Pri's blog

Peg (Margaret) Snyder has passed away.   I learned this today through a message from  Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director, UN Women  Peg was born in 1929 and this would have been her 92nd year. P humzile pays a tribute to her role as “ a pathfinder in the work for gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. Referred to as the ‘UN’s First Feminist’, ..[she was the] first director of the Voluntary Fund for the UN Decade for Women,  [and]she subsequently became the founding director in 1978 of UNIFEM, or the UN Development Fund for Women, which she led for over a decade”  and you can read more about her illustrious career here on Wikipedia .  There is much in that Wikipedia article that as activists following in her footsteps we need to know, admire, celebrate and take forward . The view from the "West Wing" window I met Peg Snyder just three or four years ago, when at the request of a neighbour, Nancy Baldwin,  at 10 Mitchell Place where she lived in New Yo

  photo by Sharni Jayewardene ---------- Today Somadevi Pattini Kannangara (nee Ranasinha) would have been 97 years old, had she not left this world, much too early, almost four decades ago.   It is difficult to picture what my mother might have looked like or been like  in her 90s… She was beautiful, both inside and out, she was clever, she was fun, she had impeccable taste and she had this great capacity to love.    Her father, my grandfather, despite his very colonial orientation (he was Sir Arthur after all) gave his children very local names.  His eldest son, DKVB Ranasinha had the names Darshana Kumaru Vijaya Bahu, his younger daughter was Sita Rupawathie, and my mother, his second child born when he was GA Jaffna was Somadevi Pattini.  Goddess Pattini  or Kannaki Amma as she is known to Sri Lankan Hindu community, is venerated by both Buddhists and Hindus – but her feminine energy that made her at once a good wife and a vengeful one, and the respect she engenders,  has meant t