Both English and Sinhala, may be Tamil too have lost the ability to keep high-profile.
There was a time when we take a paper and we read it from front to back.
Even if it was not newsworthy, at least one picks up a few nice phrases and a few new words
Now it does not take two minutes for me to peruse.
I am going to list 10 (ten or more) missing points of our National News Papers.
1. All of them have lost creativity.
2. They have no understanding of future trends
3. They are obsessed with Gossips
4. They are obsessed with Politics
5. They are obsessed with Profits (advertisement)
6. They are all Polarized
7. Simply they do exist as of some sort of necessity and like having an early morning purge, one reads, rather glances through  and have an immediate intellectual clean up
purge .
Why this is I do not know.
8. It is like one way traffic, even one comes to an intersection, they prefer not to take a turn, either to the right or left, worse they do not think of pulling to a side and have a cup of tea or coffee.
Enjoy the scenery a bit
9. Are we getting brain washed?
10. Why are we so selfish?
Why don’t we look at alternative ways of thinking and look at current trends.
The 10 or missing points are:
Since I am (was) in a higher educational institute, I will take up with the education, first.
1. First IT.
There is a sea of change happening in the IT world.
This was building up over the last three years.I was obsessed with Linux but keep a track of what was happening.
The first white paper I received 3 years ago.
It is the cloud computing that is making the sea change.
The androids have already come
Then the tablets.
Then the bust of HP computer arm.
All HP, IBM and Google going to cloud services.
2. Then the amazon come up with the Kindle.
3. Amazon has taken over the Digital Library Services along with the reading habits.
4. Soon tablets will hit all the schools, in preparation the have stopped teaching or training cursive writing. 
Instead of the slate and slate pencil it will be digital tablets that will take over.
5. I hate this government Free Book Service which is 30 years outdated.
All the books can be put in couple of doubled layered DVDs.
6. One actually does not need even that and the cloud service can take over the digital content.
7. For that we need fiber-optic connection and not a land based service.
8. We do not have a satellite to facilitate the G.P.S
9. We need to improve English at schools.
10. We need to get Sinhala and Tamil into IT.
11. All that costs.
12. There is an alternative operating system and Ubuntu is taking giant strides including commercial aspect and they are ready by 2014.
But only Debian has universal language support including Sinhala and Tamil.
13. Then there is software piracy at all levels in spite of copyright law. I strongly opposed copyright law when it was brought in because we were digitally backward at the stage and I believed we needed at least 5 years to change.
More than a decade gone we are still in  squire one.
Well IT itself has taken more than 10 units.
14. We are not addressing the problem of population growth (I stated it when population was 6 billion).
15. We are not addressing the global warming and climatic change.
16. We are not ready for alternative energy for cars including electric.
17. Science, Technology and Mathematics even worse than English.
18. Doctors, Engineers who pass out won’t be able to fill government posts.
They are saturated.
19. New private medical college is a colossal waste.
20. Education hub is a daydream and we missed the bus by 10 years because of the war.
Above all we do not have resources and we are still paying the debts.
We are trapped in the debt trap.
IMF will capitalize.
Why are our papers not addressing these in real time and numbers.
This budget will be another austerity budget and things will get worse in spite of tightening our belts.
I have not seen a single article on economics and debt crisis.
We cannot put a lid on everything, like a rubber ball pressed under water with hand, the moment the hand is taken off, it ill pop up.
What the papers are doing is trying to keep the rubber ball underwater.
It is a failed exercise.

Poisoning the Nation!

This was something I wanted to write but kept postponing for more than 5 years after my first entry into minor scientific and environmentally friendly writing.

However the ideas dates back to my medical students days.

I was convinced the Mahavali River water was contaminated from its origin not only from biological agents but form pesticides that originate form tea plantation.

The amount of dog’s shit that get washed away to the river is colossal and that alone is enough to prove my point but amount man’s shit goes parallel and almost doubled or trebled that since the  rough ratio to dog to man in Sri-Lanka is 1 to 7 (ratio).

This is not about dog shit but how our agrarians poison us almost daily.

There is no food in the market which is not contaminated but there is no machinery to monitor the extent of this man made disaster since our legislation is to weak to regulate the use of artificial in gradients.

The biggest culprit was WHO who for three to four decades sprayed the enter country with DDT to fatten the coffers of American Companies which produce (they blame only Iraq and and did not find a trace) all the nasty chemicals yo test on the poor countries.

That menace is gone to some extent but our Agriculture Ministry has taken over the responsibility of poisoning our masses by default of not monitoring or regulating the use of poisons.

My friend in the University and almost my name sake was able to prove that cadmium was the cause of renal diseases prevalent in the North and North Central but both the WHO experts and the local medical experts failed to see this since renal disease is big money and a Kidney is priced at half to one million now.

If one take two kidneys from an innocent refugee it is almost two millions.

This probably happened during the war time.

The kidneys were not a problem then but it is a problem now.

One of my friends who was abroad tells me doctors there removed his normal kidney leaving his half normal kidney to survive.

I can remember in my internship my consultant removed the Normal Kidney of a woman  and went on for one week of holiday and I had to look after her till her death.

Since I was an intern I could not do anything.

Bound by ethics!

That is one reason, I did not take up Surgery which I loved as a medical student but ended up as a pathologist to see what went wrong after the event.

The poisons in our food is too numerous to list but at least it is my responsibility to make people aware.

I should end up with a little note of our drug industry.

The number one poison in the list is alcohol.

For many reasons.

1. It is a universal cell poison.

2. It is a good solvent and dissolve all other poisons and act as a vehicle for poisons.

3. Third is that alcohol is adulterer with methyl alcohol to a large extent which causes blindness.

4. Most of our children’s syrups and vitamins are not water based but alcohol based.

5. There is no way to regulate consumption of illicit (almost legal in this country) alcohol.

Just today I went to buy some vitamin syrup for an adult.

This particular one needed alcohol free syrup.

Having checked over 20 I could not find a single bottle that had a label to say what is the solvent used.

They should label them as alcohol based or water based.

I had to buy (just guess work) two and at home opened and taste them  to see which had alcohol.

One was alcohol based other was not alcohol based but expensive.

This is a primitive experiment in a country where we have not produced a Nobel Prize winning scientist.

That is why I drink only wine now even though they very are expensive.

What is the hell the Health Department doing to regulate that issue?

They have one priority.

That is dengue.

The have no priority to check all the poisons and the labels in food and drugs industry (that are imported to this country).

This include our chille powder. One Brand I tasted was totally poisoned may be with Gadol.

Anybody who has money and connection can import anything to this liberal and liberated  society.