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The Scene: Students at school gathered at the assembly hall listening to the principal speak.

“Today I came to talk to you,” the principal of the school said to the children who had gathered at the assembly hall, “about a special course of study that will be introduced into the school curriculum from next Sunday since the week will be taken up by the present compulsory subjects like history and art.”

A hand shot up from the front row. It was Shantha, Shantha Lingamwasge, one of the school’s studious students who took his studies seriously and was often seen during the lunch break, seated under the old sal tree, peering into some book or another.

“But Sunday is our Dhaham Pasala,” he said.

“Daham Pasals will have to wait,” the principal replied.

‘What about Sunday church?” another asked.

“Heaven will have to wait,” the principal said in a huff. “This is more important. Before we ask where we go when we die, we must know how we got here in the first place.”

“The stork brought us in a bundle,” said one. “From God,” said an older student. “From the Almighty and Allah is his name,” a student flatly said. “Due to Karma,” another chipped in.

“In the days of old, before the age of reawakening dawned on this island, children of all generations learnt it from the birds and the bees. They wondered why the birds did it, the bees did it, the deer did it, the cats did it—in fact, every species did it, except humans. Then they found out that their parents did it as well under the sheets at night. But they, the young, couldn’t figure out why they did it at all and for what gain. Now the truth can be told. In scientific detail.”

The students wondered, what was she going to talk about? Was she about to start talking of ‘that’? The one that made their parents fall silent the moment they entered the room. The one that made them turn off the TV immediately as it was mentioned. The one that always made them look the other way and wait as if they hadn’t heard.

Well, if ‘that’ was what the principal was going to talk about at this morning’s assembly, of course, they were extremely interested. No one had told them what ‘that’ was, and, if they had asked, no one would tell them what ‘that’ is.

A spark, a flame, a fire raged in their hearts. They stood on the cliff edge of knowledge, and they did not mind taking the fall to discover why the birds ‘did it’. Now a messiah was in their midst to take them to the tree that bore the forbidden fruit.

And they couldn’t wait to take a chunky bite.

They wondered, however, whether the principal could keep a straight face and tell the story without a blush. They were soon agog, earnestly listening to what the principal had to say on a matter close to their hearts.

“But what is the scientific explanation?” the principal asked, tucking her osari frill more firmly into her sari folds and looking over her shoulder to cast a quick glance to see if her sari drape was neatly in place. She was the epitome of the prim and proper schoolmistress, with her broad, dark, round-rimmed glasses reinforcing the image.

As the great Irish philosopher Oscar Wilde wrote in his book ‘For The Use of the Young’, “Science is the record of dead religions,” she said. “Once a long-held religious belief is scientifically proved, it ceases to be an article of faith but gains a new aura and gains new reverence as a scientific fact.”

“The process of chiselling,” she continued, “every part and piece of religion—the opium of the masses—is already underway in the enlightened West. It has taken the West decades to break down the iconic marbled edifice that people, through the ages, had erected and enshrined in the inner sanctum of the mind—and the West are not even halfway near their goal.”

“But we,” she proudly said, “in this age of the nation’s new awakening, shall do it overnight. We shall use our mighty hammer to destroy it in one fell blow. And what’s more? We shall use our razor-sharp sickle to root out the weeds that have grown around it throughout the decadent centuries when imperialistic dictates kept suppressed the masses’ right to hold and to express free and rational thought.”

“We shall bring the condom from the posh sitting rooms of the elite and make the taboo article a fit subject of discussion. We shall drag it out from the wilds of Lanka, force it out from every hut in every hamlet in the country, where it still remains a forbidden term to use in conservative homes, although it is in the Sinhala lexicon.”

“We intend, by hook or by crook, to force it out to the open from the closets of shame, where it presently lies, condemned by years of indoctrination by the puritan West, which kept it locked up and taken out only on a blue moon night to be used solely as a religious duty to beget children. All other uses were decried and put to shame.”

“We shall soon put a stop to this stuff and nonsense.” The look on the principal’s face was one of long-suppressed hatred. “We shall free our prudish attitudes and our base prejudices from the chains with which they were held. We shall, on every bedstead and mat, on every pillow and mattress, shout, ‘In this new dawn of a reawakening, we have nothing to lose but our hymens and a hedonistic world of pleasures to gain’.”

But before we enter the gates of an ecstatic heaven of pleasures, we will warn you of the dangers of unprotected sex, and we’ll teach you how the condom will help you beat the threat. Sex with a condom will keep you safe and healthy, and the fear of getting an unwanted baby will be zero. Though sheathing may marginally diminish the sensations felt compared to engaging in ‘coitus uninterruptus’ unsheathed.

