Rain and Water

Rain and Water
Annual pageant in Kandy is related more to rain gods than religion.
The end of it is marked by Water Cutting ceremony at Gatambe.
Gata Ambe mean unripe mango.
I am not sure how the name came about.

There could have been a Mango tree instead of a pipel (Bo) tree thre.
Water is revered and no wonder why America wanted it to be a barter for debt relief.
Water is going to be more expensive than petrol in the near future with the population explosion making more and more demand for drinking water.
It was very notable it rained on the very day they had the KAP (Tree-Flag)ceremony.
 

Now we need to be more vigilant to protect it from commercial exploitation.

Guppy Disease

Guppy fish used to be my favourite but now my interest is water plants especially water lillies.
But one cannot have a pond without fish.
The mosquitoes would take over in no time.
Guppy fish is the only solution.
But over time the fish lose their bright colours and become the wild type.

The wild type is resistant to disease.

 
Just to introduce some colours I bought a batch of bright coloured guppies.
Knowing very well they are incubating guppy disease I introduced them to the stock tank.
I added few of my wild guppy to interbreed.
In no time one by one all the guppies started dying
Not other fish types.
It was evident that the guppy disease was the cause.
I believe it is a virus disease and over time they become resistant.
But unfortunately my fish in the main outdoor tank started dying.
I made sure there was no contact or contamination.
I was puzzled and worried the fish food was the cause.
I need to work on this.
The vendors treat these disease fish before selling.
Within 24 hours they show the signs of disease and start dying.
If you buy a new stock do not introduce them to your main tank.
Observe them in a hospital tank for at least a week.
Treat them if necessary and introduce only the healthy ones.
Ideally the next generation of young fish.
If they are healthy they breed and breed fast.
You have a healthy batch then.

I now think even contaminated fish food carry disease if not guppy disease (viral) but bacterial disease.

Fish do not have a well developed immune system and succumb to diseases especially bacterial.

So keeping the tanks in good healthy condition is a priority.

Every time one introduces new fish this risk is increased or multiplied.

Elephant Thinking

This is what an elephant was thinking while being dressed up for the grand pageant in Kandy.
Why I  am chained?
Why these people gather in numbers to watch my incarceration?
Do these people have a brain as big as mine? 

Do they use their brain or are they very selfish to restrain my freedom?
My brain is big but my plea very is simple.
Give me my freedom.

The man does not need a brain as big as mine but they should use a bit of their cocky brain for fair play and equal opportunity.

Are these only fancy words with no meaning?

I hope few of these spectators, especially foreign visitors spare a little moment to grasp what my thinking brain does while parading in front of you and not admire the the majestic beast in me.

I am big but very gentle in my ways unlike the man the dirty beast.

Lateral Thinking

Lateral Thinking is a concept developed by Prof Bono.
In here it is to state that our PM is talking about alternative views.
This is very healthy trend evolving in our politics that was lacking in this country over a half century.
 

Whether we can translate that to politics including reconciliation is completely a new experience.

Water is our right

Water is our right.
Chandrika tried to sell water for debt.
I was very vocal (read my book water politics) then.
I was with IMMI they changed to IWMI and I strongly opposed and resigned.
The first white paper was drafted in 1989 or so.
This same paper surfaces back and again.
Good editorial.
Please maintain the pressure.
Ranil is cunning and might slip this through, if he wins, which is most likely.

Zebra Fish Breedimg

Fish breeding was childhood activity that I never had time to explore fully.
Our science teachers were mediocre and never taught us with pragmatism and interest.
It was a case of deriving a stereotype answer for particular scientific principle and nothing more when we were kids.

Thankfully we had scientific brains t even outsmart our teachers.
Fish breeding was something I learned by simple observation.
That is also live breeding never breeding egg layers like gurami or zebras.
With heavy workload both as a student and a professional there was no spare time, anyway.

It was a matter  of giving up hobbies including photography.
Well as a preparation for retirement and as a break I started keeping pet fish well in advance of my retirement.
That was a big mistake on my part leaving me no breathing space.
It restricted my well earned spare time, which could have been very well used for gin and tonic not extra work but by some rare coincidence, I discovered that if I leave the water removed from my fish tank (when changing water due to algae) in a bucket, in a few weeks I will have young Zebras.

Yes Zebras do not eat all thier eggs.

