Of A Man Who 'Sees' No End

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His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” “Neither this man nor his parents sinned,” said Jesus, “but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.” John 2: 2-3 (NIV)

These words from the Bible constantly inspired Margaret, mother of Don Patrick Mervin Weerakkody to be positive about her youngest son’s blindness. Though he could perceive light and make out obstacles at birth, his sight deteriorated fast and left Patrick, more popularly known as Wimal completely blind. “It was like her slogan” he chuckles as he recalls his childhood. Margaret and Wimal’s father Johannes, were both educators by profession and so strove to give their youngest an education equal to that which their three older children received. Their home was an environment conducive to learning, and Wimal picked up fast from what his brothers and sisters brought home from school. Their young uncle Juluis Perera, a master violinist and music teacher, created in Wimal his special favourite, an early love of music. And so a genius was put in the making.

In 1954, at nine years of age, Wimal entered the School for the Blind at Ragama, where he gained his elementary education as well as basic musical knowledge, mastering the piano, accordion and violin. These skills equipped him well for his task as a young teenager playing the role of organist and choirmaster at his local church as well as secondary school. He also acquired skills essential for the visually impaired academic – reading Braille script and typewriting – at this school. By the time he entered Christ King College in his hometown Thudalla, Ja-Ela for his secondary education, Wimal was well equipped not only to work on a par with his sighted classmates but even to top his class. He left school in shining glory, having passed the Advanced Level Examination at the very top of the national rank.

“Most of the responses I had from people in my young days were Christian, they were matter of fact about my blindness” reflects Wimal, now Professor. “At university it was different” he shares, describing snide remarks about karma and such. “The fact that I am a Christian has helped me a lot, my outlook is more positive because of that.”

Prof. Wimal Weerakkody. (c) Kalpa Rajapaksha

And this positive outlook he inherited from his mother has helped Wimal Weerakkody achieve amazing feats in life. Going through university and getting a BA and PhD he says, have been his greatest achievements to date. He admits the task was positively difficult since he did not have the convenience of facilities visually impaired students now have as study-aides. “I had to depend on sighted readers” he explains, adding that “the subject was difficult for the average reader and required a high standard of English” and was therefore the task even more trying. Nevertheless he trudged through, and in 1971 obtained his BA with First Class Honours in Classical Languages. Upon receipt of a scholarship he then commenced studies at the University of Hull, obtaining a PhD in Classics in 1977. Upon returning to Sri Lanka, Wimal Weerakkody joined the staff at his alma mater, the University of Peradeniya, and was subsequently made Professor of Classical Languages; a position he held for nearly ten years, until his recent retirement.

Among his academic achievements are translations of famous Greek and Latin texts ‘Phaedo’  and ‘The Republic’ by Plato, Hesiod’s ‘Works and Days’, works by Cicero, plays by Plautus and Terence as well as ‘Louise Braille: A Touch of Genius’ by Michael Mellor among many others. He is also a Vadya Visarad, (B.Mus.) of the First Division from Bhathkanda Sangeeth Vidyapeeth, Lucknow, India, and has won many international academic awards and scholarships including those awarded by the Commonwealth as well as SAARC.

Though his academic achievements are great, it is the gentle and compassionate person Prof. Weerakkody is, and the high values that motivate him, which his students and those who have the blessing to know him appreciate most in him. “My inspiration has always been my desire to help other persons with disabilities” he says unassumingly, “I try to acquire skills that help them and then impart it to them.”

He has truly done much more than has been expected of him as a voice of the visually and otherwise impaired, and as Coordinator of his brain-child; the Special Needs Resource Centre (SNRC) at the University of Peradeniya. Every year, Prof. Weerakkody conducts a number of workshops which he hopes will provide the visually impaired with skills for a better life. Although the workshops are geared at educating and providing specialized skills, it’s undeniable that the participants have immense fun in the learning process and go away having made good friends and wonderful memories. Prof. Weerakkody is a genial person by nature and an entertaining and enthralling teacher, and his lectures and teaching session are coloured with jokes and anecdotes which his students find difficult to forget. Among these unforgettable workshops number those on Braille Music notation for teachers and students as well as on special IT skills for the visually impaired, all conducted at the SNRC.

