The World Was His Oyster

We conclude today what probably is the longest running series of articles ever in this newspaper. It was written by Chandana Jayawardena, the hometown boy who arguably may be the best ever hotelier produced by Sri Lanka. Without doubt, he is certainly the most accomplished. Having managed a string of top properties across the globe and achieving academic and operational excellence in his chosen field, he became a teacher of hoteliering, eventually setting up his own successful consultancy business in Canada where he now lives. Jayawardena who’s visited nearly a 100 countries on work and pleasure chose to title his series “The World Is My Oyster” with good reason. He continues to tick off more countries on his bucket list as he concludes this series. He has also written a number of books.

There is good reason for us to comment this week on this individual and his work, lapped up by not only readers of this newspaper but also, thanks to the Internet, a wider readership outside our shores. There is no necessity to labour the fact that tourism and associated industries provide a living to sizable section of our population. The industry is a vital foreign exchange earner for this country and we have recently seen all too clearly what a depression in visitor arrivals can do to the Sri Lankan economy. Thankfully things are looking up at this moment and we can only keep our fingers crossed that the current political, economic and social crises will not interfere with the present upward momentum of tourist arrivals.

Chandana Jayawardena scaled the heights he did right from the very bottom starting off as a trainee waiter after completing a course at the then Ceylon Hotel School. Candidly, he has admitted in one of his articles what many Lankans would not easily do by saying he got what we call a thallu or push start into the industry by gaining admission to the Hotel School thanks to the political muscle his father wielded at that time. There are many accomplished hoteliers produced by this country who have reached the top of their profession as managers, chefs and whatever having started right at the bottom. The late Gamini Fernando, one of the earlier Lankan general managers of the Colombo Hilton who began as a steward in that hotel easily comes to mind.

The hospitality industry is one that offers many bottom up opportunities to those who choose to join it and examples like Jayawardena’s abound. Although the numbers from our country who scaled the pinnacle may not be huge, we have a good lot of people who have risen high from the first step of the ladder. Also the industry has offered many opportunities overseas to those who had their training and gathered their experience here. As everybody knows, the dollar – rupee exchange rate, nowhere near as astronomically high then as now, when the rupee has sadly depreciated to an abysmal low, has been very attractive for decades for those who worked overseas; in whatever capacity be they as professionals, blue collar or white collar workers. Those earnings made material differences to the economic condition of tens of thousands of Lankan families. Hence neighbourhoods like the ‘little Italies’ created by those who worked in Italy.

Quite apart from individuals who made good acquiring skills at home there were many pioneers like George Ondaatjie, Herbert Cooray, the John Keells, Aitken Spence and other groups who invested in resort and city hotels in the early days giving a leg-up to the possibilities of an industry that has served this country well. It first caught the eye of Prime Minister Sirima Bandaranaike during her first tenure in 1960. Young people today may not even know that the Hotel Ceylon Intercontinental, now the Kingsbury, was the first five star property franchised to a big international hotel chain to be built in Colombo. Other reputed global names like the Taj, Oberoi, Meridien managing the Galadari where Jayawardena worked and Hilton followed. Organizations like Raffles, Hyatt and Sheraton knocked at our door but the projects did not materialize for reasons like civil war, riots and other negatives that have plagued this country in recent years. Our ongoing series excerpting sections of te second volume of Sarath Amunugama’s autobiography has a lot of information on how tourism developed in Sri Lanka. Amunugama in his previous official capacity was in the thick of those events.

Today a large number of young people are looking to leave the country where they feel they have no future. Stories like Chandana Jayawardena’s can very well be an inspiration to them on the possibilities of striking out. Already our tourism industry, struggling to recover in the teeth of many challenges, is losing skilled and trained personnel in numbers it cannot afford. Given today’s country conditions, this would be a tide that will be hard to stem. But Sri Lanka has proved resilient in the past winning a war that some deemed unwinnable. Undoubtedly there’s a long, hard road to traverse but many of the present generation would not live long enough to see the light at the end of the tunnel.