A Rebel in the Presidential Secretariat | Thisuri Wanniarachchi | imno.Expert #44

0:00 I got a call from his room saying, can you come in? The president wants to speak to you. I was so scared. I was born in military housing. The backdrop of the war was very much present and kids we used to play with, their fathers would say goodbye and go off and come back in coffins. Government is supposed to operate like a system that serves everyone equitably, but more often than not, it behaves somewhat like an exclusive club that serves in the interest of a privileged few. I learned that you can someday come back and serve your country better by learning from other countries around the world. I love that you just said that because it's very common for youth to hear that study well, go abroad and live a better life. There's never that thing of like, go abroad, learn what you need to learn, come back, build something here. Sri Lanka is full of two types of people.

0:47 People who can either afford to live here or people who are looking to get out. I think Sri Lanka has become very expensive to live in. If you really want a good quality of life, you need to make a decent amount of money. Every day I look around in Sri Lanka, I'm grateful that the country is what it is because I've seen worse. I have great views on that. share share share it's not popular this is reyvani arachi welcome to the podcast you look super familiar but were you did you always have long hair no okay that's probably why i had a i had a a boyish haircut when i was younger which i don't even know what that means but i had a buzz cut um when i got married I used to just have like the military haircut the

1:33 whole time. And then I realized that's really hard to maintain the military haircut because you get it. You have to get it cut every two weeks. Yeah. And your dad was in the military. So you probably know he's probably getting a haircut. Is your husband here today? Yeah. He is at work. He's, he's super busy, but, um, he wanted to come and, you know, drop me off cause he was, he wanted to like show his support. He was really busy, but it seems like he's one of your biggest supports. Yeah. Absolutely is. Yeah. Um, and you, you grew up here. I grew up here and I also grew up in the U S yes. So I had a very interesting childhood. Um, I would do about a year, here in Sri Lanka. And then I would go with my dad because he was an entrepreneur. He had a business there. We spent another year there. And the cool

2:19 thing about our curriculum here is that you were far more smarter than the kids there in that grade. So you would be put ahead. And so every time I went back, I was like skipping two grades at a time and I was like, what is happening? So it was a bit disjointing as a kid because you're never like settled. And so the friends you made from the year before are now in a different grade. We're in the U S but New Jersey. You went to school in Arkansas, Vermont, first semester, then I transferred out. to that's Massachusetts in Vermont. Yeah. Got it. Yeah. There's so many Amhersts. I did a fun film for a school in Amherst, Wisconsin. There's an Amherst in Wisconsin. I had no idea. Wisconsin has a lot of

3:04 crossovers. They have different the same names that you get in like Maryland. You would get in Wisconsin. It's just like a beautiful concoction of big country. Yeah, absolutely. So how long have you been back in Sri Lanka? I graduated in 2016. and came back afterwards. That's awesome. So congratulations, Tissari, on your book, The Department of Chosen Ones. This is such a beautiful book and it's a great insight. For me, somebody that doesn't understand politics fully, even though I've lived in Sri Lanka, I regret that unfortunately I don't keep up with how politics operate. All I know is I see the headlines as a consumer, as a person that's part of this nation, I just know who comes up on top and that's all I know and how things move. But your, your book is a beautiful insight into, uh, into this world. And I

3:53 feel like you've done it so beautifully. Um, and this is not your first book you've written a book before this. Yeah. So I wrote my first when I was 13 and, um, It was published when I was like 15 by the same publisher, which is the upper who's like the leading publisher of English books here. And, um, yeah, that changed my whole life. And he won the state literary award, got me scholarship after scholarship, set me up to get educated. And when I was in college, I think my sophomore year, I wrote my second book, the terrorist daughter. It was about, so that was the time when. the Raj Paksa second administration was in power. There was a lot going on. So it was wiggly depicting that time.

