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The migration of S. Thomas’ College from Mutwal to Mt. Lavinia

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2 years ago

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R.S. de Saram was one of the first boys Hulugalle got to know when he entered St Thomas' College Mutwal in 1908

(Excerpted from Selected Journalism by HAJ Hulugalle)

The Editor has invited me to write something about the migration of St. Thomas’ College 50 years ago from Mutwal to Mount Lavinia. To do so I would have to begin at the beginning of my connection with the College.

I joined the Mutwal school as a boarder in January 1908. Among the boys I came to know then were Arthur Ranasingha, always a keen and diligent scholar, and R. S. de Saram, already showing the promise which made him the best all-rounder, in work, sports and leadership, produced by S. Thomas’.

The numbers of the Upper School and Lower School together in those days could not have been more than 400, and Warden Stone kept track of every boy. There were probably a 150 boarders in the four large dormitories and Winchester which housed the smaller boys. E. Navaratnam, perhaps the greatest of Thomian house-masters, wrote in the Centenary Number of the school magazine that “the boarding house system, then as now, was the focal point around which all College activities revolved.” This was because the boarders came from all parts of the Island, and formed a compact and disciplined community.

The dormitory masters were, besides Mr. Navaratnam, two Englishmen, the Rev. Handel Smith and C. W. B. Arnold, and O. P. Gooneratne. Miss Treason was Matron and was also in charge of Winchester. Many of those who were in the Matron’s dormitory, like Sam Elapata, Roy Jayasundara and Gordon Jan, are dead. A close friend of over 60 years, Leo Goonewardene, kinsman and near neighbour at Kurunegala, had a school career parallel to mine. He still preserves the elegant stance which distinguished his batting when he played for the College. He rarely misses Old Boys’ Day or the Royal-Thomian cricket match.

Mr. Christie-David, my first class-master, was something of an artist. He set a standard in map-making of which the Survey Department would not be ashamed and which some of the boys managed to reach, no doubt with help from their elders. He believed in the tonic effects of an occasional caning and sent up a few boys every Friday afternoon to stand in the line in the Warden’s study and receive their medicine. I had only a single experience of this treatment with a modest dose of four cuts.

Our new science master, C. W. B. Arnold, taught us enough chemistry in the Upper Third (fifth standard) to cope with any paper set for the Junior Cambridge (eighth standard) and laid a good foundation which stood in good stead in later years.

Mr. R. W. Evans was the head master of the Lower School, and he saw to it that no boy was issued a new exercise book unless the used one, which was handed in, had been neatly kept. He was a good musician and played the organ at the Cathedral which was in a part of the College premises. The boarders attended matins there every morning before breakfast.

Both Arnold and Evans afterwards joined business firms and prospered. The Rev. G. B. Ekanayake, the Principal of the Divinity School, was part of the College establishment. Warden Stone, the Sub-Warden (first the Rev. O. J. C. Beven), Mr. Ekanayake and sometimes Bishop E. A. Copleston, preached the sermons at Sunday evensong which were well above the heads of most of the boys.

Before I reached the Upper School I left St. Thomas’ and joined my brother at Trinity. Four generations of my family have now been to Trinity. When I went there the Principal was A.G. Fraser, a dynamic Scot who, like Arnold of Rugby, believed in a muscular Christianity. There were more activities at Trinity than at St. Thomas’ with perhaps less emphasis on scholarship even though Trinity had some superb teachers like W.S. Senior, N.P. Campbell and Lemuel. Life was less cloistered there and one got to know more about what was going on in the country.

In the midst of many distractions my work suffered. So I went back to St. Thomas’, to work harder and try to catch up with boys from whom I had parted company a few years earlier. By their standard of scholarship, I was gawky. My Latin was mediocre and I could not construe Virgil with the ease of those, like L.W. de Silva, who had been taught by C.V. Pereira and the Warden himself. How I wish I had had the benefit of the discipline exercised by C.V. Pereira, Navaratnam and O.P. Gooneratne!

I had no trouble with Mathematics and Science, and did not feel disgraced when I was placed below Ranasinha and R. S. de Saram in the Arndt Memorial English Prize for which I made a determined try. There was a crop of brilliant students in the College Form who had read widely. It was, for example said that E.B. Wikramanayake had read every book in the school library.

Many of the science students got distinctions in Latin in the Senior Cambridge Examination. Latin was a sine qua non in those days. The brighter boys had their eye on the English University Scholarships awarded on the results of the Inter Arts and Inter Science Examinations of the London University. To sit for them one had to pass the London Matriculation or gain an exemption from it, which meant passing in an extra language, ‘dead’ or `living’, and in most schools it was Latin. Every Thomian knew some Latin which was started very early. It was compulsory even in the Five A Form, a special enclave for non-scholars.

