Rites/Rights Of Passage

I have just been through the process of renewing my Sri Lankan passport for the next 10 years, and have some experience to share, which I hope will be useful.

I have seen FB posts shared by helpful people, outlining the step by step process, and followed them. They were certainly very useful. But I have some additional insights, based on the experiences I had, and observed.

If you want a ‘One Day Passport’ Process: We were warned that the queues are huge, and that it would be best to start the application process early in the morning. VERY early in the morning - by 4am. When we arrived at that time, there were already 100 people ahead of us in the line, and it took almost an hour to get into the first building.

Tip: Make sure your original identity documents are safely protected in plastic folders and placed in a watertight plastic bag as well. Also bring a fold up umbrella. This is the rainy season.

Make sure your mobile phone is charged, and bring bottled water and snacks with you. It is going to be a LONG day. If you take medications, ensure you take them before you begin the process. Particularly blood pressure medication. There are stairs to climb before you get to the initial processing floor.

Tip: Try to go with a friend, so you can chat while you go through the long initial waiting queues.

Documents: Ensure that you download and print out the Passport Application Form and fill it out beforehand.

Make sure you have a Certified Copy (or 5) of your original Birth Certificate. Only a Certified Copy is acceptable.

Make sure you have True Copies of your current NIC, and relevant sections of your current Passports, attested by JPs, or similar authorities. Multiple copies are best (at least 3, and 5 is better).

The NIC copy must be in colour.

Tip: Although this is in fact stated on the Government website, it is perhaps not well understood in this period of transition that the old NIC which many of us have must be replaced by the new one, even if the old one is in fine condition. This is mandatory.,

Try your best to get the new NIC beforehand. This involves getting a photo taken on government approved software from an accredited photo studio, and attested by both the Grama Niladhari from your area AND the Divisional Secretariat. This process alone takes a lot of time, and travel, especially as the Grama Niladhari does not work every day of the week, but only on specific days. You need a special form to apply for the new NIC.

Tip: Your new Passport photo must also be authorised by government approved software. Try to get multiple copies of this photo as well.

If you are a Dual Citizen, you must take your original physical Certificate of Dual Citizenship and True Copies of it with you.

Step One is filling out the Application Form and presenting your supporting documents to be checked. This is where any issues will arise, and you may have to take side trips to provide relevant documentation.

Tip: All the big things happen on the Second Floor, centering on Room 20.

Step Two is waiting patiently while your new NIC card is approved, and issued, and then separately waiting patiently (up to 4-5 hours) for the old NIC number previously issued to you to be deleted from the system. This whole process takes up to 8 hours. There are too many people for the staff to notify you.

There is a 2000 LKR fee for the NIC card issuance. This can vary if you are charged a Penalty Fee for any reason. Keep the receipt as proof of payment.

Tip: Hand over your stapled Application documents (they call this a ‘file’ but it is a sheaf of papers), in the mid morning. Go and have lunch and return in the afternoon. Do not lose your small paper token which is given to you. Keep it safe. You will need to produce it on demand.

The NIC events occur on the Ninth Floor.

Tip: The new NIC is not eternally valid. It must be renewed every 10 years.

Step Three is getting your fingerprints taken. This is back on the Second Floor, in Room 20.

Step Four is paying the fee for the One Day process. This is also on the Second Floor, near Room 20. It is 20,000 LKR, payable in cash. Have that with you. Keep the receipt.

Step Five is waiting patiently on the First Floor for the new Passport to be issued to you.

Bonus points to the Government for hiring very experienced and professional administrative staff, from the dignified ladies in saree, to the energetic and bearded young men, and the wise gentlemen and lady Security Guards, whose presence, patience and dedication make the whole experience a great deal smoother than it otherwise would be.

Thanks also to the brilliant individual (or team) who decided to put a popcorn machine in one of the largest waiting areas, much to the delight and sustenance of all.