There is suffient number of eggs that hatch.

They are unfortunately not visible to the naked eye. 

Now I have the fourth batch of young zebra in bucket over the last two months.

The cardinal rule is not to mix them with guppies.

hey will leave no trace of zebra eggs.

English: Lanka’s only feasible link language

 Kumar one time contemporary in our university has done a good analysis.
It is a reproduction.

Singapore at 50: 
Language the vital key

English: Lanka’s only feasible link language

by Kumar David

"A champion of the Chinese language argued (in 1965) that Chinese was used by more than 80 percent of the population and should be the first among the four languages. I gave him a dressing down. Did he want Singapore to be like Sri Lanka, with unending social strife between the Sinhalese and the Tamils because the Sinhalese imposed their language upon the whole country? Did he want Malays and Indians to feel discriminated against? How would Singapore as a whole make a living – would China give us jobs? Who would trade with us apart from Taiwan? Why should multinational corporations invest in Singapore when they could go to Taiwan where it was cheaper? If they did not learn English they would pay a price. The price would be decided by the (world) market".

(My Lifelong Challenge; Singapore’s Bilingual Journey, Lee Kuan Yew, 2012, p.60)

An addendum to this quotation; by 2010, it was found to everyone’s surprise, that 60% of Primary One school admissions were from homes where English had become the home language. Chinese had slipped to second place with Malay and Tamil following. Singapore’s tortuous language journey from the end of the war to the present time is chronicled in Lee Kuan (spelling used in the book) Yew’s compelling recounting The story reveals something profoundly important; It was language policy that underwrote Singapore’s long-range development strategy; entrepreneurship, markets, economic incentives and so on were along-the-way pragmatic specifics. Lee’s authoritarianism and anti-communism too was motivated to a surprising extent by his determination to drive through his language policy. The ‘Singapore Success Story’ is underpinned by its ‘solution’ of its language problem; this was the real trick, the rest followed. Excellence of government service, cognisance of globalisation, the city’s business and investment ethos and its inter-racial harmony, all have as their sine qua non an education language-policy that despite blunders and course corrections has succeeded at a price.

Independent Singapore is 50 years old today; following divorce from Malaysia, independence was proclaimed on 9 August 1965 (separation from Britain and the shotgun wedding with Malaya was in 1959); so today is an excellent occasion to square accounts. Lanka has made a catastrophic mess of language in education, administration, international intercourse, and faces abysmal failure in national unification, so let’s see where Singapore got it right and sometimes wrong. A lesson that comes out of this story is that in Lanka only English can serve as link language link between the Sinhalese and Tamil communities. The National Integration Ministry’s alternative approach, promoting Sinhala-Tamil bilingualism as the link, is doomed to fail.

Singapore’s experience has convinced me that Sinhalese students cannot and will not gain even modest fluency in Tamil – why should they, what’s in it for them? How can they when it is known that second language class teaching followed by reverting to mother tongue in sports field and canteen and exclusive mother tongue usage at home, yields no sustainable second language competence? Language skill dies if not used often, or unless there are other powerful motivations such as jobs, education, trade and the internet, to keep it fresh. Some Tamils may learn Sinhala (or if like yours faithfully they were immersed from a young age), but the great majority in the Tamil majority areas will not bat an eyelid in choosing English over Sinhala. The Eastern Province and the Muslim community appear to contradict this. But no, not at all, both the criterion of continuous social immersion and the material drive from trade and business actually strengthen my case.

English is what Sinhalese and Tamil young people want, the horizons it opens up are the opportunities they crave, and thankfully and in passing, it will serve as the link; not because you din the virtues of national integration into their heads, but because if young people in both communities want to learn English for other reasons, it makes sense to speak it reciprocally instead of staring at each other mutually dumb and deaf!

Lingua Sinhapura then and now

They say that 70 to 80 % of Singaporeans are Chinese but what they don’t tell you is that in the 1950s they couldn’t talk to each other! They spoke about 12 mutually unintelligible dialects – written Chinese is all the same so with a primary education (say 500 characters) one could read shop and road signs. They came from different parts of South China in the early 19th Century; Hokkien speakers (40%) from Fujian, Cantonese (23%), CheChow (18%) and Hakka (7%) from Guangdong, Hainanese (7%) from Hainan Island and other smaller groups. Mandarin was used only by a tiny Chinese elite, the literati;

I guess like French in the European courts of yesteryear, or Newton’s Principia written in Latin (maybe the greatest scientific treatise ever written, but the author felt no compunction to make it intelligible to the great unwashed). Dialect groups lived in clans in enclaves and daily life was governed by clan associations owing lineage to a village in China or an ancestral name. Rich clan members founded dialect schools for their community and that’s where most children went. The Malay and Tamil communities ran their own schools imparting instructions in the vernacular. The colonial government ran two school systems; a prestigious English medium and Chinese medium schools catering to a minority of the Chinese; education was far from widespread.

