Thuppahi's Blog

Camel Rider

Very nice of this Jewish artist to combat a ‘pro-Hamas bias’ sweeping across Australia through an art exhibition. …. published in The Australian Financial Review today. ………………………..https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/jewish-artist-says-exhibition-combats-pro-hamas-bias-20260205-p5nzuq

The watermelon represents Palestinian resistance and serves as a quiet substitute for referring to the genocide in Gaza, which Zionists claim is a legitimate slaughter rather than a genocide.

The only problem is THAT there is no ‘pro-Hamas bias’ in Australia; only a pro-Palestinian bias, and it is not really a bias but a legitimate position for any group facing a genocide supported by the pro-bias Zionist lobby. 

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Courtesy of VICTOR MELDER, our dinky-die rail-man of course

https://youtu.be/hu0vLSfHFcI?si=apbpiEUvLYMNQqXk

https://share.google/Lvaq8bMdQ1o6YpYKh

Preview YouTube video Experience A Rail Bus on Train Tracks in Sri Lanka Railways || Ganewatta To Kurunegala Full RidePreview YouTube video Experience A Rail Bus on Train Tracks in Sri Lanka Railways || Ganewatta To Kurunegala Full Ride

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ADDENDUM: Mail Exchange with  David Sansoni in Sydney & Victor in Melbourne

Michael,  Happy to note Victor has shared with you the YouTube link to this feature.

I sent it to him today, in response to his email with a link to a 29-minute video of the Polgahawela to Kurunegala train.

The photo attached is my own:  namely, my personal encounter with and ride in the Lankan Rail Bus, circa 1996  .………….. Blessings, David

Vaibhav Suryavanshi IPL factfile

Vaibhav Suryavanshi, aged just 14, became the youngest ever centurion in men’s T20 cricket when he cracked 101 off 38 balls for Rajasthan Royals (RR) against Gujarat Titans in Jaipur in IPL 2025. His hundred, which came off 35 deliveries, was the second-fastest in IPL history, as he piled up plenty of records during his stunning knock.

NOW …. TODAY, representing India  U19 vs England U19 in the FINAL of the U19 World Cup, he has  –thus far — hammered 104 runs in 56 balls…..

….. Hodi-Heleyi Heleyi-aaah, Hodi-Heleyi Heleyi-aah IS MY SRI LANKAN MAADHAL FISHERMAN’S MOTIVATIONAL CALL !!

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Helga Desilva Blow Perera, …in FACEBOOK , an ephemeral Post that has disappeared

On January 14, 1957, Lauren Bacall lost the love of her life. Humphrey Bogart—her husband of nearly twelve years, the man she fell in love with at nineteen—died of esophageal cancer at fifty-seven. Bacall was thirty-two, suddenly a widow with two young children: Stephen, seven, and Leslie, four.

Hollywood had always idolized them as the perfect couple. Their on-screen chemistry in “To Have and Have Not” and “The Big Sleep” had been electric. Their marriage was even better—witty, passionate, devoted despite the twenty-five-year age gap. And now he was gone.

But the real Lauren Bacall was the woman who, at thirty-two, became a widow; at thirty-three, survived a public heartbreak; at forty-four, navigated divorce with three children; and at eighty-nine, remained sharp, resilient, and entirely herself.

Grief to grit. Rumor to resolve. Spotlight to self. Lauren Bacall didn’t just learn to breathe after Bogart’s death. She learned to live out loud—fully, messily, magnificently—for another fifty-seven years. And that’s the real legend of Lauren Bacall.

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About ITHIHAS ….https://itihas.lk/

ITHIHAS CALL PIX    Itihas is a non-profit organisation that promotes a more inclusive Sri Lanka through a better understanding of its recent history.

It was founded in October 2022 by Sri Lankan historian Shamara Wettimuny in the midst of a new wave of civic and political consciousness among Sri Lankan youth in the context of the 2022 protest movement. The organisation’s roots, however, predate the protests, and stem from the founder’s research on the severe shortcomings of Sri Lanka’s public-school history curricula and the lack of proper resources for meaningful historical research.

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Dr. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda, in  The Sunday Times, November 2025, reviewing a new book on Geoffrey Bawa, ‘Geoffrey Manning Bawa- Decolonizing Architecture’ by architect-historian Shanti Jayewardene. The book, a landmark publication for the National Trust launched on November 30.

The golden afternoon seeps across the black and white tiles, lighting up the corridor of the Galle Face Hotel. It settles on a woman, standing by a door. She is locked in impassioned debate with a foreigner. The words “colonial,”  “imperialistic” and “orientalist” hang like daggers in the air. The speaker had just come out of a conference on the decorative arts. A Sri Lankan living in England, she spoke with the heightened sensitivity and fervour that expatriates sometimes bring home.

The Parliamentarians’ aerial garden: Parliament of Sri Lanka

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Lionel Bopage in GROUNDVIEWS, 26 January 2026, where the title runs thus “The Promise of Change and the Reality: A Balance Sheet”

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NAREN CHITTY in Sydney has kindly and helpfully responded to my QUERY and provided a list of COLOMBO CHETTY SURNAMES/LINEAGES that can be found in Sri Lanka over the past few centuries. Quite a revelation!! Many  more names than I was aware of. I anote m also appending the DIGITAL Webnote re this collective identity….. Michael Roberts

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Naren Chitty

Introduction: The Coromandel Coast milieu of 17^th century Chetty migrants to Zeylan is addressed here in relation to Udayappa Chetty (d. 1693). He was an ancestor of the Chetty family of Christian S. Chitty (1841-1891), as well as others self-identifying as Tamils. C. S. Chitty’s son James is described in 1900 as belonging to “an old family” evoking a timeframe of some centuries. (Lethbridge 1900, 350). In my view the collocation “Colombo Chetty” firmed up after 1930, decades after Christian Chitty’s death. Anthony Aserappa (1930), in the title of his book A Short History of the Ceylon Chetty Community, and throughout his monograph, uses the descriptors Ceylon Chetties and Christian Chetties.

Brahmin

Colombo Chetty

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