Prof.'s special watch with braille dots to mark the time.
How he clasps his hands together is typical of his patient, unassuming nature.
(c) Kalpa Rajapaksha

“I feel information is primary, that’s why we started the centre” explains Prof. Weerakkody as he describes how he once very informally approached a representative of the World Bank and was able to secure a donation of 50,000 USD for each national university that was willing to utilize it to help the handicapped. Though the fund was allocated for use over two years, Prof. Weerakkody and his staff of unconditionally dedicated volunteers managed to stretch the funds over four years. “Now we have trouble maintaining the centre” Prof. says, explaining that funding is very hard to come by. The centre takes on projects such as the recording of the pansiya panas jataka and school syllabi for grades 9-11, which are funded by organisations such as the Buddha Shasana Madhyasthanaya and the American Embassy. These funds nevertheless, do not provide any backing for the running of the centre or for the undergraduate students the centre is pledged to support.

Prof. Weerakkody believes that Sri Lanka has sufficient resources to provide visually impaired students with a good quality tertiary education, but that “attitude changes are necessary” for the proper allocation of these resources to be made possible. The attitude of the general public towards the handicapped population is also “mixed” he says, adding that despite the fact that “people are sympathetic”, there exist in our culture “age-old prejudices” regarding mental and physical handicaps. Prof. recalls the incident of a fellow undergraduate returning to his room on his way out for an examination, because the blind ‘apala’ student Wimal Weerakkody has stepped onto his path. Such incidents and attitudes are not only sad and embarrassing but also detrimental to the creation of a positive environment for the visually impaired within our country.

But Prof. Weerakkody has not allowed such events to deter him from achieving his goals and dreams. He has overstepped boundaries even unimpaired persons would consider insurmountable, mastering not only the fields of classical languages, philosophy and music, but those also of administration and information technology.

Since retiring a few months back, Prof. Weerakkody has been catching up on what he mischievously calls “outstanding work that lies on my table and my conscience”. He looks forward to completing a Sinhala translation of The Oresteian Trilogy by Aeschylus and quiet hours in his house hidden in the cool hills of Gampola. “I haven’t decided on anything yet” he smiles “I’ll just take things as they come”. Typical, one would feel, of how he has lived so far, grappling with immense obstacles and never faltering in his walk to bring glory his Maker.

Review - Rukshan Perera Live in Concert

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Where were you last Sunday night? If it was not the Bishop’s College Auditorium, take a minute now to add that to your list of regrets. Getting ‘Jazzed Up’ with Rukshan Perera live in concert should have been a part of every musician or music-lover’s agenda.

First up is the fact that Colombo rarely sees performances at this level. Rukshan Perera is an immensely accomplished, highly experienced and insanely talented musician. Sunday’s concert brought the cream of Colombo’s performing pop musicians together onstage with a tasteful as well as meaningful repertoire of original compositions and arrangements of popular tunes by Rukshan. Natasha Rathnayake, Voice.Print, the De Lanerolle Brothers and Thriloka are all well known for the quality of the music they produce. Having all these acts together on stage, and more importantly, under Rukshan’s umbrella, made the experience that night truly splendid.

Needless to say, the lights were not bright enough to outshine these well-known stars behind the mics and instruments. What made the evening different from other similar shows these artists perform at was the sensitivity towards music. Vocal and instrumental quality was complemented by a truly rare finesse, a refusal to over-do any one act or the other, and a balance of styles as well as individuality and unity.

Among the numbers that stood out was ‘Nature’s Calling’ featuring Natasha Rathnayake. Not only did the diva do true justice to the evocative song with her broad and sultry voice, she also seemed to be conveying her emotions regarding climate change with a pained look that absolutely refused to leave her face. The question of a wardrobe department did also come up during this number, but that did not hinder it from conveying a dramatic sense of what our environment is suffering.

