Letters to the Editor

12th December 1999

The never-ending mess

Baseline Road, now known under different names has been under reconstruction for the past two years from the Kelanitissa roundabout to the Kanatte roundabout.This is about a six kilometre stretch. This road links East to West and North to South.

The construction is supposed to be handled by a Japanese Company. In Japanese companies the slogan is "Safety first". Do we see safety first here? "NO". Open trenches all over. There is no part in this section that can be called completed. The Urugodawatte junction is still a mess, the Maligawatte junction is still a mess and the Dematagoda junction is in complete disarray. So is Campbell Place and Serpentine Road. The Borella junction has been a complete mess for the past two years. Now they have messed up Castle Street/ Horton Place junction and the Bauddhaloka junction. All three accesses from Borella to the East / West are a mess.

Is anybody bothered about this? Does the contractor care less about the traffic jams and bad road surfaces? Maybe Japan can sell more used car parts through local junk yards to clear their junk yards this way. Even the machinery used by the contractor is outdated. One has been lying near the Kanatte roundabout for the past two weeks using public space.

The average speed for doing six kms is less than three km an hour. Who pays for this? The tax paying public. Who suffers due to the inefficiency? The tax paying road user, not public officials, including MPs who have to cross this stretch to proceed to parliament in vehicles and back-up vehicles driven by those with driving licences but no road manners. They too are not bothered as the tax paying public pay for their luxury vehicles through our taxes. If this happens in Japan, which definitely will not happen, the public would have led protest campaigns and the contractor would be behind bars.

We live in a country where all are blind and deaf to fundamental rights and the taxpayer is exploited by the non-tax payer.

Tissa Jayaweera
Colombo

This is the man who says there's no God!

I am not an expert on computers. But how is it that until they reached the eleventh hour, the computer specialists did not realise the problems the world would have to face in the year 2000 because of the programmes they had invented? Computers were first introduced to us in the early 1930s and ever since then, hundreds of thousands of computer specialists the world over have been working in computer firms.

Something that intrigues me is that this is the man who says there's no God. God created the whole universe with all its millions of stars, moons and planets centuries ago and ever since then they have moved with so much accuracy. The movements are so precise that astronomers can forecast an eclipse years ahead.

Man, a creature who couldn't foresee the world reaching the year 2000, strives to analyse God and comes to the conclusion that there is no God.

F.R. de Alwis
Colombo 6

What a contrast to draw a parallel!

This is with reference to "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" by Edward Gunawardhana (The Sunday Tims December 5).

The trouble is that a microscopic minority in this fair isle of ours have been made to lie in a cradle of imperial orthodoxy, and educated in an environment totally alien to our culture and civilization.

Sad to say the writer seems to me to belong to that group of persons who are ignorant or who refuse to believe in what the vast majority in this country hold near, dear and sacred. These individuals are in Sri Lanka but they are certainly not of Sri Lanka.

Burning issues may be there, but that should in no way be allowed to burn the historical or literary knowledge of our future generation. What the writer fails to understand is that one should be a full -fledged national before he becomes an 'international'.

Knowing the past history of our nation or being a scholar on the literature of ancient times will in no way hamper one's knowledge about the modern world and its advancement in science and technology.

On the contrary it would be an impetus to those who wish to be versatile and also wish to update their line of thinking.

I am confused when the writer says, "Their role models should not be Dutugemunu, Sirisangabo or Valmiki but men like Ford, Nuffield or Bill Gates."

These personalities are poles apart and have had their own capabilities in a world so different and separated by long ages in history. What a contrast to draw a parallel!

Although Mr. Gunawardhana seems to think in this manner, so detrimental to our wellbeing , it will do well for him to know that British scholars of the calibre of Dr. Rhys Davids, F. L. Woodword or Max Muller have recorded otherwise.

D.P.B. Ellepola
Kirillavala

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