Features

My Wedding, my father’s funeral and a portrait of Mr. Bandaranaike

Published

1 year ago

2024/10/20

Thilina Walpola

“An uncommon man in the age of the Common Man”

(Excerpted from Render unto Caesar – Memoirs of Bradman Weerakoon)

Two highly personal life-defining events occurred in 1956. One was my marriage in August to Damayanthi and the other the death of my father in late September.

Damayanthi Gunasekera was the third daughter of a friend of my father’s who joined the colonial police at about the same time as Station House Officers. They both served for 35 years before retiring as superintendent in charge of districts. But more than that, Damayanthi’s mother was a Weerakoon from the same village as my father – Payagala in the Kalutara district – and a second or third cousin as well.

Damayanthi’s mother who wed at the age of 14 was said to be a beauty and it was rumoured in family circles that my father. as a young police officer, was seriously interested in her. Be that as it may my parents were really pleased when the proposal from the Gunasekera side came along.

We were married on August 10, 1956 at the Galle Face Hotel and as decided by the two of us, Sir John, my former boss who we knew me quite well by then and Sir Oliver Goonetilleke, the governor-general who had been at school together with our two fathers at Wesley College, and the prime minister and his wife were to be the chief guests. Our marriage had been registered earlier and the witnesses had been my father and Damayanthi’s maternal uncle. The prime minister was busy that afternoon with the budget debate in Parliament but his wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, came and stayed for a long while.

The other event, the death of my father, a month after the wedding built a special bond of appreciation and obligation to the Bandaranaike family. My father died suddenly two days after surgery by Dr P R Anthonis, the famous surgeon, for a tumour in the urinary tract. The funeral was fixed for a Sunday morning. It was to be a police funeral as befitted his rank, attended by a bugler or two and the blue flag draping the coffin, but it remained by and large a personal affair.

It was therefore a surprise to learn from the police, as we arrived at Kanatte, that the prime minister, who had been out of Colombo at a swearing-in parade at Diyatalawa, for newly-commissioned officers in his capacity as minister of defence and external affairs was making his presence in a few minutes having cut short his weekend stay in the hills. He was accompanied by Gunasena de Soyza, the permanent secretary. They had booked two sleeping-berths and taken an overnight train to be in Colombo on time. I have never forgotten this extreme act of caring, by a person so highly placed, towards one of his officials and the personal inconvenience he must have accepted to be on time at the funeral.

Of course, the honour paid was to my father who had had a long and distinguished service record in the police force, as it was then called. A C Dep, a DIG of Police who wrote a classic History of the Ceylon Police’ provides an interesting account of the role and purpose of the Station House Officer in those days:

The Station House Officers did not disappoint those who were responsible for the creation of this rank. At first they had a very risky time. “Every one of the SHO in the Tangalle District was either shot or knifed at the beginning of the establishment of the Stations but they stuck to their work most pluckily. They often acted aggressively themselves. But they proved a valuable asset to the Force.” (IGP Dowbiggin)
A full appraisal of their value was given thus by another superior offcer, “They are rather vain, have not that strict sense of discipline that a man who has worked his way through the ranks has, are too fond of strutting about in plainclothes and won’t stand too vigorous a talking off on parade or any similar treatment. They are inclined to sulk and resign in a huff if ill treated. It is an incontrovertible fact that as a class the SHO have been respectable and respected. Their great asset and one which will never be fully appreciated until it is lost, is that as a class they are honest. They are not given to taking petty bribes in petty cases, to do so would be beneath their dignity.”

Among those who lived up to the expectations of Longden and proved that they could fill any high post with credit and dignity were: A Peries ( appointed 1905), P P Wickramasuriya (1905), I Deheragoda (1906), C V Gooneratne (1906), R J Weerasinghe (1906), M D M Gunasekara (1907), P R Krishnaratne (1908), VT Dickman (1908), A W Dambawinne (1908) and E R Weerakoon (1910).

