Saturday, 7 September 2019

Highlights from My Sri Lankan Blog Posts


I’ve been writing blog posts about my country Sri Lanka for 3 and a ½ years now. I’m very interested
in Sri Lanka and it is the topic that I write the most about on this blog. I decided to feature a post
giving highlights from ten of my Sri Lankan blog posts. I selected ten from a diverse range of sub-
topics and ones which I thought would give a good reflection of my perspectives on Sri Lanka
featured on this blog. The headers of the post are clickable allowing you to access them if you wish.
I will give a description about each post sometimes with quotes from it.

This is a blog post featuring content from Google Street View of Sri Lanka which debuted earlier that year in 2016. This is the first post I did featuring Google Street View content. I’ve done one every year, having also done ones on Colombo and the international destinations America & Dubai. Places included are Colombo, Galle, Kandy, Point Pedro, Mullaitivu, Negombo and more. I’ll be providing two embedded locations from the blog post below. The text featured is directly quoted from it. If they do not load, you can click the “View on Google Maps” button which will open it in a larger size in a new window.

Here’s Point Pedro by the sea.

This is near Wasgamuwa National Park.

“Api Kawruda” is a popular song recorded by the band Wayo. The song was written by a songwriter
named Senaka Batagoda whose version remained unreleased until December 2015. In this blog
post, I embed Senaka Batagoda’s version from his YouTube channel and say why I find the song to
be special. It’s a great song which has a classic rock feel and I include similarities I see with my two
favourite singers Elton John and Bob Seger. I’m pleased that Senaka Batagoda’s version of “Api
Kawruda” was made available globally to purchase on iTunes this year. I pointed out that I would like
this song to be discovered by people all over the world. 

In May 2017 I interviewed Consultant/Team Leader Dr. Dimantha De Silva about the Colombo Transport Plan of the Megapolis. I said the following in the introductory paragraph “The Megapolis is a massive project that seeks to improve the quality of the Western Region of Sri Lanka which includes Colombo. The Colombo Transport Plan includes improved roads, monitoring by CCTV cameras, increasing average travel speed, an inland water transport system, a modern bus service, an electrified rail system and a Light Rail Transit (LRT) system.”

 A key component of the Colombo Transport Plan is the LRT system, officially known as the Colombo Light Rail. According to Dimantha, the Colombo Light Rail is expected to be about 75 km and have 7 lines. 2 of the lines is funded via a loan from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The Colombo Light Rail has the potential for the growth of Colombo, as Dimantha mentioned how the LRT system in Calgary, Canada (where he previously lived) made the city grow and brought in more investments including in other areas.

 There has been progress in the project this year. Firstly, the Cabinet of Sri Lanka approved the proposal to sign the agreement for the first phase of the Colombo Light Rail in January. Following that, JICA signed the agreement with the Government of Sri Lanka in March for the loan. The Colombo Light Rail was launched at the beginning of July. The first phase of the Colombo Light Rail is a 16 km journey from Malabe to Colombo Fort. Most recently in mid August, the project began construction with borehole testing.

In Sri Lanka, there is more talk about the negative issues that go on in the country than the positive
ones. I think that the negative issues are a real problem, but am disappointed that the negative
issues are often overfocused with positive issues being ignored. Highlighting positive happenings in
Sri Lanka is one thing I do in my blog. In August 2017, I thought I saw more positive occurrences in
Sri Lanka so I decided to write an article highlighting them. Now, I know that time has passed with
some of them no longer relevant or not living up to what was promised, but I think it does give
information on a side of Sri Lanka that is less heard. Some of them featured in the article include the

I thought I’d add some recent Sri Lankan positive occurrences over the last three months. In June, Sri Lanka’s first satellite Raavana-1 was launched into orbit at a distance of 400 km from Earth. At the start of July, the World Bank elevated Sri Lanka from a lower-middle income country to an upper-middle income country. This is based on a new country classification by the World Bank evaluating Sri Lanka’s 2018 figures. 

