The New Year and Vesak festivals are round the corner, and there be a ban on the sale of meat and liquor as on Independence Day 2008.

It is a known fact that most people stock up their supplies at these times and illicit liquor sales thrive. However it appears that apparently our political masters take this decision in favour of the majority Sinhala Buddhists in this country. What about the other communities? Let’s look at the facts.

The Buddhists can do this too, voluntarily, without doubt. However our political masters do not think so. They are of the view that Buddhists are not capable of following their religious and traditional values voluntarily like the others. The masters believe they have to be forced to do so by banning meat and liquor sales!

It is indeed sad that 70% of the majority in a country have to be forced by government regulations to follow a religion.

Why deprive the others from drinking and eating meat? Why force traditions and a particular religion down the throat of others?

We cannot change pompous and all knowing politicians and the minds of radically motivated religious groups. Their actions and decisions cause disgust not only among the minorities but also the majority Sinhala Buddhists.

No human being likes being deprived of the right to decide for himself. Dear political masters, please let us live as independent persons, proud in the belief that we are a free people who can decide what we want and what we don’t want. Let us live as a people who are aware of the laws of the country — what is good and bad and what we should do and not do.

As elected representatives, you have a responsibility to create awareness and provide leadership to all people of this country to live as free people, with individual religious and traditional beliefs and the freedom to follow them voluntarily.

Please, do not force your individual or collective ideas down our throats. You are doing no one a favour. Not the majority, not the minorities and especially not the country.

The US dollar is losing its 70-year old grip on the world’s financial system as an ever-more muscular Euro carves out its own rival empire, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

In the past couple of years, many countries have stopped using the dollar as their reserve currency or have dropped their currency’s peg against the dollar. They are China, Kuwait, Syria, Iran, Libya, Russia, Malaysia, Brazil, Argentina, Equador, Switzerland, Norway, some Scandinavian countries and also some Balkan countries.

The following countries are rumored to be considering dropping the dollar as their reserve currency or terminating their currency’s peg against the dollar: the Arab Gulf states, Saudi Arabia, South Korea and Sudan.

At the recent meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, billionaire currency trader George Soros warned that the dollar’s reserve currency role was drawing to an end. "The current crisis is not only the bust that follows the housing boom, it is basically the end of a 60-year period of continuing credit expansion based on the dollar as the reserve currency. Now the rest of the world is increasingly unwilling to accumulate dollars."

If the world is unwilling to continue to accumulate dollars, the US will not be able to finance its trade deficit or its budget deficit. As both are seriously out of balance, the implication is a yet bigger decline in the dollar’s exchange value and a sharp rise in prices.

As the dollar sheds value and loses its privileged position as reserve currency, US living standards will take a serious knock.

"If the US government cannot balance its budget by cutting its spending or by raising taxes, the day when it can no longer borrow will see the government paying its bills by printing money like a Third World banana republic. Inflation and more exchange rate depreciation will be the order of the day," says Paul Craig Roberts, who was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.

The JVP Wansakkarayo represented by Somawansa and Weerawansa worked hard to make Mahinda Rajapakse the President at the last presidential election by canvassing, erecting cut-outs and launching an adverse poster campaign against the other contenders, with JVP Secretary Tilvin Silva saying that "any one could be elected except a candidate from the UNP."

This same party wanted Indian made Marutis to be given to MPs then, but today they want Indian goods imported into the country to be banned; while at the same time enjoying the most expensive luxury vehicles such as Japanese Pajeros and Prados as parliamentarians.

When they canvassed to make Mahinda Rajapakse the next president of Sri Lanka, the JVP very well knew that if elected he will be the president for the next six years. But now even before the lapse of three years as president, the JVP is all out to oust him.

The JVP is partly responsible for the deplorable state this country is in.

We saw the JVP uprising during the years 1988/1989 and the number of government employees murdered — tied to lamp posts, and the number of CTB buses among other state resources destroyed by the JVP and its supporters.

The decisions taken by the JVP in the past have always been misguided and to the detriment of our country. The JVP’s sustenance is based on hatred, violence and vengeance.

All capital intensive projects from the Senanayake Samudra in Ampara to the Mahaweli/Victoria project, 160 garment factories for Gam Udawa and the one million houses project for the homeless, to the Mahapola scholarships were all implemented by the UNP.

No other political party has done anything even close to what the UNP has done. Even in spite of the small mistakes the UNP has done it is much better than all the rest.

In Sri Lanka you can fool all the people all the time as long as there are karumakkarayos to support and vote for the wansakkarayos.

Our failure to develop the country even after 60 years of independence has nothing to do with our colonial masters or the rising price of oil or the ethnic conflict. Oil prices and the ethnic conflict affected us only after the mid ’70s and early ’80s. Why couldn’t we develop the economy during the preceding three decades?

We couldn’t and did not develop economically as some of our political leaders had blind faith in socialism. After 1956 we embraced a state dominated economic model and moved closer towards the socialist countries. Other nations such as Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Thailand who were allies of the USA, accepted the free market capitalist economic system.

Within a decade, these countries branded as ‘American puppets’ by our leftwing politicians economically surpassed the socialist oriented countries including India and Sri Lanka. Ironically, had Sir John Kotelawala defeated S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1956, today Sri Lanka would have been a prosperous nation. Yet even today, SWRD who is the father of ruination of modern Sri Lanka is glorified.

The failure of socialism in the Soviet Union, the other Comecon countries and China weren’t evident until the late 1980s especially due to the secretive nature of the Communist system. Also the picture wasn’t totally clear in India where within a closed economy the private sector thrived on the huge domestic market.

Although by 1970 evidence was emerging of the success of the free market capitalist system, the then SLFP government disregarded the available evidence and took the country into a total state controlled economy even though the results of this disastrous policy were visible within five years. The rest of course is history.

Sri Lankans have been told to replace bread with rice, as the import of flour involves valuable foreign exchange and the consumption of bread leads to diabetes.

The concern of the government about using foreign exchange looks ridiculous when one considers the millions of rupees spent on foreign trips by the politicians, the many millions spent to import luxury vehicles for the use of parliamentarians and the abuse of foreign aid by them. As for developing diabetes, it is a pity that the government is not aware that there are other causes that trigger diabetes than eating bread.

Speaking of replacing bread with rice, I would like to ask those concerned what amount of inconvenience and expenses a family has to incur to eat rice. First the rice has to be washed and the stones removed. It has then to be boiled. We cannot eat plain rice. I wonder how many politicians ever eat plain rice? Today a pol sambol is a costly affair. Then there must be at least one curry which must be cooked. The cost of gas has been sky-rocketing and to prepare a rice meal with pol sambol and one curry would cost a family a tidy sum.

Furthermore, today the husband and wife both go to work to make ends meet and does the wife have enough time in the morning to cook a rice and curry meal, get the children ready to go to school and get herself ready to go to work? The politicians living in the lap of luxury and robbing the common man of his money in various ways do not understand this.

This is why working people have no other alternative but to have bread for meals. No elaborate cooking is necessary when one has to eat bread. Bread can be eaten even with a dhal curry or pol sambol and time is not wasted in the preparation.

Why can’t the author of the Chinthanaya and "Badumila" Gunewardena consider these before making public statements?.

Dilrukshi Handunnetti