• Re: Fowzie Highway of Imagination

• Poor showing by Sri Lanka at Junior Davis Cup and Fed-Cup

Re: Fowzie Highway of Imagination

The letter by Mr. Brian Jansz, under the above heading is absolutely true. Without making (promising) grandiose plans, a great majority of which we are aware, will never materialise, he should direct all resources at his command to refurbishing and restoring the existing roadways and railways to their deserving state.

I remember, when I was a schoolboy in the mid-fifties, I used to travel to school by train. At that time, when the population of the country was much less, and consequently the number of employees in the CGR was also much less, the railway lines always lay along absolutely clean pathways. Not a single weed was to be seen and the edges were shapely trimmed and neatly maintained. Every morning you could see teams of cleaners picking up litter from passing trains, while other teams of workers were continually weeding and cleaning the tracks.

Now, although no increase of rail mileage has occurred for the past 85 years, workforce in the Railway I believe, has increased by more than 500 per cent. In some spots you can only imagine the railway lines are there, because you certainly can't see them, because of the overgrown weeds.

This shows better than words can say the efficiency of our Administrators who took over from the white man. If the white man could do it, I wonder why our people can't do it.

by J. Appaswamy, Kalubowila.

Poor showing by Sri Lanka at Junior Davis Cup and Fed-Cup

I would like to refer to the above article written by Lal Gunasekera which appeared in your popular weekend paper on May 21, 06. Mr. Gunasekera was spot on in his comments on these two teams, but I beg to make a small clarification to the effect that the non-playing Captain of the Junior Davis Cup team was not myself but Sri Lanka's leading coach Ganendran Subramaniam.

Mr. Gunasekera has also been misinformed about the non-playing captain of the FED Cup Women's Tennis team.

It should read as Mr. D. Pathiraja and not as mentioned in the report. The lady chaiperon was Ms. Rohini of Education Department.

I accompanied the World Junior Championships Boys tennis team as non-playing captain to Indonesia and is the appointed non-playing captain of the Sri Lanka Davis Cup team that is to take wing shortly.

by Jayendra Wijesekera