About …

I do not come from one of those well-known families in Sri Lanka/world! My family is best described in the following poem written by one of the greatest Sri Lankan poets, lawyer and a human rights activist, Basil Fernando:

Anonymous People By Basil Fernando

We
Are the anonymous people
No photos
No paintings
To record our pasts
Our forefathers
Collected no stamps
No public wall
Bears our name
No awards of us
In public games
We
Are the anonymous people
Our forefathers were the same
Age’s suffering
Connects us to past
No memories of us
But our world is vast
We
Are the anonymous people
Silence is our mask.

So, what I know about ancestors is very limited. I know my cousin, Oshani, has started to research about my maternal grandmother’s background. I look forward to her exciting discoveries. All anonymous people have their stories and they are unique (while parts of those stories may be shared by others). Those stories are stories teaches us and our children. Those stories inspire us. Those stories gives us courage to get up and move forward when we fall.  Plato said, “Those who tell the stories rule the society.”  Purpose of telling the stories from my past is certainly not to rule the society, but simply to share thoughts and insights from living experiences. This blog is an attempt to treasure valuable memories before they further drift away. I hope this blog one day will be a useful reference to Aakashi and Sean. They could at least know something about my growing up in Sri Lanka.

Mathaka Potha මතක පොත means, in Sinhala, A Book of Memories. I was born and grown up in Hendala, Wattala, in the sub-urbs of Colombo, Sri Lanka. There were a lot of fun and fond memories growing up there, like playing cricket at the Nayakakanda church grounds with friends on Saturdays and Sundays, one of those young ones, Chaminda Vaas later to become a world class cricketer.