Saturday, January 22, 2011

Flying Officer Grounded

You may think that the war efforts are accomplished that most of the flying officers are grounded and not flying any more.

Nothing of that kind but a flight record of a blackbox conversation of the final 5 to 7 minutes of ill fated flight of SL (UL-Usually Late) named P.P.P.

Thank god it is not a civil flight but a training flight with only two involved one surviving and the other succumbing to injuries ending at Mahabrahma for another round of life cycle.

I have to put the middle of the story first (but the beginning will related briefly in the flight record.) to make brief and interesting and I may have to go for another record for how Mahabrama (his assistant-that part would be interesting) dealt with the emerging crisis.

Flying is a pastime for some (politicians on our money and government coffers) and fantasy for many Sir-Lankans. Many Sir-Lankan young blood want to become a flying officer but never get a chance to get there. I remember I wanted to become a volunteer officer many moons ago but even though I had all the qualifications and the paper work my application never got to the scrutiny table when Public Service in operation.

It is a different story now that the Chief Minister decides the fate of everybody.

In this story chief Minister also has a fair share of involvement.

Sit tight and listen to the flight recorded data.

The conversation is between a pelican and the flying officer in training.

You may wonder what the hell the pelican doing in the cockpit. He was not trapped in air but he was the trainer in white suit with beautiful avian stripes to adorn.

Yes he was the trainer.
Then who was the trainee?

The trainee was a typical Sir-Lankan man who went up the ladder by being a yes man all his life without any decoration or qualification to boast about

He was somewhat similar to Bun Ki Moon who is a yes man for the big nations and red bully for small nations.

I hope you got the picture.

If he say yes to big shots he will be sure of another term in UNO.

Our man of course did not have applied mathematics but a forged certificate to say he passed the “O” Level in mathematics.

The conversation went like this.

Hello Sir!
You are my trainer?
Yes is there any problem?
No Sir have I got to Sir you.
It depends!

If you end up passing with flying colours yes but not otherwise.

He was bit confused but continued to say SiR to which the pelican with good senses did not object.

He was wanting to count how many times he Sirs him during the first flight.

Sir, you have a big beak but no hands.

So Sir, how are you going to help me with the joystick?

I have good eyes and a small brain and that were enough to navigate from Europe to Sir-Lanka to escape from harsh winter believe me I can navigate you if you listen to me carefully instead of saying Sir.

He firmly ascertained his navigation skills.

Now nose up, flaps up and raise off the ground.

Yes Sir.


Now they were in flight in the first few seconds and the flying officer was inquisitive and want to find the loop holes in his flight instructors credibility to get some bonus in the first flight itself.

Sir how you come to become a trainer in Ceylon.

It is easy any foreign joker or a bird can get a job in Sri-Lanka even in supermarkets without knowing food habits of locals. You just put a label for export and that works.

I had a export label tagged from my childhood he said.

Sir who appointed you and turned his head around and the plane two seater veered to the left?
Look what are doing get the nose straight.

OK Sir!

It is your chief minister who appointed me and it is a long story.

But Sir, I would like to hear more, thinking one day he might become a trainer himself by getting in good books with the Chief Minister and twisting his arms.

But your ex-chief Minister is a tortoise now.

How come Sir, I thought he went to heaven by the celebration we had after his death.

He never got a chance. The way he abused official vehicles and the way he drove with the entourage annoyed the Maha and he decided to pace him down to earth and made him a tortoise.

Sir my goodness will the Maha makes me also a tortoise in my next birth Sir!

In the first place you have to die!
Are you ready for that.

Yes Sir!

This answer pleased the pelican very much since he knew he did not have to train this guy for long.

Where did you meet this Tortoised Chief Minister, SiR?

Near a lake flooded in Batticoloa with a water crab with him.

The water crab was his escort Police Officer. on entourage who could always bend the law of the country for his master's favour in real life in Sir-Lanka.

But he could not prevent the premature death of the entourage who met with a fatal accident.

SiR why he was made a crab

Two reasons.
It is a delicacy in Sir-Lanka.
This officer could never walk straight with the law he always side stepped and went horizontally instead of straight.

By birth right he had to be a crab in next life.

SiR will I become a crab in next life.
This was too distracting for the pelican that the plane was in full speed now.

He said autopilot now!

My friend in excitement put the nose down.
He was only educated in Sinhala and could not read the English word autopilot and he pressed the button right under his nose without reading it in the first place.

Pelican was very happy now that his flying lesson would end abruptly.

Pelican opened the cockpit door and before making a nose dive himself said, your first and the last flying lesson are over.

Good bye and slammed the door closed.

To which our yes man said.
Yes Sir!

The rest is history and the blackbox is the only evidence we have now.

Incidentally this plane was taxied from Hambantota and landed nose down in the newly build port at Hambantota.

The blackbox was traced within minutes since the water level of the harbour is deep enough to see even a blackbox from above and our pelican friend hovered around it as if he was looking for a dead body of fish that helped the Navy very much.

Unfortunately the body of the victim was never found and the air force is still looking for the deserted officer in flight training and the flight trainer.