M D M Gunasekera who joined in (1907) was Damayanthi’s father and E R Weerakoon (1910) was mine. I could not help thinking that the references to being “rather vain”, “strutting about”, being “inclined to sulk and resign” and it being “beneath their dignity to take bribes” were exceedingly accurate about my father, as I knew him.

An Uncommon Man in the Age of the Common Man

My interest in S W R D Bandaranaike, this uncommon and complex man, who was now poised to be the harbinger of the age of the common man, led me to read as much as I could on him. Who was this uncommon man whom nobody really quite understood?

If one looked at the family background he was even more alienated from the common man and of the West, more so than Sir John with his formal dress codes and his KCMG.

It was well known that S W R D Bandaranaike was the son of Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, Maha Mudaliyar of the Governors Gate and one of the leading lights of the colonial bourgeoisie and Lady Daisy Dias Bandaranaike of the Obeysekera family. In 1902, when Mr Bandaranaike was two years old his father had been accorded the CMG (Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George) while on a visit to London. The family was one of the richest in the Siyane Korale, (now most of the Gampaha district) owning large extents’ of coconut land and valuable urban property.

Even the very name ‘Solomon West Ridgeway’ which Sir Solomon gave his son was redolent of the family’s association with the British Raj and the then Governor Sir Joseph West Ridgeway had been SWRD’s godfather. As was common at the time in this class of society, the family was Christian and of the Anglican fraternity.

Sir Solomon had tried strenuously to mould his only son in his own image. The boy was kept at home on the country estate at Horagolla and tutored by English teachers until he was 15. The private tuition was not a success as Henry Young, the first master had a ‘fondness for the bottle’ and was soon got rid of while the second, A C Radford, a graduate of Cambridge, was resisted by the young Soloman who disliked the tutor’s attempt to turn him into an English schoolboy of the times.

As Mr Bandaranaike himself had written when he was 18, “Mr Radford never realized my peculiar position and the necessity to use suitable methods in dealing with me. He spent his time in an attempt to destroy my ideals and foist his own upon me.”
The release came when the First World War broke out and the tutor went back to England and Solomon was sent to school for the first time. The secondary school that Sir Solomon chose for his son was St Thomas’s College at Mutwal. But even here, where the sons of the elite studied, young Bandaranaike was treated differently.

He did not live in the boarding like the other boarders but in the house of the Warden and according to his contemporaries had special privileges. Prestige at STC went to those who excelled at team sports like cricket and Bandaranaike who favoured more individval activities such as tennis and debating was not among the most highly respected. However he was remembered for his first class at the Senior Cambridge, his articulate writings and his debating skills.

Warden Stone, a firm and reserved man who was a Classics scholar and a teacher of Greek, won young Solomon’s respect. “Warden Stone is able to appreciate a boy’s point of view’, he was to write. ‘He never tries to force his ideas on a boy against his wishes. He has often told me ‘Stick to your own opinion’.”

Oxford and reading classics, with Stone’s advice and tutelage, was the way forward but this had been delayed until the end of the War by the difficulty of finding a berth on a ship. In his “Memories of Oxford ” Bandaranaike had spoken of the ordeal that awaited the ‘darkie’ who had the temerity to read for the Honour School of Classics. He wrote, “My first year at Oxford I recollect as a period of disappointment and frustration. In all directions I found myself opposed by barriers, which, though invisible and impalpable, were nonetheless very real.”

But this feeling of rejection had not lasted too long. The solution to his problem was as he puts it in ‘memories’ the realization that “before I am their equal I must be their superior”.
Reading Memories was an enlightening experience for me because it opened many doors into Mr Bandaranaike’s personality and his likes and aversions. One of his three ambitions at Oxford had been to be the president of the Union, a position that usually went with oratorical skills of the highest order. As a lad of 18, standing in the outer ring of the vast crowd around the Independence Hall on February 4, 1948, I had, like many others, been mesmerized by his eloquence.

