“What goes up must come down”
This is how Newton described, simply, the implications of the law of gravitation.
He found that the gravitational pull of the Earth we live on, is the attraction that Earth exerts on an object or that object exerts on the Earth.
Hence, according to the Third Law of Motion if you throw an object to the air, say a football or maybe a man or a woman, it has to come down eventually.
But the question that is troubling us at present is why does this theory of “What goes up must come down” not seem apply to what happens at present around us in Sri Lanka?
What we observe today is that everything around "happens" to be going up, or shall we say skyrocketing up, beating even the sound barrier, and doesn’t seem to be coming down at all. Fuel and gas prices are cases in point.
According to Yahapalana economic “designers”, who are fashioning the country’s economy, a secret price formula is the panacea to address this problem and hence these local prices are connected to the world prices. When the world prices go up, prices of these items go up in Sri Lanka too; and vice versa.
But what we observe in Sri Lanka is that fuel and gas prices seem to be going up and, contrary to Newton’s Law doesn’t seem to be coming down at all.
With the fuel and gas prices entering the heavens at an unimaginable speed, the other, related items too seem to race each other in going up and up—transport fares, essential goods, food items etc have turned into “untouchables” for the common voter.
The only item that showed a downward trend is our RUPEE, which is going down in value day by day, in relation to the US dollar which seem to have equalled the Sri Lankan skyrocketing trend. Due to this, our external debts too have doubled and trebled. These, too, appear to have proved Newton’s theory wrong.
And what about the Yahapalana worthies?
They are either not realizing the gravity of the situation (leaving aside Newton’s gravitational pull) or maybe don’t to care, which is more likely, as they feel that the common voter can be fooled again when the need arises. They may have forgotten what Abraham Lincoln said about fooling the voters. “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time”.
Newton’s theory has been disproved and the common people, including the ones who were fooled, have now realized their folly, but the rising up of everything including their ire seem to be in a speed mode.
The question that everyone want answered is, whether the rising up of everything would ultimately end up in uprisings around the island.
By Vijaya Ariyarathne
