Full career, with in-depth commentaries

(Written by Neville in the third person, to avoid using the word “i”)

A quotation from the body of this article:

“(Neville) believes that, by releasing creative spiritual energy into the world, through meditation and prayer, working anonymously and silently, he is benefiting the world, his community and his family far more substantially than he ever did while working overtly among them.”

The purpose of this article is to ask the reader to consider Jayaweera's career, however high-profile it may have been at one time, as belonging to a world whose values were the polar opposite of those within which he now orders his life. From the latter standpoint, from the point of view of the big picture, Jayaweera's career can be best described only as the life of the proverbial frog – and the environment in which he worked both nationally and internationally – as the proverbial well.

The natural question then is, “Why write about it at all?" The simple answer is that it is necessary as a benchmark from which to measure Jayaweera's defection to another reality. It is only as his captivity to the earlier reality is spelt out through his career that the significance and enormity of the breakout can be gauged.

Jayaweera uses a metaphor to describe his escape from the former reality. He says that the experience is like being shot out into space in a capsule. As the capsule climbs into the infinite sky his former reality recedes from view rapidly. People, things, relationships, achievements and power structures that seemed terribly important and overpowering at one time, can hardly be seen now, until finally they disappear from view altogether, while an infinity of stars and spiral galaxies rise over the horizon to receive him into his new reality.

Contrition and remorse

Looking back on the years 1960 to 1973, when he was a high-flying bureaucrat in Sri Lanka, and from 1974 to 1989 when he was enjoying even a higher profile as an international civil servant, Jayaweera confesses with contrition and remorse that the dominant qualities of his personality were a towering arrogance, an enormous self-belief, and a pompous and insufferable swagger. He never doubted his ability to perform whatever tasks he was called upon to do, but now confesses that this was nothing but his rampaging ego, which he says had been the root of most of his problems.

That overweening self-belief was primarily genetic, but was also nourished by the confidence that successive governments had reposed in him, by asking him to take on – when he was only in his 30s – jobs which his seniors had shunned and which were far above his seniority in the Service. In fact all of the jobs he held between 1960 and 1970, from the age of 29 to 40, were in Class 1 Grade 1 of the Service whereas substantively, in terms of seniority, he was only in Class 2 Grade 2.

During those 11 years, Jayaweera's career burned fiercely like a meteorite, but like all meteorites, it spluttered out quickly, so that by the time he was only 40 he had disappeared from Sri Lanka's landscape.

Commitment to discipline and integrity

Having confessed to arrogance and an inordinate self-belief as his dominant shortcomings as a public servant, Jayaweera also says that he was driven by an almost fanatical commitment to discipline and integrity in public life.

However, from the vantage point of his new world, Jayaweera also confesses that although his commitment to discipline and integrity deserve to be applauded, the truth is also that his commitment to those ends was driven by his overriding desire to impose his authority at his workplace, and was driven by his vaulting ego.

In hindsight, he says that this was true not only of himself but of many so called “dedicated” and “committed” lives. The desire to advance career, the desire to legitimise one’s existence, the search for meaning, and not least, the craving for publicity and recognition, were all elements that were diluted into the “dedication” and “commitment”. The latter never came unalloyed. They were never devoid of “self” but, always, always, contaminated by ego.

He says that he elevated almost to the status of a religious belief the view that a public servant must not only return to the state, in terms of discipline, work and productivity, his response to the salary he is paid, but must equally refrain from treating the state as if it was a board of directors of a privately-owned company, from whom he may extort maximum concessions.

Also, he was of the view that in a developing country like Sri Lanka, engaged in a long and arduous climb up the ladder of development, public servants must be prepared to make sacrifices and not think in terms of the regulation eight-hour working day and look to nursing their holidays and perks. He demonstrated this in his own life by working 14-16 hours a day, most Saturdays and some Sundays included, and by foregoing, most years, his annual quota of holidays and leave. He used to tell his senior staff that if they wanted to be effective managers and leaders, they must not expect from the junior staff working under them an output which they themselves would not display in their own work, and urged them, wherever possible, to work twice or even thrice as hard as their subordinates.

While these values may be seen to be inherently desirable in any well ordered bureaucracy, what was wholly repugnant was Jayaweera’s intolerance of anyone who fell short of them.

These qualities and values, which Jayaweera demonstrated in his own working life, made him both admired and feared, but equally, he was rightly seen as authoritarian and utterly arrogant. That again was simply the outworking of ego.

A scarred life

He also recalls that although he enjoyed a high public profile, his life was scarred by stress and tension, and by interminable conflict and discord and he says that, at least when working in Sri Lanka, he never knew a day's joy or peace of mind. He says that had he continued down that road his health would have given way in a short time, and that he would have died a long time ago. Those again were the bitter fruits of ego.

As if that was not a high enough price to pay for name, fame and public profile, he says that he also took his family for granted, and unwittingly treated them as if they were merely adjuncts of his career. Jayaweera confesses that he has never been able to live down that shame.