The large numbers of people we saw as we all progressed at various stages through the entire process were in good spirits. Many had clearly travelled a long way, from regional and rural areas, and diverse communities, ethnicities, ages and classes were represented. Everyone treated each other with respect and courtesy. There was a heartening spirit of kindness prevalent. Many strangers advised others, who clearly needed guidance, about practical steps and things to watch out for.

Tip: Wear a mask, N395 standard if possible. Many people are coughing, in close proximity to each other, with various ailments, no one covers their mouths, and the lifts between floors are very crowded. Do not get ill, if you can avoid it.

Good luck! Do not listen to people who complain. The staff at the Department of Immigration and Emigration are dealing with immense numbers of people every day, and are doing so with great patience and tolerance.

ColourBlind Casting

Image credit: Glamour Magazine

Over the past 25 years, we have seen many adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, and the adaptations have in several cases been visually very confronting and challenging, for some viewers. I believe this trend started with the Miramax adaptation of Mansfield Park, released in 1999.

While this production did not cast people of colour in the main roles, or even in minor roles, it is the first production ever to have vividly illuminated the cruelty, objectification and exploitation of slavery, as part of colonialism and enrichment, as practised by Sir Thomas Bertram, owner of Mansfield Park, in a way which shocks the heroine, Fanny, who is the moral centre of the story.

The revelation of the sources of his wealth and status show the questionable ethical conduct of the patriarch of this family, and provide a context for the subsequent moral disintegration of his children, who all fall prey to forms of temptation and depravity, even Edmund, who is intimately redeemed only by his affection for Fanny.

In more recent years, we have seen the quasi Regency Shondaland confection, Bridgerton, on our screens, openly using the slightest of speculations regarding the genetic ancestry of an English queen as a framing portal to usher in women and men of African and Indian heritage into the story landscape, each with their colourful back stories.

This inclusiveness and diversification trend has extended into the 19thC production ‘The Gilded Age’, in which wealthy African American families are brought into connection by the story writers with the Anglo-European families of New York.

In Bridgerton, the scenes where the elder sister of the Sharma family, in Season Two, participates with her younger sister and mother in the saffron/ turmeric paste beautifying rituals traditionally used by Indian brides before the impending wedding ceremony are beautiful to see. The love story between Miss Sharma and the eldest son of the Bridgerton family is based on an ‘enemies to friends’ arc which is very believable, and in which contrasting skin colour is no barrier to the recognition of beauty and desirable character qualities.

This preference to bring characters together across social barriers was foreshadowed in Season One when the eldest Bridgerton daughter falls in love with the dark and handsome Duke, and their magnetic attraction to each other is intensely illustrated in their words and actions, inter alia as a celebration of their equality or at least equivalence of social status.

In Jane Austen’s adaptations, we have not seen any casting director go beyond the pale, and venture into colourblind casting. Elizabeth Bennet may be accused by the jealous Miss Bingley of having ‘brown’ skin, but (fortunately for all of us clutching our pearls) it is only ‘tanned’, which is ‘no great wonder, in the summer’.

Shakespeare’s work, in contrast, has been often performed with people of all hues and from all ethnic backgrounds in the principal roles, and recent performances of Harry Potter on the stage actually cast a black Hermione Granger. The author herself, in her description of the characters, never specified Hermione’s ethnic heritage, only stating that she had bushy hair, and it is clear that the prettiest girls in Hogwarts School were the Indian Patel twins, and the Chinese Cho Chang.

Bridgerton aside, this embracing of diversity in the film and stage productions of beloved books which are regarded as central to the English literary canon is a trend about which I have mixed feelings. The realities of colonisation and the assertions of white supremacists created a conceptual underclass, in which people of colour lived their lives as minor characters and in service to the central characters. And therefore, in the cultural products of those eras, artworks were created in which people of colour were erased, or invisible.

The comments sections of Jane Austen online groups is an interesting snapshot of our times.

