Vesak is a Carnival

Seems it's finally over. There were insane number of people on the streets last week and traffic was horrible.

Apart from the traditional lanterns and lights, there were quite a few drunk men on the streets doing all sorts of drunken stuff and generally being assholes. I saw couple of musical shows, and a Ferris wheel in Dematagoda as well. Good Carnival, I thought - may be we'd compete with Rio someday and attract tourists.

I highly doubt, Buddha, the person who preached of simplicity and being unmoved by eight worldly dhammas would have appreciated this "carnival" and public menace to celebrate his birthday and attaining nibbana.

But who knows, Sinhala Buddhists(TM) have a strange way of practicing Buddhism...

On Politics...

Reactions to recently concluded drama by Wimal Weerawansa titled “Fast unto death” had been a good gage of the political maturity of my colleagues.

Some actually thought he would actually fast till he die! And he's doing it for real patriotic reasons etc. They couldn't really tell if Mahinda was with him or not till the last moment. They were touched by the resignation letter and some would have actually sacrificed their own lives for the cause of Wimal... These people sympathized with him and actually thought Ban Ki Moon would actually give a shit about it... Their history has close ties either with the JVP or UPFA; they voted Mahinda just because he's their candidate... They fought each other when JVP and UPFA parted, became allies when they formed governments together etc. etc.; And the JVP fraction followed Wimal when he left the JVP.

The second category actually thought Wimal ate munchie lemon-puff biscuits out of a big brown cardboard box which was marked “Manchie lemon-puff”! Lemon-puff? Really? Why not cake from Hilton? They have labeled cardboard boxes too.. And they genuinely thought that scanned piece of paper with an stupid agenda in hand writing is a real leak! This is the category of people who voted Sarath Fonseka just because Ranil or Somawansa asked them to. Wimal was once a hero for the JVPers but as soon as he left JVP he became their traitor of the decade. UNP never liked Wimal; he was a pain for them. But their ingenious brains simply could not put together the pieces of the puzzle to understand the amount of planning that went in to Wimal's drama. They didn't really understand whether it's staged or not; they just wanted to shout that's false...

The third; actually understood what's going on. They laughed; They predicted and they laughed again. First laugh was at Wimal's act; they predicted what's going to happen with it even to the detail of Mahinda offering him water... and the final laugh was at those from the above two categories. These are the people who made their own decisions in the presidential elections. They could have voted either Mahinda or Sarath; but not because of party affiliations but because they made informed decisions and actually cared about the outcome.

Ironic

This is funny; but unfortunately, I think I signed somewhere agreeing not to discuss these things in detail in public. So this is what I guess would be okay to write here.

I'm writing code for the next version of an application server that most of the .NET developers would soon start to use. And, that server is going to have a new feature integrated in to it by default - out of the box. I'm right now trying to get that done - get that feature integrated and made default through its post setup configuration program.

Since these two products were in the existence for sometime I thought someone must have done it before - not out of the box, but through some post setup customization. So I Googled... And the first hits I get are news items that say "The X server would have Y service by default - out of the box in its next release"... :)

Whateverism - An alternative to religion

There are people among us who practice Whateverism as an alternative to religion. But because of the nature of Whateverism, it's not expressed, discussed or promoted.

The core principle of Whateverism is having a lesser regard towards religion and not having a strong opinion about all or most of religious beliefs. Unlike atheism, it does not challenge religions or oppose them, it just ignores them. Another difference would be, unlike most atheists, Whateverists, do understand that intelligence, like any other thing, is relative and vary by the reference model, so they do not think of themselves as intelligent than the religious people.

Whateverists, do not necessarily associate moral values with religious believes. They take pride in that understanding, but do not socially brag about it; because they are content by what they are... :)