Tribute to wife and daughter

Now, however belatedly, he recalls with a profound sense of gratitude, the important role that his wife Trixie played in his career, uncomplainingly, and for much of the time, invisibly. He recalls that while he applied himself assiduously to his various tasks, often working 12-14 hours a day, it was Trixie who provided the backup and kept his home afloat. Furthermore, being the wife of a Government Agent in Sri Lanka (the administrative Head of a District) carried considerable social and ceremonial responsibilities all of which Trixie discharged admirably.

When Jayaweera served in the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) in London for 15 years, travelling around the world for 3-4 months in every year, again it was Trixie who had to bear the brunt of his long absences.

Not least, when he was an Ambassador to the Scandinavian countries, a huge burden fell on Trixie to play hostess at formal dinners and drinks parties, and this she did admirably.

However, Jayaweera still carries a deep burden of guilt for not having found sufficient quality time for his wife and home.

Equally, Jayaweera confesses that when his daughter Mano was a child, the pressures of high office did not leave him with much quality time for her either. Especially when he was working in the World Association for Christian Communication, and had to be away from home for more than three months in the year, every year throughout his 17 years there, often in stretches of 2-3 weeks at a time, his long absences from home took a heavy toll on her as well, and Jayaweera carries a deep sense of remorse about that too. Mercifully, however, Mano came through the ordeal with flying colours, both at school and at University, and has distinguished herself admirably, both in her career and as wife to Edmund Glynn.

Ego

Jayaweera also confesses that, although he claimed that his commitment to the development of his country, and his desire to uphold values such as integrity, discipline and efficiency in the public service, were his primary motives, in working as he did, the high profile he gained thereby and the indulgence of his ego were the undeclared but ubiquitous accompaniments. As to which of these two sets of motivations were primary is hard to tell but he says they meshed together inextricably.

Jayaweera never tires of asking himself, in the abstract though, how much of the world's so-called patriotism, public service, commitment to the poor and all that, are really ego trying to piggy-back the problems of the world rather than being selfless commitments to the alleviation of the world's needs. He also says that the surest proof of whether it is ego or non-ego that is in the driving seat is the subject's reaction to criticism and opposition. How does a patriot or a philanthropist or any person committed to doing good react when criticised, thwarted or when his/her position is threatened? If he/she reacts defensively, with anger and belligerence and seeks to unleash a stream of counter criticisms, ego is clearly in the saddle whereas if he/she reacts calmly and co-operatively and seeks to consult and conciliate, and is willing even to step down, rather than enforce his/her will, ego has taken a back seat.

A deep sadness

Nostalgia for his career is also accompanied by a deep sadness that all those, days, weeks and years he slaved away at whatever task he had in hand, foregoing the simple comforts of life and sacrificing even his family’s happiness, ultimately proved to be of no avail.

Wherever he worked, he established discipline, integrity and productivity and made of them models of good governance and good management. However, within a few years of his vacating them, decay and disintegration set in rapidly. Like clearings in a tropical forest are soon overrun by undergrowth and scrub, what Jayaweera achieved in the public domain were quickly overrun by the environment of indiscipline, corruption and inefficiency. In short order, it was as if Jayaweera had not even set foot in those places, so thorough had been the obliteration of his work.

Today, several decades later, surveying a wasteland where he once sowed lavishly and harvested richly, Jayaweera reflects philosophically, how ephemeral and tenuous are the works of human hands and what a wanton waste we make of our lives, chasing fantasies in a world built on illusions. All these things testify to the wilderness into which ego will unerringly drive human beings caught in its grip.

Métier

However, Jayaweera claims that in retirement, his life is incomparably more fulfilled personally and is more productive to others than it was when he was employed “in the world”, and that at last, working silently and anonymously, he has found his métier in life.

He believes that, by releasing creative spiritual energy into the world, through meditation and prayer, working anonymously and silently, he is benefiting the world, his community and his family far more substantially than he ever did while working overtly among them. Furthermore, he says that because the world knows nothing of his intercessory interventions, he no longer runs the risk of ego building.

He concedes however that the world will never understand how that is ever possible, but neither does he see any possibility that he will be able to convert them to his thinking.

Summarising Jesus of Nazareth, he says, “They have eyes to see but cannot see, ears to hear, but cannot hear."

He says that at 82+ (in 2012) he is bubbling over with energy, is not afflicted by any of the ailments common to anyone of his age, sleeps little and spends most of the day meditating, praying, writing, gardening and not least, doing household chores for his wife Trixie. He has more than 400,000 words of spiritual truth on hard disc and CD, mediated to him while meditating on Biblical scriptures, awaiting publication.

What brought about this dramatic transformation in his life, this transition from life on the outside, to life on the inside, from the outer plane to the inner, is the centrepiece of his writings.

DETAILS OF CAREER

Jayaweera served In the Ceylon Civil Service (later renamed Ceylon Administrative Service) between the ages of 25 and 42, when he took early retirement. During those 17 years, Jayaweera held several senior positions under government, including:

1959-63: General Manager of the Gal Oya Development Board (GODB)

The GODB was the largest development project launched by the government in the 1950s-60s , with over 16,000 workers, and over 500 general purpose and executive staff on its pay roll and serviced by over 15 UN expatriate experts. It was a multi-purpose development project, intended as a microcosm of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the USA.

