Modernization and Loss of Biodiversity

In the city and the villages that surrounded it where I grew up,  almost anything that one throws away grows (Plants and Seeds) on its own provided they did not rot away due to too much water.

There was no need to water plants and like a clockwise fashion rain did come in 10 to 14 day cycles even in the dry season.

Inter-monsoon rain was regular and now I understand and believe that the vegetation itself fashion this rain and its cycles. 

More trees mean more regular  inter-monsoon rain. 
Less trees means less rain, for sure, inter-monsoon period.

I lived for short period in Kurunegala and we moved there since doctors advised my father to move out to reduce the recurrence of wheezy episodes I had in Kandy, when very young.

I moved back and never had any problems and the problems were probably, related to growing up and poor nutrition, I ponder now.

That is just to restate the damply state of affairs of my city, yesteryear.

Even Kurunegala the weather, then, when compared to as it is now with lot of vegetation and coconut trees was very mild with more frequent dry spells than in Kandy.

Now we are going through perennial failure of rain and even the rain fails in the upcountry regions where the most of the hydroelectric  power plants are located.

All these are related to modernization and clearing up of scanty vegetation for what we call development. It is going to get worse and there is no master plan to arrest it except adding more vulnerable projects including coal power plants.

Coal Power Plants will cause irreversible damage to our eco-system and by the time it is recorded by scientific pundits I would have been long gone (Dead wood sitting on a cremation site) but I hope somebody will trace back to year 2005 where I started voicing this on a regular basis in the web.

It would have been earlier had it not been for the slow pace of development of the web but the slow pace of the printed paper of course accelerated my efforts.

Now I have made it a pastime and I study what I call the “my sphere of activity” (very limited indeed) and its observation and I want everybody who is versed in biology (or not) would contribute to this type of observations and record since we cannot believe the government and will never make any worthwhile consideration (except pass legislation they, themselves violate with political patronage and impunity) to this effort since politicians and their stooges won’t understand their policy impact on mother nature.

Like the mess we have inherited with cricket after 1996 and filling up an ancient tank and building a cricket ground on it is the classic example of the idiocy of our policy makers cricket or otherwise.

We are set for power cuts in spite of thermal power added to the system.

Now if I do not water the plants including water plants they will dry up and wilt away in as short as three days.

Unfortunately there is nobody to help me with a little background knowledge in biology to look after my plants.

If I go out for a short holiday for two weeks abroad all the plants I have collected over the period of a decade will be no more.

I am late in using my power of observation since when we were young we did not have to worry about plants wilting away.

The observation period is over 25 years.
This started rapidly from 1975 when plantation section was nationalized.

Everything I observe is in the direction of loss of bio-diversity.

The little exotic (I have lost all the orchids) plants I have now if I do not replant will be lost, if not in the wild, but in my garden which is very very tiny.

Lot in my neighbourhood has changed and except for the remaining jack-tree and the breadfruit tree (which is gradually dieing) which stand tall, all the other trees have been felled by the owners and all the tree shade/s we have now is / are less than 20 years old.

Glad to say I have contributed to many of the remaining ones with a few exotic palm trees in that lot.

None of them were for commercial value but for shear beauty of their presence in my garden.

Now I have to make a significant observation and this writing was prompted by need to emphasize that.

We live in a small hill (in the middle) not very step but the road now we use is where the waste water ran down and I believe there was a little stream trickling (probably during the heavy rainy season) down and the underground water table is very near the surface with solid rocks on top and we were without pipe born water and we had to dig a well for our daily use.

It took another 10 years to get the pipe born water and with my friends who were engineers (they worked hard) were instrumental in the Nilambe Project from which present politicians in the city steal water when they come for a respite from Colombo.

Particular president made sure he gave connections only to his partisans and I had to wait till he died for everybody in the area to get a regular water supply and that was the only time we had a president from the hill country.

Now what they do is surreptitiously divert our water to Kandy and elsewhere and depriving us at times of greater need.

Suffice is to say they never started a new scheme for a long period of time.

There was a natural shallow well at our level which we used liberally during the construction of the house and I used to take a bath on some days for pleasure.

There were plenty of fresh water crabs there (they are gone now) and I had saved couple of big crabs who landed on our low roof to safety who had escaped on flight from birds of prey. 

You should not believe that the crabs could fly on to my roof. Way our politicians travel by air I have to believe even frogs and crabs would learn to fly if they happen to be partisan with politicians, with or without wings.

The whole place is dry now in spite of ancient minor stream long long time ago.

