Features

Starting my nursing training in beautiful Birmingham

Published

3 years ago

2023/04/2

Thilina Walpola

Excerpted from Memories that linger….

by Padmani Mendis
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
(Continued from last week)

There are some who knew Birmingham in the 1950s who would be amused to hear me say that Birmingham was beautiful. It was in physical appearance faded, dull and uninteresting. It was as devoid of culture as it was of green public spaces. It was the second largest city in the UK but it had not been bombed during World War II. As a result, no urgent rebuilding and accompanying redesigning had been called for.

The city stood as it had stood for decades before, spewing smoke from its many factories as the industrial heartland of England. That smoke, spreading out to rest on the many buildings in this congested location, and on the few trees that lay in its path, gave Birmingham a “forever grey” look. After I left Birmingham more than five years later, that look would go. Smoke-free fuel and modern design and architecture would invade. Birmingham would change with my departure and be truly beautiful to the eye.

My use of the adjective “beautiful” describes the city for the full and fulfilling life that it gave me during those five years and four months. The adjective “beautiful” I use to describe the inner heart of the city, deep within its deceptive exterior. It describes the people, their warmth, their friendliness and their unlimited kindness and the resulting impact those had on me. I do believe that much of these experiences lay with the fact that I was one of the first dark faces to be seen in the city.

Later, as with its appearance, so did these beautiful qualities of friendliness and kindness go into reverse gear. After I left, as well as architectural change, racial and ethnic tensions emerged. The Asian and Caribbean invasion had begun. Had I stayed much longer I would not have been able to describe Birmingham as being “beautiful”.

The journey to Birmingham is hazy in my mind. My brother Shatir had spent the night with Emdee in Holland Park. He had come to his bed-sit where I was by taxi and taken me to Paddington in time to catch the Dawn Express. But before we left the room he lifted his mattress and took out a hidden five-pound note which he would use to take me to Birmingham.

A Novice in a Hospital

The rest of the day, 64 years ago I recall as if it were yesterday. Here we were, Shatir and I, standing in the Matron’s office at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, or ROH, Northfield, in South Birmingham. Matron Galbraith was a buxom woman and one that looked formidable, sitting at her desk in her deep blue uniform and white flowing cap. This is the first I had seen of a hospital matron. I learned later that the Matron is the boss of the whole hospital. She ran the hospital and all its staff were answerable to her. The doctors looked after their medical responsibilities. They dared not venture beyond that. The hospital was the Matron’s business.

Without even knowing all that, I could not help but see that in her demeanour as she got up from her seat to come forward and welcome us. “Oh”, she said to Shatir, “You must be this young lady’s brother.” My mother had informed her before that he would bring me to the hospital, how and when. She was expecting us. “Well you can go back to London now. We will look after your sister.” I noticed she dare not say my name. Later she would ask me to pronounce it to her many times and learned to say “Wijeyesekera” quite well.

That desolate feeling I had in the pit of my stomach I neither felt before nor since. I was to be all alone in this strange place with these strange, unfriendly looking people. That I was petrified is too mild a word to use. My brother looked at me and turned to leave the room. Wanting to do that without delay I guess before either of us got too emotional.

As he left the room I ran after him and asked him for his pen. In the middle of all this I remembered that I had forgotten to bring a pen. What would I register my name with if I had to?

Matron was a professional through and through. No time wasted on smiles and trivialities. She called her secretary and asked her to take me to “Miss Burr” in the Nursing School. So the lady did, chatting as we went, feeling for my discomfort and trying to make me feel at home. Miss Burr was the Principal of the Nursing School of the ROH. As we were introduced she smiled in greeting, asked about my journey and whether, “my brother was on his way back to London”. It seemed that they had all been informed of the arrangements.

Miss Burr appeared to be much more pleasant than Matron, I thought. But later, after I had been in her awesome presence more than a couple of times, I found that Matron was an extremely kind and concerned sort of person. I think she had developed this exterior to go with her job.

