Features

Keynote Speech at the Launch of The Ceylon Journal, by Rohan Pethiyagoda

Published

1 year ago

2025/04/13

“How Rubber Shaped our Political Philosophy”

The Ceylon Journal was launched last August. Its first issue is already out of print. Only a handful of the second issue covering new perspectives of history, art, law, politics, folklore, and many other facets of Sri Lanka is available. To reserve your very own copy priced Rs. 2000 call on 0725830728.

Congratulations, Avishka [Senewiratne]. I am so proud of what you have done. Especially, Ladies and Gentlemen, to see and hear all of us stand up and actually sing the National Anthem was such a pleasure. Too often on occasions like this, the anthem is played, and no one sings. And we sang so beautifully this evening that it brought tears to my eyes. It is not often we get to think patriotic thoughts in Sri Lanka nowadays: this evening was a refreshing exception.

I’m never very sure what to say on an occasion like this, in which we celebrate history, especially given that I am a scientist and not a historian. It poses something of a challenge for me. Although we are often told that we must study history because it repeats itself, I don’t believe it ever does. But history certainly informs us: articles such as those in The Ceylon Journal, of which I read an advance copy, help us understand the context of our past and how it explains our present.

I want to take an example and explain what I am on about. I’m going to talk about rubber. Yes rubber, as in ‘eraser’, and how it crafted our national political identity, helping, even now seven decades later, to make ‘capitalism’ a pejorative.

As I think you know already, rubber came into general use in the middle of the 19^th century. Charles Macintosh invented the raincoat in 1824 by placing a thin sheet of rubber between two sheets of fabric and pressing them together. That invention transformed many things, not least warfare. Just think of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in the winter of 1812. His troops did that without any kind of waterproof clothing. Some 200,000 of them perished, not from bullets but from hypothermia. Waterproof raincoats could have saved thousands of lives. Not long after rubber came to be used for waterproofing, we saw the first undersea telegraph cable connecting Europe to North America being laid in the 1850s. When the American civil war broke out in 1860, demand for rubber increased yet further: the troops needed raincoats and other items made from this miracle material.

At that time rubber, used to be collected from the wild in the province of Pará in Northern Brazil, across which the Amazon drains into the Atlantic. In 1866, steamers began plying thousands of kilometres upriver, to return with cargoes of rubber harvested from the rainforest. Soon, the wild trees were being tapped to exhaustion and the sustainability of supply became doubtful.

Meanwhile, England was at the zenith of its colonial power, and colonial strategists thought rather like corporate strategists do today. The director of the Kew Gardens at the time, Joseph Hooker, felt there might be one day be a greater potential for rubber. He decided to look into the possibility of cultivating the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis, in Britain’s Asian colonies. So, he dispatched a young man called Henry Wickham to the Amazon to try to secure some seeds. In 1876, Wickham returned to Kew with 70,000 rubber seeds. These were planted out in hothouses in Kew and by the end of that year, almost 2000 of them had germinated.

These were dispatched to Ceylon, only a few weeks’ voyage away now, thanks to steamships and the Suez Canal. The director of the Peradeniya Botanic Garden at the time was George Henry Kendrick Thwaites, a brilliant systematic botanist and horticulturalist. Thwaites received the seedlings and had to decide where to plant them. He read the available literature—remember, this was 1876: there was no internet—and managed to piece together a model of the climatic conditions in the region of the Amazonian rainforest to which rubber was native. He decided that the plants would need an elevation of less than 300 metres and a minimum annual rainfall of at least 2000mm. In other words, the most suitable region for rubber would be an arc about 30 kilometres wide, extending roughly from Ambalangoda to Matale. Despite his never having seen a rubber plant until then, astonishingly, he got it exactly right.

Thwaites settled on a site in the middle of the arc, at Henarathgoda near Gampaha. That became the world’s first rubber nursery: the first successful cultivation of this tree outside Brazil. The trees grew well and, eight years later, came into seed. Henry Trimen, Thwaites’ successor, used the seeds to establish an experimental plantation near Polgahawela and also shared seeds with the Singapore Botanic Garden. Those would later become the foundation of the great Malaysian rubber industry.

