They have done for the average reader in the West where the book has already received glowing reviews as the last word on Sri Lanka, never mind that many Indians and Sri Lankans themselves are likelier to smirk and click their tongues.  Gimlet however, prefers to ‘learn’ about today’s Sri Lanka from yesterday’s foreign ‘experts’: former BBC journalist Harrison and former UN spokesman Weiss, two of the most controversial foreign writers on Sri Lanka who are widely distrusted by Sinhalese and Tamils alike. Gimlette also dreams of ‘chestnut groves’ in Colombo (chestnuts don’t grow anywhere in South Asia except temperate Kashmir),  tells us that mulligatawny soup (an Anglo-Indian invention that has little to do with Sri Lanka other than on restaurant menus) is sold by vendors on Colombo’s Galle Face Greens, that Sri Lankans call their thugs ‘goondas’ (a Hindi word) and that a suicide bomber blew up the ‘Indian president’. (of course he doesn’t know that Muslims can be Tamils and vice-versa for a variety of historical reasons).. Finally and inevitably (since western nations see themselves as the authors, practitioners and bedrocks of the best and purest form of democracy), Gimlette calls the emergence of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka from its former British colonial avatar, as a ‘sure sign of liberty in trouble’.  

Much can be criticised about the slowness in finding a political solution for the Tamils of the formerly embattled North and East, but for six years now, Sri Lanka has unquestionably been on a positive, upward graph.All South Asians know that for all their tremendous achievements and hard-won successes, members of the South Asian Diaspora in western countries simply cannot — and often will not — paint an accurate picture of ground realities in the countries of their origin. "I had a view of the horizon and an endless trickle of ships. By night there was a  plastic cutlery  Manufacturers whole archipelago of lights, constantly changing shape and colour.  His descriptive passages of Kandy and of a pilgrimage to a Skanda shrine in Kataragama, where Sri Lankan Buddhists and Hindus flock to pray, contain languorous, silky passages of prose dotted by the deadpan humour that most British writers are gifted with."Stalls had appeared at the roadside, selling watermelons, bananas and bundles of firewood.  Putting those facts together, any reader would naturally expect  Elephant Complex to be replete with finely-crafted adventure stories including some on one of the nation’s best-loved symbols: its elephant population. The country is located at the most strategic crossroads of shipping lanes through which ply oil tankers between South East Asia and the Gulf and onwards to the West. Not exactly desirable developments for the UK, the US or NATO. Gimlette takes the Sri Lankan army’s hospitality, but ungratefully refers to them as the ‘heavies’, or, the ‘goons who sped us around’.  Gimlette himself makes that admission: "The civil war in Sri Lanka may be over, but here, in Tooting, it’s never quite gone away".  "I was warned before going to Sri Lanka that when I left I would know the country less well than when I arrived," says Weiss. A huge fish appeared in the door, demanding a buyer