At independence Singapore inherited this mishmash of schools run by interest groups whose dialects were unintelligible to each other and a population living in polyglot enclaves and ghettoes. The first decision, for obvious reasons that I do not need to repeat, was to ram through English in the ‘bilingual period’ of about 20 years (1965 to late 1987). English was made a compulsory second language at a moderately high standard in all vernacular medium schools while Chinese, Malay or Tamil was a compulsory second language, at moderately high standards again, in English medium schools. This worked for a while but broke down because of a rising demand for English medium schools which the government favoured though vernacular schools were not denied resources. The last Malay, Tamil and Chinese medium schools closed by 1986 due to lack of demand. Then in 1987 a watershed was crossed; after a considerable period of preparation English became the medium of instruction throughout the Singaporean school system while emphasis was also kept on second language competence; that is bilingualism became the standard.

Bilingualism itself was the next casualty, especially in the Chinese community for two reasons, one political the other pedagogic. Opposition to English was led by Chinese nationalists, leftists, scholars and graduates of Nanyang University (Nantah) – the first Chinese language university in South East Asia, set up in 1956. (Nantah was merged with National University of Singapore in 1980). Singapore’s leftists were in the forefront of the campaign to protect the Chinese language, to uphold traditional Chinese values and to halt surrender to alien powers. The 1960s and 1970s was the high water mark of Maoism and its influence on the Asian left; in Lanka recall Shan’s Peking-Line CP and the embryo stages of the JVP. The gloves came off for an almighty fight; Lee Kuan Yew, his Peoples Action Party and the state on one side, Chinese nationalists and leftists on the other. In these years Lee emerged as a ruthless authoritarian with little respect for the niceties of democracy. Nationalists and leftists were hounded. Lee is in no way apologetic: "it had to be done" he declares, no crocodile tears. Authoritarianism in Singapore started with conflicts on language policy.

The pedagogic reason to discard bilingualism was that the demand for high competence in two languages was too much; students failed in droves, parents complained bitterly about overload. Lee is frank and conceited enough by power, to call it "My big mistake". The government abandoned this style of bilingualism demanding high standards in the second (vernacular) language also and steered to a policy where second language competence at a lower level was accepted. Students who intended to specialise in language or literature in Chinese, Malay or Tamil were of course another matter, though specialist tutoring in the latter two was meagre.

The future

Now a new crisis is looming; Singapore’s Chinese are loosing their identity in a headlong rush to English. Complaints, especially from the older generation proliferated; Lee, a devotee of tradition, Chinese values, respect for elders and obedience, knew that culture cannot be imbibed except by emersion in an environment; he sent his three children to Chinese medium primary and secondary schools unlike Lanka’s fake 1956 politicos. Bilingual education faced another challenge when the authorities made a rude discovery; learning Mandarin in class and reverting to dialect in social life and emersion in dialect soaked families caused a sharp decline in Mandarin standards; dialect was choking out Mandarin. Something had to be done urgently; Mandarin had to be salvaged. As early as 1977 the Speak Mandarin Campaign cajoling and imploring parents to drop dialects and adopt Mandarin as the home language had started. Its success is still uncertain.

What has come to the rescue was the rise of China as an economic power. Singaporeans of bilingual competence in English and Mandarin were at a premium and pragmatic students responded to the niche market. High flyers like Janet Ang (CEO, Lenovo), (Kenneth Chan, CEO, McDonalds, China) and pop-stars Tanya Chua, Stefanie Sun and JJ Lin, all bilingual Singaporeans who have broken into the 1.3 billion Chinese market, captured the attention of young Singaporeans. Waves of Chinese officials, sometimes 400 strong, started visiting Singapore on study tours or enrolled on Masters Programmes after Deng’s celebrated 1992 trip. It is still too early to deliver a verdict on the safekeeping of Mandarin in Singaporean education; it depends on China’s economic expansion and its need for Singaporean bilinguals. If this need declines, Singapore will become an English speaking and educated society with Chinese, Malay and Tamil lurking in corners.

