Features

Weakness in Sinhala influenced my decision to emigrate to Australia

Published

4 years ago

2022/11/13

By Nimal Wikremanayeke
(Excerpted from A Life In The Law)

My father had been a classics scholar before he studied law. He had introduced me to The Iliad, The Odyssey, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides and the like when I was 10-years old. English was the language we spoke at home and Sinhalese was used only to speak to the servants. I am not proud of this fact. While I was growing up, the British were in power and my language was suppressed by the British, who called it “the vernacular” This continued until I was 15-years old.

In school, we had one period a week in Sinhalese before Ceylon received independence. I excelled in all the other subjects, save for my mother tongue. In 1948, when we received our independence the scene changed dramatically. From this time, we had a period of two hours of Sinhalese every day and I just could not cope with it. I was slapped regularly by my Sinhalese master, Mr Jayasekere, for not knowing Sinhalese. I excelled in Latin but failed miserably in Sinhalese. I never received less than 190 marks out of 200 in Latin but no more than 40 out of 200 in Sinhalese. This went on for several years until I went off to England to study, to widen my repertoire and broaden my horizons.

My lack of knowledge of my mother tongue had now returned to haunt me. After the election in May 1970, I mentioned my displeasure at this new turn of events in the Law Library to a Sinhalese-educated advocate. He sniggered and said sarcastically, “The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on” Yes, the caravan was moving on and leaving me behind barking madly.

I thought to myself, how the hell am I going to think and address the court in Sinhalese? I was at my wits’ end wondering what to do. As the situation continued like this for a few months I was beginning to despair. The two new Sinhala-educated lawyers I had employed tried to help me cope with my lack of knowledge of the Sinhalese language but to no avail.

I happened to go to the Magistrates’ Court in Colombo South in August 1970 and met a friend of mine, Clarence Fernando. We were discussing our situation and pondering what we were to do. Clarence told me that all was not lost. A friend of his, Frank Pereira, had recently migrated to Australia. He told me that Frank was in the legal profession and was doing extremely well. Heartened by this little tidbit, I decided to emigrate to Australia. Had I known the truth about Frank Pereira, I certainly would not have abandoned my large practice at the Ceylon Bar and migrated to Australia. I could still have conquered the Sinhalese language and have had a gracious life in Ceylon.

I returned home and asked my dear wife Anna Maria, “Shall we go to Australia?” Anna Maria, bless her, was always game for anything I wanted to do. It was only many years later that she told me she was terrified when I had asked her whether we should go to Australia.When I came to Australia I learned that Frank Pereira was a law clerk earning a relatively small income of $30 a week. In 1970, secretaries in Australia were earning $60 a week.

Napoleon Bonaparte

In desperation I turned for guidance to my Emperor, Napoleon Bonaparte. Napoleon had been a great source of inspiration to me ever since my school days. One of my classmates, Ralph Deraniyagala, was an avid disciple of Napoleon. He suffered from a bad case of Napoleonitis and was an eccentric young boy. When we were young lads in our early teens, he had selected most of us, in class, to be Napoleon’s marshals and I was fortunate to be chosen as Marshal Ney.

Ralph was not only eccentric but also extremely impulsive. He would disrupt our lessons in class by springing up from his seat and shouting out to one of his marshals to charge. He would seriously upset the equilibrium in the class but the masters tolerated his bizarre behaviour. As a result of Ralph, I started devouring whatever books I could read on the life of Napoleon Bonaparte, starting with Abbott’s magnificent treatise on the life of Napoleon. Napoleon was of the view that there was always a “Career open to talent” He proclaimed that he was “a Corsican by birth, a Frenchman by adoption and an Emperor by conquest”. It was his belief that if one had ability, one could succeed anywhere in the world. So I decided to take up the challenge and emigrate to Australia.

Ronnie de Kretser

One of my father’s readers, Ivor Misso, had left for Australia in the 1950s. Misso had a substantial practice in the District Court of Colombo but had left for what he thought would be greener pastures. Dad wrote to him to ask him whether he could help me in my new adventure. Ivor Misso wrote back, suggesting that Dad write to Ronnie de Kretser, a partner in the solicitors’ firm of Weigall & Crowther in Melbourne. Ronnie had qualified as a proctor of the Ceylon Supreme Court in 1948 and left for Australia at the same time as Ivor Misso in 1956. Dad then wrote to Ronnie who advised me to put in my application for immigration and send him a copy, as the Minister for Immigration, Mr Phillip Lynch, was a good friend of his.