We came to this area when water was becoming scarce but there was still some underground water, left.

Now to my point and re-directing my thoughts and the reason why I came this far.

1. I said I live in the middle.

2. The road was once where there would have been a minor stream now totally dry.

3. Unlike those days which I drove a car I walk up the road for my exercise which is my workout and the day I cannot walk up the road I would retire from this world for good and do not need a bypass or a borrowed organ or two to live

as a living destitute.

4. Unlike those days (it was a brisk walk,then) now I take my time to watch the flora and fauna (now dogs and cats only and a few birds).

5. I one day notice the flowers of the seeds I tried to grow in my plot but could not on the wayside at the beginning which is the ground zero level.

5. Seeds that I used to get sometimes from abroad are germinating in not my plot of land but in the plot of land at the bottom.

6. All the seed I put at the middle level could have got washed away and settle at the lowest level.

7. Strangest of my observations was a white flower (I got the seeds from botanical garden and tried to grow in our plot but never succeeded). Very pleasant surprise and the owners had left to Canada over 20 years ago and that house is still empty and once in 5 years somebody cleans it up and there was no way the cleaner (not a gardener) had planted it.

Few of them are still there.

8. Same day I went to the botanical garden from where I got the seeds (from the hanging runners coming over the fence). To my horror those runners have all gone, no flowers and dried up stems were seen in a tall tree.

I think I did some honours to the Botanical garden for picking few seeds (which I never was able to see  flowering in my garden) and spread in my garden which had got washed away and landed on a foreign soil where nobody was living now.

9. The sense of sympathetic joy was overwhelming and that is why I have to pen it down here.

10. I now remember, just couple of meters away there was an exotic plant and on a rainy day dug up the yams and I now have an enormous collection (personal favorite) of it in my roof garden.

This Sunday when I walk up I will be picking up some seeds from that flower and then try again to germinate them, and perhaps I might even donate it to the botanical garden chief (previous one was a good friend of mine and I never asked him for any exotic plants except those on sale.
The present one when I met, I suggested  he should start selling water plants (which has become a monopoly of a selected few) and I am glad to say he has obliged and there are a few new guys doing water plants in Kandy now.

I should now go for cuppa tea and wind up after stating from whom I learned the secret of throwing seeds all over the foot path (by accident) where I walk, now, though ambling.

It was my wife’s grandma.

She had the habit of spreading the seeds all over the garden and I used to pull most of them out to get some order in the garden. She was a sweet lady and she needed flowers for her daily offering to Buddha and we had at least 5 varieties almost everyday.
Now she and her daughter and my mother all gone we cannot pluck two varieties on a single day.

Strangely enough my roof top garden has three to six including three varieties of Jasmine which I grow (a trick I learned from her) in the memory of my mother who died well past 90 (and the other two ladies too I fondly remember when I see these flowers).

I wish I should not live that long since then there won’t be any birds or wild flowers to smell in this blessed island.

But as long as I could walk up the footpath (any footpath, for that matter) I am going to pluck dry flowers and spread the seeds like birds do.

I don’t care where they start germinating and like a good Buddhist I have to lose attachment to any worldly thing including flowers from now onward.

In this scenario I differ slightly from Buddhist virtues.

I want our great great grandchildren to have a reminder of the old times not of my photographs but some beautiful and fragrant flowers which we are losing by the day.
We do not have bees and the the little innocent black variety which were there for over 20 years and they come collect honey from my tiny water plants.

20 years ago there was a seed i tried to germinate by various mean but never could.Then one day I asked the lab assistant who was a keen gardener and my patient till he died when nearing 90 told me that the seeds crack when there is intense heat and then when the rain comes it germinate and if i soak the seeds it will rot.
Just today I picked up three of those plants to pot before they are run by the three wheelers. The road now finished with concrete to lure the voters get heated up and the seeds on either side crack and germinate.
Suffice it to say all the seeds coming from a plant / tree my mother in law planted.
When generation take the exit pathway like in America we will have only commercial growers and mono-culture.

Onion Saga-02

Now that cricket fever is over and I do not watch the I.P.L (gallery cricket or name it people cricket with cheap betting activated-for CEOs who do not have any worthwhile hobby to engage in, when he comes home and watch it on a potato couch) cricket anyway, and it is time to come down to earth with New Year celebration round the corner.

I neglected my pet fish and the tiny garden and even forgot to water them.

