Earlier this month I attended the launch of a new journal, the brainchild of a youngster called Avishka Mario Seneviratne. I had been urged to attend by Goolbai Gunasekara, a great patron of imaginative learning, whom I much admire, but in fact I had met Avishka previously, when he turned up at home to look through books from a library that I was disposing of.
All learning seems to be grist to Avishka’s mill, and what he conceived of is a journal that covers a multiplicity of subjects, looking at a range of aspects of Sri Lankan history. For this purpose he got together a brilliant team of writers, ranging from my old Peradeniya colleague Prof C R de Silva to the evergreen Elmo Jayawardena. There is a vivid account by Chandran Ratnam, who has done much to put this country on the map, of the making here of an Indiana Jones film, while Avishka himself has contributed an account of the life and work of Roland Raven-Hart who wrote a great deal about this country. His most famous book in this regard was Ceylon History in Stone, which covers, as Avishka puts it, ‘travel, history, heritage and people’.
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