The GODB was set up as an autonomous authority within the area of its command of approximately 1,500 square miles. It was organised around the country’s largest dam which had been constructed across the Gal Oya river in Sri Lanka’s Eastern Province in the early1950s, with multi-purpose objectives – to provide water for irrigating paddy lands, for opening up new lands and settling new communities on them, for generating power for supplying the Eastern Province, for running a dozen or more industries, etc.

The vast reservoir that was thus impounded was called Senanayake Samudra after the country’s first Prime Minister who had conceived of the project. Under the main dam there were about another eight feeder reservoirs which fed water to the main network, and the extent of land under the command of all the dams was about 2,500 square miles, ie approximately 1/10th of the country’s surface area. It had over 3,000 miles of irrigation channels supplying water to over170,000 acres of paddy lands and generated hydro power for the whole Eastern Province. It also provided the infrastructure for, and administered, ten industries within its authority, including the largest rice mill in Asia.

Jayaweera was only 29 when the government asked him to take on the job of being the General Manager of this vast project. Because of its highly unionised and recalcitrant labour force, the GODB was at that time reputed to be the most difficult managerial position under government, and before Jayaweera was posted as its General Manager, only civil servants with over 15 years' service and of 40 years or more in age had held the post. Jayaweera's appointment to it, when he counted less than five years in service and was only 29 years old, caused many seniors and even the press to raise eyebrows.

However, undaunted by the enormity of the task given him, through hands-on experience, while on the job, Jayaweera learnt the fundamental difference between "administration" and "management", which the government itself had not understood at that time. Although his main academic discipline was philosophy, in order to stay on top of his job, Jayaweera also made it a point, before assuming duties, to take a few weeks’ duty-leave and learn the elements of civil and mechanical engineering and about dam and road construction, knowledge of which were essential if he was going to be successful as the vast project's General Manager.

The job proved worthy of its reputation. From the moment Jayaweera assumed duties, thinking that because of his age he was just a "boy" who could be pushed around, senior staff, expatriate "experts" and a formidable array of militant trade unions driven by a Marxist ideology and commanding a workforce of over 16,000, ganged up on him and sought "to put him in his place", thereby establishing their claim to continue ruling the roost. However, Jayaweera would have none of it, and within the first month itself he established beyond anyone's doubt who was the boss around the place and that settled the score for the ensuing three years.

Through strong but fair managerial initiatives he put an end to labour unrest, reduced by 80% the man-hours lost through strikes, increased fourfold the industrial output and productivity of four of the six industrial enterprises under the Board's authority, and by the time he had completed his assignment, had transformed the project into a viable enterprise for the first time in its 12-year existence.

However, 50 years on, in hindsight, Jayaweera concedes that, although quantitatively and in terms of the impression he made on political bosses and employees, he had made a huge success of his administration of the Gal Oya project, he also deeply regrets the many, many errors he committed in its management. Basically, he admits he was too young and inexperienced to appreciate the enormity of the task he had been entrusted with and that he had looked on it primarily as an opportunity to enforce his personality and will. The more subtle and complex aspects of managing such a large enterprise had escaped him and he admits that if he was to return to it now he would set about it in a vastly different style.

The fifty intervening years have yielded a wisdom that at the age of 30 he could not possibly have had!

1963-66: Government Agent (administrative head) of the District of Jaffna (which is the capital of the Tamils of Sri Lanka)

The job that the government asked Jayaweera to take on within three months of relinquishing the job in Gal Oya, when he was only 33 years old, was even more intractable. It had been shunned by his senior colleagues because of its complicated political ecology and the post should normally have been held by someone at least ten years his senior. As he was when he took up the job in Gal Oya, at the age of 33, Jayaweera was the youngest to hold the office in Jaffna since it was first created 1832.

The problem in Jaffna, the capital of the Tamil people, was simply the refusal of the Tamils, who at that time comprised about 20% of the island's population, to accept what they perceived to be a second class citizenship, and submit to oppression by the Sinhala majority community.

In 1956, a strong Sinhala-dominated nationalist government had made the Sinhala language the official language of the country, relegating the Tamil language to a second class status, and this had provoked strident protests from the Tamil people. Additionally, the Tamils felt that they were being squeezed out of the Public Services and the educational system, and most of all, that their traditional lands were being systematically taken over by the Sinhala people. These perceptions, held universally among the Tamil people, had developed into a chronic and seemingly intractable confrontation between the two communities, and the District of Jaffna had become virtually ungovernable.

Since 1956, among senior Civil Servants, the post of Government Agent of Jaffna (ie the administrative head of the district of Jaffna) had become the most shunned senior post in the public service, on a par with the post of General Manager of the Gal Oya Board, which Jayaweera had only recently relinquished.

In July 1963, the then Prime Minister of Sri Lanka, Mrs SWRD Bandaranaike, had personally visited Jayaweera in his home in Badulla, where he was recuperating from his three-year ordeal working in the Gal Oya Board, to appeal to him and his wife, for the sake of the country, to take on the job of Government Agent of Jaffna.

