Features

JRJ in action and events leading to the July 1983 disaster

Published

3 years ago

2023/01/8

Excerpted from volume two of Sarath Amunugama’s autobiography

Another innovation of the JRJ regime was the introduction of lotteries to supplement national budgetary allocations. The pioneer of this scheme was Wickreme Weerasooria who was the Secretary of the Ministry of Planning. I got associated with this project because printing was a subject assigned to the Ministry of State of which I was the Secretary.

The idea of a lottery was first mooted by Ingrid McAlpine nee Wijeratne, who lived in UK for a long time and returned after the UNP victory to be inducted as a close friend of the President and a member of Madam Elina’s inner circle. She was the niece of Philip Gunawardena, her mother being Philip’s elder sister. But the Wijeratnes were UNP supporters and had been strong backers of JRJ when he contested the Kelaniya electorate.

As President, JRJ went out of his way to help those families whose parents and grandparents had backed him when he was a young, and perhaps lesser known, candidate. Among them were the Gunasekere and Wijeratne families whose progeny were promoted in the Mahara, Gampaha and Kelaniya areas. Ingrid’s project proposal was accepted by JRJ and Wickreme with his usual gusto launched the National lottery which was at that time the only lottery permitted.

The funds so collected were available to the President as discretionary funds which were not permitted earlier under the National Budget. Other senior ministers in his cabinet quickly saw the advantages of these discretionary funds, as well as printing contracts and began to lobby the President to set up their own lotteries. Predictably the first to lobby the President and set up the Sevana Fund and lottery was the Prime Minister.

He did not use the good offices of Ingrid but chose his favourite Ajantha Wijesena, who used his marketing skills to develop the Sevana Fund for subsidizing his minister’s housing development program. Lalith followed with his request for a Mahapola lottery to be managed by Ingrid. By this time the Finance Ministry was getting alarmed at the proliferation of discretionary funds of individual ministers and the setting up of extra-budgetary mechanisms which diluted Treasury control of state finances.

Wickreme also pointed out the wasteful duplication of publicity and marketing agencies and even more urgently the decline of income of the National Lottery which was under the charge of the President. Other Ministers were also lining up after being promoted by printers and advertising agencies who saw a golden opportunity. Finally the President had to put his foot down and refuse new requests.

However he directed that a substantial portion of the income from the National Lottery be diverted to Mahapola. Lalith was satisfied but it created a bad precedent because successive trade ministers started playing politics with those funds. They saw a god given opportunity to divert funds to their electorates outside the country’s budget.

Lalith won the hearts of the undergraduates of his time with his initiative. I can testify to the fact that many of the Mahapola recipients flocked to pay homage at his funeral and lined the roads as a tribute to a man with a vision who made their lives better. The role of Lalith, Gamini and Ronnie clearly showed the value of literate and dynamic ministers. Unfortunately that tendency was nipped in the bud by political leaders who had to pay their dues to loyalist party hacks and financiers who had helped them in times of adversity.

Chambers of Commerce

Lalith was the ideal choice for establishing commercial links with our partner countries as the Minister of Trade. With his wide range of contacts, superlative knowledge of the law and the English language and his well-known habit of hard work and diligent preparation he made ministerial missions abroad most fruitful for the country. He also had excellent contacts with our private sector which at that time happened to be dominated by old Royalists.

Among them were Ken Balendra, Ratna Sivaratnam, Chari de Silva, Wijemanne, Ranjan Gooneratne and several others. The plantation sector was dominated by old Royalists and Old Trinitians. They were all close to the young minister and could interact with him on a friendly basis. Many successive Presidents tended to appoint second raters as ministers who could not reach out to the important capitalists in the country. They had to depend on cronies as intermediaries who were usually corrupt and were rent seekers. This parasitic class came to the fore with Chandrika and especially Mahinda Rajapakse.

I was directed by the President to join Lalith’s pathbreaking mission to set up the first Japan-Sri Lanka Trade chamber in JRJ in action and events leading to the July 1983 disasterTokyo. This high level delegation

included Chandi Chanmugam from the Treasury, Paul Perera of BOI, Raju Coomaraswamy, Chari de Silva, Wettasinghe, Cornel Perera, H.R. Fernando and a few others. I represented the tourism sector. The Japanese side included Yasoao Fukuda who was later to be Prime Minister of Japan and all the leaders of the ‘Daibatsu’ or the major business houses of the country.

