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Student Days... by Buddhika Kurukularatne

Buddhika Kurukularatne, lawyer, politician and now well-known as a raconteur of racy stories, mostly about the eccentricities of our political leaders, through his popular weekly newspaper column has gone back to his roots to regale us with a collection of tales of his student days.

Some years ago Buddhika delighted us all with his original and accurate characterisation of himself as a student when he recalled that he had in his youth 'passed several schools, if not exams'. The same wry humour is largely manifest in the present work where Buddhika gets to work remembering, - with of course, the latitude one extends to memoirs, sundry, and not so ordinary, - incidents in his years of growing. Memory as it has been said is not the most reliable of sources.

As Professor EFC Ludoyke, Sri Lanka's doyen of English Literature, once reminded us 'memory is the most fallacious of human powers. But the good Professor added that perhaps that was why memory was regarded as the mother of the Muses, since it triumphs over fact. Whether in Buddhika's case memory is fallacious or not, is not the question. But of his being inspired by the muse there is no doubt.

Buddhika certainly has the ability to hold your interest. His experiences are authentic and he tells his story in a way that you can see it. His autobiography of childhood has some good examples. In the kindergarten or the 'baby class' as it was known "we wrote on slates with slate pencils.

The slates were kept on our laps. As I had the habit of either losing or breaking my slate-pencil my mother used to tie the slate-pencil to a string and put it round my neck like a garland." That resonates. Most of our mothers did the same.

His stories are located mainly in the South and carry the flavour of that special sub-culture with its persons, objects and occasions. Buddhika opens several doors and we learn why young men from Ambalangoda usually win the annual two mile swim, what a 'chekku' is and does, and provides intimate detail of how the best kalu dodol in the country is made.

The characters he describes range from DS Senanayake (some little known facts about a man not from the south) and 'actually as a matter of fact' one of the neatest short biographies of the great man I have read, to the three pissas that play the very devil in Buddhika's township. His favourite is kalisan pissa who characteristically wore the European dress coat, shirt and trousers all in tatters and no shoes. Kalisan pissa never used obscene words and would as the spirit moved him suddenly burst into Shakespeare.

Buddhika has a keen eye for the ridiculous and his microcosmic township mirrors in all its foibles the paradoxes of our wonderful island home. Where else in the world would you have the Vesak perahera sponsored by the UNP and the Poson perahera by the LSSP and the temples too dividing between the parties. The book is fun reading and you will enjoy it.

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