‘Mansfield Park has, to my mind, the best TV Austen adaptation of all time: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p04vfvpn via @bbciplayer

Impeccable costuming, wonderful casting, fidelity to the novel, understanding of the period, and no painful, anachronistic, ignorantly woke attempts to force every third character to be black or trans.’

Shoehorning people of colour into European landscapes is problematic. But what seems to really offend some people is the high status which these people of colour are afforded, in these fictional narratives. It is ‘anachronistic and painful’, because it clearly offends supremacist beliefs that people of colour could be so well established, so dignified, and elegantly costumed, and coiffured, and move as equals through gilded drawing rooms, and be centered in narratives instead of sidelined.

One of the worst and laziest equations ever made is the lumping together of minorities as second class citizens, seen as having lesser value: women, disabled people, trans people, people of colour and people exhibiting other forms of divergence from a standard of normativeness which is male, heterosexual and with skin containing less melanin, into the messy category of ‘different’, which to the minds of many is a euphemism for ‘deviant’. Women are not even a minority, statistically.

In Georgette Heyer’s novel, These Old Shades, the Duke of Avon’s sister has a black servant boy, called Pompey. The social mobility we are being shown in what I term Regency concoctions is wish fulfillment on the part of those who prefer a more colourful and equitable world, and have chosen to create it themselves, in fictional storytelling, reality falling far short of the way they clearly wish the world to be.

Colourblind casting on the one hand asserts the primacy of human personality, of intelligence and soul and emotion, as being more significant than external identifiers of race, colouring, facial features, hair type, physiognomy and body shape. In these contemporary performances, it is visually suggested that calibre, and content of character, is more important than the colour of a person’s skin. We relate to the characters on our screens as human beings, and we become interested and involved in their challenges and experiences as if they were real, and relatable.

However, in our identity obsessed world, it is also a form of false equivalence, and erasure of difference. We are not all human flat packs, culturally constructed the same. Our unique social and anthropological characteristics, and the cultural traditions in which we have evolved, are part of us.

The genders are different, and more diversely and subtly formulated these days. The actor who played the eldest Bridgerton son could not be more than a good friend to the lovely Miss Sharma, in real life.

This celebration of difference is at the heart of any union of human beings, whether personal in marriage, or political, in the form of nations. Tolerance is not a grudging recognition of someone else’s equivalent centre of self, but ideally, in a less threatened and defensive society, a more positive delight in multifoliate hues and difference.

In our excitable contemporary world, in which people find it difficult to do anything other than compete for territory and contest the most desirable sociocultural space to occupy, and the most compelling platforms on which to speak their truths, it is the reinterpretations of classic stories which portray to us the evolution of our species. Both in the bold steps forward, with the diversification of what we are now being shown as admirable and worthy, and the hue and cry (often muted, in genteel literary groups) that inevitably follows.

Home Maintenance

I had thought that the house would feel empty and forlorn, but it does not.

I know the art of entertaining, you see. I have been learning it for five years, now.

But now, the hosts have gone, bowing out one by one, and what are left are some items to be inventoried, and evanescence. If I stop and sit for a while each day, in silence in their rooms, thinking of them, each beloved face, will they see me, remembering them?

At first, I just put framed photographs up everywhere, and further contained them in garlands of fairy lights in the shape of butterflies. Battery operated, to withstand the vagaries of powercuts.

When I come home from an evening out, I find these fancifully lit portraits illuminated, like modern Books of Hours. As I remove shoes and shawls and cloaks, it feels as if I am being gently welcomed.

My friend asked a priest to come and bless the house and all those who had dwelled there, and he went through from room to room, saying the words of a cumulative blessing, and went through to the gardens, and did the same.

I let my thoughts trail, and they trace a sparkling path, up the oak stairs carved with large acorns, representing resilience and endurance, and the lights in their rooms down the hall suggest that the inhabitants of these rooms might still be amongst us, or I amongst them. I was the youngest, you see.

This feeling of their presence is even stronger when I play music that they loved, or watch the films my parents used to view together.