4:40 And that was nominated for the state literary award. But for like 10 years plus since then, I haven't written anything creative. I went into public policy. So yeah, I'm glad to finally write this. And it's my first nonfiction book. It starts off with this grim understanding of a of a coup that happened in 2018. And I love that you set that off the bat. And then I'm just like, okay, now I need to know what happens. Um, so, so walk me through your journey. So you, you, you came back, you, you, you started in Sri Lankan government, and this is again, um, I think you explained that, you know, just like any young individual, you're ready to take on the world and solve the issues of our country. And you went in with that mindset of like, Hey, let's make some change,

5:27 but things changed for you your perspective changed over time i was just mostly intrigued by the the behavior of people inside institutions so the way i got into government was i had no interest in working in government the way i saw it growing up was like this very boring bureaucratic pencil pushing kind of right uh spaces where like i i didn't really dream of doing that kind of work But I, Bennington, my college, my undergraduate university had, has had this thing called fieldwork term, where they send us off to do an internship off campus for, from December to February every year. So I wanted to come home, my husband

6:16 my then boyfriend is also here he was going to school in upstate new york okay but we both loved coming back home of course so i just wanted an excuse to come home so i made sure my field work term was in colombo and the easiest internship to get was at the ministry of higher education okay so i thought i'm just going to sit at the back of a in the back of a ministry office and you know do some boring work, but this happened to be December 2014 when the whole good governance election was in play. So it was super interesting to see how, you know, before the election, how the insights of the ministry behaved and how after the election, you know, the political appointees were kind of chucked out and new guys came in and how people carried themselves.

7:02 And it was just this very interesting study of human behavior. And I was like, this is so cool. Like I need to do more of this and I need to get my foot in the door at like the most powerful, government institution in Sri Lanka. So I told myself I'm going to somehow get my next fieldwork internship at the presidential secretariat. And so throughout that semester, I was just emailing every person I could find in the presidential secretariat. And those says they had this, the president's office website had like a contact page with everyone's email. So I sent out like 60 emails and heard back from like three. And they were all like, sorry, no go. We don't have time to do a security check on you. Sorry. And then, so throughout college, I ran a blog.

7:51 I was like newly woke and insufferable in the way only newly woke people can be. And I was just, it was called the Lankan liberal. And I also was commentating on, commenting on what was going on in Sri Lanka at the time, about the Rajpaks administration and what was going on. And my dad was in the military and he was a senior brigadier. about to be promoted to general it's not the best time to have a daughter publicly lashing out against the government the commanding chief yeah um but it worked out he was you know he did become a general and he he was very much fine without my even despite my uh transgressions yeah but um yeah because of that website um i had

8:41 the blog i had made some allies on the city center side so when that election happened I had all these folks who I could reach out to and be like, hey, could I get a position in the president's staff? And one of them happened to be the digital director in the president's staff. And he was like, sure, come and interview. And he interviewed me and he was like, I could really use you for my social media team. but I'm gonna walk you over to the policy research department and you're gonna be better off that given what you're studying. Did he ever tell you why he made that decision or why it was? I think he was doing it for my sake. Cause I mean, I'll just be making social media posts for the president. But instead he wanted me

9:27 to go, cause I was studying politics and economics. He wanted me to go and get that exposure. I'm super grateful he did that because he did need someone. I could see he had the, The vacancies were there, but, um, it helped me, it set me up to, um, uh, you know, follow this career and get to where I'm today. So. Your idea of, of government government in Sri Lanka, uh, how has that changed since you served? And then you famously obviously resigned in 2018. What was your pers what was your perspective going in to serve that administration? And then the point of leaving, what did you, what did you From you as a person, how did your perspective change? I think it comes down to,

10:14 I've always looked at government ever since I started working in government, since that first internship. It's a collection of people. We like to look at governments as these dramatic institutions, but they're just made up of people like you and me. and their behavior and their tendencies, their insecurities, it all comes down to that. And these institutions tend to be captured by there when institutions are weak they tend to be captured by people and their own insecurities so what i saw in going in was i assumed that if you had solid policy the stuff we learn in our classrooms at university if we could go