It included Mitsui, Mitsubishi, C. Itoh, Sumitomo and many other companies who wanted to do business under the JRJ dispensation. This meeting contributed to making Japan one of our major economic partners and a long term friend. Over 40 years later when on an official visit to Japan I was able to participate in another meeting of the chamber. I referred to the fact that the Chamber had met continuously from that inaugural meeting and Mr. Fukuda and I were probably the only living survivors of the original meeting held in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo under the leadership of Lalith.

Lalith’s expertise was also sought in Geneva by Gamini Corea for UNCTAD and Lakshman Kadirgamar for negotiations on `intellectual property’. These invitations led to a milestone in Lalith’s life when he began to date Srimani de Saram who was working in the secretariat of UNCTAD, on the staff of Gamini Corea its Secretary-General. He married her in Geneva and she became his standard bearer after his death. Tragically Srimani herself was afflicted with a cancer and died not long after her husband.

Ethnic Conflict

If there was one issue which spelt the eventual doom of the UNP it was JRJ’s inept handling of the ethnic issue. Like Hitler’s ‘Thousand year Reich’ the euphoric UNP hoped to remain in power for a long period of time. JRJ’s models of Singapore and Malaysia were, in effect, one party states. Unlike in the UNP, in those nations leaders who obtained freedom remained to guide their destinies with near dictatorial powers.

JRJ too wanted to ‘roll up the electoral map’. This was a euphemism for the untrammeled perpetuation of UNP rule. The JRJ constitution, with its new electoral system, was tailormade to accommodate the UNP which was the largest party in the country. There was no hope for the SLFP except through coalition politics. With no prospect of regaining office, the usually indisciplined SLFP leaders, who had earlier paid homage to the Bandaranaike ‘family show’, now began to cut loose, criticize their leader and even enter into a dialogue with JRJ. But all these plans went awry due to the prolonged ethnic conflict.

The President was beleaguered, abandoned by his erstwhile comrades, and had to literally fight for his life. Walls in Colombo were plastered with JVP slogans calling for “Death to the Old Man”. How did this happen? What were the series of blunders that bedeviled JRJ’s second term of office? The main factor was his inability to contain the ethnic conflict. This led to his alienation from India which at that time, opportunistically or otherwise, espoused the Tamil cause.

Later when he attempted to compromise with India he was reviled by the majority of the Sinhalese who followed the virulent anti-Indian line of the JVP, supported by the SLFP. By making Cyril Mathew and some of his backbenchers to join that bandwagon he further alienated India and Sri Lanka was put on a slippery slope to disaster.

At the beginning of his tenure JRJ had an opportunity of solving the Tamil question. Though his rival Kobbekaduwa did well in the North and East at the 1982 Presidential election, largely because the SLFP closed the door to foreign agricultural products which Jaffna farmers grew in abundance, many Tamils believed that JRJ will remove restrictive communal provisions like the language laws, University quotas and offer better opportunities to them for trade.

In addition the Tamil elite in Colombo were mostly supporters of the UNP. It is ironical that the most pro-devolution politician in the State Council days was Bandaranaike. When he entered politics as a young man Bandaranaike was an advocate of federalism. In contrast JRJ was from the beginning a supporter of a strong unitary nation based on his historical readings about Sinhala kings.

The Senanayakes and following them JRJ, had a streak of Sinhala nationalism. In my personal experience when talking to JRJ about the ethnic question he usually referred to the Tamils as ‘Damilas’; a terminology used in ancient Sinhala inscriptions. The problem was that instead of addressing the real concerns of the Tamils, the youth in particular, he spent time in attempting to ‘strike a deal’ with the Tamil leadership.

Though this seemed a viable option at the start, the entry of militant Tamil youth swung the pendulum towards the confrontation. The communal riots that followed the UNP victory reduced JRJs options because he did not want to antagonize the Sinhala extremists at the very beginning of his regime. In allying himself firmly with the US he did not watch his flank which was Indira Gandhi’s India.

