එල්ටීටීඊ ගුවන් ප්රහාරය
What does the raid on Katunayake signal? Ivan puts the LTTE’s light aircraft at five on Iqbal Athas’s count, notes that two flew from the Wanni, bombed the base and returned untouched, and reaches for the IRA’s mortar attack on Heathrow as the comparison — an attack that did no damage and changed how London’s business community understood its own risk. His conclusion is that this is a moment to act together rather than to score off each other.
යල් පැනගිය මාර්ග නීති
Hundreds of crores are spent widening and modernising roads while the speed limits stay in the past — 52 kilometres an hour on every highway in the country, urban and rural alike. Ivan asks what the spending is for, and objects to a new rule banning even a small child as a third rider on a motorcycle, which is the family vehicle of the lower middle class.
මුහුණ සමග තරහට නහය කපා ගැනීම
The donor countries may reduce their dealings with Sri Lanka or drop them altogether, and nothing about that would be good for the country. Ivan understands why a guerrilla movement wants the state destabilised; what he cannot understand is southern parties working, knowingly or not, to the same end — the protest marches against foreign countries included.
රනිල් මංගල සන්ධානය
The value of money is evaporating, inflation is at twenty per cent, bank rates are climbing, economic activity is shrinking and the administrative and war costs are rising. Into that Ivan reads the new alliance: the second place it gives Mangala Samaraweera has not pleased the UNP’s own second rank, and the crossover laws it promises already exist and are already ignored.
ලෝනා රයිට් හා වෘත්තීය පුහුණුව
A portrait of Lorna Wright, who stayed to work for the poor when she could have gone to Australia, and an argument built on her work: unemployment should be addressed through the international labour market rather than the domestic one, because creating an industrial job at home costs millions. Ivan ends by asking temples to become vocational training centres rather than political ones.
රටේ ගැලවීම ඇත්තේ කොතැන ද?
The system has rotted past the point where the usual contest for power can go on, and none of the parties competing has grasped it. The government faces a financial crisis it is meeting by borrowing expensively abroad and taxing people at home. Ivan says somebody must begin the change — the president, or failing him the opposition leader, or failing both an informed public.
ද්රෝහී ප්රීමා ගිවිසුමට වගකිවයුත්තේ කව් ද?
Prima raised the price of a kilo of flour by thirteen rupees overnight and the ministers blamed each other. Ivan goes to the agreement itself: the officials who negotiated it, one of whom was working for the company and another who joined Prima in Singapore on a large salary after retiring — and the extraordinary fact that the Sri Lankan government holds no copy of the second agreement at all.
අයවැයෙන් පසු
It is now clear the opposition cannot defeat the budget, whatever the new UNP alliance with Mangala Samaraweera and Sripathi Sooriyarachchi promised. Ivan predicts what follows: the two men’s standing evaporates, the UNP fragments, and the only powers left standing are Mahinda Rajapaksa in the south and Prabhakaran in the north — a return to the J.R. Jayewardene pattern of a strong government facing a broken opposition.
බදු සඳහා ජාතික ප්රතිපත්තියක්
Every government that comes to power invents new taxes, some of them oppressive and some that reduce productivity, and Sri Lanka has no agreed national policy either for what the state spends or for what it takes. Ivan sets a monthly Rs 300 for a child in an orphanage against Rs 100,000 a month in house rent for a minister who owns his own house, and the electricity board losing Rs 60 million a day.
මහා වීර දිනයේ ප්රභාකරන්ගේ කතාව
The LTTE has a heroes’ day and so does the JVP, and no other party has one. Ivan reads Prabhakaran’s speech against the year’s losses — the two failed assassinations, of the army commander and the defence secretary, which he says became the driving force of the war — and ends on the economy, where the GSP+ concession holds up the garment industry and losing it would push the country from tangle to tangle.