COLOMBO - Over a breakfast of coconut-milk rice and sweets on Thursday, the Sinhalese and Tamil new year, an affluent group of friends in Colombo discussed how to divide up the packets of milk powder that one of them had managed to buy.
A nurse living in the upper-class Ward Place area asked her children to eat up all the food because it would otherwise spoil in the fridge, as long blackouts resumed after the new year's gift of uninterrupted power supply.
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