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 28th 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!
