Village lifestyle and art morph
Commune living helps a kid to evolve
I was raised in a semi-rural village not far from Colombo. Our house was in a large block where everything grows, from coffee plants to coconut and jack trees. All spills were forgiven because kids were given only metal plates. There were no ceramics to break.
Anyone was welcome at any time of day in our home. Family, friends, and relatives were all welcome. Neighbours walked in as they passed our home.
It was a great place to grow up. My Neighbours’ kids were my friends. I could go anywhere in the neighbourhood. No permission was needed. There was no formality. It was the best in commune living. Everyone’s home was always open for everyone. And I was a free-range kid.
Darkness could not get in. This has allowed me to go to darker places and describe difficult things openly because I have a base to return to.
I was well-parented; obviously, being the eldest child has its advantages. It comes with responsibilities, but it has disadvantages because you are a role model from the day your first sibling is born.
I was born with a pencil and paper and drew from a young age. I still draw all the time. I drew when I was bored. I drew my imagination with my finger on the white sand in our front yard.
I read from young age, books, magazines, my father’s newspapers, and family bibles. Anything that had printed letters was mine to browse. At home, in my grandfather’s book cupboard or from the school library. My imagination was running riot.
In junior school, when I was twelve, I helped in the production of the school’s newsletter. Calligraphic headings and artwork were mine, hand-drawn. Imagine a kid’s joy seeing your work re-produced 1000 times and given to each student to take home.
You may think I picked up a career in creative arts, movies or anything cool with a base like that. But it was not so. Back in the day, there were three faculties in school: science, commerce and art. If you score high marks, you get selected for science. The second lot is selected for commerce, and the bottom students are selected for art. I may have been a good artist and scored well in other subjects. If you wanted to study art and literature, you were considered the lowest in the pegging order of school and society. So, I ended up doing science.
In the boarding school, I was the secretary of the English literature society. I took minutes, records, and everything else. I maintained the facility’s book library.
After year ten, I found science boring. I wanted to study accounting. I skipped higher studies. My father enrolled me in a university to be an accountant. I was now venturing into commerce and business.
All this while, my mind was still in the arts. I did calligraphy on my lecture notebooks. Every week, I went to the movies. I had stacks of books and magazines, mostly borrowed from friends and libraries. I read at every moment I could. I could not travel by bus if I were not reading. I always had a book in my bag. Not a minute of my time was wasted.
When a senior student offered to read my palm and predict my future in the university, I was curious to see what I would be. Reading my palm, he predicted that I would become a movie director. I was so happy. It was manna to my ears. In my heart, I always wanted to be a movie director. But I had no idea of scripts or what it would take to be a movie director — it was only a crazy dream of a seventeen-year-old.
Back in the day in the seventies, following your passion for life, in arts was out of the question. Artists were always poor back then. Creativity was not an industry. My father, seeing my dilemma, intervened. I ended up being an apprentice in the telecom industry at eighteen.
At the interview, the panellists were stunned that I could speak English well. I was embarrassed when they asked how I learned to speak so well. I did not think I was better than the others. But, for me, that was the norm. Who wanted to compare yourself to others? You compete with yourself at that age.
I kept on reading and drawing. When I wrote or drew, the world slowed down. I forgot everything that existed outside. When I read, I could not hear the noises outside. I sat in my front yard and drew our family home. I stood in front of my mirror and drew my nude portrait. None of these was premeditated and planned. They just happened. It was just me. It may be my free spirit living in an open space.
Back to work, I did not last long in the telecom industry. I was being creative means taking risks. I got a job offer two years into the job; I left Sri Lanka to work in the front office in a hotel in Dubai. The only notion I had of Dubai was that I had picked up from the portrayals of Arabic culture and cities from my Tin Tin cartoon series, another addiction. So imagining my life as Tin Tin, I left without a second thought.
But within four months in that job, at 21 years of age, I got a chance to join a bank in Dubai. So within a few short years, I was in the technology crew at the bank.
There was no art now in my life, perhaps except for the joy of handwriting. Now, it was about entrepreneurship. I was learning to code and running systems in the early eighties.
But creativity has a place in technology. So I looked at business problems with a different lens. I learned to optimise code so that I could save time. I coded to execute code without human intervention. I coded to make room for me for a more extended lunch break — dire needs rapid innovation.
I did not envision anything much beyond that. Technology is about innovation. So, I evolved and learnt a lot of new things, doing diverse roles in the fintech industry. Switching roles, jobs and banks became my second nature — even industries. Art, creativity, and reading opened my thinking. I diversified my brain, gained a lot of self-confidence, and learned the art of taking calculated risks.
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