10:59 and apply that there that it would work out but it's honestly just you it comes down to people and human behavior and what we usually have in government is a reflection of our own society. So what you face, you often in our own like relative circles, our families, our communities is very similar to what you see in government offices. You'd think it'd be different, but it's a lot of people with, who are struggling to, who are struggling to be progressive. And when they are, trying to be progressive, this, they often find themselves, um, you know, facing backlash from those who

11:47 are still stuck in, you know, the past. So it's tricky. So what your question was, please let's cut that out. But your question was, my first question was for you as a person, uh, you're, you're at the end of the day, we all have a romanticized idea of certain things. Like even me with film, I walked into this industry with an idea of what it was going to look like. But today it's completely drastically changed of how things should move, at least in Sri Lanka or the direction we should be heading in Sri Lanka. How has that changed for you? Oh, that's a good question. I went in with a lot of ownership in mind. Like I felt like this was my government, my place to be.

12:32 And even when things got tough in my first few years, when reform took like a lot of work and there was union backlash that would stop like every inch of progress. Um, we'd still push through and every, at the end of the day, I'd be like, it's fine. It's my government government. It's my country. But over time, it kind of got chipped away at by this political capture that I started seeing. There's like, my book is the department of chosen ones. It's exactly about that. It's, um, basically There is a, the government is supposed to operate like a system that serves everyone equitably, but more often than not, it behaves somewhat like an exclusive club that serves in the

13:22 interest of a privileged few. And that is what I was exposed to throughout my time in government. And walking out of there, I realized that it's gonna be, I realized I didn't want to be waiting to be chosen because I was never going to be one of them because I hadn't inherited a constituency and I was ready to choose on my own. So that's when I decided there were better ways to serve than just from within government. Yeah. And that was that to write a book? Was that to? No, I moved on and I worked for the bank, the World Bank for about seven years. And I continue to work in international

14:11 development and in other multilateral development banks. And I enjoy going into different governments in different countries and learning how to work with them and supporting them with primarily social protection. But yeah, I learned that sometimes you can serve someday come back and serve your country better by learning to learning from other countries around the world absolutely i love that you just said that because uh the narrative in in sri lanka at least the mainstream is uh when in your youth it's very common for you to hear that study well get through school go abroad and live life live a

14:58 better life there's never that thing of like go abroad you know, learn what you need to learn, come back and make like build something here or make a change. That's not valued. I mean, now we're starting to see that a little bit change. There are a lot of people in our generation and before they're coming back and actually investing time. Um, but for you to have fostered that for yourself, um, is, is very interesting. You grew up, we all grew up, I guess, during the war period. I think, uh, when it was at its peak and as you mentioned, your father was in the military. Um, and talk to me about that. You growing up in the civil war of Sri Lanka, especially in Colombo as well. Yeah. So I was born in military housing. My, uh, when my parents were very young and we

15:46 were just, um, very young, they lived in military housing in Panagoda. It's a housing compound. And it was very visceral, like, The backdrop of the wall was very much present there. And kids we used to play with, we would see routinely, like their fathers would say goodbye and go off and come back in coffins. And it's the house after house, turning into a funeral. And it was very traumatic and no place for a kid to be spending her first. early years and my brother was it did you know that was like traumatic at that time or was it like that was normal that was the normal um but it was difficult and i recall like think i i recall knowing

16:35 the fear of losing someone way before i probably should yeah um but it was very like i think it was a formative experience nonetheless And we moved out of there fairly quickly. I think my parents realized they can't be raising their kids there. Um, but you know, the wall was very much, I remember my brother's baseball team was blown up in a one in the fourth station, uh, Fort yeah. Train station, uh, bombing and things like that are not normal occurrences in a childhood. Uh, but I think those also helped make me driven. like it helped drive me forward in

17:20 the way it has in my like childhood i recall um thinking like when the war ended i was aware vaguely not as much as i should know but i was aware that there was a lot of death in the north and east and there's a lot of loss experience throughout the country and i felt a sense of like survivor's guilt about it and i thought the only way to make that worthwhile is to like that i felt an enormous debt to i owed enormous debt to these people who who died so that my family could survive and then this need to serve i think came from that yeah that's amazing um because i mean

