A personal vignette

Nevil Kanakaratne

The academic, professional and political achievements and career of the late Lalith Athulathmudali, who met with an untimely death in tragic circumstances, is too well-known and a matter of record for me to make any further useful contribution to it.

What is perhaps less well known are some of his personal qualities and attributes which made him one of the most respected and popular among our public figures in recent times.

The present volume on this distinguished personality of our time merits a reflection on the more human aspects of his personal character. What follows may not enhance his many public achievements but to me highlighted him as an individual of high integrity and personal values.

I had myself just returned from studies at Cambridge and had started my own career at the Bar in 1952. Lalith's father, the late D. D. Athulathmudai, himself a member of parliament and a lawyer, buttonholed me at the Law Library at Hulftdorp one morning and said that he would like me to give some advice and a few tips to his young son Lalith who was about proceed to Oxford for his legal studies.

I was more than delighted to be of some help since I was already familiar with Lalith's considerable oratorical skills having been myself a judge at the competition at Royal College, where he was then studying, for the Best Speaker's prize (awarded annually by J.R. Jayewardene in memory of his late father Justice E.W. Jayewardene) Athulathmudali brought Lalith along to me at my house one evening. Lalith was then a callow youth of eighteen and was characteristically modest and shy.

I spent about half an hour with them giving a general account of life in England and especially of what he could expect from Oxford from my own experience in Cambridge.

Being aware of his debating and speaking talents, I advised him strongly to take an active part in the Oxford Union where I was sure he would do well. They thanked me very much and left.

I was accordingly thrilled to hear a few years later that Lalith had been elected President of the Oxford Union - the first Sri Lankan to be so elected. The years passed by, and he and I went our different ways - he to continue his postgraduate studies at Harvard and then to lecture in Singapore before returning to practice in Colombo and to enter politics, while I eventually ended up in the diplomatic field.

Almost a quarter of a century later I was returning to Colombo in 1978 after completing my assignment as Sri Lanka's Ambassador to the United States and was in London on the way back home.

It was a bright spring afternoon and I was walking down Oxford Street when I heard "Mr Ambassador!" I turned around with surprise on hearing these words in the middle of London's busiest street and saw Lalith approaching me. He was then already a Minister of the Cabinet of President J. R. Jayewardene.

I walked up to him and said "Good afternoon, Sir, my congratulations! It is nice to see you after all these years." His reply was unexpected, and later gave me food for thought.

"Why do you address me as "Sir", don't you remember my coming to you to get your advice before I left for Oxford?" I replied "True, but you are now a Cabinet Minister and I am but a returning Ambassador." Lalith: "Yes, but I will always regard you as a guru."

We stopped and indulged in a short conversation. He wanted me to see him back in Colombo.

Time passed on, and I proceeded first to the United Nations Secretariat in connection with the United Nations operation in Namibia a few months later, and to Moscow as Ambassador in 1982, having called on him and spent some time with him before my departure for Moscow.

Six y ears later, on my return to Colombo, I met Lalith again at a function at which the then British High Commissioner was talking to him when I joined them. Without a moment's hesitation he turned to the High Commissioner and said "Mr. High Commissioner, you of course know Mr. Kanakaratne, but you don't know that it was his advice to me before I left for Oxford that prompted me to take part in the Oxford Union, eventually leading me to become its President. I owe a lot to him."

The above may not be so important in either Lalith's or my own public careers but it was remarkable evidence of his basic sense of decency and of gratitude that he should not only remember a very minor role I had played in his early life but that he should repeatedly acknowledge this in public.

Unfortunately, for us all this is not a common trait of many friends and acquaintances who, more often than not, tend to forget their beginnings as they climb higher and higher on the ladder of success. On me this made a deep and abiding impression of Lalith the man - far more than his academic brilliance, his professional success, and his considerable service to his country.

It was this impact on me that led me, when proposing a vote of thanks to him at the annual dinner of the Sri Lanka-United Kingdom Society in Colombo in 1989, where he was the Chief Guest, to describe him (in the words Charles Dickens had used in 1846 about Harvard men) as "a man of learning and of many attainments who would bring grace and elegance to any society in the civilized world."

I am sure that those who have known him well, both in his public and his personal life, will share this opinion of Lalith Athulathmudali.