The Young people of Sri Lanka do not seem to realize their limitations

It appears to me that the behavior of Sri Lankan youth is quite astonishing. They appear to believe they know everything and have little regard for the knowledge and experience of the elders. I wonder why this is occurring today as compared with our day when respect for the elders was implicit. Now there is no respect at all.

I was arranging a meeting for a young person from Kurunegala yesterday to meet a VIP and had called him the previous day confirming the time and place I had arranged the appointment for him, saying I had to make certain changes to the diary of the VIP in order to accommodate the 3pm meeting as he was arriving from Kurunegala. Having told all this, when I called around noon yesterday to check on arrival time and address, he was in some far off Hunnasgiriya where he could only arrive at the office only around 5pm at the earliest depending on the state of the traffic. I told him that and postponed the meeting, as I knew if I had gone through hoops to reschedule it for later and he was not there on time, it would be me who looks a fool.

This sort of inconsideration, where it was incumbent on him to call me and say he would be late, is the kind of example I am talking about.

Further a more important issue has arisen. In the recently concluded election for the Colombo Municipal Council, the UNP candidate who came second was a Mr John Ram a first time entrant into to elected politics. He was said to be most upset that he did not get the Deputy Mayorship of Colombo, which was given to a much more seasoned politician Titus Perera. It is important for him to realize that though he obtained the second largest number of preference votes, that he is still not sufficiently well versed in politics, despite his father being a Provincial Councillor for the Western Province which was probably the most important reason for his garnering this high number of votes, though even in the scheme of things he only achieved about 10,000 total preferences. Apparently another pipsqueak Anuradha Wimalaratne who spent lavishly and was not rewarded for it by the number of votes he received, also felt that Ram should have been treated better. Ram is also said to have thought that he did not get it because he was Tamil, a sorry reason for a person to attribute that as a reason either. He should realize that it had nothing to do with his race, but completely to do with age and experience.