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books, Darjeeling, Education, Gangtok, Jaldhapara, Kalimpong, Maithripala Sirisena, Pelling, Sikkim, State Minister
but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done
I had lots of work after deciding to support Maithripala Sirisena’s candidacy, and then after he won and I was made a State Minister. And even after I resigned there was much to do, culminating in working for a UPFA victory at the August 2015 election, as I thought the President wanted. But both the UPFA and I – and in the end the President too – fell victim to the infighting within the SLFP. Extreme elements on both sides destroyed the compromise between him and the former President that I believe he had wanted when he gave the latter UPFA nomination for the election.
So he found himself with a government in which the UNP had a majority, and used its power for more sophisticated corruption than he had originally objected to under the Rajapaksa regime. And he also found it with no clue as to how to run the economy, plunging into greater debt than had been objected to previously, and at higher interest rates.
What went wrong in 2015 is however the substance of the last section of the Endgame series I am also writing. Here I am concerned only with what I might term the personal fulfillment I turned to when I found myself no longer in Parliament. A man must after all have an occupation, and since I do not smoke, and since I did not think I wanted to resume regular work, I decided to take up writing in a serious way.
I was helped to this decision by Ariyawansa Ranaweera, one of the poets I had published in ‘Mirrored Images’, the anthology of English and Sinhala and Tamil poetry from Sri Lanka that I had put together for the National Book Trust of India. I had arranged readings of the poetry at the launch in Colombo, and then at the various other launches that were arranged in cultural centres round the country, including at several universities. Continue reading
