The world is still sympathetic to the terror organization LTTE

India with strong marketing caught the world attention on Mumbai 26/11

War has cost Sri Lanka 70,000 lives and cost US$200 billion to the economy

The Diaspora is only 1 million but Sri Lanka has 20 million voices

Last week when I saw my former colleague from the Government Peace Secretariat appearing before the "Lessons Learned and Reconciliation Commission (LLRC)’ and later that evening we saw the adverse publicity on BBC and CNN, it was very evident that global perception were very sympathetic towards the LTTE. It was then that I decided that it is my duty to write these thoughts, given that we were part of the larger team that fought the war with the LTTE.

Will the 21st century belong to China? For a while, perhaps – but only in the sense that it was said to belong to Japan in the 1980s. Looking back now, that seems ridiculous, but at the time best-selling books were predicting that Americans, not to mention the rest of the planet, would be reduced to virtual serfdom by the relentless high-speed growth of the Japanese economy. Then it stopped growing.

Official data published on 16 August revealed that China’s economy has overtaken Japan’s this year, making it the second-biggest economy in the world. This followed last month’s announcement by the International Energy Agency that China is now the world’s biggest consumer of energy (and burns about half of the world’s total coal production).

Earlier this year China overtook Germany to become the world’s No. 1 exporter, and it now makes more cars than any other country in the world. Indeed, it makes as many as Japan and the United States together.

Had it not been for the Revolutionary war of Independence, America perhaps would have remained a colony of Great Britain for longer than it did. It was the disregard of the demands by American colonists that precipitated this war. The most significant reasons for their discontent were taxation without representation in the British Parliament, and the imposition of unreasonable taxes. If Great Britain had had the foresight that its stand on demands made would precipitate war, it would have been more accommodating. This would have delayed the cry for independence. The lesson to be learnt by those in power is how vitally important it is to continually gauge and ascertain the mood of the people, if consequences with serious implications are to be avoided.

In a joke used to promote the versatility of the famous London Department store, Ronald Reagan calls up Harrods and asks to order an elephant; to which the clerk replies “Asian or African?” For most of us our knowledge of the types of elephant species ends there. Thus many people in the country who head towards Pinnawala assume they are seeing just another herd of   Asian Elephants. However, many are unaware that elephants found within the country are an indigenous species that is fast being destroyed by various intrusive human activity.

The Sri Lankan Asian elephant is referred to by the scientific name of Elephas maximus, Maximus distinctly separate from the Mainland Asian Elephant, Elephas maximus Indicus, found all over the continent.