When onion was fetching Rs.300/= and above and when we were buying some rotten onions a few of them were thrown away in the dustbin in the kitchen, I retrieved them from the bin and planted in few pots to see the onion saga really emerging.

Except two all of them sprouted well and I watered them liberally.

They were healthy with my dog adding useful urea (his urine as a fertilizer) spurts in his rounds with me.

Mind you dogs love the smell of fresh plants growing and my dog has the habit of smelling the leaves of the young plants and enjoying the smell and fragrance of flowers (I have Jasmine too) and as a stamp of approval of my work he does the yeoman service of spurting some urea (he is a bit of a young natural scientist unlike our kids who learn only from government published books not updated for ages-and certainly have no idea of, from where the beans and onions come from) and he never does the big job on the plants (he lets me know when he wants to do the big job and never on the plant beds-that is why call him a young scientist).

So sorry for the diversion and my dogs rounds has to be appreciated in best of terms since I had no intention of using onions in the kitchen but as a plant to watch and make my simple observation of using them as bio-indicators of atmospheric temperature.

In no time they started blooming with long stems and I gradually reduced the amount of water and abruptly stopped watering them to see what happens next.

This is the same ploy I applied to pineapples plant after flowering but stated watering it to see from where the next stem comes. It has grown a stem with a wild plant accompanying it’s root and growing strongly in spite of bearing a fruit once.

Incidentally another pineapple plant started flowering after two years.

The real surprise came today.

As I said I neglected my routine and due to intermittent inter-monsoon rain (not heavy) I did not bother to water other plants.

The surprise is on top of the flower stem there were tiny onion bulbs growing and the slender stem bearing their weight. The intermittent rain had caused the seeds to germinate.

I immediately took it out with the young bulbs and planted in another pot.
Another flower stem was separated and put it on a pot with soil soaked with water.
The other to were left alone to see what happen next.
This is how I learned my biology and science as a kid.

I did not have a science teacher till I was about 15 years old and when I got a science teacher, I was well advanced in my own discoveries, he could not spoil my natural instinct and discoveries.

Now I wonder how I came this far with minimal help from the teachers except the mathematics teacher and physics teacher.

Biology teacher was horrible to say the least.

Now coming to my inference.

In Kandy we could not grow the following 40 years ago.

1. Pineapples
2. Pumpkins (no flowering)
3. Papaw
4. Lemons and Oranges (no fruits and flowering fails)
5. Some type of orchids ( I do not have a single orchid now which was a hobby of my father when we were in Kurunagala and with his demise, the hobby died a natural death and in Kandy we could have only a few of the orchids growing that were plenty when we were in Kurunagla).

All of them are growing (except orchids which I have not tried) and flowering now and the global warming has hit us real.

It is time for me to transfer my interests to orchids now with retiring age approaching fast.

Onion Saga -01

Onion saga is much better topic than the Coconut saga.

Coconut saga was deliberate attempt by Americans (Jimmy Cater included) to undermine coconut oil (which they have succeeded until perhaps I came into the writing scene quite by accident- to promote peanut oil and peanut butter).

The lesson in history is not to believe Americans if he or she happens to be an American diplomat male or female.
I am made to believe that the woman scientist who published the coconut theory (bad for heart) had an untimely death (was made to commit suicide by her very own masters) is not a tragedy in human sense but a discovery in science.

Now even the coconut go up to Rs.100= I am not inclined to write anything on coconut but Onion Saga is welcome reminder for me to get into full gear and explode if possible.

This time it was not American intervention.

This time it is coming from and booming Indians who have spawned a Scientific Inquiry and few pertinent questions.

According to economic pundits Indian economy is booming but despite the rocket carrying satellite burst in air, Indian farmers for the first time in Green Revolution initiated by Mrs.Gandhi have failed to take into account of the average Onion Bargjji Eaters.

But I was happy they did not.

When Indian market sneezes we have a political hiccoughs.

I was given strict instruction by my wife not to come home without Bombay Onions even if I have to go to Bombay for that (Sorry my Mumbaians -we still call onions Bombay Onions and Bombay Mutai is our sweet- we do not read or see global name changes).

I did find a place to by Onions and just before the fellow started weighing I took a big onion in my hand and asked him to weigh and tell me the price.

Believe it or not it was 50 (fifty fifty), the price of a coconut.

I asked the fellow to parcel that onion separately and got a kilo of onion and came home happily.
My wife opened the parcel and asked me why one is separately wrapped.

My answer was that is fifty rupees and rest are multiples of fifty.

And I told her that it has poison weight for weight and do clean and wash them before cooking and eating.

