Vesak

Vesak was on Thursday. Most Buddhists go to pansal (temple) to observe sil (to my knowledge the 5 percepts) during the day. I didn't go (yes..I'm a bad Buddhist). There is a pansal next door so I spent 2 hours out front listening to the hamuduru (monk) recite gathas (versuses) through a microphone while readinig What Buddhists Believe. During the night we went out to see the various decorations and celebrations. The entire district is lit up with vesak kudu (latterns) of different colors and along the streets families set up dansals (booths where they hand out free food and drinks). Most families don't eat dinner and go out to various dansals and eat dinner (buth (rice) dansal) and have dessert (cake dansal). Most dansals offer Nescafe, ice coffee and soup. The other major Vesak decoration is the thorana which is a "religous storyboard" made up of pictures and lights. Most thoranas are 30 feet + and tell a story usually from the Buddha's life. An audio recording is played with the thorana so people can listen to the story.

I had assumed that Vesak was over on Thursday but my cousin informed me that the night activities continue for the whole week. We went out Thursday-Saturday night and drove around the Gampaha district. We saw 6-7 thoranas and stopped at various dansals. By 9 pm the crowds get quite massive and younger groups (my age) start driving around in tractors singing songs and dancing. Overall my Vesak experience was quite enjoyable. The only negative was that I wasn't able to visit Colombo over my 4 day holiday. Since Colombo is the capital city, I'm sure the activities/decorations in Colombo were massive.

In other news I have taken a strong interest in the business environment in Sri Lanka. I've set my homepage to www.lankabusinessonline.com which i read every morning. I have a strong interest in starting a business in Sri Lanka during this summer and I have been working through a couple of ideas already. On a similar note the stock exchange in Sri Lanka (Colombo Stock Exchange) has been doing extremely well. In the last year it provided an average return of 124% (2nd best return in the world behind Russia) and in the first quarter of 2010 it was the best performing stock market in Asia. For those of you who invest in stocks I would highly recommend looking into the CSE. I hope to have some money invested in the market before I leave and have started reading Ben Graham’s (father of value investing) famous book the The Intelligent Investor.

As I write this post I am watching the Sri Lanka-India cricket match on TV (7 hours of cricket). One thing I love about being in Sri Lanka is that I can watch cricket on TV without having to search for the game online. The Asia Cup is coming to Sri Lanka this month and I'll be heading to Dambulla to watch a couple of matches. It'll be my first time watching a cricket match live so I’m really excited. Anywho I head back to Colombo tomorrow morning to start a week of work. I’ll post again during the week.

Video of a Thorana

Video of Moving Kudu

Video of Pansal