Sri Lanka It's Happening

June 10, 2005

Finished reading Spit and Polish by Carl Muller a couple of days ago. This book is certainly more spit and less polish but it certainly was readable. Not so the White House Connection by Jack Higgins which I just finished.

The Higgins is most put downable but I read through it anyway cause there wasn't anything else to read in the house. Most people would have rented a movie but I decided reading the white house connection was less painfull than driving through Colombo.

Getting back to Muller, reading through some of the pages you get the impression that he just put his sexual fantasies into writing. Other chapters though are very plausible. What is not plausible however is the liberal Sri Lankan sexual attitudes of the 50s that Muller has tried to paint.

True that was a long long time before I was born but nothing I have seen, heard or read point to a free love era in Sri Lanka. Though it may have existed before the days of the British Raj.

Curiously before the brits arrived, Sri Lankans are said to have rolled in the hay (or paddy fields) more often than they do now. With the brits came lonely queen Victoria's morals. Then the brits left but Sri Lankans just assumed the victorian morals as their own!

Posted by raditha at June 10, 2005 8:16 AM