We duly made our application for immigration in November and we were successful due to the efforts of Ronnie de Kretser. I received a warm letter from Phillip Lynch congratulating me on my application and wishing me all the best in my new country. We were passed for immigration in December and it was only then I began to have second thoughts about migrating to Australia. However, Melbourne, my intended destination, was not unfamiliar to me as Dad had brought us out to Australia on a one-month holiday in 1952.1 had liked it then.

Distribution of work

Late in 1970, all the government corporation work was given to friends of the SLFP, Mrs Bandaranaike’s party. This was nothing new. Each successive government in Ceylon repaid its loyal supporters by giving them government legal work. (I was to be unpleasantly surprised many years later to also find that some work in Australia is handed out on patronage and privilege.)

One of the privileged few was a lawyer who did work on the “motion roll”, which consisted of the list of summary matter applications to be heard in the Motion Court. That was the extent of his practice. The five District Courts had an hour’s work on the motion roll every morning before the trials for the day were heard. These summary matters were determined by the judge. The lawyer concerned had never conducted a trial prior to Mrs Bandaranaike coming to power in 1970, and did not know how a trial should be conducted.

Weakness…

As I mentioned earlier, I had a large and a lucrative commercial practice. I was briefed for the defendant in a “mortgage bond” case. In Ceylon, a mortgage under Roman-Dutch law could only be enforced by court proceedings, unlike in Australia, where proceedings for possession could be issued after the mortgage had been terminated by appropriate notice. I had no defence to the action as my client was seriously in default of his obligations under the mortgage.

The above mentioned lawyer was briefed to appear for the plaintiff, the State Mortgage Bank, a government institution. When we went to court, he was gloating and told me that the days of the English-speaking advocates were over for it was now the turn of the Sinhala-educated lawyers.

The case was called on for hearing before Judge Vaitialingam. My opponent opened his case with bravado and then led his evidence. He kept smirking as he knew my client had no defence. The evidence he led was short and sweet. He led evidence that the mortgage had not been paid, then sat down. He did not lead any evidence that my client was in default. He did not lead any evidence that a demand had been paid for the arrears. Nor did he lead any evidence that my client had failed to cure his default. He then closed his case.

I asked him whether he had finished. He said “yes.” I asked him several times whether he had finished and he kept getting angrier and angrier. The judge then asked him whether he had finished and he again replied “yes.” I then made a No Case submission upon which my opponent sought to re-open his case. The judge refused his application, saying that I had asked him several times whether he had finished to which he had replied “yes” The judge had also asked him the same question and got an answer in the affirmative. He refused the application and dismissed his case.

It cost the bank Rs 150,000 or the equivalent of $30,000, a substantial sum of money in 1970.1 gave my opponent the two-finger salute which Henry V’s long bowman gave the French at the Battle of Agincourt and walked out of court. Suffice it to say that lawyer did not get another government brief. This case was not included here for the purpose of skiting about my forensic ability, but for the purpose of illustrating that patronage can occasionally go wrong.

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Features

Proactive peacemaking becomes a paramount need

Published

8 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Wasting wars: Some war-displaced people in Lebanon. BBC

It may be some time before the full impact of food inflation is felt in the West. Until such time the world would continue to keep itself in suspense over whether the Trump administration is in earnest when it seeks to convey the impression that it is backing a negotiated solution in West Asia.

As is usually the case, consumer stress would be one of the final determinants of political change. To the degree to which the average US consumer somehow ‘muddles through’ and puts the food on the table, to the same extent would the Republican sections of the US public in particular be tolerant of the Trump administration’s inconsistent handling of the West Asian war and the main issues stemming from it. That is, there would be no grave popular disaffection and a demand for political change in the short term.

However, the indications are that the Trump administration’s support base is suffering some erosion in the wake of the current economic crisis. While reports indicate that Democratic sections are firming-up their opposition to the political centre, Republican support for Trump is also showing signs of waning, we are given to understand.

The above developments are probably why Trump is on record as having given Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a ‘dressing down’ recently on his seeming intransigence on the question of giving negotiations a chance in West Asia. The show of displeasure could be really aimed by Trump at containing the impatience of the American public.

However, the current ground situation in the Middle East, particularly the uncontained bloodshed, is likely to impress on the thinking sections of the world that more than temporary political change is needed in West Asia and the US.

A well thought out political solution that addresses all the contentious issues at the heart of the Middle East conflict is what enlightened opinion would demand, and very rightly. Right now, the ‘peace efforts’ initiated by the Trump administration give the impression of being piecemeal solutions at best.

