Appreciations
View(s):The officer that many respected and even emulated
Rtd. Senior DIG Gamini Herbert Gunawardane
On May 5, Sri Lanka lost an illustrious son of her soil, a devout Buddhist who was an exemplary human being and officer. Gamini enlisted in the Sri Lanka Police on May 2, 1963 as a Probationary Assistant Superintendent at the young age of 24. Since then he served in many parts of the country as ASP, SP, SSP and DIG. In 1993 he was promoted to Senior Deputy Inspector-General of Police and until 1998 he served as the Head of the President’s Security Division, Ministerial Security Division, Southern Range, Crimes & Criminal Intelligence and Police HQ.
He received his primary education at Dharmaraja College, Kandy and thereafter graduated from the University of Ceylon, Peradeniya wiith a Bachelor of Arts in 1962. He participated in extracurricular activities and sports in his academic career in school and at University. He had the distinction of being selected to Harvard University, USA where he successfully completed the Masters in Public Administration. He was awarded a Fulbright Research Scholarship to develop a new concept of policing for the Sri Lanka Police.
Gamini and I became acquainted in 1982 when following the Diploma in Personal Management conducted by the IPM. We soon became very good friends along with our two families. In 1985 he invited me to be Consultant and trainer to the Officers of the Central Range in the fields of Leadership, Planning, Strategy, Teamwork, Communication and Interface with the public in a manner that would earn respect for the Police. I was engaged in this role till 1989 up to the time Gamini took up office at Police HQ. Thus, I have a very good knowledge of Gamini’s style of leadership that inspired his subordinates to do what is right always.
He was fearless in standing against dishonesty. He was absolutely straight in all his dealings and all officers and others who had the opportunity to be associated with him respected him and several emulated him.
One of the many incidences where his leadership was proven was when an all-island curfew was declared following the signing of the Indo-Sri Lanka Pact on July 29, 1987. The Central Range consisting of Kandy, Matale and Nuwara Eliya Districts were exempt from curfew. What is more, the Kandy Perahera was conducted in all its glory without incident to the delight of tourists and locals even though the rest of the country was under curfew.
His career comprised a mix of dedication, integrity, loyalty and of sparkling personality and moral rectitude. He was an affable person and was recognized as a kind-hearted officer by all who served under him. He was a ‘role model’ for his high level of honesty, integrity, impartiality and leadership. He held his rank with supreme confidence, yet never losing the common touch. He did not know the meaning of fear or favour.
His wife Sushila Kumarihami Gunawardane played the roles of wife, mother, mentor and friend with great passion and excellence. Sushila who obtained her Masters in Education from the Harvard Graduate School of Education was the ‘rock’, steadfast and true in her continuous caring for her beloved husband, especially during his last four months where she nursed him and spent her time beside him encouraging him and making him as comfortable as possible.Sushila, an epitome of dignity and respectability was the wife that Gamini was very proud of. Gamini and Sushila devoted their lives to each other without reservation.
Their son, Kosiya, has been in Australia for over 20 years but has been closely in touch with his parents. He visited his father each time he fell ill and was a very concerned and caring son.
Gamini will be sadly missed by Sushila and Kosiya.
May he attain the supreme bliss of Nibbana!
Dr. Nalin Jayasuriya
A great friend, caring and compassionate lady
DIANA CAPTAIN
A few weeks ago I was preoccupied with a devastating personal tragedy when the news of Diana’s death reached me adding to my grief. She was a beautiful, compassionate and lovable lady whom I had known from my student days at Trinity College Kandy.
Kandy in the 1950s was an idyllic town with many civic amenities. Of them the most important for us were the libraries and bookshops that dotted the town. Trinity had an impressive library which functioned under our teacher Vernon Jansze. He had co-opted some of us as curators who helped in the ordering of books, classifying them and stamping them with the college seal. As curators we could use the library freely not only during off periods but also during weekends.
The Kandy Municipal Council library was located close to Trinity on Trincomalee Street. It was presided over by the cadaverous Mr Bhai who allowed us freedom to browse through the latest magazines spread out in the front lobby and borrow three books at a time from the lending section. But our favourite retreat was the USIS library located in the basement of the spacious Lake House building. The head of the USIS library at that time was Diana Captain. Unlike the dusty KMC library, Diana’s fiefdom was ultra chic. The whole basement was air-conditioned and the book racks and tables and chairs were of stainless steel. The books and magazines were brand new and we would marvel at the technical quality and the finish of the American publications.
Diana was the most trusting of the librarians and she would allow us to borrow as many books as we wanted and was not very insistent about sticking to deadlines for returning them. But what bowled me over was that she generously allowed me to keep the back numbers and extra copies of the magazines that were on display at the Centre. Thereby I was able to build up a small library of influential magazines and books which gave me a good grounding for my university career.
After reading the Kenyon Review, Encounter, Poetry London-New York and The New York Review of Books, kindly donated by Diana, from cover to cover, I was able to enter the intellectual life of the University from my first year itself. Thanks to my familiarity with the new American poets due to my well thumbed small library gifted by Diana, I wrote an article to the Ceylon University magazine under the title of ‘’The Poetry of Siri Gunasinghe ‘’ which caught the eye of Sarachchandra and brought me into his orbit. It also interested Siri Gunasinghe and we began a wonderful friendship of over 60 years which ended only with his death last year.