How it Was in the School of Nursing

Before I knew it, I was standing in a classroom meeting a group of young women dressed in nurses’ uniforms – caps and all. I was in my saree selected specially for this day. The thought came to me that soon I would be just like one of them. The Nursing Course had really started on 20 October. I was a day late to join these young women who would soon be my colleagues and many of them later my friends. Some of us would be together for two years, while some of us would be together for another three. And a few of us still remain friends. Miss Burr then called out to “Nurse Turner” and “Nurse Smith”. A blonde and a brunette with shiny faces, both rather pretty, stood up.

She continued, “Could the two of you take Nurse Wijeyesekera to Mrs. McIntyre in the sewing room now? She is waiting for you and she will fit Nurse Wijeyesekera with her uniform, apron and cap. Then in the afternoon would you take her in to the city and show her where she could purchase her shoes and stockings and any other things that she may like? Don’t forget her tie-pins.” These would be required to hold my apron onto my uniform. The uniform was a pin-stripe in blue and white. Subdued as a nurse’s dress should be.

Off we went to the sewing room. Everybody called her Mrs. Mac it seemed, except the formal Miss Burr. She took all the measurements she required and then said to me, “Come in an hour dear and we will have all these ready for you.”

My response was the typical Ceylonese one – a shaking of the head from side to side to say yes. But in that part of the world this movement is taken as a no. So she said, “Oh she can’t understand English. Isn’t she lovlay?” That is how she said the word lovely in her “Brummie” for Birmingham, accent, At which Val and Jane took cover to hide their giggles. I was probably the first brown face that Mrs. Mac had seen. Also, the first saree for that matter. And it surely would have been so with many of my colleagues at the school and others around the hospital.

While we were being introduced in the classroom Miss Burr took care to point out to me that Lyda and Mahin both came from Persia and Barbara from Jamaica. I noticed that the two Persians were light skinned. So was Barbara because, she told me later, her father had Scottish ancestry and she had his skin colour. So I was the only one with a dark skin.

But then in Birmingham it mattered not at all. Except when, as I will share later, the dark skin was admired and liked and I was the beneficiary of special attention and kindness tinged with a distinct touch of favouritism.

Miss Burr had told us that it was the first time the hospital had accepted young ladies from foreign countries as student nurses. She said that both she and the hospital were happy to have us. She hoped we would be happy at “Woodlands”, as the ROH was referred to fondly.

Making Friends

It was Val Turner and Jane Smith of course who would show me the ways of being a student nurse at Woodlands. We would remain close friends for the rest of our training. What amazes me to this day, however, is that the four of us who had come from lands far away bonded with no delay. Before long the four of us would be inseparable. Lyda has now passed on. Mahin and Barbara and I still communicate frequently. More frequently now. Because earlier it had to be “Skype”. Now “WhatsApp” makes it so much easier. That is not to say that we do not communicate with the British friends we made during those early days in Birmingham. We do. But that special bond the three of us made in Birmingham, not forgetting Lyda, still holds firm. I will come back to them again when I share with you my journey in Jamaica thirty years or so later.

The difficulty of saying my name was too much. So my colleagues soon asked if they could shorten it to – guess what – Padi, just as I was called back home. From my first day at Woodlands as a student I was officially “Nurse’ and soon “Nurse Padi” to all who had to use my name, including the staff and patients at the ROH.

I was a Nurse. I had made a temporary stopover on my way to becoming a physiotherapist. More than that, I had entered the World of Disability. I had started on my life’s journey.

On being a Nurse

The next two years as a student nurse was the most intensive learning period of my life. Real life lessons to teach me to be the human being I wanted to be. Being a nurse in a hospital for disabled people as I was, taught me soon enough that my life’s learning until now was largely background. That background learning was the preliminary which pushed me forward. Pushed me into the practice of acquiring learning and that would take me to the core of knowing what I wanted to be and how to be that person.

