Features

It’s a Girl, But is it Black?

Published

5 years ago

2021/03/14

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

President Biden has completed 50 days of his Presidency in a style as different from that of his predecessor as night and day. And he has performed magnificently, in the backdrop of the worst health and economic crises ever faced by the nation.

Amazingly, a crisis of regal proportions has overwhelmed the world’s headlines. A scandal that has driven media attention of the most terrible crises faced by the world to obscurity. A cataclysm that will change our lives forever.

Will the unborn child who is destined to be eighth in line for the British monarchy be black? This is the burning question which raises any number of new and unanswered questions.

Archie, the firstborn of Meghan and Prince Harry, will have a little sister according to the latest news breaks. When is the due date? This vital information has not been revealed for reasons of national security, but her bump seems suspiciously prominent. The adoring public needs to know.

The recent Oprah interview, which brought this controversy into the spotlight, highlighted most dramatic allegations in the interview made by Prince Harry and Meghan. Why was their firstborn, Archie, denied a royal title? Was it because of his skin color? Which, incidentally is alabaster white. Archie is now plain Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, while the children of Harry’s elder brother, William are Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. Seems unfair, definitely not cricket, old boy. However, according to a decree made by a long dead King, only the children of the first in the line of succession are entitled to royal titles. But Prince William is not the first in line, Prince Charles is.

Having a colored Monarch is anathema to all the finest traditions of the ancient House of Windsor. Archie got lucky. He was born with a white skin, to the envy and relief of his white subjects. But what if the child on the way has a DNA throwback to an African, and turn out to be a black baby! At Buckingham Palace, for God’s sake.

All these rules and traditions got to be so confusing, even to the British, that Queen Elizabeth II created in 2004, by Royal Warrant, no less, the Roll of the Peerage, a public record of the relative levels of aristocracy in the United Kingdom. The Roll is maintained by the Crown office within the British Department of Justice, and published by the College of Arms. The Roll, in its devotion by the British, is second only to the Bible.

A system of aristocracy headed by a monarch, treats with contempt the efforts of other, sadly tradition-free countries,Vicky to experiment with various methods of government. Like Democracy in the USA until 2016; the Marxism of early 20th century Russia; the Principle of Ethnic and Religious Purity, most famously in the Germany of the 1930s and proliferating throughout the world; the disaster of dynastic, criminal autocracy, again in the USA from 2016 to 2020, which is being emulated, with similar consequences, in much of the Third World, including our beautiful Sri Lanka. All these systems of governance are either dead or terminal while the successful and eminently just system of the British Monarchy has endured, indeed flourished, for centuries.

The complex rules of racial classification in American traditions have always confused me. My understanding is that if you are 1/64th black, if your great, great, great grandfather was black, then you are black, however white your skin color is. You and your future generations will, as the saying goes, always “have a touch of the tar brush”.

Look at Meghan. She has the beautiful skin tone and features of a tanned European woman. But when she fills a job application in the USA, she ticks the box that says Black. And now that Harry and Meghan have shed the most aristocratic shackles of the British monarchy and are private citizens, so will Archie and his future sibling. How the mighty have fallen!

Maybe the perfect opportunity for a budding author to script a modern sequel to Mark Twain’s classic, The Prince and the Pauper.

We have the ultimate examples of this racial confusion. President Obama’s father was a Kenyan, but his mother and his grandparents who had an important role in raising him were Kansas white. Obama was never known as half-white, he was always our first Black president. And so with our current Vice President, Kamala Harris. Her father was from Jamaica, a black man from the West Indies. Her mother, who single-handedly raised Kamala and her sister, Maya, was born in Madras. VP Harris always talks about the Indian traditions that had been instilled into her when she was growing up. But she will always be our first Black Vice President.

The abiding rule is that If you are not 100% white, then you are black. How these 100% white people figure out to a certainty who their ancestors slept with is a secret they will take to their graves. A secret that fosters and strengthens their belief in White Supremacy.

Trying to figure out if the British monarchy is racist, because a technically black child not yet born should have a royal title is hardly a difficult – or material – question. A colored British Prince? How revolting. Imagine a colored man being Britain’s Tory government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or worse, the captain of the English cricket team. Or the Catholic unthinkable -an African Pope. Almost as unthinkable as Jesus being a Jew from the Middle East, whose natives are not famed for blonde hair and blue eyes.

