Imparting acquired wisdom and lived experiences
After ‘In the Pursuit of Governance’, his memoirs published in 2002, Desamanya M. D. D. Pieris has now compiled a tome of his speeches and writings from convocation addresses to book reviews.
We meet the eminent former civil servant in his Wellawatte home, overflowing with books and magazines. Dr. Pieris now in his mid-eighties, aided by a walking stick to support his lofty frame, sits down to talk of this, his latest book.
COVID-19 prompted him to collect miscellaneous utterances and jottings, after the success of his previous book ‘In the Pursuit of Governance’ which, with only 750 copies printed, did the rounds prodigiously in Colombo, and is now much-prized in the secondhand book shops of Maradana.
Dharmasiri Pieris schooled at Richmond College, Galle, the Royal Primary, Thurstan College and then St. Joseph’s College. At Peradeniya, he stood out because he read both Sinhala and English for his BA. After a brief stint as an assistant librarian in the Vidyodaya University, he started scaling the heights of the civil service.
He was, most notably, Secretary to Prime Minister Sirimavo Ratwatte Dias Bandaranaike (at age 32), Secretary to the Ministry of Food and Cooperatives and later to the Ministry of Education and Higher Education.
He was in the midst of a tumult of historic events including the 1971 insurgency, the Republican Constitution, Land Reform, housing reform, tea auctions being transferred from London to Colombo, the Non-Aligned Conference, the 1983 riots, etc.
He recalls being Secretary of the Ministry of Food and Cooperatives during the ‘83 riots, when with long hours of curfew, food was hard to come by. “Day and night I had to work with my team to ensure the main food items – rice, flour, sugar – were in supply.”
Apart from Mrs. Bandaranaike, he has worked with leading politicians over the years, Dudley Senanayake, J. R. Jayewardene, Gamini Dissanayake, Lalith Athulathmudali, Richard Pathirana et al.
However, “I’ve never touched politics and will not touch politics now,” stresses Dr. Pieris, stating that, while “for the country to work properly there must be a harmonious relationship between political leaders and public servants, public servants themselves cannot become politicians. “In that case, the politician won’t get proper advice or advice that may be unpalatable to them; what they must hear in private.”
“Partly what has happened in this country today,” he says is that the roles have been reversed resulting in breakdown. The distilled wisdom in these pages from wide reading and experience, he hopes will be beneficial to readers of all ages. Neither of his books disclose anything of a private nature that can harm someone though “sometimes (politicians tend to) reveal things (to us) they might not say even to their spouses…” These, he says he will “carry with me to the crematorium.”
His convocation addresses in the book alone are worth a fortune for the mind in search of illumination. With the wisdom of both the East and the West, and also well-versed in eastern literature (the only old classical Sinhala work he has not read is Saddharmalankaraya), he imparts what can only be called pearls pure and immaculate.
Revealing a rapier-sharp mind in his speeches, he points out that university education is “not so much the course content, but training in the use of your critical faculties to address diverse and even complex issues, and to reason with clarity.”
“The university would also have done well if it has inculcated in you a sense of humility at the vastness of the expense of knowledge which is ever growing, and a realization of how little all of us know.”
Incidentally he is Senior Honorary Fellow at the Postgraduate Institute of Medicine, the only non-medical person given that honour.
Speaking of the old values of the East, Dr. Pieris at one point quoting the late Justice C. G. Weeramantry reiterates that despite our now eternal clamouring for our ‘rights’ – “if a man performed rightly his duty under the law the entire spectrum now covered by rights fall into place automatically”.
Quality of life today, he opines, is equated to money and material wealth whereas what we should do is ‘develop balanced livelihood’ or balance the forces within us – greed and charity; anger and compassion; pride and humility, etc.
He also emphasizes the need for critical thought. In a world where we are ‘bombarded with propositions which seem attractive’, whether advertisements or propaganda, we must make distinctions between the genuine and the counterfeit, ‘sincerity and humbug’.
“One of the most important aims of your life should be to earn the respect of your peers and respect of society. This, you will only earn if you are conscientious, diligent, responsible, fair and helpful. Above all, you must have a moral sense, a sense of right and wrong and a sense of what is fair and unfair.”
His succinct summing up of ‘operacy’ and empathy as being much more important than literacy and numeracy in today’s education philosophy is tied up with the Sinhalese proverb ‘Pandithayata edandne yanna be’ and the timeless Buddhist concept of Karuna respectively – manifesting how ingrained his intellect is.
In his national orations, prefaces, forewords and reviews too he imparts the same wisdom. As a number of early readers have told Dr. Pieris, the book is truly a primer if you are a total alien trying to get an idea of how best to lead a human (and humane) life.
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