Jayaweera could not turn down a personal request from the country's Prime Minister and accepted the new posting. However, upon taking office Jayaweera quickly found that the people of Jaffna had genuine grievances and he was torn between his loyalty to government and his conscience. He chose the daunting option of seeing Mrs Bandaranaike personally and telling her that the policy of repression of the Tamils and confrontation with them would not prove of any benefit either to the Tamil people or to the government or the country, and that if she still wanted him to continue as Government Agent of Jaffna, he would eschew the policy of confrontation and repression hitherto adopted by government and instead pursue a policy of consultation, conciliation and compromise. Though taken aback by Jayaweera's audacity, Mrs Bandaranaike relented, but with the proviso that it was only a special dispensation granted to him for his administration of Jaffna and was not to be understood as a change in national policy.

Thereafter, by pursuing principles of justice and fair play, Jayaweera succeeded in establishing goodwill between the government and the Tamil people, and during the three years he held this post, there was peace and harmony throughout the district.

The first fruits of Jayaweera’s endeavours to bring about a reconciliation between the majority Sinhala community and the Tamil minority community became visible when, within two years of his taking on the job of Jaffna’s GA, a new government was formed comprising a coalition of the majority Sinhala party the UNP, and the Tamil parties, i.e the Federal Party and the Tamil Congress.

However, within a year of Jayaweera's departure from Jaffna, the government in Colombo squandered all the gains he had made during his three-year tour there. The Sinhala-Tamil coalition broke up, and the conflict raised its ugly head again, leading to violence and civil war over the following four decades. Up to the time of writing (2009) the conflict is known to have taken over 60,000 lives.

Overcoming, through consultation, conciliation and compromise, the antipathy that had separated the Sinhala and the Tamil people for hundreds of years, and being able to grant to the Jaffna District an administration that was free from tension and conflict, even for the three years he was GA, gave Jayaweera great satisfaction, and the subsequent resumption of hostilities has caused him no end of distress. Jayaweera considers his tenure as the Government Agent of Jaffna to be the most successful and satisfying years of his career under government.

1966-70: Chairman and Director General of the Ceylon Broadcasting Corporation

On the completion of his tour of Jaffna in 1966, the US Embassy in Colombo awarded Jayaweera a two-year Fulbright Scholarship to do postgraduate studies at the John Hopkins University in the USA. Having initially agreed to release him on sabbatical leave for the requested two-year period, at the eleventh hour, when he was about to embark for the States, the government did a rethink and said that Jayaweera’s services could not be spared and that he must take on another special assignment, under the then Minister of State, Mr JR Jayawardena (later to be Sri Lanka's first President under the new Republican Constitution).

Jayaweera was asked to transform the extant Department of Broadcasting into a Corporation – incorporating a workforce of 3,000 – draft the legislation for the purpose, serve as the new Corporation's first Chairman and Director General, and run the Corporation as a viable entity for at least four years.

It looked to Jayaweera that the succession of impossible jobs that government kept thrusting on him were comparable to the interminable "Trials of Hercules" of Greek legend.

Setting up and running the new Corporation proved even more hazardous than any of his erstwhile jobs. The job of Director General (DG) of Broadcasting had been the graveyard of many Civil Servants. Prior to Jayaweera taking over the job in 1966 there had been 11 DGs in 8 years, which is a lifespan of less than a year for each DG. The reason for this extraordinary rate of attrition had been political interference and the inability of successive DGs to stand up to the politicians. When Jayaweera took over the job he had insisted with his Minister Mr JR Jayewardena that there should be no interference either in administrative matters or in programme or news matters, or in any matters within his administration, to which Jayewardena consented, though not without some shock at Jayaweera's impudence.

Whereas not one DG before Jayaweera had survived for more than a year, Jayaweera ran his full term of four years, and left only when there was a change of government in May 1970. During those four years the Prime Minister (PM), Mr Dudley Senanayake, himself took over the portfolio of Broadcasting, but not once during Jayaweera's tenure did either JR Jayewardena or Prime Minster Senanayake ever attempt to interfere in Jayaweera's administration. On the rare occasions when individual Cabinet Ministers tried to interfere, so as to project their own images on the media, Jayaweera gave then short shrift. Several Cabinet Ministers complained to the PM that Jayaweera was arrogant and unresponsive to the needs of MPs and their voters, but the PM merely asked Jayaweera to continue to put his Cabinet colleagues in their place and that he would personally back him to the hilt. On one occasion Senanayake even told Jayaweera that if he had another dozen Civil Servants like him, he would gladly dismiss half his Cabinet of 24 men and women, and administer the country through Civil Servants.

The trust that Prime Minister Senanayake and Minister JR Jayewardene reposed in Jayaweera was so high that they took the unprecedented step of incorporating in the Broadcasting Act a clause saying that during the first four years of the new Corporation's life, its Chairman and the Director General shall be one and the same person. This was absolutely unheard of in the structure of Corporations in Sri Lanka, and it gave Jayaweera extraordinary power to run the Corporation according to his own lights, free from any kind of interference.

During his tenure of four years as the Chairman and Director General of Broadcasting, Jayaweera insulated the Corporation against political interference, formulated a new broadcasting policy, restored discipline and decency within the workplace, got work out of a highly undisciplined staff, coping with some thoroughly obstreperous and politically motivated trade unions. Managing all these competing forces resulted in Jayaweera having to displease some powerful political elements and trade unions.