As leader of the House he had outlined his vision of a new order, freedom from ignorance, disease, want and fear. And he exhorted all of us to join him “in fanning the flickering flame of democracy”. It was heady stuff in the mould of Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ at the ‘dawn of the midnight hour’. In “Memories” he had explained the exultation he felt when orating and the power of holding an audience in thrall by his words.

This is how he put it after making “the best speech I ever delivered at Oxford”: Soon the House hung breathless on my words; there was dead silence among the audience which was too absorbed even to applaud. I was conscious of such power over my fellow men as I had never known before. For a few moments I was master of the bodies and souls of the majority of my listeners.”

Mr Bandaranaike’s achievements at the Union were such that he had a right to believe that his ambition to be the president might be fulfilled. But fate intervened in the way of a serious illness that he developed during the autumn term of 1923 which kept him away from the Union and from serious canvassing. It would have been an uphill task since there was also at that time at Oxford a palpable feeling that it was undesirable that the Union should have a president who was not white.

He had earlier tried for the post of junior treasurer in March of 1924 and won, but his quest for the presidency in June was of no avail. He ended third to HJS Wedderburn, the heir to the Earldom of Dundee. Bandaranaike was reportedly deeply hurt at the bloc vote against him – possibly on racial grounds – and this is said to have left him skeptical of the sincerity of the British, especially politicians of the Conservative kind. This stayed with him during the rest of his political life.

I was also moved by the manner in which Bandaranaike had grappled with the problem of authority throughout his early days in relations with his father, his tutors, at STC, at Oxford and so on. Many years later, in perhaps the definitive biography of SWRD Bandaranaike, the political scientist James Manor described this dilemma which Bandaranaike faced throughout his life in the following way
Each time he moved into a wider arena this problem arose in a new form. His childhood was dominated by his difficulties with the authority first of his father whom he mocked, resented and feared, and then of a tutor who acted as his father’s surrogate. At school and at Oxford he was intensely preoccupied with what he saw as his struggle to establish his superiority and his authority among his fellow students.

Throughout his adult life he was unable to accept the authority of any superior. He denied the legitimacy of British rule in Ceylon – a posture which helped him reject his father’s public role as a pillar of the British regime – although for long periods he maintained an uneasy truce with colonial officialdom. As a young politician he could not accept the authority of the leading Ceylonese nationalists who were suspicious of a young man whose father and grandfather had scorned them.

The result was two decades of alternating cooperation and strife, even when (after 1936) he served in a team of ministers led by a senior nationalist – D S Senanayake the architect of the island’s independence in 1948. That phase ended in 1951 when Senanayake with his allies and kinsmen drove Bandaranaike out of Ceylon’s first post-independence Cabinet.

In his early days after assuming office, Mr Bandaranaike was to refer somewhat grandly to the world, to the country and indeed to all of us, as living in a period of transition, caught between two worlds – one dying and the other struggling to be born. He liked to portray himself as the midwife assisting in the birth of the new world which his period of intense labour and change would help produce.

Like Jawaharlal Nehru, with whom he had established a firm friendship, Mr Bandaranaike, too, was a man caught between two cultures. His upbringing and education had been wholly in English and he had a command of the language to become one of the finest speakers in the Oxford Union. On his return to Ceylon after five years abroad he could hardly speak a sentence in Sinhala. Yet, in adulthood he acquired a clear understanding of the hopes and fears of the mass of the Sinhalese for their language and culture and for Buddhism.

