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Library of our first University Memories of “Villa Venezia”

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I wonder how many are yet around to share my memories of the wonderful library of Villa Venezia that brightened our undergraduate years in the University before it fled Thurstan Road to Peradeniya. It was, probably, Jennings’ predecessor Marrs, who picked on the exotic Villa Venezia to house the University Library. I have not yet come across any photograph, or drawing, of this miniature Venetian palazzo built for an imaginative, but long forgotten, Colonial grandee amidst the lush greenery of Cinnamon Gardens.

The Villa was a baroque two-storied pink building flanked by elegantly twisted columns, and overhung by an ornate balcony that would have enthralled Romeo. A large ground floor room charmed its readers by walls frescoed by scenes from Greek and Roman mythology, closely copied from Venetian originals. The top floor housed the library proper and the spacious reading room. This was an era long before the invasion of electronic gadgetry. Reference books were ranged subject-wise on wooden shelves to be withdrawn, on request, by helpful, and surprisingly literate, Library Assistants.

The spacious and airy reading room held long desks and chairs for readers silently poring over reference books. Generally this silence was interrupted only by the scraping of chairs pushed back by departing readers. But there was one time-honoured exception. This was when readers noticed a lovely fresher creeping stealthily along the corridor or a courting couple oblivious to the readers. These diversions gave rise to ‘The Stamp’. This was the spontaneous scraping of shoes by the whole community of readers who, meanwhile kept their heads buried in their books with enthusiasm. Much stamping took place during the Vacation, inspired/provoked by the holiday wear of female undergrads. These young ladies were very properly dressed in sarees during lectures. But when Vacation dawned on me and no lectures threatened, they embraced casual wear to visit the library at Villa Venezia. Bird watching male undergrads now enjoyed admiring the elegant calves of fair batch mates in short dresses – a welcome change from ankle length sarees.

The disappearance of Villa Venezia took place after I left University. Unimaginative University authorities seem to have missed the opportunity of acquiring this unrecorded architectural gem. It fell to the wreckers’ sledge hammers of the philistine who bought the property.

So ended the life and death of Villa Venezia, as the first library of our first University, Its ornate splendor and marble floors now echo only in the memories of those ancients who loved its ambience many decades ago. May this essay be its requiem!

TISSA DEVENDRA

( 1948- 1952)

 

 



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Opinion

Need for alternative fuel source   

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Kantale Sugar Factory

The Middle East conflict is raging. There are reports of one merchant ship being set on fire. If it escalates further, Sri Lanka’s economy will suffer.The cost of fuel amounts to nearly 30% of Sri Lanka’s total imports. There are also fears that the availability of petroleum-based fuels will be over in the world soon.

It is high time Sri Lanka reduced its independence on imported fuel.

Only China is said to be seeking self-sufficiency in fuel viz the production of Butyl alcohol (Butanol). They are said to target 100 million tons to be produced in the near future. Hydrogen is a by-product of producing Butyl alcohol.

It is used to generate electricity through fuel cells. China is said to manufacture about 10% of the fuel cells in the market. The fuel cells were expensive as the critical unit was made out of platinum. A few years ago, the Cambridge University developed a catalyst based on steel to replace the platinum.

Production of butanol, as in the case with ethanol – the alcohol drink- is based on sugar, starch and cellulose.

The raw materials used for producing butanol is corn and in Brazil it is sugar cane. These are two crops that are very expensive to grow and maintain because the plant last only a year and has to be replanted annually.

There are plants available in Sri Lanka, which will last at least 25-30 years once planted, could yield about 1.5 times that of sugar cane. These crops will bear the yield in about 2.5 years after planting. There are also plants that last about 90 years

The only land mass where such plant crops could be grown in one unit is the denuded sugar cane lands at Kantale Sugar Factory. The public should be encouraged to plant sugar cane. They will gain economically from not only planting sugar cane but also from employment opportunities at sugar cane processing centres. My estimation is that about three or four million new jobs can be created as this industry is labour intensive.

Butanol distilleries are not massive structures like the distilleries at Pelwatte, Sevenagala or the old Kantale. Some Universities in the US report regularly on their work on the production of Butyl alcohol. According to the information emanating from those universities, the production facilities are slim and compact.

The technology for the production of Butyl alcohol is not found in Sri Lanka. It is best to seek the assistance of China in this regard.

Butyl alcohol distilleries are said to require four rectifying columns according to technology used in China and this fact is confirmed by a research article published in New Zealand.

There is the possibility of reducing the number of rectifying columns to two.

I have studied numerous research papers on Butyl alcohol production as I have been in the field of alcohol distillation and blending trade for a long time since 1968.