I must also recount another episode relating to our first year at Peradeniya. There were four of us Trinitians who regularly visited the USIS library. They were Jayantha Dhanapala, Ahamed Marikkar, Ananda Wickremeratne and myself. We were good students and unsurprisingly all four of us were selected to enter the University in 1957. It was a time of the interregnum between leaving school and entering university. Diana was aware of this and wanted to help us. One day she called us to her office and said that a USIS exhibition was being held in Kandy and offered us positions as ushers at the week-long exhibition. We were to be paid a handsome stipend. So the four of us tidily dressed in white suit and college tie controlled the crowds that flocked to the exhibition. A few weeks later we entered University with our hard-earned stipend in our pockets. We got through the mild rag with our treasure troves undetected. I invested part of my earnings on two Van Heusen shirts and for some time I was one of the best dressed students on campus. When Diana was transferred to Colombo she was succeeded by Indra de Silva who also made us feel comfortable in the USIS library.
When I was appointed the Director of Information in 1968, I was able to resume my friendship with Diana. At that time the US administrations were quite liberal unlike the hardline ideologies that seem to prevail today. One particular aspect of this open-mindedness was the regular visits of famous US musicians, artists and film makers. Martha Anderson, Dave Brubeck and Duke Ellington were among them. Diana arranged those visits and the fabulous parties that followed. She had friends among all political parties, communities and professions and made it a point to keep in touch with those with no power.
She was particularly close to the leaders of the LSSP. NM, Colvin and Doric were her admirers and she treated them as close friends often intervening without fanfare to make their lives more comfortable. I know that she was a close friend of Colvin’s family and would follow the careers of the children and grandchildren with great concern. Diana’s father had been the General Manager of the Wellawatte Spinning and Weaving Mills and had interacted sympathetically with Colvin and his political cohorts who had begun their Trade Union activities with the workers there. Later Doric had been elected the Municipal Councillor for Wellawatte representing the LSSP.
She went out of her way to help Ranasinghe Premadasa when he was a novice in municipal and later national politics. As Director of Information under Premadasa who was then our Deputy Minister, I collaborated with Diana in arranging his first visit to the US which proved to be a great success. After a two-week tour Premadasa was hosted to a lunch at the UN building in New York by U Thant, the Secretary General himself. That was a great gesture since Secretary Generals usually do not even meet Deputy Ministers leave alone hosting them to lunch. There is a backstory to this lunch which space does not permit me to narrate here.
There will be many who will miss Diana. She was a great friend and a caring and compassionate lady on whom wealth and social connections sat lightly.
Sarath Amunugama
A tribute to an outstanding scholar
Dr.M.A.M. Shukri
It was with much sadness that I heard of the demise of Dr.M.A.M.Shukri, by far the greatest scholar the Sri Lankan Muslim community has produced. Dr. Shukri was more than just a scholar of Islam, he was a man of many facets who served as the director of an Islamic academic institution that produced some remarkable men, a mentor to a younger generation of scholars with a balanced view of religion and a livewire of various organisations to which he contributed immensely with his vast knowledge and experience. Men like him are very few indeed.
I first got to know Dr.Shukri as a Director of the First Global Group which I served as the editor of Islamic Finance Today magazine and of which he was a member of the editorial board. Despite all his achievements, he remained one of the simplest and humblest of men, the salt of the earth, so to say. I always wondered how one man could have contributed so much to the enhancement of knowledge and was also deeply saddened by the fact that many of his writings contributed to learned journals over the years had not reached the ordinary public. I convinced him to release these in the form of a book which I was only too glad to help him put together, The Mind’s Eye. Musings and Reflections of Dr. M.A.M. Shukri, a veritable treasury of knowledge from an Islamic perspective covering everything from archaeology and literature to human rights and the relationship between man and nature.
The extreme simplicity and yet at the same time the immense profundity he imparted to his writings always struck me as the work of a very high and sophisticated mind that knew how to present even the most complex arguments in the simplest possible language. If this proved one thing- it was his firm grasp of the topics he dealt with. Dr. Shukri had after all majored in Islamic Philosophy with a focus on the mystical Sufi treatise Qut Al Quloob for which he received his PhD from the University of Edinburgh following a Commonwealth Scholarship, no mean achievement for a man hailing from the southern town of Matara.
However this was only one aspect of Dr. Shukri’s many facets. His most notable contribution to the community and the country was his role in the development of Naleemiah Institute set up in Beruwala in 1973 by M.I.M.Naleem, a well meaning philanthropist who had come up with the brightest idea possible to enhance the quality of Muslim academia in the country. This was to set up a university cum seminary which would impart a sound and balanced Islamic education while at the same time equipping its graduates with secular professional knowledge in every possible area they chose to make a living of. The revolutionary idea of maintaining a balance between the Islamic life and the needs of the modern world attracted many young men to this hallowed institution. When they passed out, they did remarkably well as both Islamic scholars and professionals and to this day play a very prominent role in various government bodies and private organisations.
It was thanks to Dr. Shukri’s guidance as the Director of Naleemiah that it rose to its peak, attracting the most intelligent young men of the community as students, enlisting the services of the most erudite teachers from both here and overseas and gaining nationwide and worldwide recognition for its study courses. Not surprisingly he served in this capacity for nearly 40 years, which itself speaks volumes of his contribution to this institution. It was also in this capacity that he convened a symposium of renowned historians to research on the history of the Muslim community of Sri Lanka at a time when there existed an immense void. The initiative led to one of the best books ever to document the history of the community- Muslims of Sri Lanka: Avenues to Antiquity.
Dr. Shukri also served in the boards of many other organisations including in the board of directors of the country’s pioneering Islamic outreach organisation, Centre for Islamic Studies where he played a very important role in its early years. The very presence of so distinguished a personality in itself was sufficient to give a fillip to the many organisations he kindly consented to be in, greatly helping them to fulfil their purpose and mission. Such was the man. His charisma, knowledge and most importantly his utter humility rubbed off on everybody who knew him.
May Almighty Allah have mercy on his soul and grant him Jannatul Firdaus.
Asiff Hussein