I will probably get in trouble for this.....

When I was young, my refuge was a beautiful garden in Colombo, Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) called Gordon Gardens.  And I am not the only one who sought refuge there in that peaceful spot.  A dear friend of ours whose Dad worked at Customs House used to wait there patiently for his Dad every day.  It was a very special garden.  Queen Victoria never visited Ceylon, but there in Gordon Gardens was a huge, beautiful statue of her in marble - I'm not even an "anglophile" but there was something REGAL and serene about her statue.  In the pathway leading up to her graceful statue was a fountain, surrounded by canna lilies.  One could sit and rest there (albeit the chirps of the harmless fruit bats in overhead trees).

I'm submitting an old post-card and some photos I took while there in the late 1960's:  MANY people forgot about this place.  During subsequent civil wars Gordon Gardens was completely closed off to the public because of its proximity to President's House.

THEN, what I recently heard was a tragedy.  Heard that the U.K. Embassy requested the statue and would have put it on it's own land, but Rajapaksa had a DREAM that if he destroyed all symbols of former foreign rule, he would become more powerful!!!  So - according to Sunday Leader - he destroyed the statue of Queen Victoria placing the "remains" in Viharamahadevi Park in PIECES for vandals to loot and take away.  Here is a photo of the "rubble" of what used to be her statue:

AND, in same article it said he also took away a beautiful shield from 1500's Portuguese time and had it thrown in the sea in bits.  Whether or not he actually ordered this is only something I read in the Sunday Leader, but the photo of the rubble of Queen Victoria's former statue is very real.

What I know from history repeating itself is this:  if we destroy our past, we have no future.  Can one even imagine President Obama WIPING away all those "vestigess of colonial slavery" from American History?  We NEED the past to learn from it and move on to the future.  These things in Sri Lanka were world HERITAGE items....who is anyone to destroy them?  It brings to mind the horrible destruction of the UNESCO treasures of Bamiyan in Northern Afghanistan - the sleeping Buddhas - totally destroyed by the Taliban. 

If you really want to rid Lanka of all its "colonial history" why not set fire to all the tea plantations and tea factories?  After all, tea was not "native to the island", nor did the Sinhalese invent "tea growing".  Whether you liked the British or not....there would not be a Sri Lankan tea today had they not risked their savings and lives to travel so far and attempt coffee growing (which was wiped out by a blight....instead of giving up, they tried tea). 

Please TELL me you don't think "Baila" music was a Sri Lankan invention!  It was a gift from the Portuguese (whose surnames are used over half the island) and the word means "dance".  

Moreover, how can one destroy the beautiful WEB that WAS Sri Lanka?  There were Chinese who were born there (only in the late 1990's did these poor people gain "citizenship"! - for pete's sake, their ancestors were born there in Lanka, NOT like government wanted to say "they came in the 1930's" - that was a lie).  Chinese Lankans had been there for over 400 years.  As it was - already over 80% of the Burghers migrated to Australia in the 1980's because they were not "wanted" anymore.  Lanka, you LOST some GREAT, GREAT people including justices of supreme courts, doctors, engineers.  You cast them out because they weren't "Sinhalese".  YET - you think Sinhalas were the FIRST inhabitants of Lanka?  Oh, how sadly you've learned your Lankan History - the first were the Veddahs which is a Sinhala name for them....they were the aboriginal people and prefer to be called:  Wanniyala-Aetto  (forest people).  There were a heckuva lot more Tamils (all those who could migrated to Canada, U.S., Australia, U.K. - wake UP Lanka - you lost your professional people), and there were Malays, there were Moors (one sassy Sri Lankan told me he didn't care one way or another about the Moors as they were "mostly Sinhalese"). 

So there you have it - it is what it is.  And who was the idiot who decided to bring in those damn tuk-tuks to Sri Lanka??  I know there were 1930's taxis running on "rubber bands" but did you know that all the while tuk-tuks were coming in by the thousands, these cars were being shipped to U.K. to car collectors earning around $40,000. apiece.....so, you got your "tuk-tuks" and lost all your valuable antique cars?

Actually, what I saw in Sri Lanka in  2004 embarrassed me - the BURNING of plastic bottles (which is so toxic one can't imagine), the "attitude" among upper class that they were in control of everything.  All quite disturbing.  I didn't know that country anymore.