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.
His Heritage
Continue reading Good bye to our dear Sri Lankan Pundit, Sbarrkum