But I thought the saga would end there but it did not,

My wife left home for some work outside and today the servant lady was doing the honours at the kitchen and she dropped the entire remaining (let’s say 750 grams of it to be precise) lot into the dustbin right under my nose.

They were sprouting!

Hold it I told her; Give me my Onions!
Why Sir.
I am going to plant them today in a pot.
She did not have any answer back.

Then I looked for any pots to plant them but I could not find any.

So jumped into my Denim and raised to Kandy and had a haircut in the shape of coconut with an onion ring shape of hair in the middle.

That is my hair style for the Cricket World Cup and Tharunnayata Hetek Boys Brigade if would you like to copy it?

But the style is my copyright, you boys brigade.

Happy New Year with plenty of Onions and Coconuts!

Incidentally, I had a haircut today and the barber told me there were few blisters and a moonate (green pea) sized ulceration on my top. Then I remember I was walking down the Trincomale Street in front of the Maligawa and something watery stuff fell on my head (it was not a bird’s- not crow’s -dropping) from the Queens hotel building. I thought must be from the air conditioner cooling but three hours later, I washed my head thoroughly in case it was something nasty.

I still wonder what it is and we cannot now walk in front of the Maligawa (without an unnatural accident of some sort) and this building is managed by Indians and I do not know what the hell they are storing upstairs.
Is it a curse or an accident I do not know.
In any case I come to Kandy to browse some books in the bookshops and not for shopping now but certainly or a haircut at my regular place which is surviving still.

Putting on Top of a Murunga Tree

I manage to find a two Murunga saplings and wanted to look after them till big enough and relocate them in a suitable place. I could not water them for three days and one wilted and whithered away. The other survived and started blooming prematurely. I resisted taking the flowers for a vegetable curry. I let them pollinate (which is rare with no bees around) and only one flower produced a pod.

Side by side there were two cocoa plants which germinated out of over 100 rotten seeds.
Similar fate descended one of them and I kept on watering it in spite of its stem looked like fire wood.
Murunga sapling disappeared but the stem which looked like tiny black wood after about 3 months started sprouting and few leaves appeared.
My gut feeling was correct. I thought this would happen because it is not a native plant but that comes from mid Africa.
African plants can stand adverse weather for long period of time.
Our slender plants cannot withstand adverse weather. Murunga was an example.

So my prediction is that we will lose lot of our biodiversity much more and faster than Africa loses.
Come coal power plant when operational that will aggravate the context much faster and swiftly.
I heard our energy minister thinking of a nuclear plant here.
I wish he looks at pictures of Hiroshima first and the current pictures coming from Japan.

Real reason for writing this is not for that reason.
I cannot go to sleep without a swipe at the local elections.
We have a saying in Sinhala put a man on a Murunga Branch (unfortunately not on the moon to bring rice some of them promised to bring) to mean let him eventually tumble down quickly.
I wish all the present candidates land on Murunga Branches.
Then we can see them falling off quickly with the cost of living going up by the minute.

Actually when we elect them that is what we want them to be (on a Murunga Branch) but they have devised and engineered some other methods to stay longer on the Murunga branch and unfortunately we cannot have the last laugh.

This one chance we have that we can give them a Murunga Treat and it will be a Maru or Mara (Devil) Treat.

Coconut Tales of Tail Spin and the Windshield of Whirlwind

Coconut tree which lives over 50 years of productive life sometimes more than 80 years if left untarnished by human activity lives behind a tell tale story of the weather beaten life.

If one looks at a human face at 80 (eighty) it leaves behind a sad tale of wrinkles but never leave behind the tale of destruction he or she has caused over his or her life time, leave alone the junk that is collected and left behind.

On the contrary, the coconut tree tells us all the rough times it has had over the years, if we look at the way the trunk had twisted and turned against the air current around it, it bears the true tale of forbearance.

What a contrast?

In fact it can tell the exact time of the last grand cyclone it had managed to withstand on its own.

Unlike the humans they are a barometer of wind currents of today and tomorrow.

If one looks at its leaves, the gentle rustle they create with the wind and how it raises a rhyming tune with some alarming whirring of a whirlwind, foretelling a thunderstorm that is about to land is something we have taken for granted but never given thought in any scientific manner.

We take it for granted that the water is abundant but at the same time pollute it in every possible way from Adams peak to the sea.

The same story is true for the coconut tree.

It is vandalized to the stem and we cry hard only when the coconuts go high in price but never cared to listen to its story and the windshield it creates on a daily basis.

