Features

Harpo: a brand with the flavor of music

Published

3 years ago

2023/05/7

by Malinda Seneviratne

Harpo. Harpo? That’s music. That’s what people who were young in the nineteen eighties would have said, if they moved in certain circles. DJ Harpo. A man. At first I thought ‘DJ’ were his initials. But ‘Harpo?’ What kind of name was that, I asked myself. It was much later that I learned of the Marx brothers and that they were not related to Karl. The name stuck though. DJ Harpo.

My friends who loved music more than I did and knew much more than I would ever know, talked about him. Harpo, since then, was ‘all about music’. So much so that when the name came to be associated with pizza, I kind of told myself, ‘must be some other Harpo.’ In other words, I knew next to nothing of the man.

Born on May 30, 1961, he was named Lalith Clarence Gooneratne. No one calls him ‘Lalith,’ though. In fact Harpo says only his bank knows him as Lalith. He was ‘christened’ Harpo by his father when he was but a toddler because apparently his father had noticed that he resembled Harpo Marx. The name stuck. Long before it became a brand.

A fourth generation Thomian, Harpo was heavily involved in extracurricular activities. His first stint as an entertainer had been in theatre, where he acted in inter-house plays alongside star schoolboy actors Richard De Zoysa and Chanaka Amaratunga, who went on to distinguish themselves in other fields later in life. He was a President’s Scout and also played rugby and Second XI cricket. He once mentioned that he regretted not having played in the Centenary Royal-Thomian encounter in 1979.

Clearly passionate about a lot of things, Harpo insists that nothing inspires greater passion in him than people. The hospitality industry therefore seemed to have been made for him. After his OLs, Harpo joined the Claremont Hotel School where he claims he learned everything: ‘the full Monty, from cleaning toilets, to scullery, store-keeping and everything to do with the industry.’

After completing his course in 1983, Harpo joined the Capri Club. That was the beginning. ‘There was never a dull moment. I was always firefighting with something or the other,’ he recalls and in fact this was how it was throughout his long career in the trade.

Music of course was an early love, so to speak. Harpo had grown up listening to the Velona Hit Parade and the BBC Top 20. Deejaying he owes to Gabo (Gamini Peiris), the other name that young people in the eighties associated with music.

‘It was a part time thing. I needed some cash. Gabo had equipment and hotels needed DJs. I worked until five or six at the Capri and would head out to hotels south of Colombo and return the following morning.

‘When I worked with Gabo I listened to a lot of songs. He flew around and picked up records. Back then, as you know, there were no CDs, no MP3s; it was strictly vinyl. Funk and jazz was what I most enjoyed but as a DJ one has to play anything that people wanted.’

He was and is people-fixated, one might say. He made a name for himself even as he had fun doing stuff he loved. Gabo had the equipment but Harpo eventually put together all the equipment he needed such as mirror balls, bullet beams, helicopter lighting, smoke machines and everything else required for a mobile discotheque.

Few would know that Harpo did a stint in advertising, working as an Accounts Executive at Grey’s Advertising from 1984 to 1986. He handled the accounts of Upali and Kandos, Unic Radio, Delta Toffee and The Finance Company.

It was not his ‘thing’ in that he had a different kind of calling. He moved to Ramada Renaissance Hotel (later, Transasia Hotel) where he handled logistics and also worked as a music presenter at ‘The Library’.

After 10 years, Harpo was headhunted and recruited by Hilton as the Business Development Manager.

‘Hilton International at the time planned to set up a Deli Market. I worked in the project office, focusing on setting up a businessman’s club called “Windows on the World.” It never happened, though. I left in 1999 and joined Millennium Park (now Excel World) and helped set things up.

Then one day, he got a call from Simon Barlow, the Vice President (Asia/Pacific) of Hilton, who wanted Harpo to work in China as a consultant on a project to revamp a restaurant on the China-Russia border.

‘I worked for three months. This was around the time 9/11 happened. Then I did another stint in Japan, again for Hilton.’

While in Japan, he got a call from Colombo and he returned to become the General Manager of Crescat.

‘All my life I had worked with corporates. After a few years at Crescat I decided it is time for me to move on and set up my own thing. Hospitality was in my blood, so it had to be people-related. Of course it didn’t have to be related to food, but that’s the turn I took.’

In 2004 he set up Harpo’s Cafes and Restaurants. What he did was manage people’s headaches. The headaches of those who owned and/or ran restaurants. It was essentially a management company.

‘The first was “The Commons.” At one point they decided to sell and offered me the right of refusal. I bought it in 2008/9. He now has Bayleaf, the Park Street Mews Restaurant and Curve, a tapas bar next to it, the Colombo Fort Cafe in the Dutch Hospital restaurant complex and Commons at Hatch.’