It is necessary to seek external assistance to design and build the distilleries, and it will be necessary to require the assistance of our universities to develop the processing technology to grow and process the plant materials to be used as raw material- mainly Agriculture, Plant Sciences (Botany), Chemical Sciences (Chemistry) and instrumentation. Assistance of the chemical engineering sector can be sought. This would be a profitable exposure to the students therein.

The cost of the studies to be conducted may not exceed Rs 30-40 million.

There is a fabrication factor at Wadduwa- Paiyagala, serving the existing distilleries. Work there is handled manually. Importing the stainless steel and copper pipes and machines to make flanges will help boost production.

The abandoned distillery at Kantale can be used to handle the raw materials in the central and northern parts of the country and many smaller distilleries will be needed in the other parts of the country.

There are state-owned distilleries at Pelwatte and Sevenagala and jointly owned distillery at Hingurana. These distilleries produce ethanol.

It is possible to use the ethanol produced at these distilleries as fuel for diesel-based vehicles after mixing it with additives to enhance its ignitability. A drawback will be the sheer amount of ethanol needed. A better solution is to convert these distilleries to produce Butyl alcohol. The conversion should not be very costly.  The government should consider this option earnestly.

S. P. U. S. Wickramasinghe
Former Distillery Manager at Kantale. spupalisw@yahoo.com

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Opinion

Sri Lanka’s missed opportunities

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Tourist Air Traffic in the Maldives and Sri Lanka as indicated by ‘Flight Radar 24’

As the saying goes, ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’ The above screenshot was captured on the Flightradar24 flight-tracking app at 0808 hrs on Thursday, November 7, 2024. It shows the number of flight arrivals and departures to/from the Maldives compared to Sri Lanka. The large number of small aircraft are island-hopping floatplanes conveying tourists between the Maldivian capital and the country’s many resort islands.

after all these years, Sri Lanka has still not got its act together with regard to airport usage, falling behind even small countries such as the Maldives.

In Sri Lanka, despite the ‘boast’ of as many as 16 airports, of which five are international gateways, and numerous water-landing sites, domestic aviation is all but dead, especially as an adjunct to Sri Lankan tourist infrastructure. According to a recent OPA (Organisation of Professional Associations) report on domestic aviation in Sri Lanka, the Civil Aviation Authority-Sri Lanka (CAASL) is more ‘obstructive than facilitative’.

Private aviation operators report, with reference to various approvals, that what takes the Maldivian Civil Aviation Authority two days to accomplish takes “a month of Sundays” in CAASL.

The volume of air traffic in the Maldives is so high, a new runway has been constructed and activated at the refurbished Malé-Velana International Airport on Hulhulé island, relegating the pre-existing runway to the status of a parallel taxiway. This obviates the need for aircraft landing on the new runway to backtrack along it to reach the terminal, in turn holding up other aircraft from landing and taking off. A ‘luxury’ that even Mattala Rajapaksa International Airport (MRIA) does not have in place.

Result: a smooth and increased flow of arrivals and departures, with use of the new taxiway (i.e. old runway) ensuring the new runway is available at all times for what it was intended.

But over in Sri Lanka, where are our movers and shakers of aviation tourism? What are they doing to improve aircraft movements at our major international airport? Equally importantly, what are they doing to increase the use of aviation to enhance Sri Lanka’s tourism potential? Are they asleep? Or sitting on their collective hands? Has Sri Lanka missed the (Air)bus?

What a sorry state of affairs!

Guwan Seeya

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Opinion

Memories of my Mother, Primrose

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By S. Wijay-Wardner

Grief is the inevitable cost of love. However, the higher purpose of this material existence has to be the journey instead of the final destination. Living cannot be about focusing on the ‘tragic ending’ which will befall us all; as life is a beautiful, yet challenging – and enlightening – trip along the way.

The end of this journey for our beloved mother, Primrose Wijayawardhana, was marked by a resplendent sunlit morning as we said our final goodbyes in Grantham. Her wish was for a small and private cremation without much fuss, so that those living further away wouldn’t feel obligated to attend. It has now been three months since our mother’s passing, and there hasn’t been a day that we haven’t been reminded of her, or the impact she had on our lives. Grantham happened to be the area in which Isaac Newton was born. After the cremation, we paid a visit to Newton’s house, Woolsthorpe Manor, and upon seeing the famed apple tree it dawned on me: Newton sat under his apple tree contemplating the laws of Physics, similar to how the Buddha sat under the Bodhi tree contemplating the laws of Metaphysics, which fundamentally shaped my mother’s worldview.

Dr Primrose – as some called her – had cared for many patients during her decades’ long service as a medical doctor. She began her career in paediatrics, then became the physician at Sri Jayawardenapura University, before specialising in geriatrics. Her long and varied career encapsulated the lifespan of human existence – from children, to university students, to the elderly – and she was much loved by the patients she cared so deeply for.

