Golden Oldie
I love you
because, Song
Kotelawala's stories
1.Reply to Jawaharlal Nehru
Sir
John Kotelawala succeeded Mr Dudley Senanayake as Prime Minister in the 1950's.
He was a ladies man and had a coterie of 'hangers-on', dubbed the 'purple
brigade' by all and sundry. Sir John had a ready wit and a reckless repartee,
which caused very often complications.
He
attended the 'Bandung conference' when the first conference of non-aligned
countries took place in Indonesia. India and China attended the conference.
Long before the Indo-Chinese war, an effort was being made on the principles of
'Pancha sheela', to settle problems of the non aligned countries. Each
representative was given an allotted time span to speak. Sir John, when his
turn came, did an all out attack on Communist China. This caused a lot of
embarrassment. The Hon. Jawaharlal Nehru remonstrated with Sir John, after the
speech, about its content. He told Sir John, "You should have shown me the
script of your speech, before delivering it". Sir John replied "You did not
show me the script of your speech, before you delivered it". A lot of
diplomatic feathers got ruffled by this incident.
2. Learning French, "under the blanket".
In
another foreign trip that Sir John went on, he made some remarks in the French
language. A reporter had commented on his excellent command of the French
language and asked Sir John, where he learnt it. Prompt came the reply
"Under the blanket".
'Ombers' passing through Colombo
I
heard this story in my secondary school days in the 1950's. The Korean war was
in full swing. The Americans thought, that they were bombing hell out of the
'commies', in North Korea. Our own airport in Colombo was used by the bombers
of the USAF for refueling. One of our red comrades in parliament got up to
speak about this. He said
"Hon Speaker, I want to raise
our objection to the Colombo airport being used, by the USAF to refuel it's
bombers". (He pronounced both b's in the word bombers as 'BomBers').
A comrade by his side prompted him,
to correct his mistake and whispered to him "B is silent". The speaker
comrade corrected himself in the next sentence as follows
"Mr Speaker
these OMBERS should be stopped from using Ceylon's airport".
Recently
I heard an announcer in the Indian TV "Doordharshan" pronounce both
b's in the word bomber and pronounce it 'BomBer'.
The 'wicked bible'.
A copy
of The Bible was printed in 1632. This was published by a leading publisher in
London, called Baker and Lucas. It had one of the Ten Commandments printed as
"Thou shalt commit adultery". The 'not' had been left out
accidentally - a so-called 'printer's devil'. This edition got the name
"The wicked bible" because of this 'error in printing'.
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