Year of peace and determination...

Upali GUNARATNE
Chairman, National Savings Bank

Celebrations at the beginning of the New Year will be with happiness and hope. It shall be a new and a fresh start. January first is indeed a most important day in every sense of the word. This day brings you happiness, excitement, vigour and a great joy to one’s mind. New Year celebrations are an aged-old custom observed by people all over the world.

The oldest New Year celebrations are reported from Mesopotamia in 2000 BC.

Romans calculated the 1st of January as the first day of the calendar in BC 153 and designed the world’s first calendar starting with January First in BC 46 and named it ‘Julian Calendar’.

New Year celebrations bid farewell to one year and welcome another year.

If the old year was a great one, you can give it a rousing send-off. If it was bad, you can thank your stars that it is over. If you have high hopes that the New Year will be better than the old year, you can give it a warm welcome.

National Savings Bank can be happy in two ways. We can be happy of the strong foundations laid in the outgoing year and the hopes of implementation of these plans in the incoming year.

We believe that everybody else too feels the same way. We believe that those who supported us in achieving organizational goals too feel happy and content. This precedent set by us is important to other organisations as well. If it is not the case, you cannot be genuinely happy about it.

The first month of the year ‘January’ is named after the Roman God Janus who had two faces. He could look forward and backward at the same time. Though two faces are not generally considered as a social asset for a human being, the desire to simultaneously take comfort from the past and the future is very much a human trait.

So, today is day that you should look into two directions; the past and the future. Everybody strives on this day to make good resolutions and keep them.

New Year is the time for resolutions; to review old resolutions and make new ones. We wish that all such resolutions may bring prosperity to the bank, to yourselves and to the country in general.

We hope that the New Year will be a happy and prosperous year for all of you and we believe that we shall prepare now to face challenges of the New Year. These challenges will be economic, social or global.

Our absolute wish, however, is that peace will dawn upon Sri Lanka in the year 2009. We shall work towards realisation of this wish with great commitment and wisdom. The following is a valuable thought to start the New Year with.

If there is righteousness in the heart,
There will be beauty in the character.
When there is beauty in the character,
There will be harmony in the family home.
When there is harmony in the family home,
There will be order in the Nation.
When there is order in the Nation,
There will be peace in the world.

Peace is the symbol of lovability of the country, individual and the organisation. This journey we embark today with a sense of oneness bearing one goal in mind will then be truly successful.

Thus we may be able to reap the fruits of this endeavour at the end of the year 2009. This ardent hope for success will then be a great source of strength to start the New Year.