My observation days back to my childhood inquiry not necessarily based on any scientific themes. If I wanted to fly a kite I look at the coconut trees and their leaves and then bring out the kite if I consider the conditions are favorable.

Then I go to a place where I can get the kite over the coconut trees quickly and off I go with the wind.

I never paused to think what a service it does as a wind breaker.

This little piece is to finally put to rest and peace of my mind with the wind physics (theory) of biological nature and facts which I call the biophysics of coconut saga.

I should have done this decades ago!

Not only the coconut tree stands to the wind upright but it divide the wind to upstream high and a downstream gentle for us to live in peace. This we forget when we chop it for fast growing development and consumption as timber.

It is the scene of coconut trees that touches my heart when the plane lands at Katunayake. It was strikingly beautiful 30 years ago but now we see s few coconut trees near the airport and the sudden thud of landing.

The landing is also not as smooth as it used to be.

I even go to the extend of saying that the planes used to land smoothly due to the coconut plantation driving the unnecessary tailspin and head wind currents well above the plane as it touches down making it easy for the pilots to land.

Think about it this as food for for thought for scientists who are hell bent on discovering new source of energy along with foot prints of destruction.

I wish our veteran pilots do some study on this keeping in mind those who were on service during the second world war II might know it better than the present day autopilot youngsters.

Coconut tree is a wind breaker and a windshielder.

Of course it will provide its trunks to climb when the next tsunami comes if we start growing thousands and thousand of them around our beaches instead of constructing polluting hotels that divert the sewerage to the sea.

This is my wishful thinking but I am sure more trees will be down to move the fast development trends of our political mights.

Good Bye my friend windshield and welcome thy whirlwind of destruction in the name of construction!

Banana Logic and Banana Watching

I gave up banana watching few years ago when the price of a single banana (not a bunch) went up beyond my purse but kept on practicing Banana Logic to the core which I learned from the politicians of this Banana Republic.

It is a very simple logic.

Take no responsibility of the events and consequences and tame the masses with slippery excuses and logic.
Latest is the flood in Batti’coloa and the government’s inability to provide relief and not even believing that the masses are suffering untold hardships. Not only they slip the responsibility to weather gods but exaggerate the loss to the vegetation (not people) especially with very accurate number of paddy fields lost from air conditioned offices in Colombo without ever visiting the flood victims or the area under floods. They release statistics by the minute and they appear on Media and TV as Gullible Truths of the this century, which everybody knows even with aerial shot it is hard to estimate.

The devastation was more than the tsunami and it outlasted it by many weeks.
The tsunami was matter of hours but flood was a matter of weeks not days.
We of course capitalized on the political and economic fronts and the monetary benefit some got by promoting the disaster was fabulous to say the least.

Some by standers got rich leaps and bounds.

That is history.

But this time the paucity of the response and the inability to get even UNO involved was stark reminder that we cannot change the minds of the UNO officers trapped in glasshouses and in real frozen state to change their goals of undermining the underdogs in diplomacy since our antic delivering MPs spoiled soup of even the banana logic too much.

This essay is not on that banana logic spoiled by our own efforts and less said about it is better for our body politics which is in downward trend anyway.

This is about the mega bananas one sees in the supermarkets.

They are big and weight for weight expensive and I cannot believe that our soil has become rich in spite of overuse and the floods washing the top soil away.

I was very inquisitive in a scientific way.

It took few months to discover the truths that also did not come from the agrarian officers but from vendors.
It is a truth that one cannot harvest plantain vegetation for for than two years.
The soil gets absolutely drained off and one cannot grow anything else afterward.

In years gone by in Kandy bucket latrines were the vogue (now one has to pay 10 rupees for a piss in a city mall) the the contents of the buckets were loaded in Guhagoda (near Isolation Hospital) and covered with at least 4 feet of soil and were allowed to season out for 4 years and then leased out for growing banana.

The banana yield was the best in Kandy and they were of healthy size but not of the elephantine of today.

There is something amiss.

Not only they are big but the skin of the banana splits before ripening.
That is quite abnormal as if somebody has injected water (this can be done) under the skin.

My investigation reveal stark reality of that banana logic.

The bigger the size bigger the price and the economic weight.

What the growers do is that they inject UREA (contaminated with cadmium that causes kidney failure) into the flower stem to get them bigger.

Now I believe after the last UREA dose they even inject plain water dose to make them plump. With drug abusers are increasing in number in the country the thrown away plastic syringes are readily available anywhere including hospital dumps. I think even bizarre epidemics may emerge from eating these elephantine bananas. The water injected and the UREA injected are not sterilized.