Under normal conditions, for instance with Nehru, Shastri or Morarji Desai, JRJ would have had room to maneuver. But at this stage Indira was taking India on a different path which asserted India’s primacy in foreign relations in the subcontinent. She wanted India to be a regional super power as demonstrated in her invasion of East Pakistan and the creation of a pro-India new nation called Bangladesh.

In this scenario both JRJ and his policies appeared to be irritants to Indira’s left leaning advisors who were jubilant that their military interventions against their main enemy Pakistan was successful. At this juncture with the Indian Congress being challenged electorally for the first time, Indira was also persuaded that the Tamil ‘card’ would benefit her in the forthcoming elections. In the face of her defeat in the Nehru stronghold of Rae Bareilly, she had moved to the Chikmagalur seat in South India signaling the growing strength of the ‘southern cow belt’.

During the SLFP coalition regime of 1970-1977, Tamil disquiet was rapidly increasing. The educational policies of Minister Badiuddin Mahmud, which was dominated by two nationalist extremists – Udugama and Sumathipala as its top bureaucrats brought in policies designed to build up education in Sinhala rural areas which had been badly neglected by successive governments. This attempt at re-balancing education was at the expense of Tamils who had earlier benefited from widespread education.

During the Colonial period Christian Missionaries, particularly from the US, had introduced a system of education which was not bettered anywhere else in the island. Education had been the lifeline of the Tamils; their passport to employment and relief from the harsh, dry climate and water shortage which marked the peninsula.

The worst of these Udugama-Sumathipala fiats, as far as Tamil youth were concerned, was the introduction of ‘standardization of marks’ in determining entry to higher education provided by the state. Since due to socialist policies the state had a monopoly of education this decision appeared to be discriminatory of the minorities and the urban poor.

As Director of Combined Services during this time I sat on several committees to examine the effects of these policy shifts on the public service. At these meetings Parliamentarians representing urban electorates like Pieter Keuneman and Bernard Soysa opposed district wise quotas for higher education saying that urban poor children were no better off than the rural poor child and were unfairly discriminated against by the new educational laws.

But the rural based SLFP was in favour of ‘positive discrimination’. They argued not very convincingly that this policy would help rural Tamil students as well. But the stakes were too high to win over the Jaffna based students. They were now anyway skirmishing with the police who were mostly disaffected Sinhala lower orders sent on punishment transfer far away from their homes. The situation in Jaffna was a tinder box about to explode and the Tamil Parliamentarians were too scared to reach out to Sinhala leaders for a solution now that seniors like Chelvanayagam and Ponnambalam were no more.

The progressive alienation and radicalization of Tamil youth led to a stiffening of the attitudes of the Tamil Parliamentarians. This led to the landmark Vadukkodai declaration of the Tamil United Liberation Front of 1975. This declaration emphasized the concept of the North and East as the ‘homelands’ of the ‘Tamil speaking people’. Merging the North and East for the first time to make it a viable geographical entity necessitated the inclusion of the Muslims as part of the ‘Tamil speaking entity’ since the Muslims were in a majority in the East and together with the Sinhalese in the Eastern province formed a clear numerical majority over the Tamils.

It was the Vadukoddai ideology which was gaining ground when JRJ entered the scene. The stinging defeat of the SLFP in reality complicated the situation. If the SLFP had a greater number of MPs in Parliament after the 1977 election they would have constituted the main opposition. But with their abysmal defeat the Tamil United Liberation Front had a bigger member of MPs and JRJ, with great delight, helped in making the TULF leader Amirthalingam the leader of the Opposition.

But this fateful decision had many long term consequences. -Amirthalingam was known as a firebrand orator and an extremist. With the weight of office as the Leader of the Opposition his fire was doused. Though he tried to play the role of a national leader in his impassioned defence of Mrs. B, he naturally used his powers as Opposition leader to highlight the grievances of the Tamil people further polarizing the two main ethnic groups. Whereas, on the other hand, the SLFP deprived even of the consolation prize of Opposition leadership, had no hesitation in promoting Sinhala extremism in order to embarrass the UNP.