18:07 just like you said just growing up with it i think when you grow up in that those types of circumstances Uh, I think it creates this sense and I could be wrong for me. I feel like I get over things a lot faster because the worst that has happened, like as part of your surrounding, it's happening or happened that you are a person that's able to move faster than most. So whenever we're like, we're interacting with people outside who are in the same generation as us in a different country, I feel like I'm able to just switch on and move forward to the next thing. I don't know if that's something that you've experienced. I do relate to that. I think people respond to trauma in different ways. I think two different ways. Mainly one is I'm really like zooming out here. That's

18:53 not a psychologist. I think you could either be hateful or you could be grateful. I think you could be hateful that it happened to you. Yeah. Or you could be grateful that you're still alive and you're here to live another day. And every day I look around in Sri Lanka, I'm grateful that the country is what it is because I've seen worse. And I think we have a long way to go, but we've come a long way to it. This is not the reality we grew up in. So I'm so glad that we are here. I know things can be much better. Yeah. But, um, it's moving it's moving yeah you describe your childhood as the um villain origin story yes why villain origin story because it's an

19:39 obsessive compulsive need to like do things like why can't i like f off and be on my own and you know like why can't i just do that and i had to do that for a while like i had to figure out when we lost the election in 2019. so after the coup The president was very nice about it. Yeah. Actually walk me through this coup because, um, for me again, it was just like, there were so many intricacies in how this happened. I just saw the headline. Right. And I was just like, ah, how did this happen? So, so you were serving, uh, my, uh, the president at the time, and then shit started to go south. Yes. Yeah. Um, so he decided overnight that he was just gonna rip up the constitution. Um, and bring in, so

20:27 you have to understand how dramatic this was because that election that brought him in was a complete like ousting. It's not the technically correct word, but an ousting of that regime saying like F no, because he had, Mahindra Rajpaksa had changed the constitution, taken out term limits and ran for a third term. It was like a real threat to our democracy. And then the whole Syriacinna campaign was about good governance and not letting this kind of stuff happen. So when he decided overnight to sack Ronald Wickhamasinghe and bring in the guy who the voters had rejected, it was a total betrayal of our democracy. It would be one thing if Mahindra Rajpaksa had the votes in parliament to be prime minister, he did not. So it was

21:14 a totally unconstitutional act. It was surprising and it was scary. When it happened, it was a Friday evening. I know that no one in the bureaucracy knew that it was going to happen because even that Friday afternoon, I spoke to the secretary, to the president. He was like super chill. He was like, what a slow day. Um, and then I went off to meet the labor unions for a meeting and. just after those meetings, I went home and was showering and I could hear the breaking news blasting on TV that this is happening. So it was a total surprise. I was totally politically manured. And, um, so come Monday, I thought I'll go to work and all my colleagues will be like super mad and angry, just like I am, but they were just going

22:04 about that day, like business as usual. And I, I assumed everyone would be lining up to resign. Um, That was not the case. And I realized these folks were super scared to stand up to the president. People with much more political capital and wealth and connections and credentials, much better than I do, much more than I had, were scared to stand up to the president. And that made me think, I need to not be one of these people. I figured that they have this real fear of losing access to him yeah um many people who surround who who joined a very

22:49 powerful figures in a realm start forming an identity based on their access to that person and their power and they're so scared to lose that access they feel like they don't have an identity apart from that so i was like if i were to go along with these guys i'm going to turn into one of them i need to resign Um, but I was the only one to do it in the entire president stuff. And I was also the youngest at the time and he's tough. And I was 25. I had just turned 25. And so, yeah, I, I submitted my letter of resignation about an hour in the president called. So I got a call as how the book begins. I got a call from his room saying, can you come in? The president wants to speak to you. I

23:35 was so scared. Um, this is like, uh, If it was so intimidating, man, like the presidential secretary is usually pretty chill. I mean, it's got a standard amount of security, but during the cool, the number of snipers and the security was, it was like a war zone people. There was so much security and so many barricades. So you can imagine walking in through that. And I have this, so I think because I'm from a military family, I can sniff out an STF sniper. Like they have a very unique smell. And really what is that? It's not a stink. It's not a stink. It's just, I don't know if it's that ammo or the uniform, but I could smell like a metal in there. And I