But up to that time, Sri Lanka’s rubber plantation remained a solution looking for a problem. Then, in 1888, the problem arrived, and from a completely unexpected quarter: John Dunlop invented the pneumatic tire. Soon, bicycles came to be fitted with air-filled tires, followed by motorcars. In 1900, the US produced just 5,000 motorcars; by 1915, production had risen to half a million. The great rubber boom had begun.

Meanwhile, the colonial administration in Ceylon had invited investors to buy land and start cultivating rubber to feed the growing international demand. But by the early 1890s, three unusual things had happened. First, with the collapse of the coffee industry in the mid-1870s, many British investors had been bankrupted. Those who survived had to divert all their available capital into transitioning their failing coffee plantations into tea. They were understandably averse to risk. As a result, the British showed little interest in this strange tree called rubber that had been bought from Brazil.

Second, a native Sri Lankan middle class had by then emerged. The Colebrooke-Cameron reforms had led to the establishment of the Royal academy, later Royal College, by 1835. Other great schools followed in quick succession. From the middle of the 19^th century, it was possible for Sri Lankans to get an education and get employment in government service, become professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, civil servants, clerks, and so on. And so, by the 1890s, a solid native middle class had emerged. The feature that defines a middle class, of course, is savings, and these savings now came to be translated into the capital that founded the rubber industry.

Third, the British had by then established a rail and road network and created the legal and commercial institutions for managing credit and doing business—institutions like banks, financial services, contract law and laws that regulated bankruptcy. They had made the rules, but by now, Sri Lankans had learned to play the game. And so, it came to be that Sri Lankans came to own a substantial part of the rubber-plantation industry very early in the game. By 1911, almost 200,000 acres of rubber had been planted and world demand was growing exponentially.

In just one generation, investors in rubber were reaping eye-watering returns that in today’s money would equate to Rs 3.6 million per acre per year. It was these people who, together with the coconut barons, came to own the grand mansions that adorn the poshest roads in Cinnamon Gardens: Ward Place, Rosmead Place, Barnes Place, Horton Place, and so on. There was an astonishingly rapid creation of indigenous wealth. By 1911, the tonnage at shipping calling in Sri Lankan ports—Colombo and Trincomalee—exceeded nine million tons, making them collectively the third busiest in the British Empire and the seventh busiest in the world. By comparison, the busiest port in Europe is now Rotterdam, which ranks tenth in the world.

We often blame politicians for things that go wrong in our country and God knows they are responsible for most of it. But unfortunately for us, the first six years of independence, from 1948 to 1954, were really unlucky years for Sri Lanka. As if successive failed monsoons and falling rice crops weren’t bad enough, along came the Korean war. In the meantime, the Sri Lankan people had got used to the idea of food rations during the war and they wanted rations to be continued as free handouts. Those demands climaxed in the ‘Hartal’ of 1953, a general strike demanding something for nothing. Politicians were being forced to keep the promises they had made when before independence, that they would deliver greater prosperity than under the British.

So, by 1949, D. S. Senanayake was forced to devalue the rupee, leading to rapid price inflation. Thankfully we didn’t have significant foreign debt then, or we might have had to declare insolvency much earlier than we finally did, in 2022. And then, because of failing paddy harvests, we were forced to buy rice

from China, which was in turn buying our rubber. But as luck would have it, China entered the Korean war, causing the UN, at the behest of the US, to embargo rubber exports to China.

This placed the D. S. Senanayake and John Kotelawala governments in an impossible predicament. There was a rice shortage; people were demanding free rice, and without rubber exports, there was no foreign exchange with which to buy rice. Kotelawala flew to Washington, D.C., to meet with President Eisenhower and plead for either an exemption from the embargo or else, for the US to buy our rubber. Despite Sri Lanka having provided rubber to the Allies at concessionary prices during the war and having supported the Allies, Eisenhower refused. British and American memories were short indeed. In India, Mahatma Gandhi and the Congress Party had chosen the moment, in August 1942 when Japan invaded Southeast Asia and were poised to invade Bengal, to demand that the British quit India, threatening in the alternative that they would throw their lot in with the Japanese. The Sri Lankan government, by contrast, had stood solidly by the Allies. But now, those same allies stabbed the fledgling nation in the chest. Gratitude, it seemed, was a concept alien to the West.