JRJ’s solution to this unhealthy state of affairs was worse than the disease. He unleashed Cyril Mathew as the UNP’s own Sinhala extremist. Mathew with the resources of the state behind him not only attacked Tamils he disliked but also attacked other opponents of the UNP like Madoluwawe ‘Sobhita and Ediriweera Sarathchandra which alienated a swathe of the Sinhala intelligentsia.

Mathew consolidated his position as a Sinhala hero by promoting goon squads drawn from Corporations under his care as the Minister of Industries. These goons were unleashed on the urban Tamils in August 1983 leading to an unprecedented communal holocaust which marked a point of no return. After 1983 JRJ downgraded Mathew but it was much too late. The UNP government was held up as being a promoter of state violence against Tamils.

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Features

New mediation law for smarter dispute resolution of civil and commercial disputes – I

Published

7 hours ago

2026/06/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

The Mediation (Civil and Commercial Disputes) Bill was passed by the Parliament on Thursday, June 11, 2026. Harshana Nanayakkara, Minister of Justice and National Integration, introduced the Bill, and explained its provisions and value for Sri Lanka and global developments in the use of mediation. Encouragingly, it was passed unanimously.

Sri Lanka’s commitment to provide legislative support for the use of mediation is timely and most welcome. Given that the backlog of cases pending before courts is over a staggering 1.1 million, it is clear that Sri Lanka is yet another country that remains challenged to find responses to make dispute resolution more efficient. The impact of laws delays is serious and damaging not only to the disputants personally, but also for businesses and the economic development of the country. The delays in concluding cases impacts the economy adversely, both directly and indirectly, but are often seen only as an access to Justice concern. This is unfortunate. In many jurisdictions across the globe, alternative dispute resolution processes (ADR), such as mediation, have been introduced to alleviate laws delays. While Sri Lanka enacted legislation (1988) to provide for mediation in respect of minor community disputes of a low monetary threshold, the enactment of the new law heralds a commitment to provide for the recognition of a disciplined regime for its use for higher value civil and commercial disputes.

The new law provides for the recognition of mediation as a dispute resolution option that can be voluntarily selected by parties, and for a governance regime to ensure that mediations are conducted in compliance with certain standards which are globally accepted. It provides statutory recognition to the principle that a mediated settlement agreement that has been signed by the disputants, is valid in law. It does not provide for any management control by government or establish entities. In addition to the voluntary reference by parties, a court can also refer a dispute in an action before it, to mediation, at its discretion, after considering all circumstances and if considered appropriate. The voluntary nature of the process is not affected because, while the court can refer the dispute to mediation and the parties must then engage in the mediation, there is no compulsion for the parties to settle against their will.

The law sets out the obligations of Mediators, disputants and the Service Provider. Certain categories of disputes cannot be referred to mediation. These are disputes the settlement of which requires the inclusion of terms that can be given effect to, only on a decree of court, such as the termination of a marriage or a declaration of nullity of marriage or the adoption of a child or the partition of land to obtain rights in rem. A schedule sets out eleven (11) categories of actions that cannot be settled by mediation. However, matters relevant to such disputes may be mediated for the purpose of submitting terms of settlement to court for consideration of incorporation in a judgement, decree or order in compliance with applicable law.

The new law also provides that in a mediation, certain key principles of the process must be complied with. These include the confidentiality and the without prejudice rule in respect of matters discussed at the mediation; the rule that Mediators must be neutral and impartial; the party centric nature of the process that provides primacy to the wishes of the disputants including that it is they that determine the outcome and that a settlement is reached only if all disputants agree to the terms; the noncoercive role of the mediator whose duty is to facilitate and manage the process using mediation specific skills and techniques, but is debarred from imposing a decision. Although a settlement agreement is valid in law, provision is included to obtain a decree of court, based on the terms of the settlement. A mediated settlement agreement can be set aside on an application made to court, on specific limited grounds which are provided for, including that it is offensive to the public policy of the country. If the parties are unable to agree on a settlement, a certificate of non-settlement is issued. The provisions of the law are based on international best practices and principles articulated in the 1988 UN Mediation Convention (the Singapore Convention) and the UNCITRAL model law.