If asked what his most important contribution to broadcasting in Sri Lanka was, he says that it was the fundamental change in broadcasting policy and restoring discipline, decency and good order among broadcasting staff.

Up until when Jayaweera took over, broadcasting in Sri Lanka had been merely a medium for entertainment and disseminating news. However, Jayaweera was convinced that in a developing country, a powerful medium such as broadcasting should not be content merely with providing news, music and entertainment, but had an obligation to help in development tasks as well. This led Jayaweera to harness the resources of broadcasting in support of the government's central policy initiative, which was to make the country self-sufficient in food. This caused the political opposition to accuse Jayaweera of playing politics to which he replied that if what he was doing in broadcasting to accelerate the development of the country coincided with the government's aims as well, he should not be charged with playing politics, and argued with opposition leaders that it was not a condition of broadcasting ethics that the government should not reap the benefits of the Corporation's activities undertaken for reasons totally unrelated to politics. All that Jayaweera had done was to make self-sufficiency in food one of the aims of broadcasting policy and self-sufficiency in food was a national goal rather than merely a party policy.

On the other hand Jayaweera does concede that the intensity with which he supported the drive for national self-sufficiency in food, by putting the electronic media fully behind it, could have led the politicians of the opposition parties, whose convoluted minds reduced even national issues to party politics, to imagine that he was in fact playing politics, regardless that self-sufficiency in food was an issue that cut across party barriers and was a burning national issue.

During his tenure in Broadcasting, Prime Minister, Mr Dudley Senanayake, took a great liking to Jayaweera. Senanayake was the last of Sri Lanka’s gentleman politicians. The scion of the country's first Prime Minster DS Senanayake, Dudley Senanayake was the archetypal upper-crust liberal gentleman from an age gone by. He was a cricketing fan, played golf daily, was a habitual photographer and an avid listener to Beethoven and Tchaikovsky LP recordings. A product of St Thomas’s College Mt Lavinia and of Cambridge University, it would however be fair to say that he was also notoriously laid back and a very untypical politician.

Senanayake was also supposed to have been of an indecisive mould, and very weak in handling crises. On a previous occasion, five years earlier, when after his father’s demise, he had taken over the Premiership and was confronted by a minor crisis, he suffered a breakdown, resigned and deserted the field of battle. However, this time around, in his second outing as Prime Minister, Senanayake was showing metal that people never suspected he had. Against that background, it was widely claimed that it was Jayaweera who had put steel and muscle into his administration, which though not expected to last the first year in office, ran its full course of five years, surviving many rough patches along the way.

Jayaweera admits that Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake reposed great confidence in his managerial skills and in his ability to manage crises. So much so that he was even nominated by the Prime Minister to a place in the country's Security Council whose membership had always been reserved only to the three Service Chiefs, and the head of the Police, and was chaired by the Permanent Secretary of Defence.

Not only that. The measure of the Prime Minister’s confidence in Jayaweera’s managerial and organisational skills and in his unassailable integrity was best demonstrated when in 1969 he nominated Jayaweera to be a one-man committee to set up and run a National Exhibition in the nine provincial capitals of the country, and instructed the Treasury to release to him Rs 30 million from the Contingency Fund (a huge sum in those days – the equivalent of over Rs 3 billion today) for the purpose. Jayaweera co-opted as his assistant the then Director of Information Sarath Amunugama, (who became a Cabinet Minister in later years) and as the secretary to the committee AJ Ranasinghe (also to become a Cabinet Minister in later years). The responsibility for accounting to the Treasury how the Rs 30 million released to him were spent rested solely on Jayaweera’s shoulders. He not only completed the National Exhibition as directed by the Prime Minister within the scheduled time and to the Cabinet’s entire satisfaction, but also accounted so meticulously for the sums spent that when the Opposition Parties came to power six months later and went through the accounts with a fine comb, hoping to trip Jayaweera, they found the accounts absolutely in order and professionally impeccable.

However, Jayaweera denies strongly that he had any hand in the politics of the Dudley Senanayake government, or that the PM sought his advice on party political issues

On the other hand the perception of the opposition parties was entirely otherwise and Jayaweera incurred their wrath for allegedly buttressing the Senanayake government and giving it an additional lease of life.

Jayaweera’s close association with Dudley Senanayake cost him dear in terms of the displeasure he incurred among the opposition parties and the trade unions as well, so much so that when a General Election held in May 1970 resulted in the eviction of the Senanayake government from office, Jayaweera fell from grace and became a victim of the new political regime. His life and career went into crisis.

However, to this day, even Senanayaka’s worst detractors acknowledge that the Dudley Senanayake government of 1965-1970 was post independence Sri Lanka’s Golden Age.

1970-73: Government Agent (administrative head) of the District of Vavuniya

This posting proved both cataclysmic and catalytic in Jayaweera's life.

