Letters to the Editor
View(s):A Houseful of law-makers or law-breakers!
Have you watched our Parliamentary proceedings lately?
I feel it must be rated “R” or even “X” like how movies are rated so that children under 18 should not be allowed to watch the law-making process in that august assembly, the Parliament of the Democratic Republic of Sri Lanka.
A couple of years ago, we saw our Parliamentarians get into a brawl, hitting, throwing chairs, and even dousing each other with chilli powder. However, if you looked at these MMA (Multiple Martial Arts) warriors, they were not dressed in judo, karate, or taekwondo outfits. Instead, they were all clad in a spotlessly clean white national outfit, and each of them carried the title Honourable Member of Parliament!
If you had enough of the visual on TV and listened to the audio, you probably heard words like booruwa, meeharaka, gona, nariya, moosalaya etc. So an innocent, unsuspecting child might think our Parliament sits in session in a zoo or an animal farm.
Baboons are the loudest, most obnoxious, most dangerous, most aggressive and least intelligent of all primates and a collective noun for a group of baboons, believe it or not is a “Parliament”.
While the locals watched the fracas in Parliament in shock, Sri Lankans living in foreign countries were forced to cover their faces in shame!
Let us look at the snow-white, spotlessly clean collarless shirt and sarong our Parliamentarians wear for a moment. If an average citizen looked like our Parliamentarians, Sri Lanka would quickly join with countries in the west, like the US, where obesity is a problem! These MPs’ shirts are bursting at the seams in the abdominal region – thanks to the rice and curry meals lavishly served for them at the heavily subsidized Parliament cafeteria – funded by taxpayer rupees.
The subject of gas hit the mainstream news media, and the social media pundits took the ball and ran with it. Honourable MPs from both sides of the aisle became instant experts in gases, gaseous expansion, butane, propane, methane etc.! A few students from a leading college GCE O’ level class who happened to be in the gallery made it a point to meet those “expert” MP’s and posed them the question: “have you heard of Charles Law and Boyle’s Law”. Invariably, the answer was – it is some law that came from Roman-Dutch Law and English law that found its way into our legal system. The students got the responses on their phones!!
Meanwhile, average households in one room dwellings where they live, cook and sleep are in mortal terror!
The average family these days is faced with a scarcity of essential commodities, skyrocketing costs and the circus act of balancing the household budget. The hopefuls are wondering if politicians in their ivory towers would play Santa this time with the issuance of a midnight Gazette notification!
But the issue is – housewives resorting to wood burning hearth for cooking, and the resulting smoke-filled skies of Sri Lanka would make the reindeer say, O’ Dear and retreat to the North Pole till the next polls.
S.Sivanandan Via email
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