Being a nurse to others would teach me to reach the depths of my humanity so that I could reach the depths of another’s distress. To learn the value of the life of each human being as she or he saw it; and the value of working with others at all times so that the person who was in need of care always had of the best. And I gobbled all this learning and put it into practice with a constant hunger for more. This is partly from whence came my enjoyment of being a nurse. And of being with disabled people.

Experiences of a Ward Nurse

After the preliminary two months in the school-learning the basic theory and practice of nursing, we went to work in the wards. I was to start in ward twelve, a long-stay ward for females. I can’t help thinking that Matron would have had me placed here. She would quite likely have thought that starting with old ladies was better for me than starting off with the men.

Sister Taylor, the ward sister, was young and active and brought to the ward the brightness and energy that it needed, as the ladies on long-stay were elderly or old. Most had fractured or arthritic hips that kept them in bed sometimes for six months or more, or even for the rest of their lives. Some had surgery to enable them to get out of bed sooner than others. Others had joint conditions about which nothing could be done. A few had had strokes as a result of which they could neither speak nor walk. Many of these patients would be bedridden forever. Many slept for the greater part of the day.

Mrs. Miller was one of these. She was 96 years old, had a broken hip about which nothing could be done, hardly communicated and spent most of the day sleeping. In keeping with her situation, she had a room to herself. She would not, or could not, cooperate with the nurses. This made nursing care very difficult. Yet she needed total care. She was reputed to be, “the most difficult patient in the ward”.

Sister Taylor soon found out how best she could use me. It was customary that, as soon as the lunch trolley was brought from the kitchen, Sister, with all the nurses walking alongside, would push the trolley along, she herself serving each patient’s portion on to a plate. A nurse would take that meal to a patient. When her trolley came to Mrs. Miller’s room she would call out, “Nurse Padi.” At this call I would have to emerge. With not another word she would hand the plate to me.

Feeding Mrs. Miller was no easy task. “Mrs. Miller, here is a spoonful. Open your mouth… Mrs. Miller, open your mouth,” I would repeat over and over again. Mrs. Miller would at last decide that she would. She would take in a few mouthfuls. And then, just as I said to myself, “Thank goodness she is cooperating today,” with no warning, Mrs. Miller would spit all the food she had accumulated in her mouth out at me.For a 96-year-old her aim was pretty good. My friends back home called me “a born optimist” and I was one now. Each day I thought I had learned to duck the volley. But then Mrs. Miller would cotton on to that and make sure to take better aim the next time. It became a game between us. Or rather, a competition.

Fernao Godhino

During my three months on Ward Six I made a special friend. His name was Fernao Godhino. He was 16 years old and had come all the way from Lisbon, Portugal to have his legs lengthened. Fernao was very short and he wanted to be closer to the height of other young boys of his age. We had an Orthopaedic Surgeon at the ROH who was world renowned for his success at doing this. I never saw Fernao standing up because he was confined to bed both when I arrived in the ward and three months later when I left it. Bill Scrase, the surgeon had already operated on Fernao.

The surgeon had cut across the tibia and fibula which are bones in the calf region of each leg. A machine was placed on the bed alongside Fernao’s legs. Each leg had fixed to it at the broken ends of the bones, two pins, each with a screw. The pins were connected to the machine in a way that a turn of a screw would move the ends of the bones on that leg apart. Sister had the task of turning the screws on each leg on alternate days. She was very fond of Fernao and carried out this task as gently as she could. But as you can imagine, every turn of the screw was sheer agony to Fernao. He would scream in pain. His screams touched all of us. His determination earned our respect and our love, staff and patients alike.

In me it seemed as though Fernao had found a soul-mate. Me away from home as he was. Much of the little free time I had was spent at his bed-side. We would talk about his home and mine. We would even sing softly together common songs that we both knew. But as this closeness grew so did a problem arise. Fernao started to tease me. It was like my brothers back home. He would tease me about me missing my home and family, about me never going back to see them and so on.

