When I was young...

Back in the day, I used to say to myself 'Here we go again' whenever my father started a sentence with 'When I was young...'. Having said that, I'm going to do just that.

In my younger days, fireworks were really fun. And above all, dependable. When we pulled out a sky-rocket from its bundle, we knew it was going to threaten low-flying aircrafts. They had strong tails and took off as straight as an arrow high into the night sky. And anything that was supposed to go 'Bang', did. The sound would have caused the neighbors to call the ol' bomb squad if we were to light one up during off-season. The 'Chakra' burnt and rotated in all it's glory for at least two minutes.

I am quite disappointed with the sorry state of the fireworks on sale these days. Every time I light one up, I feel like a participant who is just about the spin the wheel-of-fortune. It is quite common to find sky-rockets that won't fly or out of the ones that do, they wouldn't explode with a thunderous bang that would give your grandma a heart attack. The 'Charkras' and 'Nilas' often won't last longer than it would take you to say "what next".

But it still pleases me to see the sparkles in my kids eyes every time I light fireworks. I just hope they will somehow become better as time passes by.

Mayday Mayday Mayday!

It was the 1st of May or May-day! Simple interpretation – yet another holiday. The fact that there was a high probability of lesser traffic on the roads made me decide to visit Kandy and do some long outstanding social calls.

But what I didn’t bargain for is my car throwing up Air-Conditioning problems halfway on my way to Kandy. Yes, it did just that.

Over the years, Air-Conditioning (or AC) has become a vital component of some of our lives… especially with people living and working in the city. We’ve got accustomed to it so much that we find it difficult to cope in a non-AC house even for the weekend. So I had two options, either to turn back and head home or wind down my shutters and go for it. Being a member of the Male gene-pool, I chose the latter.

With hindsight, it was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made… it is right up there with me trying to conquer my fear of heights by climbing onto the cashew tree way back when I was 12 years old. My elder brother had to climb after me to get me down in that instant. I was never able to face my friends who were there that day for quite some time afterwards. But then that is another story.

The problem with holidays is just that. Just like you and me, everyone else like AC repairmen are also on holiday. So by about 2pm I was really feeling the heat. The winded down shutters blew in all sorts of smells and smoke right into and thru my car. By the end of the trip I smelled like a garbologist at a smoker’s convention.

It was an incident worthy of a Mayday call right on the 1st of May or May-day! Is that weird or what?

Colombo goes Bananas

Suba Aluth Avruddak Wewa! It was a great time to be in Colombo last week. The days leading up to the Sinhala and Tamil New Year weekend was very exciting even to the people who didn't celebrate the occasion. City sidewalks were packed with vendors with all sorts of goodies including various exotic food items and clothing.

Here I have captured a busy Banana vendor in Battamulla. His produce covered a good 25 meters length of the sidewalk.