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The Storm's Eye by Prof.Rajiva Wijesinghe

Visiting India has always been a pleasure, ever since - a horrifying 34 years ago - I accompanied my mother when she had to attend a meeting in Bombay. Those were days of restricted travel, so we used warrants to fly to Trichy via Jaffna, and then had a long bus journey to Madras. It was made longer by breakdowns, but I still recall sitting by the side of the road as darkness fell over what seemed an endless dry plain after the lush confines of Ceylon.

A shooting star dropped down the sky, and I decided then that travel would be one of my principal purposes in life. Apparently, with three planets in the ninth house, I have no choice.

My mother went on by train to Bombay, and I stayed with a wonderful old lady, Principal of one of the best colleges of the city, who provided me with a map and told me the bus routes.

I went everywhere, with a memorable day at Mahabalipuram when I decided that art and architecture had also to figure in my life. It was getting rather full I realized, after the awful emptiness I had been sensing at home.

Madras exhausted, I went off to Bangalore for the weekend, the lady in Madras having insisted to some friends there that they put me up. Surprisingly, one daughter turned out to be married to an uncle of a friend in Colombo.

A couple of years later, bored out of my mind even more after O/Ls, I told my parents that I wanted to travel by myself round India. I was not yet sixteen, and now it strikes me that I must have been mad to ask and they to agree, but it turned out a fantastic experience.

We had friends in the major cities, but in between I was on my own, including a night in a rundown hotel in Jaipur which cost just one rupee. I learnt then of the wonderful cheap tours the Indian Tourist Boards, Union and State, run in most interesting cities, and saw how they catered to a wide range of Indians.

I think it was then that I realized how silly were the myths we subscribed to about India. It was a land of squalor and ignorance, we believed, where the rich were very rich and the poor were destitute. It was a land that was about to fall apart because of language problems and racial resentments.But India was building up a nation while we were destroying ours. I visited Jaipur with a Tamil doctor and his wife, who took me around in the car they hired because there weren't enough people for the tour.

They were about to emigrate, but he had wanted to see the marvels of a state far from his own. The Delhi tours were of course full of people from all walks of life from all over the country. But I found the same true in distant Puri too, where families - who insisted on feeding what they saw as a poor lonely soul from Sri Lanka - flocked to admire the erotic sculptures at Konarak.

A little more than a decade later, at Simla, and later still in Hyderabad, it was the same. As I grow older I get less sociable, but a boy on the latter tour seemed to be as adventurous about getting to the more distant places the guide advised against, and we got talking. He was from Orissa, a student who had decided he wanted to see his own country.

Of course our own students also travel around Sri Lanka, and learn to appreciate our own wonders. But the facilities for doing so easily and cheaply on one's own are lacking. And in any case it would give us a wider perspective if we could also travel in India, and see the range of achievements of their several cultures, instead of believing, as our text books try to tell us, that we are self sufficiently wonderful.

One thing I did notice over the years was declining standards of English.

But even there I think India has pulled up its socks sooner than we have managed to do. This time, on the tour of Mysore city, a couple on the bus asked me a question in one of the palaces. When I indicated I could not understand, they turned to their son, who must have been about ten. He addressed me in perfect English, and then translated my answer to his parents. They turned out to be from Bombay. The phenomenon I gather is very common, parents deprived of English ensuring that their children don't also suffer. And of course in the plethora of choice that is encouraged now all over India, standards of English will rise very soon.

I saw this at the Conference, where the students proved surprisingly articulate. They were doing MAs in English, though some had received their primary education in Kannada, and one indeed had only changed to English for Junior College (the last couple of years in school, which finishes a year or two earlier than our system does). And of course the massive range of books, turned out by a whole host of publishers, provides all students with material at suitable levels to encourage reading.

I came back through Bangalore, to which Sri Lankan airlines now has a direct flight. They have opened up to Buddha Gaya as well, which suggests that government - or Emirates, though I have more faith in Mr Pelpola - has decided to put its money where its mouth is, and provide all incentives possible to encourage interaction with India.

Bangalore, the sleepy city I visited so long ago, is now the IT capital of India, and indeed of Asia I would venture to suggest.

Bill Gates had just been there, and his commitment of a massive sum for work on Aids suggests continuing confidence in India's potential in the field of advanced technology. Meanwhile, just before I got to India, their Prime Minister had been at a summit with ASEAN, indicating that that shrewd bunch also see which way the wind is blowing.

Can we benefit from all this? I certainly hope so. This, at least, is an area in which Ranil knows what he's doing. Apart from his own efforts, he has also, unlike in practically all other fields, found the right people for the job. Sending Mangala Moonesinghe back to Delhi was an extremely sensible measure, paralleled by his constant attention to Indian perspectives on our internal problems.

But will this be enough to move us into the new economic order that Asia is developing? For this I think radical measures are necessary, particularly to revamp our education system, perhaps to allow Indian entrepreneurs to offer our children some of the opportunities their own are now getting.

And if we could learn just a little bit from the elite administrators India still has, despite their own problems of corruption and political interference, we might after all be able to join the 21st century.

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