On a wonderful morning in May in the year 1975, a group of around 140 young men and women entered the engineering faculty at the Katubedda Campus of the University of Sri Lanka. Only around 12% of them were women, a statistic that has improved slightly to around 20% over the past 50 years! There appeared little to differentiate us from previous entrants to this campus. However, Dr L.H. Sumanadasa, who had previously been instrumental in setting up both the Institute of Practical Technology and the Ceylon College of Technology at Katubedda, had become the Vice-Chancellor of the (entire) University of Sri Lanka in 1974. Whether through his personal offices or through government policy or both, it had been deemed that all engineering entrants in 1975 from the Colombo District be sent to Katubedda.

I myself had wanted to go to Peradeniya, at that time undisputedly the more established faculty; not least because Professor E.O.E. Pereira, the former Engineering Dean and Vice-Chancellor at Peradeniya, had told me in no unmistakable terms that I should head to the Hanthane hills, when I was sent to meet him by the head of my school. Only three physical science entrants in our year had obtained four A grades at the A-level examinations. Getting an A grade was a significant achievement in those days – recently some 1300 had obtained 3 (out of 3) As for the same stream!! Anyway, all three with 4 As in our year were at Katubedda. One of them went, as I recall, to the University Grants Commission (UGC) to effect for himself a transfer to Peradeniya, but had been told not to be a fool. This may have been prophetic, because from our batch onwards, the intake quality to Katubedda increased significantly, or so I like to think.

The engineering faculty in those days had seven departments – civil, mechanical, electrical, electronics, chemical, materials and mining. The latter three disciplines were termed ‘applied sciences’ but are now all engineering programmes at Moratuwa. In addition, the faculty now has computer science, earth resources (a rebranding of mining), textile technology and transport management departments. We did experience our share of ragging at the hands of seniors, perhaps the most vociferous of whom went by the intimidating nickname of ‘Boo Bamba’ – rumour has it that he was later a professor of artificial intelligence at some U.S. University.

One of our batch nearly fainted at a rather physically demanding phase of the rag, and had to be escorted home by a few seniors – inadvertently creating history by being probably the first fresher to rag the seniors! Tales of exponential curves (‘e to the power x’) being drawn on cement floors using bare bums at the ‘Aachchi Palace’ also circulated during this rag period.

In spite of being in an institution that taught only professionally oriented programmes (engineering, architecture and technology) with almost guaranteed employment for its products, our university life was not devoid of the student activism that is such a major feature of state universities in Sri Lanka. The country had just seen the quelling of the first JVP uprising in 1971, surprisingly during an essentially socialist SLFP regime; which itself was toppled unceremoniously in 1977 by the avowedly market oriented UNP. Student activism was not viewed benevolently by the powers that be, whatever government was in office.

In our second year, a confrontation between students and the police at the Peradeniya campus had resulted in a student being shot dead. In our final year, an internal confrontation between the student union and the administration led to a hunger strike at Katubedda, causing our final examinations to be postponed from 1979 to 1980. There was no graduating batch in 1979, but two in 1980 – one in February (ourselves) and the other in November (for our junior batch, as scheduled). Political violence became much worse in the late 1980s, with the then vice-chancellor and a security guard being shot dead while in campus; and the entire Sri Lankan university system shut down for around two years.

Another issue in the background of our university life was the government policy on university admission. In 1971, the government introduced language-wise standardization, seen as a corrective against the perceived disproportionate numbers of Tamil students entering university, mainly to medical and engineering faculties. This ‘corrective’ was clearly repugnant to Tamil citizens, and may have been a factor in the formation of the LTTE in 1976. Such standardization was done away with in 1977, but a district quota system, also introduced in 1972, continues albeit with some modifications to this day. The district quota system is widely considered to deliver compensatory justice in our under-resourced education system, but also seen as a mechanism that continues to reduce university entrants from large population centres, including the Jaffna District. At any rate, the 1970s probably sowed the seeds of the two most disruptive social upheavals in our country, namely the LTTE uprising and second JVP one, both in the 1980s.

Just before we entered our specialization streams in the second year, the student union held a meeting to discuss the student response to the proposed introduction of calculators. Calculations in the first year were tackled using logarithmic tables, but we were about to graduate to (and invest in) slide rules in the next. The need to substitute slide rules with scientific calculators may appear to be a ‘no brainer’ today, but in the very real context of students from deprived backgrounds, the outcome of the discussion was by no means one sided. Anyway, we ended up using calculators from our second year onwards, and may in fact have been deprived for not having a ‘slide rule experience’ – slide rules were considered to be almost synonymous with an engineering outlook, if nothing else because they required users to keep track of orders of magnitude in their minds; the discipline of which is perhaps less developed in users of calculators!