Today people know ‘Harpo’s Pizza’. They know Harpo serves pizzas that are way better than those offered by the better known international brands. It was the first time a local player entered the pizza business.

‘It’s home-made. I make my own sauces and pasta which you can now find in supermarkets,’ he said.

Having started at Bay Leaf, Harpo now has three pizza parlors, one in Nugegoda, another in Etul Kotte and a third in Ja Ela. Through these outlets and via Hot Wheels (his own delivery service) and Uber Eats, Harpo sells around 1,000 a pizzas a month.

It was of course not plain sailing from beginning to end. There were tough times. Harpo, mirroring in a way what could be called an inimitable Sri Lankan ethos, observes, ‘There was the 88-89 insurrection, the war and yet we still did discos, the entertainment industry still flourished for it was part of a lifestyle.’

‘Even today, just a few months after the deadly Easter Sunday attacks, from a tourism point of view, we kicked in much faster than did Bali after it suffered a terrorist attack,’ Harpo pointed out. We are, he insisted, ‘a resilient nation!’

Today, he leads a simple life. He travels a bit overseas, but clearly nothing gives him greater pleasure than delighting people.

‘Coming to work is not coming to work. I am a very hands-on manager and am always with my staff of around 200 people.’

The young man who took a bus from Hotel School to Aluthgama, was received by his electrician who took him on a push bicycle from hotel to hotel, so he could entertain people, is now Harpo. A brand. Another name for pizza in Colombo. He’s also DJ Harpo.

‘Many still connect with me that way but now I am better known as a pizza person,’ he said. Time passes. And time inevitably leaves traces of it passing. In 1961, fond parents named their new born child Lalith Clarence Gooneratne. No one remembers that name. At some point he was called ‘Harpo’.

In time, he inscribed a melody on the name ‘Harpo’. Later still, he gave it a flavor. And through it all, certain things remained unchanged: a ready smile, a simple philosophy about keeping things simple, an absolute celebration of life and an unabated will to make people happy. Attributes of a brand. A brand called ‘Harpo’.

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Features

Ranking public services with AI — A roadmap to reviving institutions like SriLankan Airlines

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

Efficacy measures an organisation’s capacity to achieve its mission and intended outcomes under planned or optimal conditions. It differs from efficiency, which focuses on achieving objectives with minimal resources, and effectiveness, which evaluates results in real-world conditions. Today, modern AI tools, using publicly available data, enable objective assessment of the efficacy of Sri Lanka’s government institutions.

Among key public bodies, the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka emerges as the most efficacious, outperforming the Department of Inland Revenue, Sri Lanka Customs, the Election Commission, and Parliament. In the financial and regulatory sector, the Central Bank of Sri Lanka (CBSL) ranks highest, ahead of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Public Utilities Commission, the Telecommunications Regulatory Commission, the Insurance Regulatory Commission, and the Sri Lanka Standards Institution.

Among state-owned enterprises, the Sri Lanka Ports Authority (SLPA) leads in efficacy, followed by Bank of Ceylon and People’s Bank. Other institutions assessed included the State Pharmaceuticals Corporation, the National Water Supply and Drainage Board, the Ceylon Electricity Board, the Ceylon Petroleum Corporation, and the Sri Lanka Transport Board. At the lower end of the spectrum were Lanka Sathosa and Sri Lankan Airlines, highlighting a critical challenge for the national economy.

Sri Lankan Airlines, consistently ranked at the bottom, has long been a financial drain. Despite successive governments’ reform attempts, sustainable solutions remain elusive.

Globally, the most profitable airlines operate as highly integrated, technology-enabled ecosystems rather than as fragmented departments. Operations, finance, fleet management, route planning, engineering, marketing, and customer service are closely coordinated, sharing real-time data to maximise efficiency, safety, and profitability.

The challenge for Sri Lankan Airlines is structural. Its operations are fragmented, overly hierarchical, and poorly aligned. Simply replacing the CEO or senior leadership will not address these deep-seated weaknesses. What the airline needs is a cohesive, integrated organisational ecosystem that leverages technology for cross-functional planning and real-time decision-making.

The government must urgently consider restructuring Sri Lankan Airlines to encourage:

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

=Collaborative strategic decisions on route rationalisation, fleet renewal, partnerships, and cost management, rather than exclusive top-down mandates

Sustainable reform requires systemic change. Without modernised organisational structures, stronger accountability, and aligned incentives across divisions, financial recovery will remain out of reach. An integrated, performance-oriented model offers the most realistic path to operational efficiency and long-term viability.