One day this was more than I could take. When he started to tease me, I asked him to stop. When he did not, my tears just flowed over. I just wept buckets. Perhaps I was weeping for both of us. What were the two of us doing here? Sister heard the rumpus. She came out of her office to put her arm around me and admonish Fernao. He was in the dog-house for the rest of the day. But the next day Fernao and I were friends. Fernao never teased me again.

Fernao, who to me seemed to be a youth like any other youth and no shorter than any other, has remained in my memory since then. Just like those others from my past who live in my memory. About two years ago I thought that it would be so good if I could speak with Fernao again. So I went to my computer and Googled “Godhino” in Lisbon.

There were a few popping up. I picked one who had made available his contact e-mail. I wrote to him about the Fernao Godhino I knew in Birmingham. “Do you by any chance know of him?” I asked. I got no response. I could not find Fernao again.

(To be continued)

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Features

Eastern University and the making of a culture of peace

Published

3 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Jehan Perera

There is an important change in the way peace is being understood in Sri Lanka. The notion that peacebuilding is not simply the responsibility of governments, politicians and peace organisations, but is also a responsibility of educational institutions, appears to be permeating the consciousness of at least a section of the academic community. This was visible on International Peace Day at an event held at Eastern University by the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences. The event was unusual not least because the medical and nursing faculty of the university had decided that peacebuilding was relevant to its academic and professional responsibilities.

Peacebuilding has too often been treated as something undertaken after conflict, when the fighting has stopped and the immediate task is to rebuild relationships between communities. But peace cannot be sustained by governments and peace organisations alone. If it is to become long lasting, the values and practices of peace have to become part of the institutions through which a society educates its younger generations. Universities and other educational institutions are therefore important to peacebuilding. They are among the places where the foundations of a culture of peace can either be built or neglected.

The experience of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University provides a practical example of what this can mean. Led by its Dean, Prof Thillainathan Sathaananthan, the faculty organised an event which went beyond the ordinary academic scope of a medical faculty. University academics are experts in writing project proposals and applying for research grants. On this occasion, the members of the Faculty of Health-Care Sciences used those skills to apply for a UNESCO grant that they won to conduct an International Peace Day event. The significance lies less in the Rs 200,000 grant than in the decision to use the university’s institutional capacity and resources to invest in peacebuilding. The event at Eastern University needs to be understood as more than a successful university programme. It represents a possible paradigm shift in peace thinking.

Institutional Commitment

The Peace Day event obtained the support of the university administration, including Vice Chancellor Prof P Peratheepan, and reached out to secondary schools in the vicinity to mobilise their attendance. The event itself was meticulously organised. There were cultural items including traditional and modern dance and song in the three languages, performed by combinations of solo, duet and multiple singers, dancers and actors drawn in part from nearby secondary schools. There was a panel discussion by senior academics on the general theme of peacebuilding and how to prepare for it. A discussion among the students followed, where each student spoke on behalf of a religion that was not theirs. This is significant because peacebuilding cannot remain an idea discussed by specialists at conferences. It has to become part of the way institutions educate and prepare people for life in a plural society.

The Faculty of Health-Care Sciences at Eastern University has provided a model through its Peace Medicine course modules that were introduced to the curricular as a compulsory core course over 10 years ago. Two senior academics, Dr Kuveriel Eliyas Karunakaran and Dr Thillainathan Sathaananthan, have written a book on “Peace Medicine- A Health Care Concern” that was published five years ago. Its Peace Medicine Module integrates principles of medical ethics, compassion, equity, social justice and community engagement into health education and practice. In his introduction, former Vice Chancellor of Eastern University, Prof T Jayasingam noted “This book is an introduction to a theme which had already been operating in the Faculty of Health Care Sciences as a course.”

