NUJ and the Sampath Bank and the passing of the old brigade

(Excerpted from volume ii of Sarath Amunugama autobiograph

Back in Colombo I decided to sever my connections with WIF and concentrate on my academic interests. Accordingly, I began working with the International Centre for Ethnic Studies on an irregular basis. The ambience at ICES was very congenial with colleagues like Reggie Siriwardene, Kingsley de Silva, Neelan Tiruchelvam, Radhika Coomaraswamy, Sunil Bastian and Sithy Tiruchelvam. The ICES library was well stocked with the latest international magazines and books thanks to an energetic librarian Tambirajah who had earlier worked at the USIS and was an old friend of mine.

We had discussions and seminars on a variety of subjects with the participation of visiting academia, university lecturers and other public personalities. I could also participate in many international conferences abroad on behalf of ICES. One memorable meeting was with leading American Indologists held in the Napa Valley. We met in a small village hotel in the wine county. After the meeting I spent some time with friends in San Francisco which was an unforgettable experience.

This was the time when I became close friends with N.U. Jayawardene who, near to ninety years of age, still was in top form as an innovative and brilliant economist. It was a pleasure to meet him at home of an evening when he held forth on reforming the Sri Lankan economy. He was a perfectionist from his well-cut clothes to his cut glass decanters and whiskey glasses. He served only the choicest wines and whiskeys. He rode in the latest Mercedes Benz and had built his house in the most exclusive part of Cinnamon Gardens.

He was a hard worker and thinker and was making sensible policy prescriptions till the end of his days. When I became an MP I would consult him before speaking on economic matters. Bernard Soysa who was a Minister in 1994 complimented me on my speeches little knowing that I had been inspired by his distant kinsman NUJ. In politics they were poles apart but had a very cordial personal relationship. I still believe that if we had followed NUJ’s economic policy prescriptions Sri Lanka would have grown into an `Asian Tiger’.

NUJ was in the process of setting up his long time brainchild-a new commercial and savings bank which would use latest digital technologies and cater to a new group of depositors who were not presently investing their savings in local banks. His research had shown that a large number of rich people in the country kept their money at home or lent it irregularly to a small circle of borrowers.

NUJ wanted to call his new bank the Industrial and Commercial Bank of Sri Lanka. He asked me to recommend a forward looking advertising company which would convey his path breaking ideas to a public which could be persuaded to entrust their savings to the new venture. I had no hesitation recommending Irvin Weerakkody’s Phoenix Advertising company for this task.

I had worked with this company in the early days of the JRJ administration when we successfully changed the practice of issuing rice ration books by substituting a “Salli Potha” for a select category of consumers below the poverty line following the first budget of Ronnie de Mel. My minister Anandatissa de Alwis was an advertising wizard and I had worked with him on a communication strategy for a family health programme together with an American company which was held up as a model advertising campaign.

It was this campaign that popularized the “Preeethi” and “Mithuri” contraceptives which changed the demographics of the country. When the Taj group wanted to open an initial public offering of forty percent for Sri Lankan investors I recommended Phoenix Advertising. They presented a very creative campaign and the Taj IPO was oversubscribed much to the satisfaction of the Hotels division of the Taj group which was having internal management problems as well as difficulties with the Reserve Bank of India. It was the only silver lining in the balance sheet of the Taj Hotels division which underwent restructuring as a part of the internal leadership struggle between Ratan Tata and Mistry.

A salutary aspect of NUJs management style was that once we agreed on the concept of a campaign he did not interfere as long as the results were satisfactory. This was seen as his approach to the all important marketing campaign. I joined Irvin in planning the advertising campaign for NUJs bank. Another characteristic of NUJ was that he did not stint on advertising budgets.

We found that NUJs terminology of `Industrial and Commercial Bank’ needed to be changed to a popular and easily recognizable brand name. In our research we found that a lot of money was in the hands of a new class of nationalist minded businessmen and other rich individuals. To attract this clientele we invented the tagline “A Bank for the Sons of the Soil” which was a milder version of “Bhumiputra”.