The university administration too tried to provide cheap food and drink to cater to student poverty in these deprived 1970s. As I recall, a kahata (only tea) was just 3 cents but if one wanted a small piece of hakuru (jaggery) with it, it was a cent more. A ‘plain tea’ (i.e. tea with sugar added) was 5 cents, while a kiri kahata (tea with milk only) was 6 cents; a kiri kahata with hakuru was a cent more, while the priciest brew, i.e. ‘milk tea’ (tea, milk and sugar) was 8 cents. So the kahata was as cheap as it could get, but additions relatively pricey!! Imagine my surprise when I was studying in London in the early 1980s that one could add any amount of milk and sugar to one’s heart’s content after paying (of course around two orders of magnitude more than the above rates) for the basic cup of what we would have called kahata!!

The nature of the student union also changed during our student days. When we entered, the students were represented by the Engineering Students Scientific and Cultural Organization (ESSCO in short). All proceedings were conducted in English, and any contributions in other languages required translation. When an irate student once referred to the administration as “Waathayo”, the then President of ESSCO himself had to translate it as “Air guys”. By the time we graduated, ESSCO was no more, and had been replaced by a student union as in all state universities, with election outcomes based on proportional representation of competing groups; and Sinhala being the predominant language of discourse.

English vis-à-vis the vernacular languages is a struggle that continues to date. All programmes at Moratuwa were and are taught in English, with complete endorsement by students, who continue to see it as a passport to the world. However, everyday conversations were conducted largely in Sinhala or Tamil; especially in Sinhala, which was seen as part of the student ‘culture’, at least at campuses in the south like Moratuwa. This meant that even students with greater English language proficiency tended to hide that fact and converse in the lingua franca of the campus.

As I recall, only a few students tried deliberately to improve their English language skills by practising it with others more competent than they. Tamil students had the additional challenge that vendors and traders in the vicinity of the campus spoke largely in Sinhala; however, many such students ended up being trilingual after their campus experience! Language, in my opinion, continues to be a vexation in various ways in Sri Lanka. We need a way to find the best way forward that preserves our culture while being open to the world at large, and does not leave anyone behind.

Another significant change in our time, brought about by the Universities Act No. 16 of 1978, was the splitting up of the single University of Sri Lanka into six separate universities at the time (Sri Lanka now has seventeen state universities). In addition, our name changed from Katubedda to Moratuwa – i.e. from being the Katudebba Campus of the University of Sri Lanka we became the University of Moratuwa. There were mixed feelings regarding this, as I recall.

Some felt that we would lose the identity we had been trying to create (for the engineering faculty, one that was distinct from Peradeniya), an identity linked to the name Katubedda; someone even opined that ‘Katubedda’ had a more pleasing or aesthetic ‘ring’ to it compared to ‘Moratuwa’. Others however felt that the new ‘Moratuwa’ name would help the fledgling institution to break away from its lowlier ‘practical technology’ beginnings associated with the ‘Katubedda’ name. At any rate, the university community at Katubedda in Moratuwa had little say in the change, since it was the prerogative of the Minister in charge, in consultation with the University Grants Commission (UGC); and it was from the University of Moratuwa that we graduated.

In our final year, it was mostly our batchmates who were in the Sports Council as captains of the various sports, and a musical evening was arranged by them featuring a very well-known musical band. The unfortunate band leader was unable to comprehend the campus culture, because whatever he sang, whether Sinhala or English, slow or fast, every song was greeted with loud hooting. Although the organizers tried to explain that this was the student way of expressing appreciation, and in spite of trying to mollify the man with cups that cheer, he stalked off in disgust, leaving the rest of the band to entertain us!

One of the most colourful personalities in our batch was an old Anandian, who had acquired a reputation for teaching A-level physics tuition classes even before he entered. He maintained this avocation right through his university career, juggling examination timetables with his class schedules – other students have done such multi-tasking as well, but very few if any actually taught the classes they attended outside of university.

The fact that he was able to commute in a white Volkswagen car, purchased from the proceeds of his enterprise, no doubt helped in the balancing act. At any rate, it is his business and entrepreneurial skills in education that he made a career of – no doubt based on sound (mechanical) engineering instincts; and he ended up by establishing an enviable network of ‘international’ schools (named after the one set up by Aristotle himself) that were eminently affordable to middle class parents. Not content with being limited to such endeavours, he ventured into politics as well, serving for a while as the State Minister of University Education.