Doctors, nurses and health workers know better than anyone the harm that war and violence does. They are the people who treat the wounds and trauma that violence leaves behind. In a hospital, a patient is not asked what their religion or ethnicity is before they are treated. Health care is one of the places where peace is practised every day. The Faculty has therefore found a way of connecting its professional responsibilities with the wider social responsibility of peacebuilding. The question is whether this experience can be replicated throughout the country, at universities and at other educational institutions, so that peacebuilding becomes part of the consciousness of education itself. If that happens on a sufficient scale, it can begin to generate a culture of peace that becomes increasingly difficult to reverse.

Local Action

The Eastern University event corresponded closely to the United Nations theme for this year’s International Day of Peace, “Invest in Peace – For Everyone, Everywhere, Every Day”, which honours the “everyday architects of peace”, people driving local action, laying the groundwork for stability and building lasting peace from the ground up. The emphasis on investment is important. An investment means that something is put in: time, courage and resources. There is no more violent conflict in Sri Lanka today. But the absence of war does not automatically produce a culture of peace. The factors that fed the country’s conflict have not disappeared from the world. Racism, corruption and the violation of laws and human rights are the raw materials of conflict. So too are unresolved grievances, discrimination and the failure to recognise the suffering of others.

A country that does not deal with its past does not escape it. The past can return in the next generation. This is why the experience of Eastern University needs to be replicated countrywide, both at universities and at other educational institutions. The objective should not be to turn every academic discipline into peace studies. Rather, peacebuilding needs to become part of the consciousness of education itself. Eastern University shows that a medical faculty can develop Peace Medicine. A law faculty can examine the relationship between justice, rights and peace. Faculties of education can prepare teachers to work in diverse communities, while the humanities and social sciences can examine the different narratives through which communities understand their histories. Every institution can find its own way of making peacebuilding relevant to what it teaches.

Sri Lanka has had many declarations, pledges and programmes in the past. What matters is whether these produce changes in behaviour and institutional practice. Peacebuilding requires confronting difficult issues rather than avoiding them. It requires respect for different identities, but also engagement across those identities. It requires dealing with grievances in the present while also addressing unresolved issues from the past. It requires truth, accountability, reparations and guarantees of non-recurrence. It requires people to learn that the rights of another community do not diminish their own rights. The International Peace Day event at Eastern University was evidence of a change in the way at least some academics in a part of the country deeply affected by war are thinking about their responsibilities. Peace needs to be invested in and the most important investment will be in the minds of those who will inherit the future.

Features

Quality assured education commodities

Published

3 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Ahilan Kadirgamar

I have always noticed the little paper tags that are inside the packaging of some products that say quality assured or quality control. I often wonder who might have checked the product and stamped that tag, but I also forget the tag soon enough. Decades later, when I entered academia, I was taken aback by the emphasis placed on quality assurance in our universities. It is not something that could be forgotten and done away with; the entire university system is obsessed with quality assurance.

Beginning with the staff induction programme, quality assurance is drilled into the newly recruited lecturers. It is the norm, not seen as doing any harm and only trying to improve quality. It is accepted as given, and not questioned. Quality Assurance Cells and Committees are omnipresent and hover above the Departments and, at times, even the Faculty Boards. Quality Assurance reviews are feared by the Deans and Vice Chancellors. University life itself seems secondary to the rule of quality assurance. What do we make of this system of quality assurance and what are its implications for our university system?

Corporate speak

Universities globally have been going through major changes with neoliberal education policies. In many countries, universities increasingly became corporatised to be run like businesses in the 1980s. As state support for universities declined, cost cutting became the norm. They started hiring adjunct or part-time staff. Many public non-fee levying universities around the world began to charge fees. Decade by decade, tuition fees became more and more exorbitant, forcing students to take student loans. The total student debt in the United States now stands at close to US$ 2 trillion; which is about 20 times the GDP of Sri Lanka. As the higher education landscape transformed in the West, university administrations began to recruit Presidents, Vice Chancellors and administrative officials with corporate backgrounds and experience.