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Features

Viktor Orban, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump: The Terrible Threes of the 21st Century

Published

8 hours ago

2026/04/19

Thilina Walpola

Orban (center) Trump and Netanyahu

In the autumn of 1956, Hungary staged the first uprising against the 20^th century Soviet behemoth. Seventy years later, in the spring of 2026 Hungary has delivered the first electoral thrashing against 21^st century right wing populism in Europe. The 1956 uprising was crushed after seven days. But the opposition scored a landslide victory in Hungary’s parliamentary election held on Sunday, April 12 and^. Viktor Orban, Prime Minister since 2010 and the architect of what he proudly called “the illiberal state”, was resoundingly defeated. Orban who has been a pain in the neck for the European Union was a close ally of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Trump even dispatched his Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to campaign for Orban. After Orban’s defeat, Trump and his MAGA followers may be having nightmares about the US midterm elections in November. Similarly, Orban’s defeat has reportedly caused “great concern in the halls of power in Jerusalem.” Netanyahu has lost his only ally in the European Union and the opposition victory in Hungary does not augur well for his own electoral prospects in the Israeli elections due in October.

Ceasefire Hopes

Trump and Netanyahu have bigger things to worry about in the Middle East and among their own political bases. Trump is going bonkers, blasphemously imitating Christ and badmouthing the Pope, launching a blockade in the Strait of Hormuz and strong arming more talks in Islamabad. Netanyahu has been forced to sit on his hands, pausing his fight against Iran while pursuing peace talks with Lebanon. The leaders and diplomats from Pakistan, Egypt and Turkey are shuttling around drumming up support for another round of talks in Islamabad and a prolonged extension of the ceasefire.

Further talks in Islamabad and potential extension of the ceasefire received a new boost by Trump’s announcement of a new 10-day ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon. The background to this development appears to be Iran’s insistence on having this secondary ceasefire, and Trump insisting on ceasefire abidance by Hezbollah in return for his ordering Netanyahu to stop his brutal ‘lawn mowing’ in Lebanon. All of this might seem to augur well for a potential extension of the primary ceasefire between the US and Iran. There are also reports of the narrowing of gap between the two parties – involving a potential moratorium on Iran’s uranium enrichment, the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, and Iran’s access to its frozen assets estimated to be $100 billion.

Meanwhile the IMF has released its latest World Economic Outlook with a grim forecast. “Once again, says the report, “the global economy is threatened with being thrown off the course – this time by the outbreak of war in the Middle East.” Before the war, the IMF was expected to upgrade its growth forecasts for the global economy. Now it is going to be weaker growth and higher inflation with oil price optimistically stabilizing around $100 a barrel in 2026 and $75 a barrel in 2027. In a worst case scenario, if the oil prices were to hit $110 in 2026 and $125 in 2027, growth everywhere will further weaken and inflation will go further up in countries big and small.

In a joint statement on the Middle East, the Finance Ministers of the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, Sweden, Netherlands, Finland, Spain, Norway, Republic of Ireland, Poland and New Zealand have called on the IMF and World Bank “to provide a coordinated emergency support offer for countries in need, tailored to country circumstances and drawing on the full range and flexibility of their tool kits.” They have also welcomed “advice on domestic responses that are temporary, targeted, and effective, and encourage work to identify steps needed to protect long-term growth.”

Subversion from the Right

The two men, Trump and Netanyahu, who started the war and precipitated the current crisis are not being held accountable by anyone and they are still free to do what they want and as they please. The third man, Victor Orban, who did not have anything to do with the war but extended wholehearted ideological and political support as a faithful apprentice to the two older sorcerers, has been democratically defeated. Together, they formed the terrible threes of the 21^st century, spearheading a subversion from the right of the emerging liberal status quo of the post Cold War world. Orban’s defeat is a significant setback to the illiberal right, but it is not the end of it.

The three emerged in the specific historical contexts of their own polities that are both vastly different and yet share powerful ingredients that have proved to be politically potent. The broader context has been the end of the Cold War and the removal of the perceived external threat which opened up the domestic political space in the US, for locking horns over primarily cultural standpoints and climate politics. This era began with the Clinton presidency in 1992 and the election of Barack Obama 16 years later, in 2008, created the illusion of a post-racial America.