This reminds me of a point Dr. Dimantha De Silva made in my interview with him. He said that we won’t be able to receive the JICA loan when graduate to upper-middle income status that he predicted would occur in 1 and a ½ years time during May 2017. Through Sri Lanka’s new classification occurred in July 2019, his prediction is close to reality as the classification comes from 2018 figures. It’s good that we were able to get this loan in time. Dimantha was part of a recent positive development. He lead a project comprising of his students which entered transit data into Google Maps. Thus the railway routes throughout Sri Lanka and most of the Western Province’s bus routes have been available in Google Maps from late July onwards. This project was carried out by the University of Moratuwa’s Civil Engineering Department in collaboration with the National Transport Commission.

Lastly, Sri Lanka had another achievement when it comes to space exploration. In late August, it
was reported that a team led by Sri Lankan scientists discovered two planets outside the solar
system known as ‘exoplanets’. These planets were discovered by going through many thousand
data files captured from the NASA Kepler/K2 Mission.


 This article is written in response to the area measurement sector in Sri Lanka still being primarily
imperial, despite adopting the metric system in the 1970s. The usual practice Sri Lanka uses is
square feet for the size of built-up areas and perches, roods & acres for lands with the metric square
kilometres used for large lands. The metric units for area measurement are square metres and
hectares. I am making the case for metric area measurements to be used giving its benefits.
Benefits include the interrelatedness among different metric units as seen in the above image, the
simplicity of calculation, one unit for land and living area instead of two, fixing the area measurement
muddle, synergy with the construction industry and more. I also included metric area sizes of Sri
Lankan landmarks in it. I’m pleased that people have been finding this article on Internet searches
making it as of this writing my eighth most popular blog post. I’m also working on another article
about Sri Lanka and the metric system, that being the story of how it switched.

 Metric is the preferred area units on government projects and is common on foreign funded or
assisted projects, thus one major project that is both of these is the Colombo Port City project. It is
Chinese funded, and part of the Megapolis (I interviewed Dr. Dimantha De Silva about the transport
aspect of the Megapolis) comprising 269 hectares of reclaimed land. The project also will feature
5.65 million square metres of built-up area. This includes 1.5 million square metres of office space.
According to the Sunday Times the amount of office space in Colombo (as of December 2017) in
contrast is about 300,000 square metres with 200,000 more being constructed.

I’ll now show how metric shows the difference between some of the Port City figures using my image above. The land size of the Port City is 269 hectares = 2.69 square kilometres = 2.69 million square metres. Thus, we can see that its built-up area of 5.65 million square metres is more than two times that of its land size. I’ll conclude this section with a few news stories about the Port City. It finished its land reclamation in January. In July, a Resolution was passed in Parliament that made the reclaimed land of the Port City part of the Colombo District. The total project area is 446.61 hectares, comprising the reclaimed land (269 hectares), water area (113 hectares), sea bed area (29.58 hectares), canal area (15.24 hectares) and the beach area (19.79 hectares). This development made Sri Lanka’s land size approximately 4.5 square kilometres larger.

In this article, I gave a list of good qualities I wish to see in Sri Lanka, as the country has issues
being a developing country. I’m including five of those points here.

 I dream of a Sri Lanka
  • Where we have a new political culture not known for bribery, corruption, nepotism, lies, etc but to serve the nation with honesty and integrity.
  • Where we don’t have several issues of crime allowing citizens to relax for both serious and minor crimes.
  • Where the rule of law applies equally to all.
  • Where there aren’t serious issues regarding the cost of living.
  • Where all citizens are treated equally.

I’m into classic rock music, so I would love to see a Sri Lankan classic rock radio station. I think it
could work well as retro music stations are the most popular Sri Lankan radio stations right now. I
mention how I see the station functioning including songs I could see being played on it. The
paragraph below features some quotes from it put together as a paragraph.