The story is told of S.J.K. Crowther, formerly Editor of the Ceylon Daily News”, of his first encounter with D.S. Senanayake, our first Prime Minister. Crowther was a new boy and at a test examination he turned to his burly neighbour, whose name he did not know, and enquired surreptitiously how the Latin noun “res” was declined. Senanayake whispered: “yes, rem, yetis, rete.” When his paper was scrutinised by Mr. Handel Smith, Crowther was in no position to give the source of his error.

Some of the most famous teachers in Thomian history moved with the school from Mutwal to Mt. Lavinia; among them C. V. Pereira and Navaratnam (both old Trinitians), O. P. Gooneratne and H.J. Wijesinghe, (Royalists), Leonard Arndt, H.D. Jansz, E.S.D. Ohlmus and George Amarasinghe. The Sub-Warden, the Rev. P. L. Jansz, who had acquired the gift of tongues was a fascinating teacher. He knew more Sinhalese than the Sinhalese boys and more Tamil than the Tamil boys. In addition, he knew French, German, Italian, Spanish and Hebrew.

He was supposed to teach the Inter class English texts but he wandered into so many exciting fields of knowledge that the less diligent boys were never able to master their texts. George Amarasinghe, still hail and hearty in his eighties, was a great mathematics teacher, fully in the tradition of his predecessors like Warden Miller, J.R. Jayatilaka and T.N. Nathanielsz.

I was a prefect of Copleston House which was separated from the main precincts by a noisome jungle. Mr. H. J. Wijesinghe, our dormitory master was Captain in command of the Cadet Corp. He kept a pony which he used to ride at the head of the column during route marches. In his absence some of the more daring boys initiated themselves into the art of horseback-riding. C. H. Davidson was one of the boys in Copleston House in my time.

It is sometimes said, especially by those of the older generation, that a Sixth Form or College Form boy 50 years ago had a better education than the average undergraduate of today. Those who left after the Inter had no difficulty in getting the London degree by private study. The Colombo University College was started in 1920 and the University twenty years later. Most of us were quite ignorant of Ceylon history and proficiency in Sinhalese and Tamil were rare. But one could say with confidence that the discipline of the subjects taught, and taught with thoroughness, had a greater character-forming influence than the loaded syllabuses of today. A boy sitting for the Junior Cambridge, for example, was more at home with the English Language than many a graduate of today.

Even the most ardent nationalism must now realize that, under modern conditions, every educated person needs to have a command of English or other world language which unlocks the treasure house of knowledge and which neither Sinhalese or Tamil will be able to do for a long time to come. Rich in certain respects, our national languages are inadequate to meet the demands of higher education, especially in science and technology. There is thus no alternative to an effective bilingualism.

It is noteworthy that the bigots who would exclude English are the first to ensure that their own children get it! With English as the medium of instruction, the schools were available to surmount the barriers of language and geography. Communal differences were dissolved and it meant nothing that a boy came from Batticaloa or Galle. The price paid for this unity was the gulf that was created between the elite and the masses.

Yet, St. Thomas’ produced many of the political leaders of the first half of the century. They were adept at mixing with the masses and found no difficulty in haranguing them in the language which the populace understood. Indeed they seemed to have learnt something from Cicero and Demosthenes in the demagogue’s art.

There is of course much greater control of education by the government now, and the schools are no longer autonomous. The official policy seems to be to gear the pace of the caravan to the speed of the slowest camel. The flow of brilliant European teachers has been arrested. Classes are often unwieldy in number. Good books in the national languages are few. The spectre of unemployment leads to early specialization but science teachers are lacking.

In these circumstances, if a boy does not wish to be left behind he must not only be prepared to work hard; he must plan his program of studies with the best advice available to him. Unless this challenge is met successfully, the justification for private schools will disappear.

(This was first published in the S. Thomas’ College Jubilee Number in 1968)

R.S. de Saram was one of the first boys Hulugalle got to know when he entered St Thomas’ College Mutwal in 1908.


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Features

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

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18 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

=Joint planning across operational divisions

=Data-driven, evidence-based decision-making

=Continuous cross-functional consultation

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

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

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

By Chula Goonasekera – Citizen Analyst

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Features

Why Pi Day?

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18 hours ago

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2026/03/13

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International Day of Mathematics falls tomorrow

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

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

Archimedes

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

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

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

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

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

π = 9801/(1103 √8)

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

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

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

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

Happy Pi Day!

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

by R N A de Silva

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Features

Sheer rise of Realpolitik making the world see the brink

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2 days ago

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2026/03/12

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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