In reality, the right was able to push back – first with the younger Bush presidency (2000-2008) pursuing compassionate conservatism, and later with the foray of Trump (2016-2020) threatening to end what he called the “American Carnage.” Of the 32 years since the election of Bill Clinton, Democrats have controlled the White House for 20 years over five presidential terms (Clinton – two, Obama – two, and Biden -one), while the Republicans won three terms (Bush – two, Trump – one) spanning 12 years.

Trump has since won a second term for another four years, but already in his five+ years in office he has issued executive orders to roll back almost all of the liberal advancements in the realms of civil rights, equality, diversity and inclusion. All that the celebrated acronym DEI (Diversity, Equality and Inclusion) stands for has been executively ordered to be banished from the state, its agencies and its programs.

In Europe, the European Union became the champion and bulwark of liberalism and subsidiarity, which in turn provoked the rise of right wing populism in every member country. Brexit was the loudest manifestation against what was considered to be EU’s overreach, but after Britain’s bitter Brexit experience the populists in the European countries gave up on demanding their own exit and limited themselves to fighting the EU from their national bases.

Viktor Orban became the face and voice of anti-EU nationalists. But he and his political party, the Christian Nationalist Fidesz – Hungarian Civic Alliance, are not the only one. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK in Britain and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally Party in France are becoming real electoral contenders, while right wing presidents have been elected in Argentina and Chile.

The rise and fall of Viktor Orban

Of the three terribles, Orban is the youngest but with the longest involvement in politics. Born in 1963, Viktor Orban became a political activist as a 15-year old high schooler, becoming secretary of a Young Communist League local. He continued his activism while studying law in Budapest, visiting Poland and writing his thesis on the Polish Solidarity movement, giving lectures in West Germany and the US as a potential future Hungarian leader, and undertaking research on European civil society at Pembroke College, Oxford.

At the age of 26, Orban gained national prominence with a speech he delivered on June 16, 1989 in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square to mark the reburial of Imre Nagy and other Hungarians killed in the 1956 uprising. Imre Nagy was the leader of the 1956 Hungarian uprising against the puppet Soviet Union outpost in Budapest.

To digress and make a local connection – the pages of Sri Lanka’s parliamentary Hansard of 1956, contain an impressive record of the political debate in Sri Lanka over the events in Hungary. The LSSP’s Colvin R de Silva eloquently led the Trotskyite prosecution of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the suppression of its freedoms. Pieter Keuneman of the Communist Party used his wit and debating skills to defend the indefensible. GG Ponnambalam, the unrepentant anti-communist, used the opportunity to take swipes on both sides. Finally, for the government, Prime Minister SWRD Bandaranaike deployed his own oratorical skills to empathize with the uprising without condemning the USSR. The four men were Sri Lanka’s foremost verbal gladiators and they used the occasion to put on quite a display of their talents.

Back to Hungary, where Orban began his political vocation identifying himself with Imre Nagy and demanding the withdrawal of the Soviet army from Hungary and calling for free elections in that country to elect a new government. That same year in 1989, Fidesz was recognized as a political party; Orban became its leader four years later in 1993 and led the party and its allies to their first victory and formed a new government in 1998. At age 35 Orban became the second youngest Prime Minister in Hungary’s history.

During his first term, Orban started well on the economy, reducing inflation and the budget deficit, was welcomed to the White House by President George W. Bush, and led Hungary to join NATO overruling Russian objections. But the slide into authoritarianism and corruption was just as quick, including the attempt to replace the two-thirds parliamentary majority requirement by a simple majority. By the end of the term the ruling coalition disintegrated and Orban lost the 2002 election and became the leader of the opposition over the next two terms till 2010.

Orban returned to power with a two-thirds majority in 2010 and immediately introduced a new constitution that set the stage for ushering in the illiberal state. What had been previously a communist state now became a Christian state where ‘traditional values’ of gender rights, sexuality, and exclusive nationalism were constitutionally enshrined. The electoral system was changed reducing the number parliamentarians from 386 to 199 – with 103 of them directly elected and 93 assigned proportionately. Orban went on to win three more elections over 16 years – in 2014, 2018 and 2022 – each with a two-thirds majority, and used the time and power to transform Hungary into a conservative fortress in Europe.