 The presenters would offer their usual commentary on topics such as Sri Lankan & world affairs and music. They would offer interviews with important Sri Lankan personalities (including musicians) as well as interviews with American and British rock musicians. As a Sri Lankan Bob Seger fan, I would love to hear Bob Seger interviewed by a Sri Lankan radio station. This station would have the American influence that I like which is common among Sri Lankan radio stations. There would be an American giving voice overs for some of the show ads and audio clips about the station that are played between shows and during ad breaks. This station would make a deal with a western company to get original recordings of songs and the licensing rights to play it. There would be competitions to win original copies of iconic rock albums.

I enjoy comic books and wrote this blog post where I gave types of Sri Lankan English comics I’d like
to see produced. Different types of stories that I discussed in the article include social commentary,
history, politics, humour, graphic novel adaptations, superheroes, sci-fi and international themes. I’m
including the sci-fi section below

Sci-Fi
Sci-Fi is the type of comic I’d most like to see. Sci-Fi is perfect for comic form as it allows the comic artists to draw creative and enjoyable imagery. Sci-Fi is at its best when it discusses the human condition. Sri Lankan sci-fi comics could discuss the human condition and of course Sri Lanka & its society.

There could be stories set in the future offering two possibilities which are:
  • A dark future showing us where we as a country do not want to go to.
  • An optimistic future showing us where we as a country wish to be. 

 Another option is an alternate version of the present which could go in all sorts of different ways.
  • An alternate universe Sri Lanka which is worse than our current setup. This would show us where we as a country do not want to go to.
  • An alternate universe Sri Lanka which is better than our current setup. This would show us where we as a country wish to be. 
  • An alternate universe Sri Lanka which is neither better nor worse but simply different.

Some Sri Lankan sci-fi stories which could be featured are aliens landing in Sri Lanka (It could be in
an open way or where only a small number of people get into contact with the aliens), a Sri Lankan
inventor inventing a new piece of technology and its implications for Sri Lanka (and possibly the
world), time travel stories which go to the past and/or future, a Sri Lankan or group of Sri Lankans
travelling into space set in the present or the future.

I decided to feature a collection of Sri Lankan content from the social media site Twitter. I focused on
the month of September 2008. I subsequently wrote similar blog posts on Bob Seger and Star Trek:
The Original Series. The content I featured is tweets, which is a message of 280 characters or less.
Types of tweets I featured include economics, politics, pictures and positive occurrences. I’m
featuring two tweets from the post below including the accompanying text.


It’s good to see a story of a whale shark being rescued. It’s interesting to note that whale sharks are not harmful to humans.


This is a great photo of Nuwara Eliya taken by Rovin Shanila featured on the Sri Lankan Trends
Twitter account.

This article is advocating positivity for Sri Lanka, as negativity is very common among Sri Lankans.
In each paragraph, I give an example of a negative attitude with my thoughts on what I’d like to see
instead. I’m featuring one of the paragraphs from the article below.

People Getting Written off Too Easily
There is a trend to write off a person because of something questionable that they did, even if they
were individuals who were viewed very highly prior to that incident. I do think that some individual’s
actions can have gone too far to the point that being critical of them makes sense. However, there
are many cases where I agree with the criticism, but think it's taking it too far to write them off for it
as the individual's actions do not discredit his or her good qualities and achievements.

So that was a collection of highlights from my blog posts on Sri Lanka. I’m pleased that I was able to
reference all the key topics of this blog in this post which are Sri Lanka, Songs, Bob Seger, Sci-Fi,
and Star Trek. If you’re interested in any of my future posts, you have the option of following me via
options in the right sidebar. The sidebar also has a search function where you can search to see if
I’ve referenced or written about a topic you’re interested in. I will continue writing about Sri Lanka on
this blog and will feature many of the same issues I’ve focused on so far while also aiming to break
new ground and cover different topics. 
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