The popularity of mediation has grown for its value in being time efficient, cost effective and party centric. Parties have control over the outcome and have the space to discuss their concerns, fears and interests and need never agree to settle unless fully satisfied that settlement terms address their interests. Disputants are free to walk out of a mediation process at any time, if dissatisfied with the progress. The discussions are confidential and a valuable feature is that the process offers an opportunity to reduce acrimony which is prevalent in most disputes, and to restore fractured relationships which is very important in family and business related disputes. This benefit and the prospects for governments to reduce the cost of the administration of justice, by using mediation, is articulated in the preamble to the 2018 UN Convention on International Settlement Agreements Resulting from Mediation (2018) which states that the use of mediation results in significant benefits.

Pursuant to the interest generated within the country regarding the value of using Mediation for commercial dispute resolution, and heralding what we like to see as the initial steps of a Mediation boom in the country, several positive advancements have taken place –

* Parties have opted to include mediation in the dispute resolution clause in contracts;

* Given that mediating disputes requires very specialised techniques and skills, many professionals, including predominantly Lawyers, have engaged in training programmes offered by international training bodies that offer accreditation;

* Trained Mediators are engaged in an effort to form themselves as a professional Organisation;

* Mediation Advocacy training programmes have been held to train Lawyers on their niche role in the mediation process. That role is distinctly different to that of a court Lawyer who’s obligations are centred on an adversarial approach where the dispute is adjudicated in terms of the law alone. Hence lawyers need training to be useful within a non-adversarial process which is party centric and has a focus on reaching a settlement, based on the interests of disputants.

* Sri Lanka enacted the Recognition and Enforcement of International Mediated Settlement Agreements Act No. 5 of 2024 (the UN Mediation Convention Act) and ratified the Convention becoming the 14th country to do so. Sri Lanka will be seen as an investor friendly country in respect of dispute resolution where mediation is used, since it offers an enforcement regime which is recognised universally.

* The landmark determination of the Supreme Court (SC SD 22 of 2025) in the challenge by the Bar Association to the constitutionality of the Mediation (Civil and Commercial Disputes) Bill, found that none of the provisions of the Bill were unconstitutional and gave a judicial sign off to statutory provisions that seek to ensure that mediation services are provided in this country, in a disciplined manner in compliance with universally accepted standards.

* Perhaps, inspired by the statutory obligation imposed on judges to attempt pretrial settlement of disputes, in terms of the Small Claims Court Act and the Small Claims Court Procedure Act (both of 2022) and the Civil Procedure Code provisions on Pretrial Conference and Pretrial Orders, 125 District Judges were recently trained (with support from the ADB) in Mediation. The training provided a dual benefit – it provided training in skills that are required to settle disputes and equally importantly, provided a comprehensive understanding of how mediation will function when judges themselves refer disputes for settlement by private mediators.

* Trained Mediators are already conducting mediations with success.

* A not-for-profit guarantee company, the International ADR Centre – www.iadrc.lk ) was established in 2018 as a joint venture of the Ceylon Chamber of Commerce and the Institute for the Development of Commercial Law & Practice (ICLP) to promote ADR and is actively engaged in promoting mediation through training, disseminating information and creating awareness among stakeholders, including the business sector. In addition to the International ADR Centre, “Udecide” is a project that promotes training of mediators and other activities that enrich the mediation culture.

* Commercial Mediation has been included in the Masters level programme at the Colombo University;

* The Sri Lanka Law College offers a component on Mediation in the Post Attorney Diploma programme, which commenced recently.

The private sector was actively engaged in the drafting of the Mediation Bill under the leadership of the International ADR Centre, which held many stakeholder consultations to obtain feedback from those that were conversant with the subject. The Centre had previously assisted the government to draft the UN Mediation Convention Act (Act No. 5 of 2024).

Several international Organisations that previously provided for resolution of disputes by arbitration, have provided for institutional rules to provide mediation services. These include WIPO and the ICC. Specifically, in relation to Investor State dispute resolution (ISDR), the International Bar Association (IBA) adopted its Mediation Rules in 2012 and ICSID (of the World Bank group) adopted its Mediation Rules in 2022. UNCITRAL, which is currently working on reforming ISDR, promotes mediation, observing that the use of mediation could reduce the costs of ISDS and also preserve relationships between the investor and the State. UNCITRAL has formulated provisions on and Guidelines for, Mediation for investor state dispute resolution.