In these circumstances, Sri Lanka had no choice but to break the UN embargo and enter into a rice-for-rubber barter agreement with China. This resulted not only in the US suspending aid and the supply of agricultural chemicals to Sri Lanka, but also invoking the Battle Act and placing restrictions on US and UK ships calling at the island’s ports.

Understandably, by 1948, Sri Lankans entertained a strong disdain for colonialism. With the Cold War now under way, the USSR and China did all they could to split countries like Sri Lana away not just from their erstwhile colonial masters but also the capitalist system. If any doubt persisted in the minds of Sri Lankan politicians, Western sanctions put an end to that. The country fell into the warm embrace of the communist powers. China and the USSR were quick to fill the void left by the West, and especially in the 1950s, there was good reason to believe that the communist system was working. The Soviet economy was seeing unprecedented growth, and that decade saw them producing hydrogen bombs and putting the first satellite, dog and man in space.

As a consequence of the West’s perfidy in the early 1950s, ‘Capitalism’ continues to have pejorative connotations in Sri Lanka to this day. And it resulted in us becoming more insular, more inward looking, and anxious to assert our nationalism even when it cost us dearly.

Soon, we abolished the use of English, and we nationalized Western oil companies and the plantations. None of these things did us the slightest bit of good. We even changed the name of the country in English from Ceylon to Sri Lanka. Most countries in the world have an international name in addition to the name they call themselves. Sri Lanka had been ‘Lanka’ in Sinhala throughout the colonial period, even as its name had been Ceylon in English. The Japanese don’t call themselves Japan in their own language, neither do the Germans call themselves Germany. These are international names for Nihon and Deutschland, just like Baharat or Hindustan is what Indians call India. But we insisted that little Sri Lanka will assert itself and insist what the world would call us, the classic symptom of a massive inferiority complex. While countries like Singapore built on the brand value of their colonial names, we erased ours from the books. Now, no one knows where Ceylon tea or Ceylon cinnamon comes from.

Singapore is itself a British name: it should be Sinha Pura, the Lion City, a Sanskrit name. But Singapore values its bottom line more than its commitment to terminological exactitude. Even the name of its first British governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, has become a valued national brand. But here in Sri Lanka, rather than build on our colonial heritage, not the least liberal values the British engendered in us, together with democracy and a moderately regulated economy, we have chosen to deny it and seek to expunge it from our memory. We rejected the good values of the West along with the bad: like courtesy, queuing, and the idea that corruption is wrong.

We have stopped fighting for the dignity of our land, and I hope that as you read the articles in The Ceylon Journal that are published in the future, we will be reminded time and time again of the beautiful heritage of our country and how we can once again find it in ourselves to be proud of this wonderful land.

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Features

Why ‘Southasianness’ should continue to matter for the ‘SAARC Eight’

Published

6 hours ago

2026/09/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

Ambassador Ravinatha Aryasinha (at centre of top table), other dignitaries and the RCSS team at the formalization of the SAU-RCSS agreement.

At a time when Sri Lanka’s foreign policy is coming under intense scrutiny by some local sections it is only right that impartial and independent commentators shed some clarity on what fundamental foreign policy directions Sri Lanka ought to take. The extremely fluid and complex nature of current international politics renders such an understanding crucially important.

Given its vulnerabilities in a number of spheres Sri Lanka has no choice but to persist in broadly following the path of Non-alignment. That is, it should be ‘a friend of all and an enemy of none’, to the extent possible. However, it does not follow that in the process it could compromise what is seen as its national interest.

