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| Sunday, 9 October 2005 |
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Junior Observer |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
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D. J. Wimalasurendra : A great engineer and visionary
It was D. J. Wimalasurendra who first put forward the idea that we can generate electricity by harnessing our waterfalls. That was in 1918. He was not taken seriously by the British Colonial government of the day. Dewapura Jayasena Wimalasurendra was born in Galwadugoda, then a village outside the Galle Fort, on September 17, 1874. The road through the village in which he was born has been named after him. His father was a master craftsman working in gold, silver and ivory. Wimalasurendra was educated at Ananda College, Colombo, where he shone in his studies. At the school's prize-giving in 1890, he had the honour of receiving the prize for the Best Student of the Year from Colonel Olcott. His schooling over, he was sent to England where he qualified as an engineer and on his return to the island, joined the government service. In 1901 young Wimalasurendra, then only 27 years, was assigned a very important and hard task - to prospect for gold in the Badulla and Nuwara Eliya districts. It was while looking for gold in the valleys and hill sides of the hill-country that he came upon the magnificent waterfalls. He looked on in amazement at the water thundering down the cliffs. And in a flash, he had seen the wilderness around the fall lit up by thousands of electric lights. In 1918, at a meeting of the Association of Engineers, Wimalasurendra read a paper explaining his vision. With his knowledge in engineering, he had calculated that 1145 mega watts of electricity could be generated by harnessing the power of the water of the Kehelgamu Oya as it cascaded down. "A hundred thousand lights can be lit with the electricity generated," he said. That is how the hitherto nameless waterfall came to be called Laxapana - "lakh of lights." The Engineers' Association, whose members were almost all Britishers, did not take Wimalasurendra seriously, in fact they scoffed at his ambitious proposition. Wimalasurendra knew what he was talking about. Five years earlier, in 1913 he had worked on the building of the small Blackpool power house to supply electricity to Nuwara Eliya, using the water of the town's reservoir. Five years after Wimalasurendra read that paper before the Engineers' Association, the Government decided, in 1923, to start a hydro-electrical scheme, harnessing the water of the Kehelgamu Oya, and the work was assigned to the Public Works Department (PWD). The man who first proposed this was nowhere in the scene. Sad and disappointed, Wimalasurendra went away to England, but returned in 1926 and was appointed chief engineer of the PWD. By then work on the hydro electrical scheme had come to a halt. Resigning from government service, Wimalasurendra contested and won the Ratnapura seat in the new State Council in 1931. Maybe, he believed that as a State Councillor, he would be able to get government departments moving. The work on the stalled hydro-electrical scheme was started again. The dam across the Kehelgamu Oya, impounding the water of the Laxapana fall, was built and completed in 1948. When the Laxapana Scheme was completed and the lights along the path to Sri Pada were switched on in 1950, Wimalasurendra's dream had at last become a reality. Wimalasurendra's reaction on seeing the first lights is on record. He said; "Although I was not fortunate to have a hand in the working of the scheme I proposed, it is a great relief to see with my own eyes, in the evening of my life, the new dawn I saw nearly half a century ago become a reality. Now, when the time comes for my departure, I can go with a light heart." D. J. Wimalasurendra passed away on August 10, 1953. - Sumana Saparamadu Che Guevara : A revolutionary leader
Born into a middle-class family in Rosario, Argentina, Che at two years old, developed asthma from which he suffered all his life. Although his family moved to the drier climate of Alta Gracia (Cordoba), his health did not improve. He was given a primary education at home, mostly by his mother, Celia de la Serna. Che became a passionate reader of Marx, Engels and Freud at an early age, before he even went to secondary school (1941), the Colegio Nacional Dean Funes, Cordoba, where he excelled only in literature and sports. Although his parents, notably his mother, were anti-Peronist activists (Peron was President of Argentina), he took no part in revolutionary student movements and showed little interest in politics at Buenos Aires University (1947) where he studied medicine, first with a view to understanding his own disease, later becoming more interested in leprosy. In 1949, he made the first of his long journeys, exploring northern Argentina on a bicycle, and for the first time, coming into contact with the very poor and the remnants of the Indian tribes. He returned home for his finals, sure of only one thing, that he did not want to become a middle-class general practitioner. He qualified, specialising in dermatology (study of the skin and skin diseases), and went to La Paz, Bolivia, during the National Revolution, which he condemned as opportunist. From there he went to Guatemala, earning his living by writing travel-cum-archaeological articles about the Inca and Maya ruins. In Guatemala he met and was charmed by Cuba's Raul and Fidel Castro, then political emigrants, and realised that in Fidel he had found the leader he was seeking. He joined other Castro followers at the farm where the Cuban revolutionaries were being given a tough commando course of professional training in guerrilla warfare by a Spanish Republican Army captain. When they invaded Cuba, Che went with them, first as a doctor, then as a Commandante of the revolutionary army of Barbutos. He was the most aggressive, clever and successful of the guerrilla officers, and the most earnest in giving his men a Leninist education. In 1959 he married Aledia March and together they visited Egypt, India, Japan, Indonesia, Pakistan and Yugoslavia. He initiated the Tricontinental Conference to realise a programme of revolutionary (rebellions), guerrilla cooperation in Africa, Asia and South America. After a half-hearted attempt to come to some kind of terms with the U.S.A., he was also attacking the North Americas, at the UN, as Cuba's representative. Che's stubborn attitude towards both capitalist and communist establishments forced Castro to drop him (1965), not officially, but in practice. For some months, even his whereabouts were a secret and his death was widely rumoured. He returned to Cuba to train volunteers and took a force of 120 Cubans to the war in Congo. Che's final revolutionary adventure was in Bolivia: he grossly misjudged the revolutionary potential of that country with disastrous consequences. The attempt ended in his being captured by a Bolivian army unit and shot a day later. Because of his wild, romantic appearance, his style, his stubborn attitude in refusing to go along with any kind of establishment however communist, his contempt for mere reformism, and his dedication to sharp and violent, action, Che became a legend and an idol for the revolutionary, and even the merely discontented- youth of the late 1960s and early 70s. Che's remains were found near Vallegrande, Bolivia at the end of June 1997. His remains were identified and returned to Cuba. |
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| Politics | Produced by Lake House |
Does the name D. J. Wimalasurendra ring a bell? Surely you have heard
of the Wimalasurendra power house, which supplies electricity to the
national grid. This power house has been named after D. J. Wimalasurendra,
a great engineer and a visionary. 
A well-known Latin American guerrilla leader and revolutionary
theorist, Che Guevara, whose real name was Ernesto Guevara, became a hero
to the New Left radicals of the 1960s. 
