Going Global

With McCain joking about replacing his entire team of senior advisers with Joe the Plumber, this pretty much says it all.

Karuna Amman took some time off of his busy schedule to have an interesting little chat with us recently.  Here are some choice excerpts;

On his latest career move...

'Ah well its been an interesting career move, joining the Sri Lankan parliament. Sure we all had our good times running around in the jungles of Vanni shooting both the LTTE and the Government troops but my rebellious days are over, i have realized that it is time to shoulder responsibility and take a stand. I had been contemplating it for quite a while and can safely say after being on both sides that the perks are much better over here! Prabha even skimps on the AC. and we all know how hot it is over there. I think we can be extremely proud of how this nation treats its public servants. when even in England, as i observed when i was there, they are made to travel in (face contorting with painful remembrance) public transport. Eww!'

On his critics..

'People will always criticize anyone if it is advantageous to them. I don't really care about my critics. it is now time for us all to get together and develop the nation. And if they have a problem with me, they can pay me a visit on the east coast and i will show them what real hospitality is. When im done with them they wouldn't be able to walk straight or sit down for the rest of their term in parliament would surely see the error of their ways and work towards my goal of peace and development.'


On life in general..

'Ah life? well i have always been a trigger happy gun toter an engaging person. That's what I was born to be and my life has been an interesting heavy duty tank roller coaster ride so far. The days I spent in the jungles as a rebel running from both sides were some of the best in my life (smiles fondly with a faraway look in his eyes), but I eventually realized that I couldnt pursue what I felt was my ultimate purpose in life, and that is to destroy the rest of humanity help my fellow human beings, and feeling that i had outgrown the LTTE in terms of my capabilities as a person i was on the lookout for new opportunities. That's when my good friend the president approached me and offered me a post in his bloodthirsty noble institution. And here i am!'

And the Future?

'Ah the future is full of opportunity! i have plans to eventually take over the country launch a campaign to develop the East. Those good people really need to be killed for their own good to be assisted. And i am calling all my fellow politicians and new countrymen to forget the past. I have big plans for you. Embrace me and my policies we shall greet the golden age of Karunaland Sri Lanka together!'

Certain sections in this post have been subject to censorship. Mr. Amman was a bit maerry just after his parliamentary initiation bash and might have er, 'blabbed' a bit.

The real price of everything, what everything costs to the man who wants to acquire it is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. Whats everything id really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.

That was Adam Smith.

I have always been a fan of vadais, if you don’t know what a vadai is, then you've probably not hung around a lot of Sri Lankan trains, roadsides or bust stops much. They are small, made of dhal and flour, fried, crispy and can usually include a little piece of maldive fish or a prawn or two. The prawn variety is known as an isso vadai, isso meaning prawns, and are extremely popular around Galle Face, before it was shut down that is (by shut down i mean Galle Face, not the isso vadai industry har har).

Excuse me while I clear up my watering mouth. Now vadais are generally very popular in crowded areas and a pack of 5 small maldive fish vadais (back when I was schooling, which was not so long ago) cost about 10 bucks. you'd get some fried chilies to much along with them and iv always considered them to be a tasty treat.

What do vadais have in common with indices and the theory of value? I hear you ask. Well I’m getting there so please do be patient.

So recently I was in Ratnapura on a Saturday for a funeral. Bussed it there alone and when i got there what did I see? You guessed it! a chap selling vadai in a little cart. So i walked over and asked for a pack of 5 maldive fish vadais (generally a bit smaller than your average chicken egg) and i dig out my wallet expecting it to cost about 20 bucks (allowing for inflation) and guess what? chap asks me for 30.

Ok. well I guessed times were hard and the vadais did look pretty crisp. So I shelled it out. So that was a 300% increase in price over a period of oh say, 3 years or so.



Sounds like a good indicator of the real level of inflation in the country to me. Maybe the Central Bank should consider initiating a vadai index. Or maybe even a basket index of all roadside ‘fast-food’ items if correlation is as obvious as it is with the vadai. Maybe I should start an island wide campaign to generate awareness. This could be a start.

Life, is a salmon tin.

We are all living inside one. It is called Earth. Previously, us Sri Lankans were living in a smaller tin called Sri Lanka or Serendib/Thmbapanni or any of the other names we called our country. Fact was, the name of the island bore no real relevance, for then we fought and killed each other to our hearts content only identifying ourselves in terms of which highly divisive feudal kingdom we belonged to. All this, of course only until some bigger fish from another tin invaded our little tin. I believe they were of the Protugese variety.