The next ear-catching number ‘Something Is Happening to Me’ featured another guest act fast becoming uncontrollably popular in Colombo: Voice.Print. The acapella group seemed finally to have overcome their tendency to sing as many different artists rather than one performer, possibly thanks to the amazing delivery of a reverberating bass line by Melantha Perera from Mirage fame. It seems a family thing, the way he and his brother Rukshan go about their music-making: seemingly effortlessly!

‘What Time Is It?’ was a question far from the audience’s mind, the two and a half hours of the show gliding by in what felt like minutes, but Rukshan got at the keyboards nevertheless, to ask it. He used variations on the famous Big-Ben tune as a recurrent motif in this number that really got the crowd laughing and applauding. The confidence he exudes was most obvious in this number as he stopped in the middle of the song to prompt the audience to go “blah blah blah”.

The Colombo Brass Ensemble sensitively accompanied Rukshan as he opened an instrumental medley of popular local folk tunes on his flute. The Mozart Meets India-like performance was one of the many numbers during which Rukshan displayed another of his qualities that’s uncommon among locally established musicians - a true desire to share the lime-light.

Harshan Gallage, drummer for the backing band Thriloka, gave us a short taste of his unmatched skills at the drum-kit during this piece, battled by Dylan Rathnayake on percussion. Eshantha Peiris too shared a few moments of sparkling improvisation with the audience, characteristically gentle yet brilliant, during an "experimental" jam session with Rukshan on guitar and Julius Mitchell from Voice.Print doing his thing.

Official beat-boxer for the acapella act, Julius got the most alone time with his audience - and justifiably so! There are many young aspiring artists out on the Sri Lankan musical horizon doing quite a number of fabulous things with just their vocal apparatus, but Julius Mitchell is probably the only one with a whole dj's console as well as a good collection of popular dance tracks all concentrated in the upper part of his body. Slick, smooth and unassuming, his command of the audience too is quite something to see! Somebody only needs to take him to a club and give him a mic to put most dj's out of business.

Voice.Print (yes, they featured heavily in the programme) returned onstage to back Rukshan up on another memorable performance; the ‘Nursery Rhapsody’ - an arrangement of popular local children's songs in the form of Queen's ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. The harmonies were undoubtedly more complex than what they usually do, but the challenge was decently well lived up to. Rukshan's vocal flexibility was made obvious as he kept switching, in this number, from straightforward western-style singing to the sri lankan lilt with ease and no awkward moments, and carrying no trace of an artificial accent (the lede of most western-influenced local vocalists) into the sinhala lyrics - parts of which included ‘Me Gase Boho’ as well as ‘Athuru Mithuru’!

Most of Rukshan’s lyrics (especially those to 'We Are Brothers', his duet with Melantha, composed in memory of his mother, their music teacher) stood out in their remarkable simplicity. They refuses to succumb to pop-culture, discussing unfashionable matters in clear, un-poeticized language. The whole concert was testimony to Rukshan's deep and more importantly, genuine, concern with the world around him - not only in his lyrics but also in the way he highlighted the younger generation of artists onstage, those needing and deserving the exposure.

Among the better-known artists was Mariazelle on backup vocals and Ishan de Lanerolle doing a sensitive and subtle bass-line for a medley of local pop tunes that brought the maalu kaaraya, kammal kaaraya and the kandy lamissi together in Colombo 7! Chris Wickramanayake took to the keyboards to accompany Rukshan on 'Sri Lankan Blues'. The lyrics were a little mashed up in this one, but honestly not grounds for complaint, as the song was simply fabulous. Another memorable piece was an instrumental arrangement of 'Olu Pipila', a testimony to Rukshan's instinctive musical genius. In a nation of musicians infected with the imitation bug, Rukshan stood out as capable of successfully claiming for himself not just any song, but a house-hold favourite - a risky business.

