radical ideas about society and beliefs. The lady eventually became pregnant. The family of the husband then announced that they forgive them and invited them to the ancestral home. Everything seemed to be repaired. There had been occasional suggestions that the lady should convert to Christianity, but she politely refused. Some weeks passed and it was time for delivery. One afternoon the labour pain started. Her husband had gone to attend a rationalist conference and she was along with his family. Instead of taking her to a hospital, the family members, including a priest and a bishop, urged the young woman to convert now. She should become a Christian before delivering and promise that the child would be baptised. If she was not willing to do so, they threatened, she would have to leave the house. During the day the pressure continued, and the labour pain increased. By evening, her husband came back. He tried to argue and convince the family, he pleaded they should let her deliver peacefully. But the family insisted on their demand without any human consideration. The pressure mounted and the young couple decided to leave. By 9 o’clock in the night, the husband took the hand of his wife and they stepped out into the rainy night. It was a monsoon month. The last bus from the hill village had already gone. They walked into darkness. Rain broke down. No street lights. The next house where they could go was twelve miles away. She could not walk properly and had to sit down from time to time. He consoled her. They walked and walked through the rainy night. Suddenly she realised that the placenta was broken. Liquids flew down her legs. She lied down on the muddy, rainwater filled ground. Still they had some miles to go. Mustering courage, she got up and walked with him despite her pain. By early morning, they had reached near her father’s house. They thought they would be accepted there in such a situation. They opened the gates of the compound and she fell down with a scream. In the open courtyard in heavy rain, she gave birth to a child.

The victims of Christian love, the mother and the child survived. Five years later, the little boy became the first student in the history of Kerala, who joined school without any religion in his records.

Today, nearly forty years later, the situation in Kerala has drastically changed. No such thing can happen any more. Kerala’s rationalist movement has grown very strong and influential. One of its major tasks is to encourage and protect inter caste and inter religious marriages. A special wing was set up -Intermarriage Bureaus, which look after the legal and practical requirements of couples who decide to marry against the traditional rules. And today there are thousands of school children who refuse to have any religious entry in their records. Kerala has become a successful model of a society, which transformed from its rigid traditions.

I should tell you now that the little boy, who was to meet so early in his life with the dangerous world of religious fanaticism, was me.