Following the election to power of a new government in May 1970, Jayaweera was posted as the Government Agent (GA) of Vavuniya, which was a grade 3 post – a precipitous demotion from the post of Chairman and Director General of the Broadcasting Corporation which was a Class 1 grade 1 post. Although in terms of time-based seniority, Jayaweera had been only in Class 2 of the service, all the posts in which he had served over the previous ten years had been in Class 1 grade 1 of the service. However, now he found himself lodged in a grade 3 post and thrown into a maelstrom of humiliation and detraction which proved totally destructive of his ego and catalytic for his life.

It was while he was traversing this crisis that he had an extraordinary spiritual encounter which completely transformed his life. Of that, later on in this narrative.

As the GA of Vavuniya he had also to perform a task which, in the annals of Sri Lanka's administration since 1815, had never fallen to a civilian administrator. Though only a civilian, during April-August 1971 Jayaweera had to co-ordinate the military and police resistance within his district against an armed rebellion led by the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), an extreme Marxist group that held the country in its grip for three whole months. In actual fact, on the first day of the uprising, April 5th 1971, when confronted with reports that policemen were deserting their posts, shouldering a gun himself, Jayaweera took command of the Vavuniya police station. The police station came under siege by hundreds of rebels, and though down to the last few rounds of ammunition by morning, a constabulary of 32 men, inspired and led by Jayaweera held the station through the night until an infantry platoon turned up from a garrison in Mannar, 60 miles away, to rescue them.

Although at this time Jayaweera was totally out favour with the government, during the Parliamentary debate on the uprising, the Minister for Public Administration, Felix Dias Bandaranaike, paid him a glowing tribute in Parliament, saying that Jayaweera's conduct during the rebellion was exceptional and without precedent.

It should be mentioned that the JVP uprising is not to be confused with the uprising of the Tamil people in Jaffna, which is a district immediately north of Vavuniya, and which Jayaweera had administered seven years earlier. Unlike the Tamil uprising which was, and still is (in 2009) – as perceived by them – a struggle of a minority ethnic group for justice and freedom, the JVP uprising, although led and supported solely by a group of Sinhala youth, was essentially an anti-state insurrection, propelled by an extreme Marxist ideology. It claimed to be influenced by the Latin American Marxist Che Guevara and sought to overthrow a democratically elected government and set up its own Soviet style government.

Jayaweera's response to the JVP armed uprising in the South, was entirely different from his response to the problem of the Tamils in the North. In the former instance the issue was an armed insurrection driven by an anti-state ideology, seeking to overthrow the legitimate government, and Jayaweera's response was fully to resist it with all the resources at his command. However, the latter was of an unarmed and peaceful struggle by a minority ethnic group for what they perceived to be their legitimate rights, and Jayaweera's response (1963-66) was to consult, conciliate and compromise.

However, Jayaweera claims that the failure of successive Sinhala-led governments to solve the problem of the Tamil people peacefully caused Tamil youth to resort to arms, and the ensuing civil war has developed into one of the world's longest lasting and perhaps the most

brutal armed rebellion, lasting almost three decades (as at 2009) and costing more than 60,000 lives.

At the time that Jayaweera was appointed in 1970, the post of GA of Vavuniya was of no national importance, which was why Prime Minister Mrs Bandaranaike exiled him to it as a punishment; there being no humbler position available to which he could be assigned.

However, what Mrs Bandaranaike did not know was that Vavuniya, which she had intended as the ultimate humiliation for Jayaweera, would turn out to be the most important post he held in his whole life; for it was in Vavuniya that he had an awesome spiritual encounter which turned his life around and in the light of which, Mrs Bandaranaike’s intended humiliation turned out to be an overwhelming victory for him!

Within six months of his posting as the GA of Vavuniya, Jayaweera had a cataclysmic spiritual experience which turned his life upside down (for a fuller discussion of that experience please see the article "A dramatic life crisis” on this website).

Under the impact of that encounter, having undergone a seismic paradigm shift in consciousness at the age of 43, with another 22 years of service under the government ahead of him, Jayaweera took early retirement and accepted an invitation from the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC) to serve as their Director of Research and Planning, and relocate from Colombo to London.

1974-89: Director of Research and Planning at the World Association for Christian Communication (WACC), London.

Although in chronological sequence, Jayaweera's tenure as a Director at the WACC in London followed closely on his retirement from the Sri Lankan government in 1972, when he was the Government Agent of Vavuniya, much of what happened in his life while working in the WACC may not be fully intelligible to the reader unless he/she has read the aforementioned article "A dramatic life crisis” and related portions in his autobiography, “The Fork in the Road”.

Downsizing

The words "Christian Communication" in the WACC are misleading, says Jayaweera. They suggest that the organisation concentrated on evangelism in the ordinary sense of that term, which is to spread the Christian faith and make converts. To the contrary, the WACC was quite categorical in eschewing any activity which might hint of evangelism. Rather, its main objective was to bring Christian values such as truth, justice, fairness, balance, moderation, decency and respect for all cultures, to bear on public media. To this end, the WACC supported models of Christian communication, so understood, across the five continents, and buttressed them with research, training, publications and funds.

Even though invested with the dignified title of a "Director" – one of four directors working under a General Secretary, who was the chief executive – for Jayaweera, working in this new role was a lesson in humility and downsizing. Whereas over the previous 15 years he had been the "top man", supervising cadres ranging from 200 to 300 at staff level, and managing work forces ranging from 3,000 to 16,000, and had exercised power over thousands of square miles of territory and over the lives of millions of people, he was now shorn of all worldly power and was reduced to the status of a "nobody", at least in the eyes of the world.

