So to discuss about this awesome festive season, I have invited to our studio, I think, the best resource person under the sun. Kala Keerthi Rohana Pradeepa, Mr Edwin Ariyadasa, of course, he’s a well known journalist in the country and he is also the editor of the largest illustrated English version of Dhammapada called the Treasury of Truth. And to join him…

Imagine, as a child, I had read John Milton, Paradise Lost… works like that. In my childhood days, these various Sunday stores from which you buy provision for home, they used to wrap whatever we buy in newspapers. Maybe sugar, maybe the provisions that are needed for homes and the newspapers had been imported from America. Sometimes I would read some of those. They are brought, then I unwrap them, smoothen them and read. Strange enough, I can still remember some of the goods were wrapped in copies of New York Times, New York Times literary supplements and things like that.

At that time, in that remote village of ours. You know, strangely enough, I read about certain incidents in American history in those. The shopkeepers always had a kind of good feeling towards me. They…they had the feeling that this is a child that is unusual. They would make a change or two from their routine. Sometimes they will preserve some things that they think would interest me and would give those things when I visit the place. It’s a kind of strange kind of inducement.

When we were at Sinhala school we have to study with children from various family backgrounds. And that… in that Sinhala school, most of the people were barefoot. And occasionally the teacher asked us to stand round this table while he took the lessons. One day, a teacher, I remember the name, L. H. Jayasena, when I was about ten, he asked each person, “What would you want to be when you left school?” Some of the boys would say I want to be a driver. I want to be a conductor. Girls at best would say they will want to stay at home. Or if someone was ambitious, that girl would say, I want to be a teacher. Those were the aims that they had in life. When he came to me, he asked me, “What do you want to be when you are grown up?” I said, “maṭa kartr-eke venna ōna.” I want to be an editor. Everybody laughed! This was not something that existed in that kind of circle. Everybody laughed. The laughter was not a laughter at me because they didn’t know that there was kind of job called editor. But I knew. I had read extensively and I was in the habit even while I was at the Sinhala school reading English newspapers as well. Frankly, I still can’t understand what drove me. What made me so thoroughly alert to the need to read.