Today I heard about a grand wedding of an Indian tycoon (Ambani's son) from a friend of mine, and he showed me some videos of it too. He said famous and powerful people from around the world have been invited to it, and the cost of the event was going to be several Billions (of Indian Rupees or USD, I don't know). If you think about it, India is a country with a higher population of substandard living conditions. There are innocent and miserable children who are forced to work for a mere subsistence, being deprived of education, health facilities, and food and water. I remember a movie based on a true story in which Akshey Kumar was playing the leading role where he makes sanitary towels (pads) for poor women who could not afford it. In such a country, a single wedding event spends billions of money. What a crappy world we are living! You could imagine how much wealth this family has amassed. On the other, this "mental disease" of exorbitant spending must be highly we
There is an ambiguity in interpreting the Article 46(1)(b) of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution of Sri Lanka which was almost unanimously passed by the Parliament, during the 100-day pro-good-governance government. I'll quote it:
"Ministers who are not members of
the Cabinet of Ministers and Deputy
Ministers shall not, in the aggregate,
exceed forty."
the Cabinet of Ministers and Deputy
Ministers shall not, in the aggregate,
exceed forty."
Here, you can interpret it to have a meaning to the effect that you can appoint up to a maximum of 40 ministers (kind of ministers with such different designations as project ministers, senior ministers, state ministers, etc) who are not (both) Cabinet ministers and (nor) deputy ministers. There is a strict limit for the number of cabinet ministers (less than 30) as per the Article 46(1)(a), and due to the flaw in the above article, there is no limit to the number of deputy ministers. (However, we knew the intention of the said article was to limit the number of both deputies and other ministers to 40.)
The flaw would not have been there if there had been a comma between "the Cabinet of Ministers" and "Deputy Ministers". We know how important even something as little as a comma is in legal writings.
I have not read the Sinhala version yet, and if there is no ambiguity therein, we could neglect this flaw in English version because the Sinhala version automatically supersedes other versions (English and Tamil), according the law in the country. Even so, it's the highest responsibility of the Legal Draftsman Department and Attorney General Department to make sure the wordings of laws are consistent and accurate.