And then the Dutch. followed by the British. Thats when the whole sense of a Sri Lankan identity came into being. And we fought as a nation to take back our little salmon tin. So did external influence play a part in bringing this about? sure seems like it.

This is a phenomenon that has taken place in every single nation of the world. We only fight over what we know exists. Back in those days we only possessed a hazy idea of the rest of the world in general and therefore couldn’t get our heads around the fact that there was anything really bigger than this island of ours. Same thing happened in India, same thing in the UK, same all over the world.

Individual nations have become larger and larger. As the smaller ones have been swallowed up. Ireland was one of the last to go, most of the pacific islands were snapped up in the last world war. So where do we go to next?

What if. What if some advance alien civilization invaded our dank atmosphere and made their presence felt? Would the ensuing economic and security implications make us finally get together under a banner of a united Earth?

Would we simply proceed to identify ourselves as “Earthlings’ instead of ‘Americans’ or ‘Chinese’ or ‘Sri Lankans’ etc? We would. As the universe reveals itself to us as a very much ‘real’ place all our petty bickering over this minute planet would die down and in good old bloodthirsty human fashion, we would proceed to pool our resources and steal whatever we can from the advanced aliens to launch our own ‘war against slime’ on some underdeveloped planet on a distant star system. We would all start fighting in the salmon tin of the Milky Way. And who knows how many eons later, if we ever do survive, or live to encounter a substantial external threat, maybe even the Great Salmon Tin of the Universe.

And then only the green skinned, big headed blokes with the funny antenna would be the bad guys. The rest of us can well, rest easy.

Babies are a-booming in the modern world. Especially across the western hemisphere, increasing numbers of couples are looking to adopt after exhausting all other methods of procuring offspring. Therefore ‘babies’ have blossomed into a full scale industry. Driven by the same demand that say, fertility clinics are driven by.


Supply of course is monopolized by fully legalized adoption agencies. And this works like any other market in the sense that there is a cost attached to adoption, mainly when it comes to fees. And there is also a prosperous bunch of intermediaries operating such as lawyers, counselors etc. But this is a highly regularized process and with supply unable to keep up with demand, a black market for baby trade has emerged and is prospering resulting in kidnappings and even blatant baby selling.

The incident that triggered this post happened in good old Ceylon. And we’re well-known to have a highly de-regularized baby trade market. We’ve been hearing about it for years. Ever since i was a kid, I remember it as being a part of popular culture, there were countless numbers of Singhalese tele-dramas I’ve watched that talked about how this baby was sold to (for e.g. a family in UK) and how the kid returns after long years of absence to a remote village in a sunny island etc to find its birth parents in a poor little house built of clay etc.

The point being that due to poverty and various other reasons like loose sexual habits among rural youth and the lack of reliable abortion options lot of babies were being born that were unwanted. Many of these babies were literally being treated as garbage with numerous incidents of unwanted offspring being found dumped by the sides of roads (apparently baskets and doorsteps are an alien concept over here) and even murdered.

As discussed, at the same time, there was burgeoning demand for babies in many Western states. In states where populations were on the decline and prosperity was on the rise, couples were increasingly looking choosing adoption as an option instead of giving birth or due to impotency.

So now we have the demand for babies as well as the supply of babies which are the main ingredients of any industry right? But much of the fees potential adopters have to pay (which sometimes number in the thousands, and I am talking hard currency) go to all the intermediaries and to adoption agencies. Poor parents will only have the satisfaction of knowing that that cuddly little bundle of love will have found a (hopefully) happy home.

But why does this have to be the case? Why can’t we make sure the baby gets a good place to grow up and make a buck at the same time? i guess most of them started to think that way and i think despite popular belief, rural Sri Lankans do have a grasp of market economics for this has been happening for quite some time. The latest going price seems to have been Rs. 66,000. But then again, that was a domestic sale. If it was a foreigner the price would undoubtedly have doubled (just like tuk tuk and bus fare and basically anything else a white skinned person tries to buy on our golden shores). Clever aren’t we?

But it’s not only here where this is happening; Africa is major supplier of babies, also countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Cambodia, Vietnam (just look at the celebrity list of adopters).

So why don’t they just de-regularize the whole thing and let babies be treated as just another export good? We could have separate baby commodity markets as well, maybe diversify our investment portfolios now that oil is on the drop, stock markets are crashing and even gold isn’t as reliable as it used to be. Hell, babies could end up saving the world from a Great Depression. And Friedman would be happy too. A free market should, after all, be a free market. What do you think?