My Mother left me a list of movies she said I absolutely had to see. Old films, some from the first half of the 20th century. Those flared skirts, those intimate words, the subtle details of those stories.

The aerated vowels of those actors and actresses, emulated now by the gorgeous facsimiles of confectionery, Bridgerton and The Gilded Age, the way we want to believe everyone was. The certainty with which everyone seemed to say just what they felt. The soft brushing undercurrents of what was not said, leaving us second guessing. The living coral, left at the depths where it was still alive, not dragged up by facilitators today, petrified into lumpenness.

What is needed in these stormy seas is to be like one of those carved figures on the prow, you know, that would face outwards, challenging any storm. Withstanding. Outstanding.

Each one of these films contained a message for me, she told me in her note. It was my task to find out what that wisdom was, image by image, and construct meaning from it. Like a treasure hunt, or a paper trail, or white pebbles in a fairy tale.

So I view The Ghost And Mrs. Muir, and Yellow Rolls Royce, and Doctor Zhivago, and many starring Ingrid Bergman, and of course Roman Holiday and Somewhere In Time, and The King And I. And the house was full of movement and pictures. Starry, starry nights.

Lena Horne and Dinah Washington and Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald roll out the velvet carpets of their voices.

Mourning used to mean wearing black or grey or white for a year, denuding oneself of encumbering jewels and costumery, and abstaining from merriment and from going out to crowded places. This was to protect the public from the sudden weaknesses that blow up like storms in the psyche, which compel those of us who are grieving to excuse ourselves and go home.

At Christmas, there were crackers ornamenting the festive table. And people forgot, and said, take some home for the family.

Like new lovers, understandably eager for privacy, we who grieve seek the solace of the silence. There is a sacredness in turning away from the outside world, and laying aside the masks and carapaces, and letting our softer sides show.

There are tiny shot glasses, in jewel colours. Arrayed on polished trays, they dazzle the tired eyes.

All the veterans of loss tell me that a routine helps get through the consecutive days. A rope we throw ourselves, to prevent sinking. But we can wrap our days so tightly that nothing fresh can get through, and that is unnatural. It’s important to have calendars and clocks, to measure the time passing, because there are two times in which a grieving person lives, at once. And both need to be felt, and their impact allowed to shape us.

I do not know any answers to the questions I used to contemplate so contentedly, and with such assurance, when all the seats at the table were filled.

Hello, I want to say, raising my glass in a flamboyant and generous gesture, all you beautiful people, wherever you are, all my best wishes go with you tonight. This is how I welcome thoughts that are difficult to greet, and learn to entertain them.

From other worlds, those who no longer live in this house may be aware of the lights in the rooms, through the windows, visible from outside.

The State Of The Union

Image credit: Economic Times

We live in a time of great change: disruptions in what we have all taken for granted, right down to the sources of our survival and security. The rules and codes of conduct are being rewritten every day.

Of course, this is reflected in our personal relationships: and the marriage and divorce rates, in particular. In recent days, religious leaders have declared that marriage between same sex couples is invalid, as marriage is designed as a protection for children.

But is it? Is a home unbroken and whole when the couple stay together but fight all the time, and commit deceptions and betrayals against each other within the relationship? Often with their children seeing and hearing the conflicts in the home?

The marital landscape in Sri Lanka has become increasingly complicated. The traditional scenario, as explained to me fairly recently, was that people here get married in their late twenties, or early thirties, to please their parents and secure their status in their social groups.

They have children, and then they start to grow in their professional lives and expand their horizons and sense of personal entitlement and aspirations in their thirties and forties. Having married to please others, and with comparatively little knowledge of the character of their partner, they then have opportunistic affairs with people they encounter, usually at work, with these connections being intensified by secrecy and a sense of operating in illicit and clandestine circumstances. In their late thirties, and early forties, with the children becoming teenagers, they try to persuade their partners to enter into open marriages.

