Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum

Sereno Barr-Kumarakulasinghe, the Pundit of Wilpattu, is sadly no more As with Ruchira, I cannot place when I first knew Sereno. The blog’s records reach further back than my memory. However I’m fairly certain he was with us, at the very beginning of Brown Pundits, in 2010. His first traceable comment is dated 28 February 2014. He quoted Time magazine on Sir John Kotelawala harrying Nehru and Chou En-lai at Bandung. That was Sereno at the start and at the end: a unique and informed Sri Lankan angle. He left nearly 1,800 comments and 77 posts, the first on polyandry in Ceylon in March 2018, the last on the Iran war and the Gulf this March. I knew something was wrong before I knew anything. He had gone quiet. A man who commented most weeks does not simply stop. On 5 August I sent him two words, “how r u“. He did not reply. On 8 September the funeral notice reached me. He had died on 4 September, aged 67. After Ruchira’s passing in July I understood what this blog had become: a repository, a refugium, for people who think hard and do not agree. We never had to agree with each other. The debates got heated, and Sereno’s got very heated. My motto is let ideas procreate, let them battle, and let the best one win. Sereno took that as a standing invitation. He argued on these boards for twelve years from a farm on the edge of a national park, with elephants, monkeys and wild boar raiding the crops. formerly brown called him a feisty contributor. girmit put it better than I can:

“He shared his personal experiences generously, and by his writing one got the sense of knowing him in some way.”

Most of what follows he told us himself, in comments, in posts, in his author box, and Facebook messages. He said he was not really anonymous, and that a little digging would find him. Google summarises his life as a fixed-income developer who worked for GE Asset Management, Genworth, MBIA and the Federal Home Loan Banks, of mixed descent, and “a frequent contributor to cultural and community blogs such as Brown Pundits“. Eleven years on Wall Street, sixteen years here, and he is now immortalised as our Sri Lankan pundit.

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His Heritage He was born on 3 January 1959. His author box on this blog called him “3/4ths Sri Lankan (Jaffna) Tamil, 1/8th Sinhalese and 1/8th Irish; a proper mutt.” His father’s people were Jaffna Tamils who had been Catholic under the Portuguese, Hindu again after them, and Methodist and Anglican from around 1850, when his great-grandfather converted and took the American mission name Barr. They were administrators and translators to the British, and poets and writers in Tamil and English. His grandfather’s sister, he told us, was the first female Tamil novelist of modern times. When Roar Media profiled the Jaffna Tamils with English names in 2023, it called him an eco-tourism entrepreneur and quoted him: “all the Protestant Christian Tamils are related or connected.” His mother’s side was Sinhalese and Irish from the deep south, where his grandfather, a government surveyor, had married in the early 1900s; Anglican, then Assemblies of God in the 1940s, they built the first Evangelical church in the South. His middle name was Anukkranayagam. He admitted he was never sure of the spelling. His Career He was raised Evangelical, with Bible study until he was about 13, then agnostic, then atheist. He was schooled in Sinhala and took a degree in chemistry and physics in Sri Lanka. In 1988 he went to America on a student visa and stayed 25 years, three H1Bs later. He studied oceanography at Stony Brook and did climate research at Brookhaven National Laboratory from 1994 to 1998; ResearchGate lists twelve papers, mostly on deep convective clouds over the Tropical Western Pacific. Then Wall Street. From 1998 he was a meteorologist at a weather-derivatives firm on Exchange Place, building the Monte Carlo risk models the rating agencies wanted, and from 2001 to 2009 he built fixed-income and derivatives systems for firms including Genworth, MBIA and the Federal Home Loan Banks. He lived on Staten Island. He wrote up the Harlem of the mid-1990s for us, and Millie Jackson. A former colleague in New Jersey, asked years later on a motor-oil forum for the most interesting name of anyone he had met, gave Sereno’s. Just Sri Lankan In 2012 he went home, and stayed a Sri Lankan citizen, “no dual“, as he put it. He ran Wilpattu House at Eluwamkulam, a small budget guest house on the edge of the national park, and farmed what he could keep from the elephants, monkeys and wild boar. He was a widower and had no children. In November 2025 he wrote “Sri Kumari my Late Partner“; it drew 22 comments, and it was poignant. He told us he had survived alcoholism when many of his friends were dead by 30 or 40, and that he had no regrets about life. He was, in his own words, “5’4″ and a name longer than my height.” He called himself an atheist from his teens, and on 6 September his family buried him under Romans 8:38-39 at Kapuwatte Cemetery, after a service in Kandana.

