IN 2013

The year dawned on a high note, despite the grim prognostications of the forever grieving and discontented. 2013 sees Sri Lanka experiencing a record influx of tourists, and there is high growth despite the fact that the rest of the world is on low gear. The United States has fallen off the fiscal cliff, and as a result the economic indicators are not exactly sanguine for the rest of the world, at least according to the experts.

But that has not dented any of the optimism that people harbour with regard to Sri Lanka, which is a country that seems to be affecting a paradigm shift in how a post-conflict society should bounce back from an era of poor economic performance and general malaise.

There is a general zest and verve among the productive elite in the country, that is contagious. It is as if they are determined to leave the natterers and the incurable pessimists to wallow in the mud of their own despair. There is a pervasive feeling that the people have ‘cancelled’ these grumbler elements.

This is in large part true, and what has been said in this space before has to be reiterated when we are at the cusp of a brave foray into the world of new economic possibilities. The people are cancelling the whiners and the complainers, because they feel it in the collective national gut as it were, that though there are obstacles along the way, growth is happening, and prosperity is not far behind!

This is particularly true of the people of the North and the East, who on no account want to go back to the era of child soldiers and girlie suicide squads. There are of course those elements that want to hold these people by the scruff of their necks, and shove them in the direction of that hapless and nightmarish past.

But these northerners and easterners have said no thank you -- loud and clear. They want to co-exist with Sri Lankans of other ethnicities, and they know that post war irritants in the spheres of governance are inevitable, but that solutions that come incrementally are not far behind.

There are of course the ‘experts’ that would tell you that mistakes have been made, and that from the stock market to the Expropriation bill to the impeachment, there are calamities that signal economic sudden death.

This is in the manner of a former head of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce saying that we are building Colombo on borrowed money, ‘while Colombo is being cleaned up!’ This man cannot help the ghoulish negativity show up so conspicuously, even from behind his dark glasses, the perpetual blinkers with which he sees the world.

But he tripped up badly when he groused about Colombo being cleaned up. There is no sane person who does not like the fact that Colombo looks spruce and clean and upto the level of a world class metropolis.

No more serious gaffe has been committed for a long time -- this talk about building Colombo while Colombo is being cleaned up. This columnist would not go so far as to say that those whom the gods destroy they first make mad, but a milder version of that would be that those who criticize mean spiritedly will by and by expose their own stupidity in many ways. “They are cleaning Colombo while building on borrowed money” is but one such gaffe.

About the borrowed money, show us a house that is not built on a loan, or a building that has not been built on money borrowed on interest, and we shall rest our case. This criticism is so inane that those who make such claims ought to be taken compulsorily to South Korea.

South Korea in the 70s was called a corrupt country going nowhere, and in debt to the world. But the Koreans are now a developed nation that hosted the Olympic Games. The county is living proof that nations that forge ahead have difficulties with debt and corruption, and that this is the norm rather than the exception. But eventually, the can-do spirit prevails, and with economic gains, the good governance etc., will follow. Nobody remembers Korea’s Cassandras of yesterday by the way, but everybody does recall that Korea hosted the Olympic Games not so long ago.