Dinner @ Nirj’s on 27th July with the Prime Minister as the Guest of Honor!

                                                           From Shemali's FB

With PM being called by the President for some urgent discussions, he got late to come and so could not speak individually with guests. The guests were already seated when he arrived with Professor Maithree Wickremesinghe.

Other than Nirj of course who said he has TWO more years at the European Parliament and the UK would fudge this BREXIT lark in the end!

I had the opportunity to speak with Dhammika Perera and left off from my earlier chat with him, about Aunty Viola, Sanjeev’s new Hotel etc. He was very keen on meeting Archchi V who was in town, and gave Ranjan his number.

I spoke with Aelian Gunawardene the MD of JAT holdings, who is now one of the sponsors of Horton Debates, saying I had just printed the booklet that goes with the FT of 28^th July in which he his wife and company are highlighted. General chat about the business environment and the 23 years he had grown his business into quite a conglomerate with Dhammika being one of his major clients for the wood finishes that he manufactures, an exceptional entrepreneur SL can be proud of.

Met the DFCC Deputy CEO, Lakshman Silva, and later the following day sent an email with my blog link to the prob I had with one of their new business people. I was bemoaning the fact that there were NO venture capitalists to replace after DFCC and NDB stopped doing development finance.

Had not met Tishya in a while so caught up with him and only had time to say HI to his dad who had come late. I followed up the following day with an email to visit his factory one of these days.

Spoke with Lalla and wife who were here from Vegas and had not met in years, we said how far Rjnr had gone in his field after coming to live in SL!

Seated next to Andrew at dinner, he had been for a short while a year or two to Stoneyhurst and had met Malik and Kimarli in the N’Eliya races, and had won a best dressed male thingy and was scouting around for some work at TT to promote RW, where I don’t know, as it certainly was not in an image makeover in SL!

Of course spoke to a regular in Sharm de Alwis, who asked a Q from the PM. Christine and Avi were there and she asked a Q from the PM. Shanil, Mohan, Shemali and Prashan, and the kid who goes to CIS who usually asks Q was not given the chance today due to lack of time.

Must say Ranjan’s introduction of the PM was superb, a new angle to introducing the speaker, a refreshing list of 10 words to describe, humble is all I remember!