The latter point needs stressing against the backdrop of the criticisms the Sri Lankan government has been attracting from some quarters over what is made out to be some opaqueness in security and defence cooperation agreements it has entered into with India. It remains advisable for the Sri Lankan government to enter into pacts of this nature with India, but the government is obliged to disclose the contents of these agreements to the Sri Lankan people without undue delay in consideration of the uncompromisable sovereign rights of a people in a democracy.

However, there is no denying that the government should make it a central foreign policy premise to always work in cooperation with India. A consideration of what it cost Sri Lanka in the past to be in a disharmonious relationship with India and how such policy missteps worked against Sri Lanka’s best interests ought to dictate to Sri Lanka the advisability of maintaining uninterrupted cordial ties with India. Moreover, common sense ought to drive home to a country the costs of being at loggerheads with one’s closest neighbour who has also proved a ‘ready friend in deed.’

That said, it is the bounden duty of Sri Lanka’s diplomatic community or establishment to ensure that such cooperation does not degenerate into a policy of subservience towards India. That is, finesse and farsightedness in local diplomacy become prime requirements.

While India’s geographical location and physical size, besides her other strengths, contribute towards her centrality in regional and world affairs, her neighbours would be thinking and acting far-sightedly if they not only focus on India and her legitimate interests but also ensure continuous friction-free intra-South Asian relations. That is, for them collective South Asian well being should be of fundamental importance.

Much more than for India perhaps, such harmonious ties are of inestimable importance to India’s neigbours who are up against multiple vulnerabilities which are to a great extent regionally rooted. The latter could never, that is, afford to take their minds off the region’s collective development prospects.

The above are some of the reasons why it could prove highly counter-productive and self-defeating for the ‘South Asian Eight’ to render dormant and ineffective the historic SAARC organization. Rather than ‘dead’ SAARC has been allowed to drift into the ‘Limbo of Forgotten Things.’

The growing inter-dependence of the ‘SAARC Eight’ ought to impress on the collectivity the need to step-up regional cooperation in multiple areas which impinge on its members’ legitimate interests. For instance, the youth-led ‘Cockroach’ revolts, first in India and subsequently outside, should convince South Asia that it is continuing to be plagued in a major way by poverty and equity-linked issues. That is, West-inspired, largely market economics-dictated ways to see an end to poverty are simply not working completely.

Likewise climate-related questions are ravaging South Asia in unimaginable ways; Nepal being just one case in point. The rationale for regional cooperation remains valid and undefeated. It is time for revived and stepped-up SAARC cooperation. That is, the solutions to the region’s development dilemmas need to be found in mainly the region.

This amounts to making a case for a continued sense of ‘Southasianness’ among the SAARC countries. That is the conviction should be firm that they know their developmental challenges best and that answers to these issues must be primarily evolved by the grouping itself in cooperation with concerned sections.

From the above viewpoints the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS), Colombo did very well to tie-up with the South Asian University (SAU), India, to increase public awareness on the developmental problems affecting South Asia and for initiating a number collaborative measures that aim at ameliorating them. The relevant agreement was formalized in early September at the RCSS. The sealing of the pact took place under the aegis of SAU President Prof. K.K. Aggarwal and RCSS Executive Director Ambassador Ravinatha Aryasinha.

A press release issued by the organizations said the collaboration aims ‘to foster research networks, partnerships and collaborations for transformative change across South Asia.’ It also mentioned that the partnership marked the first agreement to be signed by SAU with an independent think tank in Sri Lanka.

Among other things, pacts such as the above are bold moves in the direction of fostering a spirit of intellectual independence in those areas of the South facing some of the stiffest developmental challenges. Rather than ‘import’ solutions to these challenges from outside the region, the SAU-RCSS initiative aims at fostering fresh approaches to evolving solutions to problems that are uniquely South Asian.

It is hoped that the SAU and RCSS initiative while leading a to a greater degree of Southern intellectual independence in the area of development thinking would also help in kick-starting the SAARC process all over again in a major way.

What ought to lend fresh urgency to the latter undertakings are fast-breaking current developments in international politics. It ought to be perceived by the most underdeveloped regions of the South that going forward their well being would matter least or not at all to the major powers of both East and West.

