Features

NUJ and the Sampath Bank and the passing of the old brigade

Published

2 years ago

2023/10/1

Thilina Walpola

N.U. Jayawardene

(Excerpted from volume ii of Sarath Amunugama autobiograph

Back in Colombo I decided to sever my connections with WIF and concentrate on my academic interests. Accordingly, I began working with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies on an irregular basis. The ambience at ICES was very congenial with colleagues like Reggie Siriwardene, Kingsley de Silva, Neelan Tiruchelvam, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Sunil Bastian and Sithy Tiruchelvam. The ICES library was well stocked with the latest international magazines and books thanks to an energetic librarian Tambirajah who had earlier worked at the USIS and was an old friend of mine.

We had discussions and seminars on a variety of subjects with the participation of visiting academia, university lecturers and other public personalities. I could also participate in many international conferences abroad on behalf of ICES. One memorable meeting was with leading American Indologists held in the Napa Valley. We met in a small village hotel in the wine county. After the meeting I spent some time with friends in San Francisco which was an unforgettable experience.

This was the time when I became close friends with N.U. Jayawardene who, near to ninety years of age, still was in top form as an innovative and brilliant economist. It was a pleasure to meet him at home of an evening when he held forth on reforming the Sri Lankan economy. He was a perfectionist from his well-cut clothes to his cut glass decanters and whiskey glasses. He served only the choicest wines and whiskeys. He rode in the latest Mercedes Benz and had built his house in the most exclusive part of Cinnamon Gardens.

He was a hard worker and thinker and was making sensible policy prescriptions till the end of his days. When I became an MP I would consult him before speaking on economic matters. Bernard Soysa who was a Minister in 1994 complimented me on my speeches little knowing that I had been inspired by his distant kinsman NUJ. In politics they were poles apart but had a very cordial personal relationship. I still believe that if we had followed NUJ’s economic policy prescriptions Sri Lanka would have grown into an `Asian Tiger’.

NUJ was in the process of setting up his long time brainchild-a new commercial and savings bank which would use latest digital technologies and cater to a new group of depositors who were not presently investing their savings in local banks. His research had shown that a large number of rich people in the country kept their money at home or lent it irregularly to a small circle of borrowers.

NUJ wanted to call his new bank the Industrial and Commercial Bank of Sri Lanka. He asked me to recommend a forward looking advertising company which would convey his path breaking ideas to a public which could be persuaded to entrust their savings to the new venture. I had no hesitation recommending Irvin Weerakkody’s Phoenix Advertising company for this task.

I had worked with this company in the early days of the JRJ administration when we successfully changed the practice of issuing rice ration books by substituting a “Salli Potha” for a select category of consumers below the poverty line following the first budget of Ronnie de Mel. My minister Anandatissa de Alwis was an advertising wizard and I had worked with him on a communication strategy for a family health programme together with an American company which was held up as a model advertising campaign.

It was this campaign that popularized the “Preeethi” and “Mithuri” contraceptives which changed the demographics of the country. When the Taj group wanted to open an initial public offering of forty percent for Sri Lankan investors I recommended Phoenix Advertising. They presented a very creative campaign and the Taj IPO was oversubscribed much to the satisfaction of the Hotels division of the Taj group which was having internal management problems as well as difficulties with the Reserve Bank of India. It was the only silver lining in the balance sheet of the Taj Hotels division which underwent restructuring as a part of the internal leadership struggle between Ratan Tata and Mistry.

A salutary aspect of NUJs management style was that once we agreed on the concept of a campaign he did not interfere as long as the results were satisfactory. This was seen as his approach to the all important marketing campaign. I joined Irvin in planning the advertising campaign for NUJs bank. Another characteristic of NUJ was that he did not stint on advertising budgets.

We found that NUJs terminology of `Industrial and Commercial Bank’ needed to be changed to a popular and easily recognizable brand name. In our research we found that a lot of money was in the hands of a new class of nationalist minded businessmen and other rich individuals. To attract this clientele we invented the tagline “A Bank for the Sons of the Soil” which was a milder version of “Bhumiputra”.

I was reading an Indian magazine on economic activities and came across a reference to a small “Sampath” Bank in an obscure province. Something clicked and we persuaded NUJ to change the name of his Bank to Sampath Bank while retaining his original designation as a sub heading. This change worked wonders and the title of “Sampath Bank – a Bank for the sons of the soil” entered the marketing and economic landscape of the country.

We knew that we had scored an advertising “hit” when a large number of rich Buddhist monks who had up to then hoarded their considerable amounts of cash in their “Awasas” turned up in their posh vehicles to open deposits in the “Bhumiputra” Bank. So did many Christian clerics. Thus Sampath bank could open its business with substantial assets by way of savings deposits generated from a new breed of clients.