There have been, of course, numerous initiatives in the past aimed at bringing permanent peace to the Middle East. These failed mainly because they did not address in full the root causes of the conflict.

At bottom the Middle East conflict is mainly about race and religious hate bred by socio-economic and material inequalities. For instance, if the Palestinian people were not displaced and deprived of land occupied by them at the time of the founding of the Israeli state, ethnic enmities would not have grown to the current unmanageable proportions.

When addressing the above questions, though, it must be remembered that the Israelis too were a displaced people who were entitled to land and a state of their own in the Middle East. Basically, out of these seemingly irreconcilable and conflicting demands have grown the Middle East imbroglio.

Middle East peace is considerably about reconciling these demands and arriving at a solution that would ensure the creation of two states that would opt for peaceful co-existence thereafter.

As long as the US does not see the need for a non-partisan solution that addresses the needs of both ethnicities and religions and goes all-out, as it were, to have it implemented, the Middle East would continue to bleed.

However, staunching the blood flow through the creation of two states would be only half the job done, though a very important part of it. More pernicious, pervasive and difficult to remedy are the inter-ethnic and inter-religious hatreds that have been unleashed over the decades.

However, if substantial, long-lasting peace is to be fostered in the region the latter ‘demons’ would need to be exorcised from the hearts and minds of the communities concerned. No doubt an uphill task but one that must be undertaken by those who wish the region well.

The UN would need to put its ‘best foot forward’ in such undertakings but it is time that it dawned on the international community and other caring quarters that Middle East peace, and all other such uphill challenges, require proactive peacemaking on the part of all civilized sections for their effective management. That is, public involvement in peacemaking too is a must.

Since hatreds are harboured in the human consciousness the enmities embedded in the latter need to be managed and defused judiciously alongside other undertakings in a peace process. In the case of West Asia, such enmities could be even spread globe-wide besides being multi-dimensional. For instance, it ought to be thought-provoking that Iran is insistent on a peace initiative that would also include Lebanon.

Besides security considerations it is also ethnic and religious affiliations that account for Iran making this demand. For instance, the Shias are a numerically important religious community in Lebanon and they provide a significant number of Hizbollah fighters, who are in a vital sense carrying out a ‘proxy war’ for Iran. It also needs to be factored in that Iran is a Shia-majority country.

Thus trans-border religious affiliations could add to the complexities and enormity of ethno-religious conflicts. However, the task of managing centuries-long enmities needs to be launched and prodded on with by peacemakers since a downing of arms alone would not guarantee substantive peace.

It is not realized sufficiently that the process of ending hatreds begins with mutual apologies by antagonists to a conflict for the harm inflicted on each other. This would be anathema in some ears but there is no getting away from the requirement. It is the vital first step to permanent peace anywhere.

In fact there could be no reconciliation worth speaking of without such mutual apologies. It is a point worth re-iterating in these times when even the government of Sri Lanka is voicing the need for national reconciliation. Well, without the words, ‘I am sorry’, there could be no permanent end to enmities – they would do well to remember.

The above requirements may not go down very well with governments, but they resonate in the hearts and minds of most people, since they are inheritors of religious traditions of some kind.

This is a principal reason why peacemaking works well when publics too are involved in them. The effectiveness of such campaigns increases several fold when they have a Mahatma Gandhi or a Jawaharlal Nehru at their helm. A strong proactive involvement by the public in peace could lead to the emergence of such leaders at some point in these campaigns.

Features

Dialog Brings Sri Lanka’s Largest Digital Vesak Experience to Matara

Published

8 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

From left to right: Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, and Lasantha Theverapperuma experience the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered VR tours.

Official Digital Partner of the 2026 ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone

Dialog Axiata PLC, Sri Lanka’s #1 connectivity provider, collaborated with the Ministry of Buddha Sasana, Religious and Cultural Affairs to bring one of Sri Lanka’s largest and most technologically advanced Vesak experiences to the ‘Dakshina Prabha’ National Vesak Zone. The three-day celebration, in Matara attracted more than hundred thousand visitors, who engaged with a series of innovative digital activities powered by Dialog 5G Ultra, including Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Virtual Reality (VR) experiences, digital pandols and a Data Dansala. The opening ceremony was attended by Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development and Hon. Saroja Savithri Paulraj, Minister of Women and Child Affairs, along with distinguished guests and Dialog’s senior management.