An open marriage in 2025 seems like a relic of the swinging sixties, popularized in London and California. In conservative South Asia, where sex education is not taught to young people, dating culture is repressive, and pornographic material is widely available, such a lifestyle meets very little moral resistance. In fact, it is seen by many who proclaim themselves as participants in these arrangements as a measure of a person’s desirability and high value: an index of their success in life. These values are evident in the lives of those for whom monetary success, public image and social status are paramount, and whose relationships are often transactional, because that is what is modelled for them in every aspect of their lives, and reinforced by their peers.

But polyamorous and multiple partner relationships are not imported from the West. Americans always think they invented everything first, from sexuality to superfoods. But polyandry was practised in Sri Lanka for centuries, before colonial culture stamped it out, and imposed monogamy and monotheism and marital monotony.

The only way that complex interconnections between human beings who are simultaneously impacted on by traditional culture, biological imperatives and colonial impositions can be navigated is through a societal normalisation of polyamory. Both partners must be equally desired by others, for such an arrangement to truly offer equal opportunity. Obviously, protection must be used, against STDs, as well as pregnancy. And to prevent the time wasting emotional debris of jealousy and recrimination, pre-nuptial agreements should be mutually agreed on, so that if any of the relationships becomes more significant than any other, or the number of extra marital liaisons cumulatively wear away any residual loyalty or affection, the material assets of each party in the marriage are protected. Because they will each need to move on with their lives after they separate.

The people who suffer most in so-called open marriages are those who still adhere to the traditional beliefs of marriage: that the union of two people is a bond entered into for life, protected by mutual promises to care for each other, and undertaken primarily as a foundation for building a family. This concept does not allow any third party into the marital landscape, and places all the onus on the two marital partners to maintain a harmonious and fulfilling connection, navigating their differences and the challenges of modern life with as much goodwill as they can summon up.

Today, unlike the relationships which were brokered in the past, many people marry across boundaries of race, religion, social class and economic disparity. This complicates matters, but also helps expand the scope of the personal commitment between the partners. It looks as if love alone is what is guiding their decisions. Yet even amongst these love marriages there has been a significant recent, and very sharp, increase in divorce, and ‘open marriages’ in Sri Lanka entered into after the monogamous model has proved too restrictive, are usually one-sided, franchising one partner whose sexual rights and freedoms are imposed on the weaker partner against their will.

However, I would argue that in our twenties, and thirties, at the height of our biological fertility and virility, we are also often comparatively ignorant of our true self. The decisions we make are often self serving, or self sacrificial, and quite superficial. We do not yet know our value, or what our own preferences and best interests are.

It is wise to identify romantic relationships early on as being the single most avoidable cause of distress and drama in human life. They are risky. And they are rarely worth entering into. Because we enter in ignorance - not only blind but multi-handicapped. The odds are hardly ever in our favour.

We are warned in the religious scriptures to not be ‘unequally yoked’ in life. This is an image taken from the days when oxen were harnessed by farmers into a wooden frame to enable them to keep an even and steady pace, side by side, when furrowing a field, to ensure a good harvest. Marriage is a harness into which both partners willingly enter. Both at the outset give up other opportunities to choose each other. To the extent that they remain in unity, the productivity is high, the yield abundant.

But such a unity develops over time. And most people who do not select their partners wisely are unequally yoked from the beginning. In addition to sexual naivety is the related problem of psychological unawareness: lack of insight into one’s own specific circumstances, needs and desires. Social stigmas operate here, to keep us unsafe and vulnerable.

Superficial selection processes stress the physical appearance of the partner, and look at their social and economic status rather than their emotional and psychological resilience and mental health, and what their aims are, in life. Discussions about financial ambitions, monetary habits, health issues, and daily routines rarely seem to occur before the splashy or showy ceremonies are planned.

