I quite like this postcard. Printed in early 19s. My guess is most probably between 1900 – 1910. Printed by The Colombo Apothecaries Co. Ltd and product number is 36. I don’t know if that company still exists. But there is good collection of color postcards by them out there. Most of them are black and white photographs, hand painted in color, and then Lithographed. So does this card. Most probably Lithographed in Europe.
I quite like the cloth this girl is wearing, or not. She looks very confident and lovely. I don’t know if those colors are real or not, if not, artist has picked very good matching colors for her cloths and jewelry. This card is not very difficult to find, in color and black & white version. Value is between 30$ - 40$. I purchased this from a UK seller, which is always the best place to find Ceylon postcards.
Prabhakaran the Movie, Ramayana the Comic Book, and Sri Lankans the Losers
We Sri Lankan are losers. I don’t know why we are, but my closest guess is we are too lazy to win anything as a nation. And then again, I don’t know what cause our laziness. Some may say it is the rice we eat or the plain tea we drink. May be it is not. May be it is something to do with our genetics. If you are one of those people who go to your aunt’s house to see your girlfriend, I apologies, I don’t mean to disrespect you. But the truth had to be said. Inbreeding is not a good thing. When you see a picture of Prince Charles, you should have recognize inbreeding do not create good output, before you start daiting your aunt’s daughter, generally known as your cousin sister. Nevertheless, our genes can’t be the only explanation to our laziness. I think it have more to do with we our exceptional talent in freeloading.
We start ourselves by freeloading on India’s freedom struggle. We didn’t “won” our freedom, like most of Sri Lankan teaches wrongly inform their pupils. Freedom was “given”. So here we are, Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka. Now we can’t go to university without tutoring for free, or have a child without delivering it for free, or have a cow without giving it for free. While we are the people freeloaded on our government, they annually freeloads on numerous donor countries. This whole chain of freeloading turned us in to an incompetent vagabond, wonder house to house, pleading for help, telling tsunami stories and bullied by neighborhood bullies, such as India.
India never enjoyed Sri Lanka that much. If you do not agree with me, talk to any middle class Indian gentlemen, in India. They may say something like, “oh. Verrry good my good frrriend, now Srrri Lanka also have computerrrs eh? You got those frrrom Indian aid?”.
If you don’t have luxury of excellent health to visit India, I strongly suggest you to read one of their comic books, such as historical comic book, call Ramayana. Indian comics are all together interesting. There are superheroes like Monkey Man, Elephant Man, Blue Man and all sorts of characters in heroic nature, and the most vicious supper-villain from Sri Lanka.
Comic books can be very addictive. But in India, it not an addiction, it is a religion. They build gorgeous statutes of the Monkey Man and worship him, thank him daily, for helping Indians to defeat the dreadful Sri Lankan villain and burn down part of Sri Lanka. Monkeys are always fun, hence he is my favorite superhero too.
Indians are eagerly waiting to see the second part of this story been made. In event of it made, I guess they may come with names like “Hanuman Returns” or “We set Sri Lanka on Fire. Again.”. I imagine that may have chapters like the Monkey Man driving an Ambassador Padmini newest edition car (the one with an Altrerntor instead of the Dynamo) on Galle Road, and burning down buildings such as Majestic City or Hotel de Pilawoos. May be my imagination is utterly wrong. May be that will have deferent sort of chapters like building a team of superheroes and sending them to Sri Lanka, so they can burn down buildings such as the Central Bank. Either way, those Indian comics has been denigrating Sri Lanka for past couple of thousand years.
We Sri Lankans are cool with that. We don’t mind Indians dress like monkeys, dance like monkeys and burn effigies of Sri Lankan villain and denigrate Sri Lanka in an annual cultural ritual.
With great sadness I must say, Indians are not very cool people like we are. They got hold of this Sri Lanka movie director Thushara Peiris and beat the shit out of him like in a Rajinikanth movie, just because of him making a movie about reincarnation of God Vishnu, also known as Prabhakaran. I don’t know why Indians are so irritated by this movie business. They say because that movie denigrates Indians. May be it is true. Come to think of it, it is very hard to roll a camera in any Indian street without denigrating India, unless you film in a real cold day, so nobody is engaging any unhygienic activity by the road side. But it can’t be the reason at all, since this movie is not about India or not filmed in that place. So I believe this is a bilateral trade issue.
Thushara Peiris tried to release this movie in India as we all know and Indians are pretty upset about this potential competition coming from the place they hated for past thousand years. The theme of this movie may attractive to an average Indian, since it talk about reincarnation of Vishnu, whom not only by Indians, some Canadians and Norwegians also worship as a superhero. So Indians bullied Thushara Peiris, steal his original film, and now they are waiting till this movie to be banned as a precaution of any unlikely event of it been released in disk format in India. What a discouragement to a young director! This is not fair trade. But Indians are not known to be fair.
I highly doubt we can protect our trade interests in this event or any other similar events. It is not that we don’t have capacity to do so. We have this excellent weapon call Boycotting which named after the Irish gentleman Captain Charles Boycott. There are so many underrated Indian movies and soap operas we can use in boycotting without whatsoever lost or cost to our side. But I suspect we are absolutely not capable of engaging in such an activity, because we are lazy people. Therefore we always loose.