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He argued the way he had worked, from the record. A comment would open with a Time report from Bandung in 1955, a Roar Media piece on the Bohras, a pedigree from ceylontamils.com or an Atlantic article on polyandry, and then he would tell you how it looked from where he sat. His first post came out of a thread. In March 2018 he mentioned in passing that polyandry “was a prevalent custom in the Kandyan kingdom till the 1800’s” and lasted in the deep hinterland into the 1950s, added “Probably do my first post on the societal structure that supported those customs,” and two days later did. He put Sri Lanka’s wars down to education outrunning jobs, and said so to anyone who reached for blood or creed. “Free education for all and raised expectations. Literacy comes with a price.” A population under two million in 1900 was fifteen million by 1970; Sinhala Only in 1956 was the first crack; the JVP risings of 1971 and 1987 to 1989 were educated rural Sinhalese youth with no jobs; Tamil nationalism ran in parallel, and the LTTE “took it many steps further, they kicked out the Muslims (and Sinhalese) from the ‘homelands’.” When a commenter offered ethnocentrism as the answer, he sent him back to the numbers. He did not think it would happen again; Sri Lanka was ageing. His worry for the future was “invasion, economic or otherwise by India.” On caste he was blunt. “There isnt even one Brahmin family of note in Sri Lanka, in politics, business or academics.” Jaffna was Vellala rule, “not just Vellala but middle/upper middle class Vellala. Even now all MPs are Vellala,” and the LTTE, “to give them credit,” had set out to erase caste. On Sinhalese Buddhism he was drier still: they pay homage to the Buddha, “then they go next door and pray to a ‘Hindu‘ god and ask for the Mercedes Benz,” Ganesh, Kali, Mariamman and Aiyanar, never Siva or Vishnu. “I think the Sinhalese draw the line in praying for a Lingam.” On India he spoke for the island. “For the avg Sri Lankan all Indians are the same; 1 billion breathing down our neck of 20 million.” He asked what separated Chinese mercantile imperialism from the Indian kind. When Vikram wrote that Sri Lanka had cut itself off from Gujarati enterprise, Sereno answered that he sounded like “the typical North/Central Indians (and Europeans) who think us black Madarassi Jungle Bunnies cant manage ourselves,” then invited him to visit: “we are friendly peoples and love your money. As the Tamils say, fish spoils after a day or two, so dont over stay your welcome.” On the West he had one long view. “Europe exported its poor (and want to be rich) into the Americas, Africa, Australia and Asia… Now the tide has reversed… Can they stop it. I doubt it. History repeats or rhymes.” His most commented post was on the Philippines, three million dead under the Americans; others were on the loot in the British Museum, on Keenie Meenie and the British mercenaries in Sri Lanka, and, this February, “Israel: Ongoing Genocide now Concentration Camps.” He was anti-colonial with a mission name, an Evangelical childhood, a Western science and an American career, and he never pretended any of it could be scraped off. He was unapologetic about his origins, his life and his choices and he was searingly honest. He once wrote to me on Facebook about the Arya Chakravartis of Jaffna:

The Jaffna Tamil Kings may have self styled themselves as Arya. However, I doubt that they were direct male descendants of Arya. i.e. Having the Y-DNA R1a. Why not Aryan; because I am a direct male descendant of the original line, thru Singai Pararasasegaram’s son Paranirupasingham… Sometime back when I first got my DNA tested had a Y-DNA plus 13 marker match… Turned out we shared a common male ancestor, 6 generations removed… So above establishes it was j2b2 and not R1a at least post 17th Century. But then who knows maybe the original Arya Chakravartis were R1a Aryan. Somewhere along the line a Mahesi/Queen had a yen for black Sudra j2b2. You know the American adage, “Once you go black, you dont go back”… I kind of like Sankili I, he bumped off 600 Catholics of Mannar, killed his father and two brothers.

A royal pedigree, a lab result, an American bar joke and a soft spot for a sixteenth-century fratricide, in one message. He wrote about music too: Marvin Gaye twice, James Brown and Bootsy Collins, Baila and Bi Kidude, papare, Sufi music from Zanzibar and Jordan, Afro-Cuban music in America, the pre-Buddhist drumming of the south. He was well-respected even though his opinions could be very controversial but he will be missed. May his Soul ascend to the Highest Heaven and find solace in the Afterlife. Ya Bahá’u’l-Abhá Sereno (Sbarrkum as I will remember him) would have raised an eyebrow at my religious expression of the Hidden Words but I’ll say it anyway in his honour: “I have made death a messenger of joy to thee. Wherefore dost thou grieve?” Rest in peace, dearest Sereno.