Memories of my time at the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies

The Island newspaper of Monday November 10 carried a supplement page on the Bandaranaike Centre for International Studies’ (BCIS) Convocation 2025, which was held that afternoon in the presence of its chairperson, Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunge.

- BY NANDA PETHIYAGODA

Feminist social analyst Priyanthi Fernando is now the Executive Director /BCIS.

Keynote speaker at the 2025 Convocation was distinguished Ms. Shalini Randeria: born in Washington DC, brought up in Mumbai and New Delhi, and alumnus of the Universities of New Delhi, Oxford and Heidelberg. She earned her PhD from the Free University of Berlin and is tenured as a professor of anthropology and sociology at the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva.

The supplement noted a very significant achievement: fifty years of successful service to the nation; not only intellectual but social too. The write-ups in the paper carried me back in memory almost four decades to when I was a student of the one year post graduate diploma course in international relations. This was in the latter part of the 1980s. I had registered for my external MA in English at the University of Peradeniya; external because I had been a frivolous teenager in my senior secondary school years and failed to enter university for either a medical or BSc degree.

Married and mother of two children I got the urge to study and thus my external BA and an idea to obtain an MA. The unrest in Sri Lanka thwarted my ambition. I had to travel to Peradeniya to meet my supervisor, Prof Ashely Halpe. The last time I had gone to Peradeniya the train journey was from 7 am to noon; the train crawling slower than even my walking speed. The lines were suspected of being mined by terrorists. That Saturday as I prepared to go, my second offspring cried, so scared was he for my safety. So I phoned Prof Halpe and instead of offering a lie as excuse such as being ill, I told him the truth. “Then give up your idea” he said. I obliged.