For example at the time of writing the foremost among US and Chinese political leaders are meeting in the US in what is made out to be a historic coming together of sorts to address issues of common concern. It is highly unlikely that the parties would be addressing the economic preoccupations of the least developed countries. The same goes for other states that matter from the East and West.

Essentially, the US and China would be looking at ways of strengthening business ties that matter majorly for them. The South and its issues would prove to be of peripheral interest, if at all they happen to matter to the protagonists. Such developments ought to be fresh reminders to the South and their collaborative organizations that there is no escaping self-help and joint solidarity.

Features

Is Sri Lanka prepared for global literacy crisis?

Published

6 hours ago

2026/09/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

by Prof. M.W. Amarasiri de Silva

Adult literacy has for a long time been one of Sri Lanka’s greatest sources of pride, serving as a social indicator that has set the country apart from several of its neighbours in the region. For many years Sri Lanka has been recognised for keeping its literacy rates at a level like those of middle-income countries and even some high-income ones, even though it has faced economic difficulties and political instability. However, since new global research has now shown an unexpected and concerning decline in adult literacy in several high-income countries, it is important to consider what this means for Sri Lanka.

The phenomenon described by Jishnu Das, Yash Dhuldhoya and Ethan Sager, the unexplained fall in functional literacy among adults in wealthy nations. calls for a more thorough examination of the nature of literacy, the pressures exerted by the modern information environment, and the vulnerabilities that Sri Lanka might encounter as it moves towards a more digital, ageing and complex society. Even though Sri Lanka’s basic literacy rates remain high and steady, the global trend acts as a warning that literacy is not a fixed accomplishment but a dynamic capability which must be continually fostered, safeguarded and adapted to changing circumstances.

Decline in functional literacy

The drop in literacy rate in high-income countries is not due to people losing the ability to read or write in the ordinary way. On the contrary, it reflects a decline in functional literacy, which is the capacity to deal with, understand, and apply information in real-life situations. This kind of literacy involves following instructions, comprehending official documents, using digital interfaces, interpreting medical information, and making sense of complicated texts that demand continuous attention.

Researchers stress that the decline cannot be attributed merely to disruptions caused by COVID-19 or the increasing use of smartphones; instead, there is going on something more fundamental: a weakening of the cognitive and informational bases that adults need to function properly in modern society. In countries such as the United States, the percentage of adults regarded as functionally illiterate has increased significantly, indicating that even highly educated societies are having difficulty in keeping up the skills required to handle ever more complex streams of information.

Sri Lanka immune?

At first sight, Sri Lanka seems to be immune from this trend. The country’s adult literacy rate is still above 92 per cent and youth literacy is even higher. According to the 2024 Census, literacy rates exceed 97 per cent among people aged ten and over, with nearly equal levels between the sexes. These figures show the continued strength of Sri Lanka’s system of free education, a system which in the past has guaranteed widespread access to school and has produced generation after generation of citizens who could read and write at a basic level.

There has also been a steady improvement in educational attainment, with an increasing number of adults finishing secondary education and a larger proportion going on to tertiary institutions. Unlike the mysterious drops observed in rich countries, Sri Lanka’s literacy figures demonstrate stability and even a slight improvement.

However, although the surface appearance is reassuring, an even more complicated reality exists. The literacy figures for Sri Lanka only record basic literacy, that is, the ability to read and write simple sentences, and they do not include measures of functional literacy. It is impossible to tell from these statistics whether adults can interpret a bank statement, understand a medical prescription, use an online government portal, or critically assess information that is spreading on social media. As is shown by the global trend, having a high level of basic literacy does not ensure a strong degree of functional literacy. On the contrary, functional literacy can fall even if basic literacy stays the same. This difference is important for Sri Lanka, particularly since the country is currently experiencing rapid digitalization, demographic ageing, and social change.