Now, he had only a staff of one, his personal secretary, Mary Luz Rivera, and a total of just 20 colleagues in the whole establishment. Whereas, he had once had a fleet of cars and chauffeurs at his disposal, and staff opening and closing his car door and carrying his brief case, now he did not have a car at all; he managed to buy himself a ramshackle Morris 1300 only after he had worked in London for three years. Whereas, over the ten preceding years, he had interacted directly with presidents, prime ministers and cabinet ministers, now his bosses were humble pastors and priests. The experience of working in the WACC was indeed a lesson in working the Christ way, anonymously and in humility, as opposed to working the worldly way, in the full glare of media publicity and public acclaim.

However, there was a compensatory element in Jayaweera’s WACC portfolio. As its Director of Research and Planning he had the whole globe for his territory and thereby the opportunity to work in, and interact with, the most diverse cultures in all continents, such as he could never have imagined possible when he worked in Sri Lanka.

The Communication Revolution

Following on his Spiritual re-energising in 1980 and inspired by the General Secretary of the WACC, Dr Hans Florin, Jayaweera conceived and spearheaded a massive global programme to bring to the awareness of Third World countries, the impending revolution in communication wrought by the new technologies, which would impact their cultures in a deleterious fashion.

Jayaweera's thesis was that the silicon chip, the integrated circuit, the satellite and the computer, in harness, were about to overhaul completely all cultures, transform peoples values and bring about such fundamental changes in social and economic structures as had not been witnessed ever, not even during the Industrial Revolution, and that whereas the Industrial Revolution took almost two hundred years to effect fundamental societal changes, the new communication technologies would effect even more radical changes within a mere 20 or 30 years.

In hindsight, three decades after Jayaweera took this message to Third World countries, all this sounds quite trite and even banal, but in the early 1980s it sounded like science fiction, and in many countries and institutions where Jayaweera lectured, the local press and audiences actually accused him of being a false prophet. Today, thirty years on, Jayaweera comments wryly that he was indeed a false prophet, but only in the sense that what eventually came to pass far exceeded the most extreme scenarios he had painted in the 1980s, and that the acceleration of communication technology over the ensuing two decades has staggered even its most ardent advocates.

Jayaweera disclaims that the vision he took to the Third World was conjured up by him, and claims that he had merely absorbed, digested and repackaged a thesis that writers like Arthur Clarke, Jean-Jacques Servan Schreiber, Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Marilyn Ferguson and Herbert Schiller had been writing about for quite some time. All that Jayaweera did was to spell out in detail what the communication revolution meant for Third World cultures in particular. In that sense, Jayaweera’s vision was unique and prophetic.

Let alone Third World countries, not even Britain, nor most European countries, had any concept of the impending communication avalanche which would shatter their lives forever, and the values by which they had lived for hundreds of years, and within a generation too.

In hindsight today, Jayaweera confesses that, even though the WACC took the high ground in alerting the world to the impending crisis, his efforts in this direction were not dissimilar to that of the little Dutch boy who tried to hold back the North Sea by poking his finger in the fissure of a dyke. Actually, he says that the little Dutch boy had more luck than he, because hundreds of villagers poured out from their houses and helped to shore up the threatened dyke. Jayaweera had no such luck, and the revolution continued to sweep across national and cultural boundaries, replacing individual cultures with a homogenised bastard culture.

Jayaweera also recalls that he must have repeated a hundred times to dozens of Third World leaders, a comment that Mahatma Gandhi had made in the 1930s. Gandhi had told Western leaders, "We want to keep our windows open to the fresh breezes that blow from your part of the world so that they may refresh and enhance our own cultures, but we do not want those breezes to develop into a tornado and blow down our little mud huts."

In the event, says Jayaweera, 30 years after he first started talking about it, the communication revolution has not only swept away Third World cultures, mud huts and all, but has also installed in its place a single global culture dominated by commerce and triviality, by Coca Cola and McDonalds, by baubles and tinsel, with the only value to which it owes allegiance being money and profit.

On the other hand, in hindsight, Jayaweera admits that, much as he was sincere in what he was trying to do, in attempting to hold back the onward march of technology, he was utterly naive and was only about as realistic as King Canute of old, who set his throne on the sea shore and ordered the sea not to encroach upon him. He concedes that today, technology is no longer being directed by man to serve human ends, but that it has taken on a mind and a persona of its own. It is an elemental force, self-propelled and a veritable demon, using the human race to serve its voracious appetite for innovation and obsolescence.

Globe girdling

Carried on the crest of the new upsurge of spiritual energy, from 1980 and until his resignation from the WACC in 1989, Jayaweera travelled the world, from Peru in the South West to Korea in the North East, from Vancouver in the North West to Papua New Guinea and Hawaii in the South East, and to almost all the countries of Africa and Asia, bar apartheid South Africa and China, interacting with a variety of people and cultures and lecturing on various aspects of communication technology, principally on the Silicon Revolution and the New World Communication Order, which was conceived of and sponsored by the UNESCO. He wrote copiously on communication issues, focusing primarily on Development Communication and on the Impact of the New Communication Technologies on Traditional Cultures. His writings in both these areas became standard reading for university students doing communication studies in the 1980s.