One of the key attractions at the venue was the Dialog 5G Ultra-powered Virtual Reality (VR) experience, which attracted more than 35,000 participants. The activation enabled devotees to virtually visit and pay homage to sacred Buddhist sites, including the Jaya Sri Maha Bodhi in India and the Atamasthana in Anuradhapura, directly from the Vesak zone in Matara.

Visitors receive complimentary mobile data through Dialog’s QR-powered Data Dansala.

Dialog also conducted an AI Digital Vesak Greeting Card Competition from 21 May to 01 June 2026, attracting numerous entries from across the country. The shortlisted designs were showcased across 20 large LED screens throughout the venue and across Matara City, and were also made available for download via mobile devices. Further, through the use of AI, traditional Jathaka Katha were reimagined in a digital format, demonstrating how technology can be used to preserve and enhance cultural and religious heritage. Together, these initiatives blended traditional Vesak celebrations with emerging technologies, offering visitors a unique and immersive way to engage with Vesak traditions.

Extending the spirit of Vesak through connectivity, Dialog conducted a special Data Dansala powered by its QR Reload platform, enabling visitors to receive complimentary mobile data by scanning QR codes placed across the venue. In addition to the Matara National Vesak Zone, similar Data Dansala activations were also conducted at the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones in Colombo.Visitors also had the opportunity to create personalised Vesak-themed digital photos through an AI Photo Booth, generating AI-enhanced portraits using their own photographs and adding a contemporary digital element to the Vesak celebrations.

Visitors watch AI-generated Jathaka Katha

Commenting on the initiative, Hon. Sunil Handunnetti, Minister of Industry and Entrepreneurship Development, said, “The 2026 Dakshina Prabha Vesak Festival marked the first time AI-powered digital innovations were incorporated into a National Vesak Festival in Sri Lanka. Presenting Buddhist stories and teachings through technology created a new and engaging way for visitors to connect with these traditions. We thank Dialog for supporting this initiative and for working closely with us to bring our vision to life. Their contribution played an important role in making this first-of-its-kind event a reality.”

Lasantha Theverapperuma, Group Chief Marketing Officer of Dialog Axiata PLC said, “We thank the Government of Sri Lanka for the opportunity to support the 2026 Dakshina Prabha National Vesak Festival and for embracing technology as part of this year’s celebrations. As the Official Digital Partner, we were privileged to contribute through our Dialog 5G Ultra and AI capabilities, creating new ways for visitors to engage with Vesak traditions while preserving their cultural significance for future generations.”

Beyond supporting the National Vesak Zone in Matara, Dialog also enhanced the Gangaramaya and Bauddhaloka Vesak zones through a range of digital activations during the Vesak season. The company additionally continued its sustainability initiatives, including the Thirasara Aloka Poojawa, which illuminated rural places of worship through solar-powered lighting solutions.

Features

Beauty, elegance and talent…for women

Published

8 hours ago

2026/06/4

Sahan Weerasooriya

Universal Woman is an international pageant focused on “beauty, elegance, and talent” for women, positioning itself as a platform to shape global ambassadors. The 2026 edition will be held in Cambodia, and Sri Lanka will be there, as well.

According to reports coming my way, contestants, at the international event, will work with industry trailblazers, under international standards.

Sri Lankan supermodel, runway and pageant trainer Chulpadmendra Kumarapathirana, is the National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026.

With over two decades in the industry, Chula was crowned Miss Sri Lanka 2006, and has since shaped the next generation of titleholders through her Colombo-based Chulpadmendra Catwalk Studio, widely regarded as one of the country’s leading modelling academies.

The team behind Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026

A former host of Derana Miss Sri Lanka for Miss World 2008 and a judge for Miss Universe Sri Lanka 2025, Chula now serves as National Director for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026, leading the franchise’s search for Sri Lanka’s delegate to the international final in Cambodia.

Applications for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 are being taken, via WhatsApp: 077 659 4994, says Chula.

The judging panel for Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 includes Senaka De Silva, Pageant Aesthetic Advisor & Chairperson of the Judging Panel, Angela Seneviratne, Caroline Jurie, Rozelle Plunkett, and Suraj Mapa.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka 2026 officially began its journey with a first round of auditions, held in Colombo, marking the start of an exciting new chapter in Sri Lanka’s pageant industry.

Launching the first round of auditions

The platform aims to empower women while selecting an intelligent, confident, and inspiring representative to compete at the Universal Woman International Pageant 2026 in Cambodia, this September.

Universal Woman Sri Lanka now moves forward with the vision of creating one of the country’s most prestigious and empowering pageants while preparing to crown a queen who will proudly represent Sri Lanka on the international stage.