An auspicious time to claim the North

We went to a lovely dinner party at Dini and Brenda’s (Canadians working on a related project in SL) on Friday. At the end of the evening, we were warned by some of the local consultants that there could be problems and possibly violence on Sunday. The LTTE leader was making his annual speech and it just happened to be his birthday. Because the Sri Lankan president won the election on his birthday, there were some rumours that the head of the LTTE might claim the North on his birthday.

In SL many events are planned based on “auspicious times”. For example weddings occur at times that seem strange to us, such as a Wednesday afternoon because it is an auspicious time. Stores will have their grand opening at 9:23am on a Friday because it is an auspicious time. The paper publishes the auspicious times for the day and I guess some how you can know about them in advance. So the whole birthday theory seemed plausible.

We took off to the Blue Water hotel on Saturday with Laura, Dale (temporary consultant on our project) and his wife Jay (super fun). I thought that if there were problems it would be good to be stuck at the Blue Water! The LTTE speech however was uneventful and we all returned to Colombo as planned. The leader made long term threats but nothing in the immediate future.