Ceylon Rediscovered

ISBN: 1466268360

Author: Samaranayake, J. F.

Condition: New

Product Description Opening with a discussion of the 1959 assassination of Prime Minister S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike by a Buddhist monk, (which led to his wife Sirimavo becoming the worlds first female prime minister in 1960), Ceylonese journalist J. F. Samaranayake recounts tongue-in-cheek exchanges with a composite of Sinhalese and Tamil characters in the 1960s. A 95-pound fifteen-year-old runaway, he had bid the shores of Ceylon farewell in 1933 wearing a college uniform and carrying only a textbook in hand to return some three decades later weighing 165 pounds, temples graying, and a wife and five children in tow. He soon discovers that the real Ceylon is in the countryside whilst the city has no dearth of class and racial distinctions coupled with a conflict between national aspirations and tastes for Western ways. Worse, he concludes that the outward trappings of Ceylon as a democracy with a Free Press may just have been that-a farce. About the Author K. Don Joseph Ferdinand Gerald Samaranayake, son of K. Don John William Samaranayake and Edith Florence Victorine Gomis, was born Saturday, 6 April 1918 in Kelaniya, Ceylon. He was baptized a Catholic on the 14th day of April 1918 at St. Joseph's Church, Grandpass, Ceylon. He lived his 61 years in Ceylon, Burma, Vietnam, and India. He died on Tuesday, 11 September 1979 at the Church of South India Hospital, Bangalore, India of acute myocardial infarction complicated by cardiogenic shock. A veteran journalist, he left behind several personal memoirs and over two dozen (1950-1976) daily diaries, which he meticulously penned-a lasting testament that ink indeed flowed in his veins.