On June 26, 2011 Tropical Amsterdam screened at the 1st Kandy International Film Festival in Kandy, Sri Lanka. It was shown as a double feature together with the documentary Gandhi’s Children by Vishnu Vasu, a native Kandyan, that tells us about poverty and inequity in India. I would have loved to be in the audience to experience the two worlds of struggle portrayed in the two documentaries – worlds that could hardly be further apart. Disadvantaged people in post-colonial India struggling to survive versus a privileged group of underdogs in Sri Lanka struggling to hold on to their memories of colonial grandeur.
As you can deduct from the above lines, once again I wasn’t able to attend the screening myself, but I will share a few memories of my last visit to Kandy in December 2009 when we went there to interview Jean Arasanayagam in her hometown.
 |
| View from Queens Hotel |
That night we stayed at the colonial Queens Hotel. It dominates Kandy downtown and overlooks the lake. To my opinion, it is one of the most beautiful British colonial buildings in Sri Lanka today. A huge part of it’s enchantment comes from the almost original structure and feeling it preserves till today. The rooms are simple and a bit run down, compared to the fashionable boutique hotels that mushroom these days. Queens’ rooms are huge in size, with a big comfortable bed, dark hardwood floors and the essential ceiling fan circling slowly. No air-condition, which is right up my alley, and because of all the missing “modern comfort”, a night is quite affordable. A beautiful bar leads to the pool area in the backyard. The huge dining room as well as the even bigger hall for dancing emanates colonial pleasures. Jean Arasanayagam still recalls the planters, Brits and Burghers, coming down from the surrounding hills to the Queens for weekly social pleasures as well as for celebrating glamorous dinner dances during Christmas and New Years. She also vividly recalls the Independence Celebrations of 1948 with fireworks right at the lake next to the Queens Hotel. Jean came to watch with her parents. She did not understand what freedom from alien rule was at that time, she was still too young, but she remembers it as one of the most joyous occasions.
 |
| Queens, Ball Room Renovation |
 |
| Queens Hotel |
 |
| Queens, Dining Room |
 |
| Alexa Oona Schulz at the Queens Lobby |
No comments:
Post a Comment