The new constitution and its frequent amendments were used to centralize legislative and executive power, curb civil liberties, restrict freedom of speech and the media, and to weaken the constitutional court and judiciary. It was his opposition to non-white immigration that made him “the talisman of Europe’s mainstream right”. He described immigration as the West’s answer to its declining population and flatly rejected it as a solution for Hungary. Instead, he told his compatriots, “we need Hungarian children.” His ‘Orbanomics’ policies restricted abortion and encouraged family formation – forgiving student debt for female students having or adopting children, life-long tax holiday for women with four or more children, and sponsoring fixed-rate mortgages for married couples.

Orban wanted to make Hungary an “ideological center for … an international conservative movement”. Orban heaped praise on Jair Bolsonaro for making Brazil the best example of a “modern Christian democracy.” He endorsed Trump in every one of Trump’s three presidential elections, the only European leader to do so. In return, Orban has been described by US MAGA ideologue Steve Bannon as “Trump before Trump.” Orban’s attack on universities for being the citadels of liberalism have found their echoes in Trump’s America and Modi’s India.

For all his efforts in making Hungary a conservative ideological centre, Viktor Orban’s undoing came about because of Hungary’s growing economic crises and the depth of corruption and systemic nepotism that engulfed the government. The economy has tanked over the last three years with rising prices and the national debt reaching 75% of the GDP – the highest among East European countries. Orban’s critics have exposed and the people have experienced systemic corruption that enabled the siphoning of public wealth into private accounts, the creation of a ‘neo-feudal capitalist class’, and the enrichment of family and friends. Orban’s corruption became the central plank of the opposition platform that Peter Magyar and his Tisza Party presented to the voters and caused his ouster after 16 years.

The Prime Minister elect is not a dyed in the wool liberal, but a member of a conservative Budapest family, and a politician cut from the old Orban cloth. Magyar (literally meaning “Hungarian”) was once a “powerful insider” in the Fidesz government – notably active in foreign affairs, while his ex-wife was once the Minister of Justice in Orban’s cabinet. Mr. Magyar may not fully roll back all of Orban’s illiberalism, but he has committed himself to eliminating corruption, increasing social welfare spending, limiting the prime ministerial tenure to two terms, and being more pro-European, EU and NATO.

EU and European leaders have openly welcomed the change in Hungary, and may be looking for the new government to change Orban’s vetoing of a number of EU initiatives, especially those involving assistance to Ukraine. In return, the new government in Hungary will be expecting the unfreezing of as much as $33 billion funds that the EU extraordinarily chose to freeze as punishment for Orban’s illiberal initiatives in Hungary. For Trump and Netanyahu, the defeat of Viktor Orban removes their only ally and supporter in all of Europe.

by Rajan Philips

Features

ICONS:A Dialogue Across Centuries

Published

8 hours ago

2026/04/19

Thilina Walpola

Sky Gallery of the Fareed Uduman Art Forum is dedicated to bringing audiences, cultures, and time periods together through meaningful and accessible art experiences to create the closest possible encounters with the world’s greatest paintings. Previous exhibitions include, Gustav Klimt, Frida Kahlo, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Salvador Dali.

ICONS is conceived as “a dialogue across centuries” bringing together over a dozen artistic geniuses whose works span the Renaissance to the modern era. These works at their original scales of creation changes the conversation. You can finally stand in front of a life-size Vermeer or a monumental Monet and feel the dialogue between artists who never met but shaped each other across time. Each exhibit is meticulously presented on canvas, hand-framed, and finished at the exact dimensions of the original masterpieces, preserving the integrity of composition, texture, brushwork, color and scale.