Major risk factor

A major risk factor is the move towards digital information environments. In high-income countries, researchers believe that the prevalence of smartphones and short-form digital content may be diminishing people’s ability to engage in deep reading. Nowadays, individuals take in information in short, rapid segments by scrolling through social media feeds, quickly reading headlines, and viewing short videos. Such behaviour decreases the opportunity for sustained reading, which is necessary for keeping comprehension, critical thinking, and the capacity to deal with complex information intact.

Sri Lanka is going through a comparable change. There has been a sharp increase in the number of people using smartphones, and social media sites have become the main sources of news, leisure, and communication. Although there are many advantages to having digital access, it also results in a situation where superficial reading becomes the standard approach and could therefore lead to a decline in functional literacy over time.

Demographic ageing as challenge

A further challenge that is coming up is demographic ageing. Sri Lanka is rapidly moving towards becoming an ageing society, with an increasing number of older people who might experience cognitive decline, have less exposure to new information, and enjoy few opportunities for further learning. In high-income countries, ageing populations have led to a fall in functional literacy since older individuals have had difficulty adapting to digital systems and complicated bureaucratic procedures.

The older generation in Sri Lanka, many whom were educated many decades ago under different curriculum standards, could end up becoming increasingly vulnerable in a world in which essential services, such as banking and healthcare, are being moved online. If appropriate support is not provided, the country may witness a growing gap between basic literacy and functional literacy among older adults.

In Sri Lanka, the way in which administration and the workplace are organised has in the past placed greater trust in personal communication and on basic forms of documentation. What in high-income countries would require complex reading is instead carried out through face-to-face contact in Sri Lanka. Nevertheless, this situation is now changing. Government services are becoming available online, banks are introducing digital systems, and in workplaces there is an increasing need for employees to use electronic systems. Since these changes are happening at a faster rate, the demand for functional literacy will increase. Should adults not be able to meet these new demands, Sri Lanka might start to see the kind of decline in literacy that has been seen in other places.

Misinformation and disinformation

Another worry is the spread of misinformation and disinformation. In Sri Lanka, there has already been the quick dissemination of false information via social media, with this having an impact on public health, politics, and social cohesion. Since functional literacy is essential for allowing people to assess sources, doubt the claims made, and tell the difference between reliable information and falsehoods, a lack of functional literacy causes societies to be more open to manipulation, polarisation, and confusion.

The fact that there has been a global drop in functional literacy at the same time as misinformation has increased points to a dangerous feedback cycle: when literacy is low people become more prone to misinformation, and the misinformation in turn damages their ability to think critically about information. Given that the country has a high level of social media use and a lack of digital literacy training, Sri Lanka should take this risk seriously.

Even though there are these risks, Sri Lanka has several advantages which can assist in avoiding a drop in functional literacy. The country’s system of basic education is still strong, showing high enrolment figures and good results in basic literacy.

Families in Sri Lanka still place a great deal of importance on education and reading is still a respected cultural activity. Furthermore, because of its relatively small size and the fact that it has a centralized form of government, it is more efficient than in bigger countries to carry out nationwide literacy campaigns. These strengths offer a firm basis for developing new strategies for protecting and improving functional literacy.

Literacy a process

It should be realised by Sri Lanka that attaining literacy is not a single accomplishment achieved in childhood. In the modern world, literacy must be a skill that is constantly put into practice, kept up to date and adapted to changing circumstances. The fact that adult literacy is declining worldwide shows that even in wealthy countries with well-developed education systems deterioration can occur if adults are not supported in keeping their cognitive and informational abilities. Sri Lanka cannot afford to be careless.

It is necessary for the country to invest in adult education, in programmes concerning digital literacy and in the development of cognitive skills for all age groups. It also needs to establish ways of measuring functional literacy rather than just basic literacy so that policymakers can detect emerging weaknesses and act in advance.

A vital measure is to increase the opportunities for adult learning. Although Sri Lanka has effective literacy programmes based in schools, the country’s infrastructure for adult education is limited. Community centres, libraries, universities, and vocational institutes should take on a more significant role by providing courses, workshops, and reading programmes which are tailored for adults. The programmes should place an emphasis not just on reading and writing but also on digital navigation, critical thinking, and information processing. Adults should be given the chance to practise the skills that are necessary for them to function effectively in a rapidly changing world.