The Times They Are A-Changin’, as the Bob Dylan song goes.

The current British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is colored, of Indian origin, as is Home Secretary, Priti Patel.

A man born in Madras, Nasser Hussain, led the English cricket team from 1999 to 2003. He is also an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

And there have been three African Popes, though all before 500 A.D. What makes this fact interesting is that the ethnicity of these Popes was hidden from common knowledge, “because over the years, artists created images of them with European features”.

Racism has endured since the beginning of the great religions. The British monarchy is just carrying on these traditions. The great wonder is how the monarchy of an Empire on which the sun never set, whose rule was based entirely on white supremacy, has commanded, enthralled and earned the devotion and admiration of the world.

Now to the less important, inner page news of the comparatively insignificant crises facing America and the world.

President Biden has been working day and night tackling the twin crises of Covid 19 and the resultant economic depression. The progress he has made in containing the virus, in committing to guidelines recommended by scientists and getting the pharmaceuticals to accelerate the speed of production and distribution; and actually getting the vaccine into the arms of sometimes reluctant people, is nothing short of spectacular. The epidemiologists predict that a sufficient number of Americans will be vaccinated to reach herd immunity by the end of the Summer. The rescue stimulus package which he has now guided through a hostile, though minority Senate will be yet another shot in the arm for desperate Americans and the economy.

He has delegated the less desperate problem to his able and diverse cabinet, most of whom have now been approved by the Senate. He has also left the investigations into the numerous crimes committed by the Trump administration to the Department of Justice.

The Washington DC Attorney General is conducting an independent investigation into the insurrection of January 6, including Trump’s probable involvement/incitement. Over 300 Trump supporters have already been arrested; many have told the prosecutors that they sought to violently overturn the November election because Trump told them that the election was stolen, the Big Lie.

Georgia prosecutors are presently investigating into the telephone call of over one-hour Trump made to the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, threatening him that he (Raffensperger) would be committing a felony, if he didn’t doctor the Georgia election to “find” 11,780 votes (existing only in Trump’s delusions) and give him a fraudulent win in that state – a demand that the Republican Raffensperger rejected out of hand. A similar threat emerged last week that Trump made a recorded telephone call to Frances Warren, chief investigator of Georgia elections, pleading with her to subvert the election, saying “she would be praised” if “the right answer comes out”. The Georgia Secretary of State told Trump, very politely, to go to hell: “I can assure you that our team (the Georgia Bureau of Investigation) is only interested in the truth and finding information based on facts”. The Wall Street Journal has a recording of this conversation, which has been released to the media.

This is the integrity, the independence and the incorruptibility of public officials which has withstood the efforts of would-be dictators, auto and plutocrats and crooks to destroy American democracy; through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws of apartheid and the violence of today. Through a racist president who placed his knee on American democracy, not for eight minutes, but for four years.

The integrity, the independence and the incorruptibility of the bureaucracy of Sri Lanka in the post-independence 1950s, was ruthlessly and unscrupulously politicized, manipulated and finally destroyed by the aforementioned Sri Lankan brand of politicians and crooks. This has transformed a beautiful, abundant, thriving island to the dire, corrupt, economic and administrative straits of today – in just over 70 years.

There are other major crises facing America and the world today, according to historian Jared Diamond, “we currently have four global crises to address: the ongoing threat of nuclear attacks, climate change, running out of resources and socio-economic inequality”.

These petty crises may engage the attention of lesser mortals, but we devotees of the British monarchy reserve our concerns to the color of an unborn child.

All News Advertisement

Features

The hard challenge of clinching a political settlement in the Middle East

Published

23 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Bruised hearts: Displaced Palestinian civilians in the Gaza.(Photo by Mustafa Hassona/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Despite some sections of the Trump administration persisting with the view that the possibility could not be entirely ruled out of there being a diplomatic solution to the current US-Iran hostilities in West Asia, the skeptic could not be blamed for thinking otherwise. The intensity, scale and frequency of the tit-for-tat strikes by the antagonists over the past few days against selected military targets and civilian infrastructure in particular in West Asia make the adoption of this stance excusable.

The continuing hostilities render the mentioning of the MOU signed between the warring parties in mid-June a laughable matter. While it could very well be that the foes are wishing privately for a cessation of hostilities before long, what seems to be uppermost on their minds right now is to negotiate with each other from a position of strength. This strategy compels them to incapacitate each other militarily to the extent possible, lest they have to concede too much to each other during negotiations. Hence the stepped-up hostilities.