This interest in advertising rubbed off on my daughter Varuni who had entered the Law faculty of Colombo University of which GL Peiris was then the Vice Chancellor. Due to JVP violence the Colombo Campus was closed and the students had to languish for several years. I had enrolled Varuni for a course on advertising in Paris, which had a reputation for “frontier” advertising concepts. So with Irwin’s assistance she joined Phoenix advertising company and learnt the rudiments of marketing and advertising there in the heyday of that legendary institution.

Her close friends at that time were Dilith Jayaweera and Ishini Wickremesinghe. Dilith was a firebrand in the University and was once abducted by a rival student organization. This was no laughing matter then as some students had been roughed up and even murdered over University politics. I remember that Dilith’s friends came home to see me and got me to contact the IGP and the Minister of Higher Education of the time, Hameed, to take a personal interest in getting Dilith back from his abductors.

The following morning he was blindfolded and left near the Kanatte cemetery and we were all relieved that his life had been spared. Some time after ,since the University was as good as closed Dilith, Ishini and Varuni decided to set up an advertising company .It was a good move since they were short of capital to start a capital intensive company but had the advantage of accessing young “free lance” specialists like photographers, layout artists and copywriters which gave a new angle to their product unlike the work of full timers in the big advertising companies. That little acorn which was called Triad has now grown into a big oak and is the leading advertising company in the country with its own brand value and work ethic.

As we drifted towards the end of the 1990s Sri Lanka had ended the JVP violence after a horrendous bloodbath. The top leadership were almost all subjected to extra judicial killings. The armed forces were encouraged by Ranjan Wijeratne to eliminate them unlike in the case of 1971 when they were subjected to judicial proceedings through a Criminal Justice Commission. President Premadasa had once again shown that it was dangerous to cross his path.

This tendency was to be seen again in the near future when Lalith and Gamini, then in an uneasy alliance with him, began to challenge him openly and was kicked out of the UNP for their pains. But that was further down the road and will be described in the next volume of my memoirs. After passing the 1990s, Premadasa had to grapple with the LTTE which too, like the JVP, spurned his overtures for a settlement. But we could look to the future.

A journalist asked Pieter Keuneman, then in retirement from Parliamentary politics, what he now wished for. Keuneman, droll as ever, replied that he wanted to survive to see the new millennium. We all, now into middle age, could look forward to the coming decade with some hope. But how wrong we were. Most of the leaders of my time were brutally assassinated. This wave of violence engulfed all parties and all leaders. Many of the close friends I have described so far in my autobiography were cut down in their prime.

The hopes of many had resided with them and now they were all gone. Only JRJ remained to mourn the loss of his closest comrades and even note the demise of many who had opposed him tooth and nail. When some party stalwarts wanted him to come back after the assassination of Premadasa he refused to do so and backed Wijetunga’s claims to that office in terms of the UNP constitution. JRJ died of cancer in his 93rd year and was cremated, as he wished, by the Kelani river within sight of the famous temple with which his family was linked.

Kelaniya was his electorate when he entered politics and he always considered Kelaniya to be his home ground. JRJ too could not make it to the new millennium which displayed a very different type of politics. That will be the subject of the forthcoming third and last volume of my autobiography which will be entitled “In the Political Arena”.

(Concluded)

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Features

Recruiting academics to state universities – beset by archaic selection processes?

Published

2 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

by Kaushalya Perera

Time has, by and large, stood still in the business of academic staff recruitment to state universities. Qualifications have proliferated and evolved to be more interdisciplinary, but our selection processes and evaluation criteria are unchanged since at least the late 1990s. But before I delve into the problems, I will describe the existing processes and schemes of recruitment. The discussion is limited to UGC-governed state universities (and does not include recruitment to medical and engineering sectors) though the problems may be relevant to other higher education institutions (HEIs).

How recruitment happens currently in SL state universities

Academic ranks in Sri Lankan state universities can be divided into three tiers (subdivisions are not discussed).

* Lecturer (Probationary)

– recruited with a four-year undergraduate degree. A tiny step higher is the Lecturer (Unconfirmed), recruited with a postgraduate degree but no teaching experience.

* A Senior Lecturer can be recruited with certain postgraduate qualifications and some number of years of teaching and research.

* Above this is the professor (of four types), which can be left out of this discussion since only one of those (Chair Professor) is by application.