Our flying officer trainer, the pelican disappeared from his post.

I will tell you the rest of the story if you could count correctly the number of times this unfortunately grounded officer said Sirs in his first flight lesson instead of concentrating on flying and why the pelican deserted his post!
Flight P.P.P stands for Paksheta Pashsha Pora and I hear even the Pakshaya is having a nose dive now!

Please note even though these stories are quite akin to Buddhist stories and anthology, they are not designed for Dhamma sermons and any recitals without my implied consent will be strictly prohibited.

Banana Watching and Banana Logic

I gave up banana watching few years ago when the price of a single banana (not a bunch) went up beyond my purse but kept on practicing Banana Logic to the core which I learned from the politicians of this Banana Republic.

It is a very simple logic.

Take no responsibility of the events and consequences and tame the masses with slippery excuses and logic.
Latest is the flood in Batti'coloa and the government's inability to provide relief and not even believing that the masses are suffering untold hardships. Not only they slip the responsibility to weather gods but exaggerate the loss to the vegetation (not people) especially with very accurate number of paddy fields lost from air conditioned offices in Colombo without ever visiting the flood victims or the area under floods. They release statistics by the minute and they appear on Media and TV as Gullible Truths of the this century, which everybody knows even with aerial shot it is hard to estimate.

The devastation was more than the tsunami and it outlasted it by many weeks.
The tsunami was matter of hours but flood was a matter of weeks not days.
We of course capitalized on the political and economic fronts and the monetary benefit some got by promoting the disaster was fabulous to say the least.

Some by standers got rich leaps and bounds.

That is history.

But this time the paucity of the response and the inability to get even UNO involved was stark reminder that we cannot change the minds of the UNO officers trapped in glasshouses and in real frozen state to change their goals of undermining the underdogs in diplomacy since our antic delivering MPs spoiled soup of even the banana logic too much.

This essay is not on that banana logic spoiled by our own efforts and less said about it is better for our body politics which is in downward trend anyway.

This is about the mega bananas one sees in the supermarkets.

They are big and weight for weight expensive and I cannot believe that our soil has become rich in spite of overuse and the floods washing the top soil away.

I was very inquisitive in a scientific way.

It took few months to discover the truths that also did not come from the agrarian officers but from vendors.
It is a truth that one cannot harvest plantain vegetation for for than two years.
The soil gets absolutely drained off and one cannot grow anything else afterward.

In years gone by in Kandy bucket latrines were the vogue (now one has to pay 10 rupees for a piss in a city mall) the the contents of the buckets were loaded in Guhagoda (near Isolation Hospital) and covered with at least 4 feet of soil and were allowed to season out for 4 years and then leased out for growing banana.

The banana yield was the best in Kandy and they were of healthy size but not of the elephantine of today.

There is something amiss.

Not only they are big but the skin of the banana splits before ripening.
That is quite abnormal as if somebody has injected water (this can be done) under the skin.

My investigation reveal stark reality of that banana logic.

The bigger the size bigger the price and the economic weight.

What the growers do is that they inject UREA (contaminated with cadmium that causes kidney failure) into the flower stem to get them bigger.

Now I believe after the last UREA dose they even inject plain water dose to make them plump. With drug abusers are increasing in number in the country the thrown away plastic syringes are readily available anywhere including hospital dumps. I think even bizarre epidemics may emerge from eating these elephantine bananas. The water injected and the UREA injected are not sterilized.

They are raw contaminated water.

We were healthy eating bananas that came off nutritious from the nourishing off bucket latrines in Kandy yesteryear and not anymore.

My recommendation are
1. Do not pay for big bananas
2. If the skin is split do not buy them (sure sign of overdose)
3. Even supermarkets are suspicious of their dealing with the venders
4. Buy a reputable product
5. Visit a banana plantation and see it for yourself
6. Taste before buying
7. Make pressure groups of customers
8. Invest on home garden
9. Invest on a bio-degrader container
10. Wash them thoroughly before eating (applies to all vegetables and fruits)
11. Do not put them in the fridge (many reasons including watching what happens to them)
12. Be vigilant
13. Do not buy cheap stuff (paw paw at 10 rupee/kg)
14. These are my observations and I can add many more but all of them are common sense practices.

In a country with chain of corrupt practices from grower to vender to super markets chains we are eating colossal amount of poisons everyday. The idea is to become rich and the poor customer is of no value to the Mudhalali and the Government (except just prior to an election).

90% of the fruits and vegetables are poisoned at various levels.

There is only perpetuation.

No remedy is available in sight or distant future.
It is only a money matter.

There is no controlling authority but corruption at all levels including food inspectors.

If one is eating poisons it is ones own responsibility and that is the the way the officials and government operate and look at the problem.

Good example is that government would not provide free medicine to drunkards (all of us are drunkards politically) and does not look at the root problem of drinking beahaviour.

If you look at the the liqueur bill of House of Parliament we can see where the root cause is.

This is somewhat similar to how we handled and handling ethnic issue.
There is absolutely no difference.