Such corporatisation of universities in the West has since been imported into countries like Sri Lanka, introducing a new corporate vocabulary, including quality assurance, graduate competencies, programme outcomes, intended learning outcomes, etc. University teaching has become secondary to documenting so-called outcomes. The teacher-student relationship, the environment of the lecture hall and even administering the university have been over-determined by the processes of ensuring quality. How did such major changes come about in such a short time? Indeed, academics of just two generation ago, would never have heard of these terms and processes in the Sri Lankan university system.

World Bank Trojan horse

Since the early 2000s there have been a number of World Bank projects that have drastically changed the character of Sri Lankan universities. Quality assurance as a central agenda within universities, and many other changes to the working of our universities, came through these World Bank initiatives. The Improving Relevance and Quality of Undergraduate Education (IRQUE) project and Higher Education for the 21st Century (HETC) project were two such earlier projects that set up the Quality Assurance and Accreditation Unit (QAAU) under the University Grants Commission (UGC) and established systematic quality assurance reviews for state universities. The public often thinks these are grants from the World Bank to modernise our universities. However, they are not grants but loans.

The most recent such project, Accelerating Higher Education Expansion and Development (AHEAD) is a US$ 100 million loan from the World Bank implemented from 2018 to 2023, which consolidated the quality assurance structures from the earlier projects. Furthermore, these projects are implemented with tremendous arrogance, prioritising their implementation over all other concerns in the universities, when the project over six years for example accounts for just one fourth of our budget allocation for universities this year.

The AHEAD project drastically changed course curricula, sought to increase student enrolment in science, technology, engineering, mathematics (STEM) disciplines, commercialise the university research agenda and create university-business linkages. All of this was pushed to supposedly help us face development challenges. We have heard the ideological attack on our universities and even students claiming they are “unemployable graduates”. These changes to our higher education system were supposedly going to create jobs and increase employment.

The irony of the AHEAD project is that just as it was ending in 2023, apparently after having reached its targets, the Sri Lankan economy was collapsing. The World Bank often gets the direction of causality wrong. It is the economy that creates jobs for graduates, and not the training or kind of graduates that create jobs. It is decades of World Bank policies, and those of its ideological twin the IMF, that have led to such high youth unemployment, not only in Sri Lanka but also in many other countries in the global South.

Sri Lanka entered an IMF agreement in March 2023 and started a new Country Partnership Framework with the World Bank in June 2023. These programmes have little to say about, and actively discourage, government initiatives that aim to create an industrial policy or an employment creation policy. Instead, they push for austerity measures, which not only restrict the allocation for education among other sectors, but also end up contracting the economy to the detriment of increasing employment. Their goal is the commercialisation of higher education, to make universities into businesses and run them like factories.

In this context, the ideology of quality assurance is powerful. The International Organisation for Standardisation (ISO), whose different standards are necessary for marketing, is the institution that came up with the concept of “quality assurance”. It promoted quality assurance as a process of identifying defected products. Therefore, when the World Bank promotes this conceptual framing, our students are, in fact, seen as products on the assembly line, with quality assurance processes aiming to prevent the release of defected products from the university system. For the US$ 100 million we borrowed for the AHEAD project and the many more million dollars in similar World Bank projects, there is no evidence of increased employment of graduates.

Commodity fetishism

Over a century and a half ago, Karl Marx critiqued the economic analysis prevalent at that time that associated some inherent or monetary value for commodities without considering the social relations that underlie the production of those commodities. Marx called this commodity fetishism. Furthermore, he theorised that such commodity fetishism was also a reason for the alienation of human beings from the world. If our labour and what we produce is seen devoid of the social relations that underlie them, we lose our connection with the people and the world. In this process we become alienated from what we produce and the world.