As both of my parents were doctors, I’d always presumed that they’d met at medical school. But in a serendipitous conversation with my mother only days before her unexpected passing, I decided to ‘interview’ her (into my phone) about a variety of topics, including her music, her family and her personal history, and I found out that my parents actually met when they were much younger – and they grew closer over a shared love of music.

Fatefully, after all these years, we had begun to upload her music to YouTube only a few months prior her untimely passing. As Primrose Jayasinghe, my mother was an ‘A Grade’ Radio Ceylon recording artiste from a very young age. She’d met my father at their schools’ debating and Buddhist societies, long before they were qualified medical doctors in their own right, and certainly well before my father had gone on to become a household name in Sri Lanka (not only because of his expertise in cardiology, but as he also hosted a health-related show on television).

My father always greatly admired my mother’s musical talents, and she had asked him to help write lyrics to some songs she was working on for a radio programme. Despite being a musician myself, I had never realised that music itself was one of the reasons my sister and I had come into existence. I had learned songwriting intuitively by myself, but I knew I had inherited my melodic abilities from my mother, which eventually saw me have a few chart hits in the UK.

Another big part of my mother’s life was Buddhism. In fact, before she took to medicine, she’d considered becoming a Buddhist nun. (Funnily, my sister told me that, as a child, she had also thought about being ordained – showing that, in both my sister’s and my case, the apple did not fall far from the tree!) My mother had mentioned, to me and my sister on various occasions, that she had never planned on getting married or having any children. But then she and our father met, bonded over music, and the rest is history. Or, to put it in her words to me, just days before her passing: “I’ve realised that this was all meant to be”.

This fortuitous chat with my mother, has turned out to be such a source of consolation to me that I’ve been encouraging others to do the same: ask all the questions whilst you still can. Because when a loved one becomes a memory… memories become priceless treasures.

By intuition, I also happened to find myself addressing any lingering issues that she MAY have had a ‘heavy heart’ over… and I hope I managed to resolve those well. I thought to myself, just in case anything were to happen, I’ll do my best to convince her not to worry about us at all, and to not have any fear or regrets. I wanted to help her to be at peace, should that moment of transition come. How fortunate those instincts turned out to be.

Mum’s heart may have stopped beating, but she certainly did not die of a broken heart. She knew she was loved by us – and many others. But love itself leads to attachment… which my mother knew was a source of potential suffering. She was extremely devoted to Buddhist philosophy throughout her life, which really helped her perspective, particularly in what turned out to be her final days. In some ways, the ‘worst’ result for Buddhists isn’t so bad by others’ standards: being reborn. However, the ‘best’ result for Buddhists would be to escape the eternal cycles of life, death and rebirth. As all things must pass, suffering and death are seen as the inevitability of life, and the primary aim of Buddhism is the cessation of suffering… hence also my parents’ choice to be doctors.

Fortunately, my mother did not suffer in her last days. That would have been grotesquely unfair for someone who had been a doctor for almost all of her adult life. She loved her job and her patients loved her – the many cards, letters and gifts she received over the years are testament to that. My mother also strongly believed in karmic fate, which helped her to be at peace with whatever was to come her way. She knew she had done her best to prepare for the inevitable. She’d even travelled around Sri Lanka and the UK in the months and weeks prior to her passing, in order to visit family and lifelong friends.

Despite her diminutive stature, my mother was made of tough stuff. I only ever saw her cry once – and that was on my behalf, when I got injured as a child. She was mentally very strong, but she was equally kind and sensitive, and she got immense joy from being around the playful innocence of children and animals. She was also unique in that she would channel her inner child regularly. Both my sister and I will miss her silly voicemails to us – which, if heard by anyone else, would be assumed were from a little child, and not our wise philosopher of a mother! But that was her charm: she was one-of-a-kind; a very special person that we, and the world, were lucky to have.

However, we’ve still lost the lady who taught us to read, inspired us to have art exhibitions as children, encouraged us to follow our passions, and who loved us unconditionally – and nothing can replace that… or her.

At this time, as we mark three months since her passing, in another example of fate or providence, a newly-established temple in the UK – Hull Buddhist Centre, overseen by Venerable Anamaduwe Wimalajeeva – will be holding its first ever Katina Ceremony on that very day. Katina ceremonies were incredibly important to our mother, and she happened to have previously worked in Hull, and she also had a very good relationship with Ven. Wimalajeeva. So for this ceremony to fall on this exact day is especially serendipitous. We have therefore decided to co-sponsor the events of the day in her memory, and we shall reflect on our mother’s life with eternal love and thanks for all that she gave us, and everything she did for us. Our mother made us the people we are today, and for that my sister and I will always be grateful.

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