Importance of digital literacy programmes

It is just as important to have digital literacy programmes. Since an increasing number of services are being offered online, adults need to learn how to use digital tools with confidence and in a safe manner. This involves knowing how to fill out online forms, moving around on government websites, using banking apps, and being able to spot misinformation. The digital literacy courses available should be accessible, affordable, and adapted to different age groups, especially older adults who might feel put off by technology. Schools can also contribute by incorporating digital literacy into their curriculum so that future generations acquire good functional literacy skills from an early age.

Sri Lanka should also investigate introducing policies which promote cognitive health among older people. Since cognitive decline can lead to a deterioration of functional literacy, it becomes more difficult for older individuals to deal with information. It is possible to help keep cognitive function by setting up programmes that promote reading, social interaction, physical activity, and continued learning. During regular medical visits, healthcare professionals should include cognitive assessments so that any problems affecting literacy-related skills can be picked up early.

Sri Lanka needs to create tools for measuring functional literacy, since the figures available on basic literacy give an incomplete account of the country’s capabilities. By using assessments of functional literacy like those employed in high-income countries, Sri Lanka would be able to monitor how well its adults can apply their literacy skills in real-life situations.

Features

From Colombo to Vegas: Sri Lankan talent shines at WCOPA

Published

6 hours ago

2026/09/24

Sahan Weerasooriya

Chris with Sachini Ayendra, the very first contestant who represented Sri Lanka at WCOPA 2015 / Bronze winner at WCOPA 2026 Natharie Wickramasinghe with her parents

The World Championships of Performing Arts (WCOPA) is known globally as the Olympics of performing arts, but Sri Lankans came to know of it more closely when Natharie Wickramasinghe, representing Team Sri Lanka at WCOPA 2026, in Las Vegas, earned a Bronze Medal in the Ethnic/Folklore Dance category.

Behind Sri Lanka’s WCOPA journey is Sri Lanka-born Chris Rajendra, who migrated to the United States in 2007, and deserves special congratulations.

Passionate about discovering and promoting talent, Chris has been actively involved in the pageant and performing arts, industry since 2002.

A major milestone came in 2015, when he introduced WCOPA, to Sri Lanka, for the first time, creating an international platform for Sri Lankan performers.

Sachini Ayendra became the very first candidate to represent Sri Lanka at WCOPA, in 2015, marking the beginning of Team Sri Lanka’s journey.

Chris served as National Director for Team Sri Lanka from 2015 to 2018, and has returned to the role for the 2026–2027 term, continuing his commitment to identifying, developing and promoting Sri Lankan talent internationally.

His involvement in pageantry and performing arts includes:

Recruiter, Miss Nevada United States – 2014

Chris Rajendra: National Director – WCOPA Team Sri Lanka

Manager, Miss Colombia Las Vegas – 2013 to 2017

Director for the West Coast and International Divisions of Ms. Latina International and Ms. International World – 2017

National Director for Team Sri Lanka – WCOPA, 2015–2018 and 2026–2027

Co-National Director for Team USA – WCOPA 2026

In the USA, Chris began his career in retail before transitioning into insurance and financial services, where he built extensive experience in sales, marketing, leadership and business development.

He owned and operated a brokerage, affiliated with multiple insurance companies, and later served as Marketing Director with Transamerica and World Financial Group.

As his business expanded across Las Vegas and California, he continued to hone his expertise in sales, marketing and client relations. He now works as a Sales Executive at Hilton Grand Vacations.

Looking ahead, Chris will shortly launch the application process for Team Sri Lanka 2027, giving talented Sri Lankan performers another opportunity to represent the country on the world stage.

The 2027 World Championships of Performing Arts will take place in Las Vegas, USA, in July or August 2027.

Through his work in both the corporate and performing arts worlds, Chris Rajendra continues to combine leadership, networking and talent development — creating opportunities for Sri Lankan performers to showcase their abilities on a global platform.