But without it, the population has boomed, and sexually transmitted diseases—of which we shall tell you in greater detail later—have widely spread. Gonorrhoea is on the rapid rise, and so are syphilis and herpes. And HIV, the most dangerous of them all, is claiming lives at an alarming rate.

Once you have learnt of these inherent dangers of unprotected sex, then the world will be your oyster. Gone will be your intense frustrations; denied is release, not only till you are betrothed but till you’re wed. The religious stigma will disappear, the social frown will cease to crease their brow when the telltale sign of an unveiled bride will no more tell the tale of premarital sex.

All the dangers of unprotected sex, all the worries you may have suffered before, all the restless nights of fears will soon be gone, sheathed in a cylindrical rubber pouch. It comes in all sizes. If it fits, if it’s tight, then you’re all right. If it’s loose, if it slips or if the balloon bursts, then start praying.

Had your parents known of this simple dumping bin before, most probably you wouldn’t be here today. Remorselessly thrown into the trash bin after they have had their pleasures and quickly forgotten.

We’ll take you step by step to the advanced levels where the delights of the Kamasutra await those who intend to be connoisseurs. We’ll teach you how to take and how to give. This is no one-way street. And once we ourselves are satisfied you’re theoretically up for the job, we shall tell you:

“You have mastered the theory. Go do the practicals.”

President to play Jekyll at morn and Hyde at night while abroad Vijitha’s legal solution to overcome a single uniform problem Along with the arrest of former Sri Lankan President Ranil Wickremesinghe for crossing a thin line presumed by FCID officials to exist between an executive Head of State’s official duties, for which the whole gamut of presidential privileges are accorded without stint, and his private activities, for which there is none, not even his security, has the FCID, unwitting or not, jumped the gun and condemned all past, present and future presidents to the prospect of a spell in the slammer? On the basic premise that the law must be equally applied to all, without any exception, unless provided in the Constitution or in any written law, the FCID has recklessly rushed to enforce it without due regard that there is no explicit reference in the Constitution to where a sitting president’s constitutional privileges begin and where they end. TOGETHER AGAIN: Ranil and Maithree after a traumatic experience in court and hospital On Tuesday, Foreign Minister Vijitha Herath, standing in for the usual Cabinet spokesman, Nalinda Jayatissa, sits on a bench of three before the media and proceeds to give his interpretation on presidential privileges, as if he is the supreme fount of Lanka’s law. He says that presidential privileges start at home and stay at home. Within the island mass, all acts done by a president are deemed to be clothed in official privilege. There is no distinction; there is no divide. Whether he stays at the presidential secretariat or whether he goes romping at night to attend a pal’s party and, on the way home, drops in at a casino to place his chips on red to win, presidential privileges stick to him like a second skin. He remains President twenty-four hours, seven days of the week. But, according to Vijitha Herath’s judicial interpretation of the constitution, outside the Lankan isle, it’s different. There are two sets of clothing a president must take to wear whenever he leaves the island. If he’s going to England, for instance, to attend a function for which he has been officially invited by His Majesty’s Government, then the President can travel in a convoy of cars, surrounded by a contingent of Lankan bodyguards, accompanied by an entourage of aides to see to his every need and stay at the best hotels that befit a president, all paid without murmur by the Lankan taxpayer. No fuss. But if the state veil of privileges that is accorded to a president is lifted during hours when he is not attending official state business, and he is left to stand, bereft of his official presidential attire, naked on foreign soil. If he decides to spend the evening seeing a West End play, he will have to wear his second set of clothing, those of the Pauper Prince. Leaving his bodyguards behind, he has to tramp or hail a cab, where a British cabbie will unroll the shutter and ask in a Cockney accent, ‘Where to, mate?’ He will have to occupy a seat in the front row gallery, the cheapest seats in the theatre. At the end of the play, he will scramble, in the West End’s rush hour, to find a cab, and if he doesn’t find one, he will trudge the cold dark streets of London, furtively keeping an eye out for muggers, and, raising the collar of his coat, bury his face to avoid being recognised. But if he had been recognised and held in awe by West End theatregoers or held with a revengeful eye by assassins, he would still remain in their eyes the President of Sri Lanka, no matter in what guise he went. If that’s the law as you see it—one uniform to wear for all seasons in Lanka and another dual set when abroad—then, Mr. Herath, the law is an ass. One more question, Mr. Herath. When you attended official functions abroad as Foreign Affairs Minister and, during your spare time, spent the leisure hours with your expat Lankan pals, did you go with your bodyguards, or did you go alone?