(To be continued)

by Dhara Wijayatilake
Attorney-at-Law; Former Secretary to the Ministry of Justice; Director and Secretary General of the International ADR Centre.

Features

A Testament to the Sri Lankan family

Published

7 hours ago

2026/06/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

The passing of Dr. Devanesan Nesiah a few days ago brought back memories that spanned more than four decades. Devanesan signed the witness register at my marriage in 2002. It was a year of hope. The Ceasefire Agreement between the government and the LTTE had brought a respite from a war that had devastated the country for nearly two decades. The possibility of peace seemed real. It was fitting that Devanesan should be present on that occasion because his entire life was dedicated to building bridges across divides and seeking rational and humane solutions to conflict. He was a friend, mentor, and guide whose life embodied values that Sri Lanka, indeed the world, needs today.

In reflecting on Dr. Nesiah’s life, we need to be reminded that the forces that unite us as a people in Sri Lanka are stronger than those that divide us, and that the bonds of human affection can transcend even the deepest divisions of ethnicity, history and politics. I first met him in 1984. I had just had my very first newspaper article published in the Jaffna-based Saturday Review. The editor was Gamini Navaratne, a Sinhalese. This was a reminder that even during the darkest period of ethnic conflict, the bonds between communities remained strong. The article I had written was based on my encounters with the anti-Tamil violence of July 1983.

At that time, Dr Nesiah was the Government Agent of Jaffna. Tens of thousands of Tamil people who had fled violence in the south had been transported to the north by a government that had failed to protect them. He came up to me at an event, introduced himself, and told me that he liked what I had written. He also said that he would soon be leaving for Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and that we could meet there. Over the next three years, Devanesan and his wife Anita adopted me into their family. I used to visit them two or three times a week, not only to be given meals by Anita but to discuss matters with Devanesan. These included the academic papers and newspaper articles that were written. Later, Anita earned her PhD in religion and served on the boards of many civic organisations, including the National Peace Council.

Practical Solution

In 1992, we had both returned to work in Sri Lanka when Devanesan invited me to accompany him to Jaffna to celebrate the eightieth birthday of his father, K Nesiah, the distinguished educationist affectionately known as Professor Nesiah. The older Nesiah had been a leading member of the Jaffna Youth Congress. This remarkable movement championed complete independence from British rule, national unity, and the eradication of social inequalities based on caste and communal identity.

At a time when many feared that independence would lead to majoritarian domination, the leaders of the Youth Congress chose instead to place their faith in a shared Sri Lankan future. They believed that people from different communities could build a common nation while preserving their distinctive identities. So did Devanesan. This vision remains relevant today. It needs to be actualized.

The tragedy of Sri Lanka’s post-independence history is not that diversity exists. Diversity exists in every society. The tragedy is that we often allow diversity to become a source of fear, though we share many of the same values of family, hospitality, respect for elders and compassion towards others. During our visit to Jaffna in 1992, we met representatives of the LTTE administration, including Raheem. The discussion turned to the controversial issue of merging the Northern and Eastern Provinces. Dr Nesiah argued that if the merger could not be achieved due to political opposition, it might be more rational to seek greater powers for provincial councils instead. Raheem disagreed. Devanesan was interested in finding practical ways to achieve justice and coexistence. That was characteristic of him.

Devanesan Nesiah was a student of conflict and strategy. He became a doctoral student of Professor Thomas Schelling, who would later receive the Nobel Prize for his pioneering work on conflict and cooperation. Schelling’s insight was that even in the midst of conflict, there are usually common interests that adversaries share. Even adversaries locked in a struggle usually depend on each other for the outcome they each want. The challenge is to identify those common interests and build upon them. Conflict is not simply a contest between enemies. It is also a search for ways to coexist. Together as students and peace practitioners, we applied those theories to the Sri Lankan context to understand what was going on and to share that understanding with the Sri Lankan people.