State universities cannot hire permanent academic staff as and when they wish. Prior to advertising a vacancy, approval to recruit is obtained through a mind-numbing and time-consuming process (months!) ending at the Department of Management Services. The call for applications must list all ranks up to Senior Lecturer. All eligible candidates for Probationary to Senior Lecturer are interviewed, e.g., if a Department wants someone with a doctoral degree, they must still advertise for and interview candidates for all ranks, not only candidates with a doctoral degree. In the evaluation criteria, the first degree is more important than the doctoral degree (more on this strange phenomenon later). All of this is only possible when universities are not under a ‘hiring freeze’, which governments declare regularly and generally lasts several years.

Problem type 1

– Archaic processes and evaluation criteria

Twenty-five years ago, as a probationary lecturer with a first degree, I was a typical hire. We would be recruited, work some years and obtain postgraduate degrees (ideally using the privilege of paid study leave to attend a reputed university in the first world). State universities are primarily undergraduate teaching spaces, and when doctoral degrees were scarce, hiring probationary lecturers may have been a practical solution. The path to a higher degree was through the academic job. Now, due to availability of candidates with postgraduate qualifications and the problems of retaining academics who find foreign postgraduate opportunities, preference for candidates applying with a postgraduate qualification is growing. The evaluation scheme, however, prioritises the first degree over the candidate’s postgraduate education. Were I to apply to a Faculty of Education, despite a PhD on language teaching and research in education, I may not even be interviewed since my undergraduate degree is not in education. The ‘first degree first’ phenomenon shows that universities essentially ignore the intellectual development of a person beyond their early twenties. It also ignores the breadth of disciplines and their overlap with other fields.

This can be helped (not solved) by a simple fix, which can also reduce brain drain: give precedence to the doctoral degree in the required field, regardless of the candidate’s first degree, effected by a UGC circular. The suggestion is not fool-proof. It is a first step, and offered with the understanding that any selection process, however well the evaluation criteria are articulated, will be beset by multiple issues, including that of bias. Like other Sri Lankan institutions, universities, too, have tribal tendencies, surfacing in the form of a preference for one’s own alumni. Nevertheless, there are other problems that are, arguably, more pressing as I discuss next. In relation to the evaluation criteria, a problem is the narrow interpretation of any regulation, e.g., deciding the degree’s suitability based on the title rather than considering courses in the transcript. Despite rhetoric promoting internationalising and inter-disciplinarity, decision-making administrative and academic bodies have very literal expectations of candidates’ qualifications, e.g., a candidate with knowledge of digital literacy should show this through the title of the degree!

Problem type 2 – The mess of badly regulated higher education

A direct consequence of the contemporary expansion of higher education is a large number of applicants with myriad qualifications. The diversity of degree programmes cited makes the responsibility of selecting a suitable candidate for the job a challenging but very important one. After all, the job is for life – it is very difficult to fire a permanent employer in the state sector.

Widely varying undergraduate degree programmes.

At present, Sri Lankan undergraduates bring qualifications (at times more than one) from multiple types of higher education institutions: a degree from a UGC-affiliated state university, a state university external to the UGC, a state institution that is not a university, a foreign university, or a private HEI aka ‘private university’. It could be a degree received by attending on-site, in Sri Lanka or abroad. It could be from a private HEI’s affiliated foreign university or an external degree from a state university or an online only degree from a private HEI that is ‘UGC-approved’ or ‘Ministry of Education approved’, i.e., never studied in a university setting. Needless to say, the diversity (and their differences in quality) are dizzying. Unfortunately, under the evaluation scheme all degrees ‘recognised’ by the UGC are assigned the same marks. The same goes for the candidates’ merits or distinctions, first classes, etc., regardless of how difficult or easy the degree programme may be and even when capabilities, exposure, input, etc are obviously different.

Similar issues are faced when we consider postgraduate qualifications, though to a lesser degree. In my discipline(s), at least, a postgraduate degree obtained on-site from a first-world university is preferable to one from a local university (which usually have weekend or evening classes similar to part-time study) or online from a foreign university. Elitist this may be, but even the best local postgraduate degrees cannot provide the experience and intellectual growth gained by being in a university that gives you access to six million books and teaching and supervision by internationally-recognised scholars. Unfortunately, in the evaluation schemes for recruitment, the worst postgraduate qualification you know of will receive the same marks as one from NUS, Harvard or Leiden.

The problem is clear but what about a solution?

Recruitment to state universities needs to change to meet contemporary needs. We need evaluation criteria that allows us to get rid of the dross as well as a more sophisticated institutional understanding of using them. Recruitment is key if we want our institutions (and our country) to progress. I reiterate here the recommendations proposed in ‘Considerations for Higher Education Reform’ circulated previously by Kuppi Collective:

* Change bond regulations to be more just, in order to retain better qualified academics.