At the heart of the exhibition is Jan van Eyck’s ‘Arnolfini Portrait’, a work that epitomizes the detail, symbolism, and human intimacy that have inspired generations of artists. Alongside it, visitors will encounter paintings that shaped the renaissance, impressionism, modernism, and the evolution of visual storytelling by Munch, Matisse, Monet, Degas, Da Vinci, Renoir, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Cézanne, Caravaggio, and more. The exhibition invites audiences to experience a rare conversation across centuries of artistic brilliance.

By bringing together works that are geographically and historically dispersed, ICONS creates a compelling space for comparison, reflection, and discovery. Visitors are invited to move beyond passive viewing into a more engaged encounter—tracing artistic influence, identifying stylistic shifts, and uncovering unexpected connections between artists who never shared the same physical space, yet remain deeply interconnected across time.

Designed and curated for both seasoned art enthusiasts and first-time visitors, ICONS offers an experience that is at once educational, immersive, and accessible—removing many of the traditional barriers associated with global museum-going.

Exhibition Details:

Dates: April 24 – May 3
Time: 10:00 AM – 5:00 PM (Monday – Sunday)
Venue: Sky Gallery Colombo 5

Features

Our Teardrop

Published

8 hours ago

2026/04/19

Thilina Walpola

BOOK REVIEW

Ranoukh Wijesinha (2026)

Published by Jam Fruit Tree Publications.
82 pages. Softcover. ISBN 978-624-6633-81-3

The author is a graduate teacher at St. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia; his alma mater. On leaving school he read for a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English Language and English Literature at the University of Nottingham (Malaysia). On graduating, in 2024, he went back to his old school to teach these same disciplines. There seems to be a historic logic to this as his grandfather, a notable Thomian of his day, also started his working career as a teacher at the College before moving on to the world of publishing; as a newspaper journalist and sub-editor.

On his maternal side, Wijesinha’s grandfather was an accomplished journalist, thespian and playwright of his day, and his mother is also a much sought after teacher of English and English Literature and, as acknowledged by him, his first, and foremost, English teacher.

Ranoukh Wijesinha and friends at STC

Though there are some well-written, almost lyrical, pieces of prose in this publication, it is the poetry that dominates. Written with a sensitivity to people and events he has either observed himself, or as described to him by those who did, it also encompasses all genres of poetic verse, from the classical to the modern, including sonnets, acrostics, haiku to free and blank verse, the latter more in vogue today. All in all, it presents as a celebration of English poetry and its ability to, sometimes, express depth of thought and feeling far better than prose.

Dedicated to his mentor at St. Thomas’, his Drama and Singing Master had been a great influence on Wijesinha His sudden, premature, death understandably came as a shock to the still developing student under his tutelage. The poems “The Man who Made Me” and “The Curtain Called” best demonstrate this. In addition, it is apparent that Wijesinha has endured much mental trauma in his young life. Spending much time on his own, the questions these moments have raised are expressed in “When No One is Listening”, “There was a Time”, “Midnight Walks” and the prose “A Ramble through Colombo”.

However, the majority of the poems concern ‘Our Teardrop’, Sri Lanka, for whom the writer has a great love. He explores its history, its natural wonders, its people, its tragedies, its corruption and the hope that things will get better for all its people. “Bala’ and “Dicky” address a time of violence from days gone by when there were few glories, just victims. “Easter Sunday” brings this almost to the present time.

There also is humour. “Ado, Machang, Bro, Dude” celebrates his friends and friendships in a way that will reverberate with all the present and previous generations of those who are, or were once, in their late teens and early twenties.

There is little to criticise in this first of the writer’s forays into published works except, as referred to previously, to re-state that the prose quails in the face of the power of the poetry. It is all well written, filled with passion and compassion, and gives comfort that there still are young Sri Lankan writers who can be this brave, and write so powerfully, and profoundly, in English. It is hoped that this is just the first of many from the pen of this young writer.

L S M Pillai