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| Sunday, 12 June 2005 |
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Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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Ranil: Bionic man or Frankenstein? Light Refractions by Lucien Rajakarunanayake With crisis upon crisis and every issue becoming critical, these are days
when brain power of important players in the political field has become
topic of discussion. While some in the red limelight are said to be having
Others have brains that are tuned only to regaining power and Sri Lanka for exploitation of its resources and sharing the spoils with one's cronies. Still others are known to have brains always keenly focused on the marked tendencies of fascism and an obsessive belief in the success of terror in achieving one's goals. We are in no way short of those in politics whose brains make them view society only in terms of race and religion, with the inevitable dominance of one race or religion. The Bolsheviks who carried out the October Revolution in Russia wanted the brain of Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, posthumously analysed to see what made him a great revolutionary thinker and strategist. It appears the time has come for such a study of the brain of a leading politician in Sri Lanka, whose records are in defeats and not success. Talking of brains, it was exciting to hear Mr. Hemakumara Nanayakkara, a leader of the UNP in the South, who shows signs of outdoing S. B. Dissanayake in political vituperation, describe the brain of his leader Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe, and its electronic structure. Speaking at a UNP event in the Akmeemana area, Mr. Nanayakkara said Ranil Wickremesinghe was one who had a brain that could give leadership not only to Sri Lanka but also to all of South Asia. Regaining South Asia! One cannot fault Mr. Nanayakkara for having such a high opinion of the brain power of his leader. However, he went further and said that even political analysts are agreed that what Ranil Wickremesinghe has is an electronic brain. Hemakumara Nanayakkara who is more familiar with the rich earthy symbols and idiom of the Sinhalese language would not have made this leap into the field of electronics, without some certainty about it. He is qualified in the USA, although in agriculture and not cerebral sciences, yet a statement by him about his leader's brain cannot be treated lightly. The closest one recalls of something resembling an electronic brain is the story of the Frankenstein monster, built to be manipulated by its master through remote control. We all know how Frankenstein finally destroyed its own creator. Frankenstein was a totally artificial structure, the seminal idea of today's robots. However, Mr. Ranil Wickremesinghe is human, and this is the first time that one has heard of a human being having an electronic brain, unless he or she has been specially fitted with one, in place of one's natural organic brain, and so far no scientist has done that. With the best known advance in electronics being the transistor, it must be that the Ranil Wickremesinghe brain has transistors replacing neurons and other natural structures than link parts of the brain and its various specialised parts. This is indeed a unique individual, worthy of study by the medical fraternity both here and abroad, to learn how an electronic brain functions. We have not been told by Mr. Nanayakkara whether the political analysts who have agreed that Ranil Wickremesinghe has an electronic brain, have any capabilities to identify anyone's brain as being electronic. Of course it is always possible that what they meant was that this is no ordinary human brain, but something different, that does not function at the normal human level and manner. Revealing that Ranil Wickremesinghe has an electronic brain in this day and age is certainly not very complimentary to him. In these days of CDs and DVDs it is akin to comparing his brain to an old LP record, caught it its groove. Mr. Nanayakkara is obviously unaware that cyber science has moved far ahead in the electronic age with everything going digital, and cyber scientists now well on the way to making computers powerful enough as to be capable of artificial thought, to think that an electronic brain is a something to boast of. Believing to have put Ranil Wickremesinghe and his brain power on a higher plane than others in politics, Nanayakkara has put him very much lower. Little does he realise that an electronic brain needs battery power to function. We are still unaware of Ranil Wickremesinghe carrying a battery pack on his person to power his brain. Taking Mr. Nanayakkara seriously, it is possible that it was when the batteries powering the Wickremesinghe brain was low that he went on a spree of making promises of gold necklaces and bracelets to youth, replacing betel chewing with chewing gum and putting paddy cultivators on the field into designer jeans. The revelation of Ranil's electronic brain has given us more than a glimpse of the causes for his many failures so far, and possibly his constant day dreams of power in his hands. It certainly needs something less than a highly evolved natural human brain to launch one's presidential campaign with confetti or at Siri Kotha, or to say that this country is full of demons that he will drive away. It could be some faulty wiring in the electronic circuit in his brain that makes him remain silent for long spells on important political issues. It is possible that Nanayakkara was trying to tell us that Ranil Wickremesinghe is in fact a bionic man, capable of doing anything that the TV character does. But the greater fear caused by his saying that Ranil has an electronic brain is that Ranil is in fact a modern day Frankenstein, who can be manipulated by his masters, the big master in the Vanni, and others close to him with the old school tie and those in big business. He can be a Frankenstein that will always be a threat to others and not
to his masters. It is time to take him for a CAT scan of his brain. |
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too much of ideological baggage in their brains, it is also said that even
more important persons who see blue in all things, have brain power that is
just now focused on rushing into a dangerous political gamble over a joint
mechanism. 