This account shows that the pre-1950s language backgrounds were different in Lanka and Singapore. It is also clear that policy over there was driven by pragmatism; here blind racism, starting with SWRD and his bigots, and continuing to the Rajapaksa government. Maybe we can rescue ethnic reconciliation if we make a start by defeating Rajapaksa on 17 August in the Sinhalese areas, but I am pessimistic about salvaging English for our youth. So much devastation has occurred; a vacuum of teachers, English dumbness in the middle ranks of government and even the private sector. In shops, supermarkets, bazaars – you name it; Colombo is a city where streetwise-English has withered. As for students, even university students, it is a wasteland. What I am driving at is that the minimal social environment needed for a second language to survive has been vacated. It will take a generation, if the government is serious, which it is not, to undo the devastation that narrow nationalism has inflicted.

“man-in-the-cloud" attack

“man-in-the-cloud" attack

This is a small blog piece related to an article on “man-in-the-cloud" attack.

The vulnerability discussed in this article is real.

In my case, being an open source man and Linux promoter, sharing what little I know is automatic and almost mandatory.

I may kick the budget of old age but I leave behind lot of digital footprint for to be exploited ad hoc.

So the mobile you use may be a big risk factor.

If you lose your mobile or somebody steals it, all your emails and contacts are at risk.

I cannot offer any solutions.

But it is better to use the non digital land phone for strictly private phone calls.

But even the government can eavesdrop (Sri-Lanka Under MR, I do not know how it is now and USA in particular).

Other option is to have an android of cheapest (Rs.5000/=) price with limited capacity and function for ordinary communications and emails and your value added iphone or any android or commercial for mission critical work and make it sure that it is kept under lock and key physically when not in use for long periods and not to carry it when one is on a shopping free or holidaying (hard thing to do).

We did not have all these gadgets an we carried out confidential work without fear or favour just 20 years ago.

Now we are getting paranoid and young people who are starting their careers should take a special not of the vulnerability of the mobile phone an in particular if you have private data in the Cloud.

This was one reason I was never too keen on for a mobile.

In my twilight years, it is getting bit lazy and less mobile physically that is when you become hooked to a gadget and the vulnerability of old age is also exposed.

It is the responsibility of the mobile carrier to safeguard your interests but if you leave your door open, very little they can do.

Next Cafe

This not about Nescafe but about your cup of coffee or tea.
We were forced to drink the same beverage for 21 years, same taste and same colour.
Now is the time for change.
If we do not take the initiative now, we will be treated like donkeys.

Are you for change?
YES should be the answer.

Linux and Mobile Phone

Linux desktop PC is lagging behind the Android World.
Why I do  not know?
I was reading the Linux Magazine, September edition and its publisher has realized the need to work on the mobile field in Linux.

Next edition will come out with a feature article.

I am eagerly waiting for it.
I downloaded few mobile utilities but none of them installed (mounted) on my Linux PC mounted my non proprietary kit kat.
This is where I support the EU directive to formalize, rather normalize the Mobile Code.
Code weaving is not the answer.
The Linux developers have to work hard on these issues and come out with tangible solutions and produce a non platform based kernel that would standardize code weaving or expansion.

Wireless World

I just downloaded a torrent link for a Linux distribution for wireless or digital radio stations of the world.
I did not have time to download or test it.

But this is about the mobile world.

 
I am new to mobile world
It is a big  learning curve.
I am enjoying it, all the same.
Touch system is the most difficult to master, in spite of fine surgical dexterity of young age. 
For a desktop maestro with keyboard wizardry it is a novel experience.
The beauty of the virtual keyboard is,  it is fast on anticipation and spelling corrections.

I generally give scant regard for getting the grammar correct but do the editing over the next 48 hours.
But the obsession is to get the blog piece posted in double quick time.
This is again to compensate for my boredom travelling by a slow bus plying from Peradeniya to Kandy.
I am now blogging on the fly.
Thanks to all the Android developers.
It is becoming a democratic habit.

I wish the young would use it craftily during this election, which is a turning point in our politics.

It has the same power as social media but does not need a BIG PC to explode.