“Bando, do you remember when we last had a smoke together?”
- Saturday, 11 October 2014
The above piece of conversation was overheard by one of our staff reporters in the garden behind the presidential election steering office at Gregory’s Road, Colombo 07 that had been opened by Basil Rajapaksa.
After the opening of the office, and partaking of the meals and doing the transactions are over, some of the participants had gone out to the garden to have a smoke. One of them, a professor who chairs a certain Sri Lankan institution, did so in order to calm down following a heated exchange of words inside the office.
That verbal exchange came after Willie Gamage, who is in charge of the election steering office, appointed the other person in the story to coordinate the work in Kandy district. The ‘professor chairman’, who was nearby, asked the appointee, “Machan, can you handle Kandy on your own?’ Angered by the question, he has replied with a question, “Do you think Kandy is too big for me?” The ‘professor chairman’ was rendered speechless, as the other has a longer history in the SLFP than himself.
The above conversation took place when both came out and were having a smoke. There, in front of all others, the other asked the ‘professor chairman,’ “Bando, do you remember when we last had a smoke together?” Astonished by the question, the ‘professor’ chairman said, “No Machan, I do not remember”.
“If you don’t, I’ll make you remember. The last time we had a smoke together was at the Rupavahini canteen. Those days, it was not like this. Smoking was allowed inside. It was late October in 2005. When Dr. Jagath Wickremasinghe and I came to speak about the economic plan under Mahinda Chinthana, you and Charitha Ratwatte came to explain the UNP’s ‘Reawakening Sri Lanka’ economic plan. Do you remember now?”
That left the ‘professor chairman’ dumbfounded, and he managed to stammer out, “No. No, Machan. You are wrong. I have never been with the UNP. I think you have mixed things up.”
When he was retorted, “We are not born again, Machan. We remember things well. The other thing is that UNPers like you are in top positions everywhere in this government. This is a UNP government with a SLFP leader,” the ‘professor chairman’ finished his cigarette in a haste and got vanished.
The ‘dramatis personae’ in this conversation are former chairman of the Ceylon Electricity Board and Bank of Ceylon Dr. Udaya Sri Kariyawasam and Foundation Institute chairman Prof. Ranjith Bandara, who gives economic advice to economic development minister Basil Rajapaksa today after submitting a research paper on ‘Wild elephants in Sri Lanka’ for his doctorate.