They are raw contaminated water.

We were healthy eating bananas that came off nutritious from the nourishing off bucket latrines in Kandy yesteryear and not anymore.

My recommendation are
1. Do not pay for big bananas
2. If the skin is split do not buy them (sure sign of overdose)
3. Even supermarkets are suspicious of their dealing with the venders
4. Buy a reputable product
5. Visit a banana plantation and see it for yourself
6. Taste before buying
7. Make pressure groups of customers
8. Invest on home garden
9. Invest on a bio-degrader container
10. Wash them thoroughly before eating (applies to all vegetables and fruits)
11. Do not put them in the fridge (many reasons including watching what happens to them)
12. Be vigilant
13. Do not buy cheap stuff (paw paw at 10 rupee/kg)
14. These are my observations and I can add many more but all of them are common sense practices.

In a country with chain of corrupt practices from grower to vender to super markets chains we are eating colossal amount of poisons everyday. The idea is to become rich and the poor customer is of no value to the Mudhalali and the Government (except just prior to an election).

90% of the fruits and vegetables are poisoned at various levels.

There is only perpetuation.

No remedy is available in sight or distant future.
It is only a money matter.

There is no controlling authority but corruption at all levels including food inspectors.

If one is eating poisons it is ones own responsibility and that is the the way the officials and government operate and look at the problem.

Good example is that government would not provide free medicine to drunkards (all of us are drunkards politically) and does not look at the root problem of drinking beahaviour.

If you look at the the liqueur bill of House of Parliament we can see where the root cause is.

This is somewhat similar to how we handled and handling ethnic issue.
There is absolutely no difference.

Onion Saga

Onion Saga is much better topic than the Coconut Saga.

Coconut saga was deliberate attempt by Americans (Jimmy Cater included) to undermine coconut oil industry (which they have succeeded until perhaps I came into the writing scene quite by accident- to promote peanut oil and peanut butter). 

The lesson in history is not to believe Americans if he or she happens to be an American diplomat male or female.

I am made to believe that the woman scientist who published the coconut theory (bad for heart) had an untimely death (was made to commit suicide by her very own masters) is not a tragedy in human sense but a discovery in science.

Now even if the coconut go up to Rs.100/= I am not inclined to write anything on coconut but Onion Saga is welcome reminder for me to get into full gear and explode if possible.

This time it was not American intervention.

This time it is coming from and booming Indians who have spawned a Scientific Inquiry and few pertinent questions of common sense.

According to economic pundits Indian economy is booming but despite the rocket carrying satellite burst in air, Indian farmers for the first time in Green Revolution initiated by Mrs. Gandhi have failed to take into account of the average Onion Bargjji Eaters.

But I was happy they did not.

When Indian market sneezes we have a political hiccoughs.

I was given strict instruction by my wife not to come home without Bombay Onions even if I have to go to Bombay for that (Sorry my Mumbaians -we still call onions Bombay Onions and Bombay Mutai is our sweet- we do not read or see global name changes).

I did find a place to buy Onions and just before the fellow started weighing I took a big onion in my hand and asked him to weigh and tell me the price.

Believe it or not it was 50 (fifty fifty), the price of a coconut.

I asked the fellow to parcel that onion separately and got a kilo of onion and came home happily.

My wife opened the parcel and asked me why one is separately wrapped.

My answer was that is fifty rupees and rest are multiples of fifty.

And I told her that it has poison weight for weight and do clean and wash them before cooking and eating.

But I thought the saga would end there but it did not.

My wife left home for some work outside and today the servant lady was doing the honours at the kitchen and she dropped the entire remaining (let’s say 750 grams of it to be precise) lot into the dustbin right under my nose.

They were sprouting!

Hold it I told her; Give me my Onions!
Why Sir.
I am going to plant them today in a pot.
She did not have any answer back.

Then I looked for any pots to plant them but I could not find any.

So I jumped into my Denim and raced to Kandy and had a haircut in the shape of a coconut with an onion ring (shape) of hair in the middle.

That is my hair style for the Cricket World Cup and Tharunnayata Hetek, Boys Brigade  would you like to copy it?

But the style is my copyright, you boys brigade, you have to pay me royalty!

On my return I bought some plastic pots to plant the onion bulbs.

Happy New Year with plenty of Onions and Coconuts!

My New Year Resolution is to post at least one post week on plant watching or banana watching or me gone bananas!