I was reading an Indian magazine on economic activities and came across a reference to a small “Sampath” Bank in an obscure province. Something clicked and we persuaded NUJ to change the name of his Bank to Sampath Bank while retaining his original designation as a sub heading. This change worked wonders and the title of “Sampath Bank – a Bank for the sons of the soil” entered the marketing and economic landscape of the country.

We knew that we had scored an advertising “hit” when a large number of rich Buddhist monks who had up to then hoarded their considerable amounts of cash in their “Awasas” turned up in their posh vehicles to open deposits in the “Bhumiputra” Bank. So did many Christian clerics. Thus Sampath bank could open its business with substantial assets by way of savings deposits generated from a new breed of clients.

This interest in advertising rubbed off on my daughter Varuni who had entered the Law faculty of Colombo University of which GL Peiris was then the Vice Chancellor. Due to JVP violence the Colombo Campus was closed and the students had to languish for several years. I had enrolled Varuni for a course on advertising in Paris, which had a reputation for “frontier” advertising concepts. So with Irwin’s assistance she joined Phoenix advertising company and learnt the rudiments of marketing and advertising there in the heyday of that legendary institution.

Her close friends at that time were Dilith Jayaweera and Ishini Wickremesinghe. Dilith was a firebrand in the University and was once abducted by a rival student organization. This was no laughing matter then as some students had been roughed up and even murdered over University politics. I remember that Dilith’s friends came home to see me and got me to contact the IGP and the Minister of Higher Education of the time, Hameed, to take a personal interest in getting Dilith back from his abductors.

The following morning he was blindfolded and left near the Kanatte cemetery and we were all relieved that his life had been spared. Some time after ,since the University was as good as closed Dilith, Ishini and Varuni decided to set up an advertising company .It was a good move since they were short of capital to start a capital intensive company but had the advantage of accessing young “free lance” specialists like photographers, layout artists and copywriters which gave a new angle to their product unlike the work of full timers in the big advertising companies. That little acorn which was called Triad has now grown into a big oak and is the leading advertising company in the country with its own brand value and work ethic.

As we drifted towards the end of the 1990s Sri Lanka had ended the JVP violence after a horrendous bloodbath. The top leadership were almost all subjected to extra judicial killings. The armed forces were encouraged by Ranjan Wijeratne to eliminate them unlike in the case of 1971 when they were subjected to judicial proceedings through a Criminal Justice Commission. President Premadasa had once again shown that it was dangerous to cross his path.

This tendency was to be seen again in the near future when Lalith and Gamini, then in an uneasy alliance with him, began to challenge him openly and was kicked out of the UNP for their pains. But that was further down the road and will be described in the next volume of my memoirs. After passing the 1990s, Premadasa had to grapple with the LTTE which too, like the JVP, spurned his overtures for a settlement. But we could look to the future.

A journalist asked Pieter Keuneman, then in retirement from Parliamentary politics, what he now wished for. Keuneman, droll as ever, replied that he wanted to survive to see the new millennium. We all, now into middle age, could look forward to the coming decade with some hope. But how wrong we were. Most of the leaders of my time were brutally assassinated. This wave of violence engulfed all parties and all leaders. Many of the close friends I have described so far in my autobiography were cut down in their prime.

The hopes of many had resided with them and now they were all gone. Only JRJ remained to mourn the loss of his closest comrades and even note the demise of many who had opposed him tooth and nail. When some party stalwarts wanted him to come back after the assassination of Premadasa he refused to do so and backed Wijetunga’s claims to that office in terms of the UNP constitution. JRJ died of cancer in his 93rd year and was cremated, as he wished, by the Kelani river within sight of the famous temple with which his family was linked.

Kelaniya was his electorate when he entered politics and he always considered Kelaniya to be his home ground. JRJ too could not make it to the new millennium which displayed a very different type of politics. That will be the subject of the forthcoming third and last volume of my autobiography which will be entitled “In the Political Arena”.

(Concluded)