* Update the schemes of recruitment to reflect present-day realities of inter-disciplinary and multi-disciplinary training in order to recruit suitably qualified candidates.

* Ensure recruitment processes are made transparent by university administrations.

Kaushalya Perera is a senior lecturer at the University of Colombo.

(Kuppi is a politics and pedagogy happening on the margins of the lecture hall that parodies, subverts, and simultaneously reaffirms social hierarchies.)

Features

Talento … oozing with talent

Published

2 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Talento: Gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band

This week, too, the spotlight is on an outfit that has gained popularity, mainly through social media.

Last week we had MISTER Band in our scene, and on 10th February, Yellow Beatz – both social media favourites.

Talento is a seven-piece band that plays all types of music, from the ‘60s to the modern tracks of today.

The band has reached many heights, since its inception in 2012, and has gained recognition as a leading wedding and dance band in the scene here.

The members that makeup the outfit have a solid musical background, which comes through years of hard work and dedication

Their portfolio of music contains a mix of both western and eastern songs and are carefully selected, they say, to match the requirements of the intended audience, occasion, or event.

Although the baila is a specialty, which is inherent to this group, that originates from Moratuwa, their repertoire is made up of a vast collection of love, classic, oldies and modern-day hits.

The musicians, who make up Talento, are:

Prabuddha Geetharuchi:

Geilee Fonseka: Dynamic and charismatic vocalist

Prabuddha Geetharuchi: The main man behind the band Talento

(Vocalist/ Frontman). He is an avid music enthusiast and was mentored by a lot of famous musicians, and trainers, since he was a child. Growing up with them influenced him to take on western songs, as well as other music styles. A Peterite, he is the main man behind the band Talento and is a versatile singer/entertainer who never fails to get the crowd going.

Geilee Fonseka (Vocals):

A dynamic and charismatic vocalist whose vibrant stage presence, and powerful voice, bring a fresh spark to every performance. Young, energetic, and musically refined, she is an artiste who effortlessly blends passion with precision – captivating audiences from the very first note. Blessed with an immense vocal range, Geilee is a truly versatile singer, confidently delivering Western and Eastern music across multiple languages and genres.

Chandana Perera (Drummer):

His expertise and exceptional skills have earned him recognition as one of the finest acoustic drummers in Sri Lanka. With over 40 tours under his belt, Chandana has demonstrated his dedication and passion for music, embodying the essential role of a drummer as the heartbeat of any band.

Harsha Soysa:

(Bassist/Vocalist). He a chorister of the western choir of St. Sebastian’s College, Moratuwa, who began his musical education under famous voice trainers, as well as bass guitar trainers in Sri Lanka. He has also performed at events overseas. He acts as the second singer of the band

Udara Jayakody:

(Keyboardist). He is also a qualified pianist, adding technical flavour to Talento’s music. His singing and harmonising skills are an extra asset to the band. From his childhood he has been a part of a number of orchestras as a pianist. He has also previously performed with several famous western bands.

Aruna Madushanka:

(Saxophonist). His proficiciency in playing various instruments, including the saxophone, soprano saxophone, and western flute, showcases his versatility as a musician, and his musical repertoire is further enhanced by his remarkable singing ability.

Prashan Pramuditha:

(Lead guitar). He has the ability to play different styles, both oriental and western music, and he also creates unique tones and patterns with the guitar..

Features

Special milestone for JJ Twins

Published

2 hours ago

2026/03/3

Thilina Walpola

Twin brothers Julian and Jason Prins

The JJ Twins, the Sri Lankan musical duo, performing in the Maldives, and known for blending R&B, Hip Hop, and Sri Lankan rhythms, thereby creating a unique sound, have come out with a brand-new single ‘Me Mawathe.’

In fact, it’s a very special milestone for the twin brothers, Julian and Jason Prins, as ‘Me Mawathe’ is their first ever Sinhala song!

‘Me Mawathe’ showcases a fresh new sound, while staying true to the signature harmony and emotion that their fans love.

This heartfelt track captures the beauty of love, journey, and connection, brought to life through powerful vocals and captivating melodies.

It marks an exciting new chapter for the JJ Twins as they expand their musical journey and connect with audiences in a whole new way.

Their recent album, ‘CONCLUDED,’ explores themes of love, heartbreak, and healing, and include hits like ‘Can’t Get You Off My Mind’ and ‘You Left Me Here to Die’ which showcase their emotional intensity.

Readers could stay connected and follow JJ Twins on social media for exclusive updates, behind-the-scenes moments, and upcoming releases:

Instagram: http://instagram.com/jjtwinsofficial

TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@jjtwinsmusic

Facebook: http://facebook.com/jjtwinssingers

YouTube: http://youtube.com/jjtwins