During these long globe-girdling flights, Jayaweera used waiting time at airline terminals, and the hundreds of hours he spent on board aircraft and, not least, time within his hotel room, for meditating on Biblical scriptures. He rarely socialised wherever he went, would not even go out for a drink, hardly watched any television, but sat in meditation, hour after hour, letting the Word of God melt into him and become flesh. Jayaweera says that the endless hours he spent in meditation were not for the joy or the peace or the sense of inner power that it brought him personally, which were only some of its many benefits, but primarily to channel Spirit for the good of humanity and for the world at large.

For Jayaweera, meditation was the most effective form of evangelism, undertaken silently, anonymously and imperceptibly, whereby he could channel the Spirit of Christ into the life of the world, without aggravation and without coming into conflict with anyone, and not least, without exposing himself to the risks of rebuilding his own ego.

During the time he worked in the WACC Jayaweera also served as:

*A member of the Central Religious Advisory Committee (CRAC) of the BBC and of the ITV, London 1976-1982.

*A Trustee of the International Broadcasting Institute (IBI) later renamed the International Institute of Communication, London 19761982

*WACC's permanent representative at the UNESCO (Paris) and in the International Telecommunications Union (Geneva) 1982-1986

*Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies,(University of Sussex) 1975-1978

*Research Fellow at the Institute of Mass Communication Research (University of Leicester) 1978-1982

1991-1995: Sri Lanka's Ambassador to Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland

After a break of almost 20 years, Jayaweera resumed his links with the Sri Lankan government under President Premadasa. Premadasa first asked him to serve as his Media Consultant and after a short stint in that role, sent him as Ambassador to the Scandinavian Countries – Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland – charged with a special task.

At that time the four Scandinavian countries were spearheading an initiative in the UN system to cut off Foreign Aid to Sri Lanka from all Western countries on the grounds of alleged human rights violations, and were planning to move a resolution in the UN Human Rights Commission (HR Commission) at Geneva censuring Sri Lanka. Jayaweera's special assignment was to head off those moves by the Scandinavians and also to be a member of the Sri Lankan delegation to the sessions of the HR Commission in Geneva to argue Sri Lanka's case. In the event, both goals were realised.

The Scandinavians failed in their attempt to cut Sri Lanka off from aid, and the proposed resolution at Geneva to censure Sri Lanka was never tabled! On the completion of those tasks, Jayaweera took final retirement in 1995, at the age of 65.

About his role as his country's Ambassador, Jayaweera wants to say that while it was the most glamorous and pompous job he did, it was also the most superficial.

Most of his time as an ambassador was spent at cocktail parties and formal dinners at which he was not able to discuss anything of substance with fellow diplomats but mouth banalities and indulge in polite conversation. Also there was a deep moral issue that worried him. He says that the expenditure that the sending country had to incur merely to maintain an embassy and staff in station was relatively exorbitant – especially if it was a poor country such as Sri Lanka – and not proportionately productive, except to maintain its prestige. On the other hand, he concedes that maintaining embassies is a necessary aspect of a corrupt world system.

Looking past the glamour and the tinsel of his job as an ambassador for his country, Jayaweera says that his job was not without comic relief. He was accredited as Sri Lanka's Ambassador, simultaneously to Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland, of which the first three were ruled by monarchs. On arriving in the country of accreditation, the ambassador designate has to present to the country's monarch, in his/her palace, credentials of accreditation from the sending Head of State.

The ceremony that surrounds the presenting of credentials to a monarch is a daunting and even overpowering experience, which Jayaweera found both unbearable and comic. The ambassador is driven to the palace in a glass-covered coach, which must have been built about 400 years ago – at least its suspension and the rattling glass panes suggest so – and drawn by six milk-white horses. As the coach is sighted from the palace, six trumpeters blast out a fanfare from its battlements, to signal the approach of the ambassador. Then there is the guard of honour mounted by the sovereign's personal bodyguard, dressed in 17th century ceremonial uniform. In Norway, Jayaweera had to walk through the ranks inspecting the guard of honour, in a winter temperature of minus 10 C, with snow falling thick around him and without any cover for his bald head.

All this ceremonial, although adjuncts of his job, Jayaweera found quite intolerable although hilarious, but submitted to it knowing that it was all a part of the world's paraphernalia for projecting illusion as reality and for reinforcing both personal as well as national ego.

There was also a huge problem connected with conscience. On more than one occasion, he was in a position of either having to speak an untruth or having to support a morally untenable position, all on behalf of his country. Today, he admits frankly that being a diplomat, especially being a head of mission, although glamorous and abundantly prestigious, is also about the most morally vulnerable job anyone can do, except perhaps being a politician, a lawyer or a businessman.

Final Retirement

After the close of his tour as an Ambassador in December 1994, Jayaweera took final retirement and settled down with his wife Trixie in a village in Kent where he spends most of his time in meditation and prayer, and in gardening and writing.