By Riyad Riffai.
Digging into the first few pages into the book, Return to Sri Lanka – Travels in a Paradoxical Island, shattered my expectations of an academic piece on the post-colonial Sri Lankan economy. When Razeen said his book was coming out, this is what I expected, what we all expected. But it was a fallacy, what we got was a very personal journey to the unknown bits of a very serious and well known academic, Razeen Sally's life in Ceylon and later Sri Lanka.
In his book, Prof. Razeen Sally writes an extremely powerful story of his recollection of growing up as a schoolboy in the mid-sixties, of challenges faced by a young Welsh mother and her Sri Lankan Muslim husband to raise three young boys, to his unexpected return to the land of his birth. The book narrates the writers' personal experience, on how the model colony had transformed from its utopian state to post-independence epilepsy in less than two decades later, fueled by ideology, supremacy, insecurity and above all the lack of opportunity.
The book gives a fresh perspective to the mysterious past of the four corners and the bits in-between of the island. Razeen has taken great care to write much of the book on personal experience and as a career academic to careful research to add the bits and pieces of history not sparring the inconvenient truth which is customarily left in the hands of the chosen to edit.
At the end of the book, one gets the feeling the writer is demanding for change, serious change if passed we'll be still clambering to escape from Bane's Pit for the next 70 years. Quoting from one of the best books ever written, "It was the best of times and the worst of times" by Charles Dickens' historical novel, A Tale of Two Cities. Absolutely, it is the best of times for a few and worst of times for many. This is the key message for me that the writer refers repeatedly. Unfortunately, for the past seven decades, Sri Lanka seems muddled in the latter as well as the foreseeable future.
This is Prof. Razeen Sally's first shot at writing a book that is nonacademic, of nothing on macroeconomics, trade or commercial policy that he's been churning out from his days at the LSE and now at the NUS. He's done one pukka job. Full stop.