'How did you go bankrupt?" Bill asked (in Ernest Hemingway's 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises). "Two ways," Mike said. "Gradually and then suddenly." Sri Lanka is much the same.
The James brothers robbed banks. The Marx brothers made people laugh. The Rajapaksa brothers wreck countries. Well, only one country, actually, but they have done a spectacular job on it.
After twenty years with the Rajapaksa brothers in power most of the time, Sri Lanka today is bankrupt. There is no money left to import food, fuel or medicines. There are daily power outages, and the economy has ground to a halt. Even domestic food production has crashed, and the poor are starting to starve.
