In the history of the world April 30 has relatively little significance unlike some other memorable dates.
It was on this day in 1861 that President Lincoln ordered federal troops to withdraw from native Indian territory, a precursor surely to other US occupations of foreign lands and some ignominious withdrawals subsequently.
It was also the date in 1900 when the United States annexed Hawaii where 71 years later I spent an effervescent and lively four months as a Jefferson Fellow in the rather laid back University of Hawaii campus.
I was less than 10 years as a journalist at Lake House when I won this fellowship to participate in a programme at Honolulu's East-West Center. It brought together nearly a dozen Asia-Pacific journalists interested in mass communication as an agent of socio-economic development. This was in the heyday of "development journalism", a concept evolved very much in Asia and which I taught several years later at workshops for Asian-Pacific journalists on behalf of the Commonwealth Press Union and the Commonwealth Foundation.
A couple of years later, I was followed to Honolulu by my good friend Rex de Silva who I had recommended. Rex was editor of the now defunct Sun. In later years he was editor of the Borneo Bulletin in Brunei. He tried to entice me to swap places with him when I was with the Hong Kong Standard.
Rex and I had spent four extremely fruitful and journalistically interesting months at the Berlin Institute of Mass Communication. This was in 1966 at the height of East-West confrontation and divided Berlin was a microcosm of that Cold War.
Yes, April 30 hardly makes a footnote in history. Still to President Clinton's family this date in 1997 must be important for it was when daughter Chelsea decided to attend Standard College.
If it is important to the Clintons it is more significant to me. For tomorrow I complete 50 years in journalism, a journey that began on May 1, 1962 when freshly out of the University of Peradeniya I went to work on the Ceylon Observer at the then prestigious and powerful Associated Newspaper of Ceylon Ltd, popularly known as Lake House or Beira Gedera to its detractors.
It is a long journey that has had extremely enjoyable and absorbing moments, produced vibrant debates and ideological disputes within and without that establishment on issues of contemporary importance and over newspaper battles won and lost.
They were continued in Hong Kong and in London. The dramatis personae had no doubt changed just as the locale had. But the concerns that absorbed us then continued to manifest themselves under new guises and new labels and haunt us with their new imperialism.
It would be foolish to try to encapsulate 50 years in this profession, vocation, trade or whatever one calls it. That experience could only be effectively and deservedly captured in a book for it traverses interesting and significant phases in the political history of Ceylon/Sri Lanka and Hong Kong where I worked for 10 years and saw the transition of that colony from a British administration to the rightful custodian, China.
Then for the next 10 years I saw in London, working first as the Europe Editor of the Hong Kong Standard and later at Gemini News Service made famous in the media world for its commitment to in-depth coverage of the global South by the indefatigable Derek Ingram. Still later I served as a journalism training consultant to the Commonwealth Press Union and a copy editor to the Commonwealth Foundation.
During my days with Gemini News Service I also edited the Commonwealth Feature Service whose death-knell was sounded nearly 10 years ago due to funding cuts. Gemini News itself suffered a similar fate when donor funding to Panos London which ran the agency also came to be heavily trimmed.
No single column like this could capture the wide sweep of this journalistic experience. One could make broad brush strokes to provide some colour to a brief article. But the host of anecdotes that bring to life the many political and other leaders, the personages that one met over the years and provided the journalistic 'fodder' for decades of writing, satirising and lampooning, cannot be legitimately brought alive except in much longer writings.
In conversations over the years I have related some anecdotes often evoking hoots of laughter or shocked surprise. Some of these stories are now only known to me as those who are subjects of these tales have passed to the Great Beyond. But at various times during their life time I have related them to different audiences.
I suppose it is because these tales, some very relevant to an understanding of the politics of that day and to the history of this country, that made several friends ask me to record them for posterity.
I remember Mangala Moonesinghe, then about to relinquish his post as our High Commissioner to the UK, trying to persuade me over lunch at my home in London to put all those stories , told and untold, into a book.
Another High Commissioner to London, the eminent lawyer Faisz Musthapha was also insistent that these anecdotes that often reflect the ethos of the time should be passed on to the next generation.
More recently Minister Sarath Amunugama, a contemporary at Peradeniya, on two separate occasions at my home in Bangkok was urging me to write a book collating some of the more memorable episodes and providing a kaleidoscopic image of the times.
For two reasons at least I have been putting off the idea. The inner discipline that is needed for this kind of exercise, I sadly lack. The journalist and publisher Vijitha Yapa once suggested that I send him a chapter at a time if I am incapable of disciplining myself to undertake the task all at once.
Another reason is that this kind of autobiographical writing leads to 'self' often creeping into occupy centre stage. There are some who find it virtually impossible to write anything without bringing themselves into the picture whether such self-congratulation and self-advertisement which is what it is, is intrinsic to what the subject or not.
One tends to become an "I" specialist and already there are too many "I"s in this piece.
There are others that pass off as political pundits who cannot refrain from quoting some prominent writer, philosopher, or a well- known personage as a kind of stand first to their writings. This is perhaps to give the reader an impression of one's erudition, wide- reading and supposed intellectual depth. But I suppose any worthwhile book of quotations should be able to provide an appropriate quote for the occasion.
Quoting some well-known person surely does not automatically add value to what one has to say.
As much as I would like to relate some of those anecdotes here, I think it would be more prudent to do so when I sit down hopefully to tell it in full.
For a journalist nothing is more self-satisfying than producing what is known as a scoop. It brings inner joy and feelings of a job well done while becoming the envy of others in the business.
During these years in Sri Lanka, Hong Kong and London there have been numerous scoops, a few in this newspaper too in reports from London. While those that won accolades in Hong Kong could be told, the others would have to wait for a more propitious occasion.
(The writer is now Deputy Chief of Mission at the Sri Lanka Embassy Bangkok but contributes to newspapers in Thailand, Malaysia and Sri Lanka) |
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