Reforming loss-making institutions like Sri Lankan Airlines is not merely a matter of leadership change — it is a structural overhaul essential to ensuring these entities contribute productively to the national economy rather than remain perpetual burdens.

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

Features

Why Pi Day?

Published

2 days ago

2026/03/13

Thilina Walpola

International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

The approximate value of Pi (π) is 3.14 in mathematics. Therefore, the day 14 March is celebrated as the Pi Day. In 2019, UNESCO proclaimed 14 March as the International Day of Mathematics.

Ancient Babylonians and Egyptians figured out that the circumference of a circle is slightly more than three times its diameter. But they could not come up with an exact value for this ratio although they knew that it is a constant. This constant was later named as π which is a letter in the Greek alphabet.

Archimedes

It was the Greek mathematician Archimedes (250 BC) who was able to find an upper bound and a lower bound for this constant. He drew a circle of diameter one unit and drew hexagons inside and outside the circle such that the sides of each hexagon touch the sides of the circle. In mathematics the circle passing through all vertices of a polygon is called a ‘circumcircle’ and the largest circle that fits inside a polygon tangent to all its sides is called an ‘incircle’. The total length of the smaller hexagon then becomes the lower bound of π and the length of the hexagon outside the circle is the upper bound. He realised that by increasing the number of sides of the polygon can make the bounds get closer to the value of Pi and increased the number of sides to 12,24,48 and 60. He argued that by increasing the number of sides will ultimately result in obtaining the original circle, thereby laying the foundation for the theory of limits. He ended up with the lower bound as 22/7 and the upper bound 223/71. He could not continue his research as his hometown Syracuse was invaded by Romans and was killed by one of the soldiers. His last words were ‘do not disturb my circles’, perhaps a reference to his continuing efforts to find the value of π to a greater accuracy.

Archimedes can be considered as the father of geometry. His contributions revolutionised geometry and his methods anticipated integral calculus. He invented the pulley and the hydraulic screw for drawing water from a well. He also discovered the law of hydrostatics. He formulated the law of levers which states that a smaller weight placed farther from a pivot can balance a much heavier weight closer to it. He famously said “Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the earth”.

Mathematicians have found many expressions for π as a sum of infinite series that converge to its value. One such famous series is the Leibniz Series found in 1674 by the German mathematician Gottfried Leibniz, which is given below.

π = 4 ( 1 – 1/3 + 1/5 – 1/7 + 1/9 – ………….)

The Indian mathematical genius Ramanujan came up with a magnificent formula in 1910. The short form of the formula is as follows.

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

For practical applications an approximation is sufficient. Even NASA uses only the approximation 3.141592653589793 for its interplanetary navigation calculations.

It is not just an interesting and curious number. It is used for calculations in navigation, encryption, space exploration, video game development and even in medicine. As π is fundamental to spherical geometry, it is at the heart of positioning systems in GPS navigations. It also contributes significantly to cybersecurity. As it is an irrational number it is an excellent foundation for generating randomness required in encryption and securing communications. In the medical field, it helps to calculate blood flow rates and pressure differentials. In diagnostic tools such as CT scans and MRI, pi is an important component in mathematical algorithms and signal processing techniques.

This elegant, never-ending number demonstrates how mathematics transforms into practical applications that shape our world. The possibilities of what it can do are infinite as the number itself. It has become a symbol of beauty and complexity in mathematics. “It matters little who first arrives at an idea, rather what is significant is how far that idea can go.” said Sophie Germain.

Mathematics fans are intrigued by this irrational number and attempt to calculate it as far as they can. In March 2022, Emma Haruka Iwao of Japan calculated it to 100 trillion decimal places in Google Cloud. It had taken 157 days. The Guinness World Record for reciting the number from memory is held by Rajveer Meena of India for 70000 decimal places over 10 hours.

Happy Pi Day!

The author is a senior examiner of the International Baccalaureate in the UK and an educational consultant at the Overseas School of Colombo.

by R N A de Silva

Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

Published

3 days ago

2026/03/12

Sahan Weerasooriya

A combined US-Israel attack on Iran.(BBC)

The recent humanly costly torpedoing of an Iranian naval vessel in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone by a US submarine has raised a number of issues of great importance to international political discourse and law that call for elucidation. It is best that enlightened commentary is brought to bear in such discussions because at present misleading and uninformed speculation on questions arising from the incident are being aired by particularly jingoistic politicians of Sri Lanka’s South which could prove deleterious.

