Sri Lanka It's Happening

June 5, 2007

If there is anyone worse than the extremist buddhist monks in Sri Lanka, it has to be the bishops. They prevailed upon a sinhala hard line buddhist extremist president to ban the Da Vinci Code. The film not the book.

Once upon a long ago, Bishops controlled knowledge. They decided who could learn to read and write, that usually meant, only priests did get to learn letters. Apparently the bishops of Sri Lanka still believe that only priests can read, that's their logic behind banning the movie but not the book.

The book is not something that I would normally care to read and the movie not something I would normally care to watch. But these are not normal circumstances. A banned film has to be seen. It's a matter of protecting the film maker's freedom of expression. So that's what I did last night. It wasn't a particularly good movie but there was a power failure last night and I was left with nothing to do, so watched the movie on my macbook and killed a few hours.