These reminiscences would not be complete without mentioning a few charismatic teachers as well. Most of us would remember the one who at times devoted 10% of his lecture time to thermodynamics, and the rest to politics; this same teacher had returned to Sri Lanka after his PhD in London, driving a Morris Oxford all the way. We may recall too, a mathematics professor who asked us “How much is one plus one?”; and proceeded to gaze out of the window in deep thought, counting on his fingers and saying “Let me think”, as if to search for an answer – I think he was trying to teach us the notion of correspondence; or have I got it wrong? Let me think… Then there was a Dean whom all of us quaked to meet one-on-one. One of our batchmates who had to so do, had reportedly persuaded another to exchange shirts and footwear, so that he would appear more presentable to the irascible administrator.

We should not forget the Department Head who managed to get a new car with 10 Sri 1 as its registration plate; and then proceeded to convert it (probably in our Auto Lab) to run on LP gas – soon after we graduated he was named one of Ten Outstanding Young Persons by the Sri Lanka Jaycees. Finally, there was this teacher in charge of a somewhat snake-infested survey camp (for our junior batch), who when interrogated by a student representative as to who would be responsible if a student was bitten by a reptile, replied without batting an eyelid that “the snake will be responsible”. Jokes apart however, we are who we are because of the dedication and sacrifice of especially our academic staff. They had to teach in a relatively unknown institution at the time, and consistently put the institution and its students first; that is, ahead of developing their own academic careers. We were the beneficiaries of their labours, which by no means were in vain.

And so we graduated in early 1980, with around 15 first class holders among us. Almost as a symbol that the university was having a new beginning with our batch, we were the first to have a convocation (probably of course because we were the first to graduate after the 1978 Act under a University of Moratuwa banner) – and that too at the impressive new BMICH, under the chancellorship of Arthur C. Clarke, the eminent science fiction writer. We later produced over 20 doctoral degree holders, maybe 10 full professors, a few engineering deans and authors of scholarly books, and even some researchers in the so-called Stanford-Elsevier database of top 2% scientists (based on citation impact).

Others have become organizational leaders, and hence ‘movers and shakers’. Apart from the gentleman mentioned earlier, we have another who has been CEO of both a bank and a manufacturing company; and at least two entrepreneurs – one in furniture and the other in high tech start-ups (based in the U.S. but back-ending his operation with Moratuwa students and graduates); also a lady CEO of a large state-owned utility provider. Some are working in high tech environments in developed countries, pushing the boundaries of disciplines such as aerospace and nuclear and biomechanical engineering. Others have put Sri Lanka on the map through their involvement in signature projects; or coordinating multi-nation initiatives, for example in disaster mitigation. There is one of us still playing representative cricket! I am doubtless unaware of other significant contributions – our batch, while not large, is not small either.

More importantly, we have all, in different ways and contexts, been helping to “direct the great sources of power in nature for the use and convenience of humans” – and nowadays safeguarding the environment while doing so as well. Our degrees from Moratuwa have brought us socio-economic mobility, and I suppose all of us have been trying to ‘give back’ to family, community or country (motherland or adopted) in various ways and degrees, whether through technical or humanitarian ventures.

Most if not all of us contributed to a Moratuwa University scholarship scheme in the memory of a batchmate who tragically perished in the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami. Some of us have already gone the way of all the world, while the rest are awaiting our calls; probably trying to become better human beings, whether in the interests of the hereafter, or just to make life easier for those who will care for us in the bard’s seventh act of life!

But what of the university itself? If I may be permitted a personal reflection, I was one of five batchmates who returned to the university to serve on its academic staff. As a young staff member, I used to envy Peradeniya’s stature – many of its engineering faculty staff had Cambridge PhDs (for example) and their graduates seemed to have an open door to that ancient seat of learning. However, by the time I retired, some 40 years after joining the academic staff, our own graduates had been regularly accepted for PhDs not only at Cambridge but also at Oxford, Imperial, Caltech, MIT, Princeton and ETH Zurich. In addition, it goes without saying that Moratuwa is undisputedly the first choice now (from among seven engineering faculties) of the majority of those 1300 university aspirants with 3 As at their A-levels. I like to think that 1975-80 (our batch, in fact!!) was the turning point for Moratuwa University’s fortunes.

Written by a member of the 75-80 Katubedda Engineering batch who was later a Moratuwa University teacher for 40 years (with apologies for any inadvertent errors or omissions).