We are now in a world where our students themselves are fetishised as commodities for the market. Universities are no longer communities concerned about knowledge and human growth, but mere factories producing commodities, which have to be produced without defects to be marketed. In this way, quality assurance has become the cause for the alienation of students, academics and our universities themselves, from the larger relationship with our economy and society.

Our university system does need reform. It is grossly underfunded and not providing the financial support and facilities for our students. Universities have become hierarchical spaces without the academic freedom and democratic ethos necessary for producing knowledge. Academics and students need to engage more with their communities to make their learning and research meaningful, not to mention their contribution to and integration with society. However, when it comes to even questions of governance and regulation of the universities, such concerns are merely reduced to improving quality. In our contemporary times, this singular focus on quality assurance, as opposed to addressing the larger structural issues, is crippling our universities. There may be no way out, but to put back quality assurance where it started, those little tags on goods, to perhaps be noticed but quickly forgotten.

Ahilan Kadirgamar is a political economist and Senior Lecturer, University of Jaffna.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies)

Features

Thailand’s biggest new global star …

Published

3 hours ago

2026/09/29

Sahan Weerasooriya

The entertainment scene, globally, is agog with excitement, and, why not!

Yes, a new global star has emerged … from Thailand, and she hit the headlines by winning America’s Got Talent.

Rattikarn Amloy, known to millions by her stage name Nene Royal, was crowned the winner of America’s Got Talent (AGT) Season 21 at the live finale at Pasadena Civic Auditorium, California, taking home the USD 1 million grand prize.

The 16-year-old rocker, from the holiday island of Phuket (I’ve been to Phuket, courtesy Tourism Authority of Thailand), has struck a power chord around the world, and is the first Thai national ever to win the hit NBC show.

She beat nine other finalists, including runner-up magician Geno Ploeger, after a blistering final performance.

Nene’s story is pure rock and roll fairy-tale. She says she picked up a guitar at age seven, fell in love at the first chord, and taught herself mostly by watching videos online. That dedication earned her a music scholarship to Kajonkiet International School Phuket.

Her audition at America’s Got Talent — a swaggering, shredding rendition of The Cranberries’ classic ‘Zombie’ — exploded online, amassing over 200 million views across AGT’s platforms, more than any act this season.

She kept wowing: ‘Hysteria’ by Muse, then ‘Black Hole Sun’ by Soundgarden which earned her Spice Girl Mel B’s Golden Buzzer, sending her straight to the live shows.

For the final, she unleashed ‘Seven Nation Army’ by The White Stripes. Judge Howie Mandel shouted: “You should win. Give her the million, America.” Mel B praised her “mysterious, mystical stage presence”.

And for the grand finale, she lived every teen rocker’s dream — performing on stage, alongside US rock giants Linkin Park.

When host Terry Crews announced her as winner, the teenager collapsed to the stage floor in tears. “I’m very happy and you know I’m emotional right now,” she said.

And Thailand erupted. Her school held watch parties, posting: “You did it, congratulations, champion. We are so proud of you.”

Even Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul sent a personal congratulation. He had earlier hosted Nene at Government House in July, where she played guitar while he sang a Thai rock song. His office said her talent “brought pride to Thai people.”

Corporate Thailand also rallied behind her — Charoen Pokphand Foods, owned by billionaire Dhanin Chearavanont, even rented a giant billboard in Times Square, New York, to cheer her on.

With her blistering guitar solos, rock-ballad shrieks and fearless spirit, little Nene Royal has just become Thailand’s biggest new global star.

What’s more, this amazing teenager will be bringing her powerful vocals, guitar skills and signature rock-metal style to the stage, as opening act, before one of the world’s biggest rock bands, America’s Avenged Sevenfold, in Singapore, on 13 October.

Unfortunately, we are still to see a local artiste, grab the spotlight, on a global scale … like Thailand’s Nene.

Yes, they do shine, but mostly on social media, and that, too, with the aid of AI (Artificial Intellegence).