A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
A Brief Colonial History Of Ceylon(SriLanka)
Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Back to 500BC.
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Wednesday, June 7, 2017
Occasional Stories: Battle For ‘Territory’
I
was in serious trouble when I tried to buy a piece of land to build a
house to live at Peradeniya. That time I was working at the University
of Peradeniya and had some money at hand after coming back from my first
academic sojourn in Canada. This was not immediately after my return,
but after two years. At the beginning, I or we didn’t care for having
our own house being somewhat ‘socialist minded.’
Why
do you need to accumulate money or property? That was our thinking. But
when we were in Canada, we made it sure that we save enough money at
least to bring a good car. All the ‘socialists’ in the university system
used to have very good cars. A good car was an ‘intellectual symbol,’
but a house a ‘bourgeois deviation.’ We were rather comfortable in our
university quarters.
Things
changed dramatically after the open economy in 1977. There was a mad
rush to buy land and build houses and our juniors were more prone to
this indulgence than our generation. Our seniors were more ‘socialist’
than us and many of them died even without a house and rather destitute.
Let me make the long story short.
No
sooner than I passed the message that I am looking for a piece of land
somewhere in Peradeniya, Wimaladasa approached me. He was a ‘hall
servant’ so to say. Because of our working-class sympathies, we knew
them very well. One Saturday morning he was at our door step. He was
holding a file.
“Sir, good piece of land, Sir.”