Sri Lanka It's Happening

May 22, 2006

Sri Lankan history is being written all the time. Now president Mahinda has decided to try his hand at it. As revealed in the Sunday Leader for two weeks in a row he is tearing up the presidential palace like a man possessed.

A statue of lonely queen Victoria has been taken out and dumped at Victoria park, but it's now called Vihara Maha Devi park. Queen Victoria deserves worse (or better depending on how you look at it).

It's victorian morals that Sri Lankans cherish as their own. When the brits left they left a few things behind like the railway system (to which hardly a mile has been added since). They also left behind their Victorian morals. Till they came Sri Lankan women had not learnt to wear blouses. Now if you will be denied entry to the Temple of the Tooth in kandy if you wore a blouse with short sleeves. Victorian values have evolved into Sinhala Buddhist values.

So if our sinhala buddhist president treats queen Victoria so harshly, you cannot expect him to treat a rock with kindness. The rock in question though is older than the queen. But aren't all rocks thousands if not millions of years old? The historic value of this rock goes back 500 years.

On a stormy day 500 years ago, a bunch of portugues sailors were blown to the Colombo by the winds. They had promptly curved a cross and their coat of arms on it. Interestingly portugues are supposed to have drifted to Galle in a similar manner, sounds like too much of a coincidence to me.

The duth who succeeded the portugues, managed to 'lose'. It's said to weigh weigh 20 tons and not all that easy to lose. The rock was rediscovered in 1875 and then in later years moved to the building that has since become the president's house.

The president is now trying to lose it cause having a portugese coat of arms doesn't apparently go well with his chintanaya

Posted by raditha at May 22, 2006 11:13 AM