The man who climbed the Kithul tree

There is an old Sinhala saying that “Kithul gahata giya minihatath kiyanna dheyak thibunalu” which means that “even the man who climbed the Kithul tree had an excuse”. Kithul is a tree somewhat like a Coconut. Like Coconut, Kithul is also used to make Toddy, which is a local alcoholic drink. The toddy tappers will climb up the tree and would crush the Kithul flower and hang a pot under the flower to collect the syrup from the flower. The next day the toddy tapper would climb up again to collect the syrup. If the syrup is left for sometime, it will ferment and become alcohol which is then called toddy. Once upon a time, a toddy tapper caught a man up his Kithul tree. The only reason for a man to climb up somebody else's Kithul tree is to steal and drink the toddy. When the man saw the owner of the tree, he started to climb down. The owner yelled at him, and the man said that he went up there to cut and collect some grass for his cow. The owner asked whether the man didn't know that grass usually doesn't grow on top of Kithul trees. Well the man said that now he knew that and that's why he is climbing down. Most of the time when somebody gets caught doing something wrong they give excuses no matter how stupid and ridiculous they are. Recently the new UPFA government started to raid the brothels around Colombo. It is said that once when the police raided a brothel, they caught a government minister inside the brothel. He is supposed to have said that he didn't know that it was a brothel and he just went there looking for a place to get a drink. Poor man. He comes from a party that is so clean and respectable that it's members have never been to bars (or brothels) that they cannot tell the difference between a bar and a brothel.