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In these days of rising cost of living where parents are finding it
difficult to make ends meet, they are further burdened by the school
authorities in addition to the escalating donations they dole out.
A leading girls institution in Colombo distributes raffle books to
its students to raise funds for a school building fund. The students are
not burdened with one book but two. Furthermore, if there are five to
six siblings in the school, all of them are burdened with two books and
admonished, if they fail to dispose of the tickets.
Can the Ministry of Education please intervene and introduce a
ruling, so as not to burden our children in this fashion?
CLIFFORD LAZARUS
Tiger gangs take over parts of Norway(in addition to parts of Canada
and Britain). Now they have also brazenly indulged in acts of violence
on the streets of Oslo.
I wonder if Kumar Rupasinghe can justify Tiger violence being a
reaction to Tamils being oppressed by the Norwegians or whether they
acted because their 'natural homeland' has been violated or because they
have been 'marginalised' by a racist society.
To us non-Western educated types, all this shows is that the Western
hypocrites who condone or turn a Nelsonian eye towards terrorists
operating on their soil will eventually get bitten in their hinds too.
Canada has seen a lot of drug and Tiger thug related violence already
and so has Britain.
This is what happens when they encourage terrorists to roost in their
lands to commit acts of violence in other countries.
R. F. GUNASEKERA
Looking at all those advertisements to make one get fairer, we seem
to be giving the message that "being dark is ugly". Now they have a
separate cream for the men, as if their skin pigment comes from a
different chemical. And obviously, the gullible public swallows it hook,
line and sinker, by the amount of money spent on these advertisements.
If we go by the advertisements, there should be a lot of ghost like
people walking around - with face as white as lily and the rest of the
body as dark as the night.
For the advertised, cream is only for the face. If we are to apply it
all over the body on one hand, you have to buy it bucket loads and on
the other hand, you would be doing nothing other than applying cream the
whole day.
Asians are darker - compared to the Western and Middle Eastern
people. Even the fairest of us will be considered as 'black' by the
westerners - as my personal experience showed me. So what? Who wants to
be 'like someone' else? We must teach our youth that they are beautiful
- as they truly are - irrespective of the skin colour.
There is no need to ape and gape at the West anymore - we got freedom
from their oppressive governance 50 years ago but their influence
unfortunately lingers on - or rather, had so deeply set in, it seems
impossible to erase it. Or so our elder generations attitude shows.
The irony is that the fair skinned Westerners love to become dark and
spend hours under the sun to get tanned. And the cream that make them
darker is another money spinner.
It's time we taught our children true values. The colour is skin deep
- does not matter at all. Whatever cream you apply it does not change
your colour -the skin colour depends on the amount of melanin pigment in
your skin cells - which is affected only by the genes you carry and the
amount of sunlight you expose yourself to.
It is time we stopped trying to make us look fairer than what we are.
And it's time to stop proclaiming being fairer is nicer. As one of my
sisters who is dark was taunted as 'Blackie', my father taught her to
rebut by saying "your fairness is on the sole of my feet, my darkness is
in your eyes". She never worried about the colour of her skin ever
again.
Dr. MAREENA THAHA REFFAI, Dehiwela
There is nothing more infuriating and frustrating for an air
traveller to be advised that his/her baggage is missing after landing at
the destination airport. This is what exactly has been happening with
British Airways international flights and thus highlighted recently when
the situation became somewhat chaotic.
Losing of passenger baggage with British Airways has been part and
parcel for some time. In 2006, only 23 bags went missing for every 1000
British Airways passengers. Between April and June in 2007, one in 35
passengers has complained about their lost baggage.
In an average forecast towards the end of 2007, it is estimated that
a record figure of 1.3 million bags will be counted as lost baggage from
BA flights.
Last month, the condition became worse when a BA flight from Heathrow
airport to India took off leaving scores of passengers' baggage. The
London flight to the city of Kolkatta (formerly known as Calcutta) left
60 pieces of baggage of 240 passengers on board.
The airline has also confirmed they were forced to fly jumbo jets
full of lost baggage to the US in an attempt to reunite passengers with
their belongings. In the past two months alone, the airline had to fly
ten special jumbo flights to New York in an attempt to clear a backlog
of 22,000 items not transported with the passengers.
Apart from transporting left passenger baggage by air, BA has used
containerised road transport to carry baggage to a central point in
Milan, Italy where, after sorting out, dispatches to passengers who live
in various parts of Europe were made.
BA chief executive, Willie Walsh, was quoted as blaming the faulty
conveyor belt that takes bags from Terminal 1 to Terminal 4 at Heathrow
airport, associated with an additional drawback of not having adequate
baggage handlers to do the job. Association of European Airlines has
named and shamed British Airways as one of the worst large airlines for
losing bags with one in 36 passengers affected.
British Airways pre-tax quarterly profits have hit a record sum of
Sterling Pounds 289 million while the airline has been fined Sterling
Pounds 270 million for colluding with Virgin Atlantic in price fixing
for a few years on the pretext of an additional fuel surcharge imposed
on customers.
Baggage handling of SriLankan direct flights to Colombo from Terminal
4 at Heathrow airport is undertaken by British Airways staff.
DR. TILAK S. FERNANDO, London
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