In a business trip in Singapore, I met a few people from a Sri Lankan company. To be quite honest, despite a high-esteemd claim to be a citizen from international city Hong Kong, I had never met someone from Sri Lanka. It was alright, I would always think they are just like Indians and Pakistanis. This is called South Asia. Not much hype. This is an IT company, just like one of hundreds I have met. It does human resources EPR software and mobile applications. The CEO was asking me to find USD 100m and with that he would sell his company. (A note to people who do not know my job. My company is a consulting company for investment bankers looking for companies for sale but we do not have the real money.) In a cocktail reception at East Coast Singapore, with compliments of the IT company, I was one of the two people who turned up non-Sri Lankan. One of the them is a sales guy from, if I remember, Alcatel. The other one was me who had nothing to do on the night. We were chatting around just to find out all the girls there were married. (well, there was only one there.) And we started our conversation about what I don't know about Sri Lanka. I can with confidence say that until that day I wasn't sure the capital city is Colombo, which in the first place I mixed up with Colombus. And I learnt property prices were booming in the city so people have to live in suburb and commute to work. (A house costs about HKD 2m (up to USD 300,000). Then we started to talk about the political situation. I knew there are often bombing by rebel groups. I have heard of Tamil. But I did not know the conflicts have been going on for 20 years and people are basically used to it. The girl pointed to a guy on the table and said he is from the territory controlled by Tamil, and from an ethnic group which I cannot recall. "But we are friends," she said. But it is because of this unrest which keeps Sri Lanka, a beautiful island state, from tourists, according to the ambassador in Singapore who was there. He went to some lengths to explain the situation is not as bad as people are impressed and he expects a rise in tourism in the country in couple of years from now. Another thing I learnt about the country is that it used to only takes 40 minutes to travel on water from India to Sri Lanka, when the Northern coasts was not dominated by the Tamil rebels. So the night gave me a small lesson on geography, history and politics. That night, when I was watching news, there was a bombing in Colombo killing a few people. Then came the heart-felt sickness to terrorists.
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