However, even on the question of there being a negotiated political settlement in the West Asian theatre in the longer term, the skeptic could come to be seen as scoring over the optimist. Developments on the ground account for this.

At the time of writing Israel’s Netanyahu government is going ahead in fairly care-free fashion with the establishment of more Jewish settlements in the Gaza and the West Bank, and it’s all happening under the apparently complacent gaze of the US. In fact, some quarters estimate that Israel is in control of some 65% of the Gaza Strip. Ethnic cleansing, that is, is being drastically stepped-up.

Accordingly, in terms of the power relations of West Asia, the world is almost back to the status quo of the late forties of the last century when the state of Israel was established and the Palestinians were reduced to a microscopic minority in the land they came to inhabit. Therefore, even the impartial observer would be compelled to ask: ‘Will a negotiated peace be ever possible in the Middle East?’

The humanist in the observer would prefer to answer this question in the affirmative and it is indeed the ideal stance to adopt considering the staggering human and material costs of the conflict. But the way ahead to peace could be expected to be highly hazardous and arduous. Among other odds, it would also prove an uphill endeavour to win minds and hearts.

The US’ Trump administration would need to be counted out in this pursuit. This is on account of the fact that it has been far too wayward in its management of West Asian affairs in particular over the past couple of years. Given its unpredictable character it is a matter for conjecture whether it could be counted on to live up to its commitments.

Moreover, Israel could be expected to ‘go it alone’ in the Middle East regardless of whether US help is coming or otherwise. It has indicated as much in recent times and Israel could be doubted on this score only at the doubter’s peril. Because time and again Israel has demonstrated that it could steadfastly defend its interests even single-handedly in the Middle East. History bears this out.

However, a durable alliance with the US would stand Israel in good stead. On the matter of military and intelligence assistance, for example, the US’s help proved invaluable for Israel in the past and going forward this is bound to be so as well. Moreover, it is unlikely that the Trump administration would give up on Israel, considering that a strong Israel is crucial for the furtherance of the US’ strategic and economic interests in West Asia.

But whether the above factors would have a considerable bearing on the question of working out a durable solution to the West Asian tangle is an entirely different matter. Israel, as in the case of the Palestinian enclaves, is acutely security conscious and would need to satisfy itself fully that it could live in a security environment that would guarantee its complete safety, going forward.

The Middle East is badly in need of another peace effort on the lines of the Oslo Accords of the mid-nineties that brought the key actors together and helped hammer out a solution that addressed some of their notable concerns. To be sure, that process did not prove to be the ideal answer to the tangle, but it yielded some respite to the region and drove home that one-time sworn foes could indeed negotiate with a degree of success. The West Bank authority, although falling short of fulfilling some key Palestinian aspirations, is testimony that a degree of success is possible if the intent is right.

Given the current realities of West Asia, peace-making is bound to be an uphill challenge. The violence faced in recent times by the Palestinian community, in particular, has been nothing less than mind-numbing. Merciless has been the violence visited on them by the Israeli side. In such circumstances, durable peace in the region could smack of an idealist’s dream.

Nevertheless, there needs to be urgently, a meeting of minds over the divides. The US would need to be counted out as an honest broker in bringing the sides together but the rest of the West would do well to step up to the challenge.

In this exercise the onus would be on the world’s democracies to take the initiative and doggedly stay the course. An acceptable combination would be the EU and the UN. Given their credentials, the main sides in West Asia ought to find them the least controversial.

Even if the relevant institutional and political arrangements could be shored up to take a reconciliation process forward, winning hearts and minds for the peace drive would prove a grueling challenge. Over the past few years in particular tens of thousands of hearts and minds on both sides of the divide have been bruised badly in the runaway murderous violence that has come to define the Middle East.

These badly scarred personalities would need to experience healing without much delay. It is therefore a multi-faceted challenge that is at hand. Since wide-ranging expertise would be needed in the healing process, people’s participation in peace-making, ranging over the divides, would need to be made a durable reality. It will be a time for enthroning humanity and ensuring the rejection of all forms of violence and coercion.

