At least this is what Jayalath Jayawardene should be advising parents to say when he does the next installment of his "I'm just a plain doctor" on private television. Jayawardene was seen to be discussing the Sri Lankan test tube baby in one of his Doctor programmes last week. But one could see that Dr. JJ was detached and distracted. He looked basically out of the loop. Discussing the fallopian tube when Sri Lanka was becoming a test tube case for a new process of constitutionalism and nation-building was too much even for the ever suffering Jayawardene to bear.

The fact was that his UNF government was building the test tube baby of test tube babies - they were making the Sri Lankan nation the ultimate test-tube for a baby nation to be created out there in a post-conflict lab.

The Prime Minister said so in his speech in Oslo, that while everybody is tearing themselves apart Sri Lanka was becoming a 'beacon of hope.' He is like the father dealing with Santa Claus when he is dealing with the wire services such as Reuter and AFP. He brings all the joy and bonhomie to his people through the wire services - like a father bringing home all the goodies to the kids in a stocking all dressed up as Santa Claus. Thus, he tells the wire services, "we are a beacon of hope when all other nations are tearing each other apart."

But when the wire services, Reuters particularly, publish something that he doesn't like, he knows Reuters doesn't believe in this whole "beacon of hope thing" the way he does. So, like the father telling the older kid who has just discovered Santa Claus, he tells his (discerning) people back home "Bah, Reuters I mean Santa Claus, is just a humbug, but you know, I wasn't required to tell you that all this time."

But if the political atmosphere is getting suitably Santa Claus like with the approach of the silly season, it is still sober stuff in snow bound Norway, and Dr. Anton Balasingham is so sober that he could have been mistaken for an LTTE military wing leader - nay, for an LTTEer period. Can you detect even a little bit of Norwegian the spirits Schnapps talking, when Anton Balasingham says in that chilling cold ambience in Oslo that "some press persons are trying to create panic back home (in the old country eh what?) by saying that there are LTTE courts in the cleared areas."

Is Anton Balasingham's mind a cleared area, especially when he is in Norway, and is within reach of a good quantity of the best Norwegian Schnapps that Vidar the Viking will provide him? Certainly we have to assume that Anton Balasingham's mind is a cleared area, Schnapps or no Schnapps, and this is why there are no LTTE courts in that cleared area.

You should know that. Any journalist who reports otherwise, is not only a troublemaker, he doesn't know a basic verity. No fuzzy logic in Anton Bala's cleared mind - no confusion and no grey areas. Cleared means cleared means cleared, even if he has a red nose."

Anton Balasingham whether he is in Bangkok or Norway creates a rugger scrum of a press pack each time the media is present - that is his affinity with the press, being as he is a journalist turned politician.

This time, the rugger scrum had a particularly boisterous member - my, what a deja vu for scribe Bala - a man who doesn't know whether he is a journalist or a politician.

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