Marriage experts say that the best predictor of longevity in marriage is how well the couple handles conflict. And the best indicator that the marriage is beyond saving is when they feel and express not hatred, but contempt and indifference for each other, and dismiss their concerns as irrelevant. Intimacy is defined as ‘Into Me You See’, and this is only positive when such insight is handled respectfully, and with care, not weaponised when the couple argue.

Respect is the healthiest foundation of a good union, and long term friendship, and accountability. The ability to identify patterns of behaviour and work to alter them is also a key component in durable marital relationships. The vital skillset required is the ability to adapt to changing circumstances. People evolve in astonishing ways throughout their lives: at a far deeper level than a mere makeover.

Marriage requires us to confront the roles society would try to allocate to us: wife and mother; husband and father; head caterer; financial provider; bill payer; bacon home bringer; multi tasker; activities organiser; supporter; social engineer; tower of strength behind the scenes; unsung hero, etc. And outside this circle of respectable covered wagons are the freelancers: the unicorns; the potential homewreckers; the sugar babies; the filles de joies, the women with the push up bras, the men with the ambiguous visages; the escorts and third wheels.

If a person marries with a sense of a soulseated and spiritual bond, and an intellectual connection, as well as with the attractions of their hearts and bodies, this is the most connected two people can be. But even such a blessed union can only deepen and strengthen with mutual observance of what is due to it.

Marriages face innumerable challenges in the predatory society of today, where people are deemed to lose value when they age, or lose money, or become less successful, or are otherwise devalued by society. Women who have children believing they will gain respect are often disillusioned when the opposite occurs, if their husbands are not family men: they are taken for granted, and diminish from a trophy girlfriend to a mother of children, too tired to hang on a partner’s arm or be one half of a glamorous power couple. Many men in a patriarchal society seek to have both a private life and a public one: the most brazen conduct their affairs publicly.

How does a person develop their life path in a productive way, in such a volatile context? How do people commit to responsibilities and commitments as part of being a partner in a union, instead of seeking temporary escapes every time something frustrates them? If a person is surrounded by fawning and flattery at work, but confrontation and challenge at home, where his/her flaws are known by his/her partner, how can s/he withstand the contrast? Will s/he not choose the easier option?

In Celtic culture, marriages were deemed to end each year, unless both parties agreed to continue them. There is much to be said for this approach: it flips the script on the assumed longevity, and takes nothing for granted, bringing any grievances out into the open, where they can be dealt with.

We human beings live a long time, now. And the odds are against a partner chosen in their 20s being able to grow in compatible ways with us throughout the eras of our long lives. Children are our legal responsibility for 18 years. Once they are mature enough to make their own path, the parents still have each other to care for. It’s at this point that some people choose to return to a single state. They have shared their lives, bodies, dreams and finances with another person, and there’s a time limit on that level of exposure when the need is gone.

Now there is less stigma in divorce. Everyone understands that mistakes are made, in early life. Open marriages prolong the messiness and the boundary collapses which erode a primary connection. Some practitioners of open marriages say infidelity provides safety valves and avenues of release. But it draws third parties into unwanted drama, and contaminates the dynamic between the marital partners, eroding mutual trust and safety, and devaluing the promises the partners initially made to each other. It makes heartfelt repair of a relationship almost impossible to achieve.

I want to add that in a good union, it is the increased need of partners for each other’s support as they grow older that consolidates the marriage.

But that if they are unequally yoked, or incompatible, or at different levels of evolution, one partner’s illness or frailty causes the other to draw away. This is the unmistakeable sign of true commitment. That a partner wants to stay, in sickness and in health, and the best of them, if asked, would say there is nowhere else they would rather be.

Marriage is a marvellous melding of multiple undertakings: to care, to protect, to provide for, to nurture, to give as well as take, to find joy and belonging in a mutual flow of feeling and action. It sets a high bar, and is a test many people fail. If we enter it, we should be better prepared and more realistic and open-minded than we currently are, if we want better results. It is a life changing decision, whatever the outcome.

Day dreams and soft focus romantic fantasies will not prepare us for the consequences.