In fact, the whole deal of putting up a show at this level of glamour and musical quality is itself ridden with risk. But the ease with which Rukshan dealt with the tiny glitches that popped up in a nearly spotless show declared to his audience that entertainment is surely not the easy game most people think anyone can play. Sunday night's programhas the potential to redefine show-biz standards for Colombo, and if there was anything missing, it was a more relaxed audience and a Sri Lankan instrument or two. For a musical genius of Rukshan Perera's calibre and inherent talent, this is hardly a challenge!

What the audience and artists experienced that night was more than just good music, bright lights and a packed hall. It was not just Rukshan Perera showing off his skill, some musicians sharing his light or a random collection of people bopping heads. It was the inception of a dialogue that is constantly (only) whispered. If our country can produce artists of real skill and integrity, can it also produce an audience of equally matched commitment? For as they sang at the end, each move we make is part of that 'Journey of Love' we take on this "one land, one land for all".

All photographs taken off Facebook.

Review of Nanda Pethiyagoda's 'Emerged'

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Let’s first drop all pretences: very few of us had any taste for History at school. It was all a memorizing of names and dates that meant nothing to us. So when one hears the title of Nanda Pethiyagoda’s research-narrative Emerged: Noteworthy Women from Kandy, the read doesn’t seem too welcome. But the term “don’t judge a book by its cover” (or title rather, in this case) is a good piece of advice to remember here. What the insides hold will really surprise you.

The book is an enjoyable and engrossing read! True, the cover is beautiful but rather dull, the title sounds prosaic and the first few words of the front flap “this researched study” really put one off. But the introduction as well as the first ‘half’ of the book are obviously the result of much thought and personal engagement, and therefore make a really captivating read. Nanda Pethiyagoda talks of serious social (and to a large extent feminist) theory in her informal style, making the whole discussion much easier to digest and something of a light conversation over cups of tea! With what ease she seems to manage the flow is quite amazing, and has the potential to provide an education on the issues she addresses to those not usually inclined to reading such material.

Emerged: Noteworthy Women from Kandy portrays the lives of eight women, “middle class Kandyans of means”, who lived and “emerged” in the time period between 1900 and 1950. In and through these portrayals the author explores the issues of conservatism and patriarchy, attempting to discern “whether the social milieu these emerged women came from was patriarchal” and “to what extent the emerged women were influenced and guided to emerge by their mothers who were conservative and within a patriarchal system”. These academic goals are combined with a genuine interest in telling the stories of these remarkable women, providing the author with a unique style and flow.

Nanda Pethiyagoda is obviously personally very interested in the issues she discusses. Even the introduction to the author on the back flap highlights her interest in “the situation of women” and “particularly those from her place of birth and upbringing – Kandy”. Maybe because of this strongly personal nature of the inquiry, or because of the strength of her interest in the study, the research questions she asks as a point of departure to her narrative, tend either to be biased or to be based on broad assumptions. Though from an academic point of view this may seem a negative, it is this bias and assumption that hold the narrative together and makes it interesting.

The need to qualify the first statement as “the first ‘half’” arises out of the fact that the second ‘half’ doesn’t seem to flow as well. While part I consists of Pethiyagoda’s own thoughts and therefore provides better-organized material for writing, part II is built mainly of quotations from biographees and relatives of biographees, complemented by Pethiyagoda’s comments on these quotations. The juxtaposition of comments against quotes (i.e.: theorisations against stories) is not an easy feat to achieve, and the flow of the writing seems to suffer because of this.

The work Nanda Pethiyagoda sets out to achieve nevertheless, is monumental. It takes rare amounts of bravery to nose-dive into the kind of discussion the author engages in, and much more skill to take the reader along as well, without demanding much or losing him/her along the way. The author’s experience as an academic and prolific writer help her overcome these minor setbacks and make the end result a well-balanced portrayal of the amazing yet un-sung women of Kandy that Nanda Pethiyagoda knows and admires.