Rational Empathy

Dr Nesiah spoke his mind, truth to power. He was a man of logic, rationality, and principle. His integrity came at a cost. His public service career experienced many ups and downs because he refused to accommodate irrational or corrupt demands. There were periods when he was sidelined into that administrative limbo known as the “pool” and assigned no substantive responsibilities for refusing to give in to political demands. Like the rest of his larger family, most notably the Hoole family of Jaffna, he would not abandon his principles. In 2018, to protest the action of President Maithripala Sirisena in sacking the then government he returned his Deshamanya Award (Pride of the Nation) national civil honourn which was soon thereafter overturned by the Supreme Court as being unconstitutional. His commitment was not to personal advancement, but to what he believed was right.

My wife Sumadhu recalls a story he told her. One day, while travelling on official duty, he told her how he had seen a thalagoya, a monitor lizard, trussed up and being taken away for slaughter. The sight of the creature’s suffering affected him deeply. He said he saw tears in its eyes and described the moment of awakening. From that day onwards, he gave up eating meat.

The story brings to mind the biblical story of the conversion of St Paul on the road to Damascus and the Buddhist exhortation, “May all living beings be well and happy.” But the deeper significance lies not in religious comparison. It lies in the awakening of empathy.

That was the essence of Dr Devanesan Nesiah’s worldview. The prejudices that society often imposes through ethnicity, religion, caste, or gender had little hold on him. He saw them as human constructs that often served to privilege some while excluding others. Such were his values that made him an extraordinary human being. Dr. Nesiah lived according to that understanding. He showed that integrity can survive amidst conflict. He reminded us that reason and compassion are not opposites but partners, that what unites us as Sri Lankans inhabiting our common island home has always been greater than what divides us, and we need to build our institutions accordingly.

I am proud that he was my friend. I am grateful that he was my mentor.

by Jehan Perera

Features

City of Dreams …Heartbeat of Colombo

Published

7 hours ago

2026/06/16

Sahan Weerasooriya

Enroute

If Colombo’s nightlife had a pulse, you’d find it 23 floors up, at Gatz, City of Dreams, Cinnamon Life.

The entertainment lounge has shed its old skin and stepped out supper-club style — think dim lights, clinking glasses, and live music that doesn’t ask you to choose between dinner and a show. You get both.

What’s more, at the new look Gatz the music never stops and it’s all happening seven nights a week … with live entertainment, and this is the scene, beat by beat:

Monday and Tuesday: Top Hats with Daniella/Naomi, from 7.00 pm onwards.

Sohan, Kamal Munasinghe (GM, Cinnamon Life) and Imran of
Funtime Entertainments

One of Colombo’s most sought-after bands is now a Monday-Tuesday ritual.

With a super repertoire, Top Hats can swing from lounge jazz to dancefloor fire. Big venues love them. Now Gatz gets to claim them.

Wednesday: Enroute with Gananath & Debbie – from 7.00 pm onwards.

Want New York at sunset? This is it. Gananath & Debbie transport you straight to the heady days of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Ray Charles …old-school cool, live and unfiltered.

Thursday to Sunday: Terry & the Big Spenders – from 8.00 pm onwards.

Terry & The Big Spenders

The crowd favourite. A super big band sound that owns the 70s, 80s and 90s.

If you’ve been waiting for horns, harmonies, and nostalgia with volume, Terry & the Big Spenders deliver it nightly. No wonder they’re a huge hit.

Gatz is now an entertainment lounge, in Supper Club style, with Happy Hour very day, from 6.00 pm to 8.00 pm because the night, they say, should start with a toast.

And, from July, weekends at the Gatz go global. Local and foreign guest stars will be around to entertain you. Gatz is certainly booking big.

Wow! That would be another exciting experience for those patronising the most talked about venue in town.

In charge of the new setup is our legendary entertainer/singer Sohan Weerasinghe, along with Imran of Funtime Entertainment.

The twosome, with invaluable assistance from the General Manager, Kamal Munasinghe, and the entire team at Cinnamon Life, have built Gatz into more than a venue. They have turned it into the “Heartbeat of the City.”

So come for happy hour. Stay for Terry’s horns, Sing-along with Enroute and Dance with Top Hats, all on the 23rd floor, and while Colombo sparkles below the bands will take you higher.

Remember, the heartbeat is loudest at Gatz.