Features

Amazing Thailand …right here in Colombo

Published

23 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

For many Sri Lankans, Thailand is the go-to holiday — beaches, temples, food, and that famous warm hospitality.

In fact, I’ve been to Amazing Thailand 24 times myself, and was honoured with the Friends of Thailand International Media Award by the Tourism Authority of Thailand for promoting Thai tourism.

The good news I have for you today is that you don’t even need a passport to get a taste of Amazing Thailand.

The Royal Thai Embassy, in Colombo, is bringing a vibrant slice of Thailand, to the city of Colombo, with Thai Festival 2026 — a cultural experience like never before.

Whether you are an avid enthusiast of Thai culture, a total novice, or simply just interested in exploring foreign cultures, Thai Festival 2026 is going to be the perfect opportunity for you to get more than just a glimpse into one of the most celebrated cultural heritages in South East Asia. And ENTRANCE IS FREE.

The festival will be held on the 1st and 2nd of August, 2026, at Siam Nivasa, 43, C.W.W. Kannangara Mawatha, Colombo 7, and the East Parking Area, of the Colombo Municipal Council, from 11:00am to 5:00pm.

Both days will be full of live entertainment, and dispersed throughout with Thai cultural displays, including exhilarating traditional dance performances and breathtaking Muay Thai demonstrations.

Exploring art and craft specific to Thailand, tasting irresistible authentic Thai cuisine, and playing arcade games, are just a few more fun-filled events available for visitors at the festival premises.

An array of Thai products will also be available for purchase.

While at the festival, you will find Sri Lankan Alumni from Thai universities sharing their experiences with you and willing to answer any questions you might have, related to studying abroad in Thailand.

You can also register for the Muay Thai workshop that will be happening on the 7th and 8th of August, 2026, in Colombo.

Irresistible authentic Thai cuisine

Visitors can also stand a chance to win traditional Thai souvenirs, get exclusive photo opportunities, and, the big one — to enter the raffle draw, at the end of each day, for the grand prize of an all-inclusive round trip to Thailand.

Be sure to avail yourself of this exceptional opportunity and add a cultural spin to your weekend.

To keep up with the latest updates on Thai Festival 2026, head over to the Thai Festival official social media pages.

The Royal Thai Embassy in Colombo official webpage:

https://colombo.thaiembassy.org

Official social media:

Facebook: @RTEColombo

Instagram: @thaiembassysrilanka

Thai Festival official social media:

Facebook: Thai Festival in Colombo

Instagram: @thaifestival_colombo

TikTok: @thaifestival.incolombo

Features

Thicker, stronger hair …

Published

23 hours ago

2026/07/23

Sahan Weerasooriya

Hair fall, in this heat, can be so frustrating, and noticing a thin patch is even more worrying. The good news is … yes, with a little care and kitchen ingredients, you can nourish your scalp and support healthy regrowth.

Try these four easy home remedies … even our grandmothers trusted:

* Coconut Oil and Curry Leaves Tonic:

Warm 04 tablespoons of coconut oil, with a handful of curry leaves, till the leaves turn black. Cool, strain, and massage into scalp 02-03 times a week. Leave for 01 hour, or overnight.

Why:

Coconut oil deeply nourishes, while curry leaves help strengthen roots and add shine.

* Onion Juice for Spot Treatment:

With cotton, dab the juice of 01 small onion, directly on the thin/bald patches. Leave for 20-30 minutes, and then wash with a mild shampoo. Use twice a week.

Why:

Rich in sulfur, onion juice helps boost blood circulation to the scalp.

* Aloe Vera and Castor Oil Mask:

Mix 02 tablespoons of fresh aloe vera gel and 01 tablespoon castor oil and apply to the scalp, focusing on thinning areas. Leave for 45 minutes, and then rinse with cool water.

Why:

Aloe vera soothes the scalp, while castor oil coats hair to make it look thicker.

* Fenugreek and Curd Strengthening Pack:

You will need 02 tablespoons fenugreek seeds, soaked overnight, and 02 tablespoons plain curd.

Grind to a paste, apply to scalp for 30 minutes, and then wash.

Why:

Fenugreek strengthens strands and reduces breakage.

Extra Tips for Healthy Hair:

Avoid tight hairstyles that pull on the scalp.

Eat iron and protein rich foods: greens, dhal, eggs, fish.

Use lukewarm water, not hot.

Be gentle when brushing and drying.