Sri Lanka It's Happening

April 26, 2004

Next month, May is the month of wesak, the most important event in the buddhist calendar. Wesak is celebrated in Sri Lanka with a lots of lanterns, lights and wesak pandals.

Wesak pandals are big structures made of wood with a few paintings on them and thousands of lights on it. Pandals may have been a great site 25 years ago, but 25 years ago sri lanka didn't have television and only the towns were connected to the electric grid. Anway these celebrations certainly is not the way lord buddha would have wanted wesak to be commmerated.

Pandals do great damage to the country in three ways. The first is that they eat up thousands of kilowatts of electricty - what a waste of energy.

Secondly thousands of 'puwak' trees are cut down to make the wooden structure of the pandal, no one ever bothers to plant new ones to take their place.

Last but not least pandals cause massive traffic jams on the already jam packed streets of Colombo.

Posted by raditha at April 26, 2004 3:24 PM