I was standing behind a friend yesterday when I thought it would be fun to cover his eyes like an immature being, and he responds immediately, “Ah Sri Lanka!.”

Since my hands remain covering his eyes, I ask him how he knew it to be me. He replies, “well it was easy, I saw a black woman going past me, and I knew it was you!”.

“Racist!”I call him, and tell him that he was trying to spread the apartheid, but left it at that as I knew the man had no brain and mouth filter at times. Last night being one of those moments when he announced quite generoulsy to a guy I found attractive that I was in the process of evaluating how he looks. Despite the fact that he was being an idiot, the line made me consider a lot of things. His reply to my accusation of him being a racist was, “well you are black non?”.

I wondered how a lot of Sri Lankans would react to his words. With all the money they invest in facials, creams and make up, so as to look lighter skinned as they humanly could achieve.

My buddy was not a true “whitie” in theory, (though of course his skin was ten shades lighter than mine) given that he came from one of those tropical French colonies. He says he misses the place since his move to the land of his coloniser about 6 years ago, while we walk to the stadium together one morning.

Having listened to him and his chatter, I ask him whether he ever manages to hook up with a woman, given his horrendous bluntness in analysing things, and he responds that he did manage a long while back and thus not too up-to-date with flirting. A few days later, he lobbies someone from the ministry of finance, a short haired young lady who he orbits at a party. I bug him over it and he tells me it is all part of lobbying. I show him the middle finger as he had already embarrassed me in public at 2 am with his thoughtless announcements.

Well coming back to the original topic of people, men and women and most importantly shades of skin,  I think I should introduce my buddy to people in Sri Lanka. He would call all of them black, and go “you are black non?” with his air of “I have proved my point, so you better not say anything different”.

So to sum it in short, I shalt say bless those poor souls in South Asia who consider them not too black, but close to a lighter shades of brown, and make sure that fair and lovely is applied with all reverence! Bless all those souls who think they are yellow, cause the make-up companies decided to create foundation shades called yellow or saffron!

Going with my buddy’s precedence I shalt type thus:  the world has only two shades. Black, and white! And the rest is..well non-existent.