As matters stand, there seems to be no credible evidence that the Indian state was aware of the impending torpedoing of the Iranian vessel but these acerbic-tongued politicians of Sri Lanka’s South would have the local public believe that the tragedy was triggered with India’s connivance. Likewise, India is accused of ‘embroiling’ Sri Lanka in the incident on account of seemingly having prior knowledge of it and not warning Sri Lanka about the impending disaster.

It is plain that a process is once again afoot to raise anti-India hysteria in Sri Lanka. An obligation is cast on the Sri Lankan government to ensure that incendiary speculation of the above kind is defeated and India-Sri Lanka relations are prevented from being in any way harmed. Proactive measures are needed by the Sri Lankan government and well meaning quarters to ensure that public discourse in such matters have a factual and rational basis. ‘Knowledge gaps’ could prove hazardous.

Meanwhile, there could be no doubt that Sri Lanka’s sovereignty was violated by the US because the sinking of the Iranian vessel took place in Sri Lanka’s Exclusive Economic Zone. While there is no international decrying of the incident, and this is to be regretted, Sri Lanka’s helplessness and small player status would enable the US to ‘get away with it’.

Could anything be done by the international community to hold the US to account over the act of lawlessness in question? None is the answer at present. This is because in the current ‘Global Disorder’ major powers could commit the gravest international irregularities with impunity. As the threadbare cliché declares, ‘Might is Right’….. or so it seems.

Unfortunately, the UN could only merely verbally denounce any violations of International Law by the world’s foremost powers. It cannot use countervailing force against violators of the law, for example, on account of the divided nature of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members have shown incapability of seeing eye-to-eye on grave matters relating to International Law and order over the decades.

The foregoing considerations could force the conclusion on uncritical sections that Political Realism or Realpolitik has won out in the end. A basic premise of the school of thought known as Political Realism is that power or force wielded by states and international actors determine the shape, direction and substance of international relations. This school stands in marked contrast to political idealists who essentially proclaim that moral norms and values determine the nature of local and international politics.

While, British political scientist Thomas Hobbes, for instance, was a proponent of Political Realism, political idealism has its roots in the teachings of Socrates, Plato and latterly Friedrich Hegel of Germany, to name just few such notables.

On the face of it, therefore, there is no getting way from the conclusion that coercive force is the deciding factor in international politics. If this were not so, US President Donald Trump in collaboration with Israeli Rightist Premier Benjamin Natanyahu could not have wielded the ‘big stick’, so to speak, on Iran, killed its Supreme Head of State, terrorized the Iranian public and gone ‘scot-free’. That is, currently, the US’ impunity seems to be limitless.

Moreover, the evidence is that the Western bloc is reuniting in the face of Iran’s threats to stymie the flow of oil from West Asia to the rest of the world. The recent G7 summit witnessed a coming together of the foremost powers of the global North to ensure that the West does not suffer grave negative consequences from any future blocking of western oil supplies.

Meanwhile, Israel is having a ‘free run’ of the Middle East, so to speak, picking out perceived adversarial powers, such as Lebanon, and militarily neutralizing them; once again with impunity. On the other hand, Iran has been bringing under assault, with no questions asked, Gulf states that are seen as allying with the US and Israel. West Asia is facing a compounded crisis and International Law seems to be helplessly silent.

Wittingly or unwittingly, matters at the heart of International Law and peace are being obfuscated by some pro-Trump administration commentators meanwhile. For example, retired US Navy Captain Brent Sadler has cited Article 51 of the UN Charter, which provides for the right to self or collective self-defence of UN member states in the face of armed attacks, as justifying the US sinking of the Iranian vessel (See page 2 of The Island of March 10, 2026). But the Article makes it clear that such measures could be resorted to by UN members only ‘ if an armed attack occurs’ against them and under no other circumstances. But no such thing happened in the incident in question and the US acted under a sheer threat perception.

Clearly, the US has violated the Article through its action and has once again demonstrated its tendency to arbitrarily use military might. The general drift of Sadler’s thinking is that in the face of pressing national priorities, obligations of a state under International Law could be side-stepped. This is a sure recipe for international anarchy because in such a policy environment states could pursue their national interests, irrespective of their merits, disregarding in the process their obligations towards the international community.

Moreover, Article 51 repeatedly reiterates the authority of the UN Security Council and the obligation of those states that act in self-defence to report to the Council and be guided by it. Sadler, therefore, could be said to have cited the Article very selectively, whereas, right along member states’ commitments to the UNSC are stressed.

However, it is beyond doubt that international anarchy has strengthened its grip over the world. While the US set destabilizing precedents after the crumbling of the Cold War that paved the way for the current anarchic situation, Russia further aggravated these degenerative trends through its invasion of Ukraine. Stepping back from anarchy has thus emerged as the prime challenge for the world community.