24:21 remember the, what I remember from that walk to his office is the smell was so intense. That means there was so many snipers and yeah, he was honestly, he was so nice. Yeah. there are benefits that come with, I mean, being a woman and a young woman can be, there are lots of negatives that come with it in male dominated spaces. But there's also a lot of patronization that often is not a great thing, but in that kind of situation, I think he just looked at me as this like really stubborn kid who just was like a little rebellious, it's fine. He was very polite and He had a file full of letters I had written to him earlier about like, you know, concerns I had

25:09 about mismanagement, misuse of funds and stuff like that. And he walked through all of them with me and he was very polite and he said, let's stay in touch. And that was it. I was so scared going in, but he was super nice about it. But what I was mostly worried about was not him i know he's not a person living vindictive person nor does he have the time to do anything like that but there are people around him like i think most powerful politicians have like a bunch of goons around them who are constantly waiting to get brownie points yeah so i was worried about those guys and they own tabloids and they can run stories so yeah so i i was anticipating it to happen it happened exactly that way there were just so much fake news circulating about like my character and

25:59 i was 25 and like listen list of people i was sleeping with and at one point they said i was lesbian and i mean there's nothing wrong with that but I'm not. And I'm looking at all these stories and thinking like they're describing a very multitasking capable person who's having multiple affairs and running this national campaign and also has a very interesting, vivid, bicurious sexual life. I'm not that person. I wish I had the time. What a scoop. Right. And most people know who I am and my husband, I've been with him since I was 18. And yeah. I, I, nobody in my immediate circle would read these tabloids, but as some of them, some of them made

26:46 to my parents, they were circulating on WhatsApp and they were really sad and devastated to see that daughter painted that way. But we got through it. But the good, good thing was that all that noise got to the president. And I remember hearing much later that the secretary to the president had spoken to the president saying that attacking this poor kid for just standing up for her values. And the president, as soon as the coup was reversed after the Supreme Court and all that, he appointed me as secretary to this very high committee on restructuring Sri Lankan Alliance. So he felt the need to not just reject my resignation, but also elevate me after I was coming back. Um, so I, I feel

27:35 like sometimes when you do things with the right intentions, things work out your way. And yeah, I ended up coming back and serving in that committee. And there I met Harsha De Silva and Iran Mikro Ratna, who also in the committee. And at the end of the committee proceedings, Harsha was like, Hey, you want to come in, run my team at the Ministry of Economic Reforms? And I was like, sure. And, and he was like, yesterday, I was like, sure, I'll be there tomorrow. But yeah. And then we went on to do some, really cool stuff in economic reforms. And that's awesome. I, I, what do you think going through that? Like when you're dragged through the streets and in today's context, it's just like articles and news and fake media town square. Yeah. How does, how has that developed your character?

28:23 Are you, have you developed thicker skin now that, you know, like your character has been misrepresented, uh, with the public? I mean, we, When I think about being somebody in the public eye, you have to be able to handle that stuff, right? Like think about a president, for example, like the amount of things that a president would have to like face on a daily is just like, it's like the worst that we can even think about. But do you feel like that was like a training for you for what's to come? Yeah. It's such a young age to go through that was, was helpful. I think, but I, um, I wasn't bothered by any of it. In fact, it was, being the somewhat, I used to, I think a little self-centric that I am, I was impressed that people were taking time out

29:10 of their day to do this. But I was bothered mostly by like the schadenfreude of it. Like people had developed a fetish for humiliation of others. So it wasn't even just the people who were doing it, but the people who were enjoying it, reading it, sharing it. I was bothered by that because I don't want to live in a society where people enjoy other people's pain or humiliation. It's a sad place to be. And I've seen that happen to so many people. I mean, every news cycle, there's someone being attacked, right? And everyone else is enjoying it. And I find that there's a disconnect in our society between like real people, treating people like real people. Like, why would you want to

29:56 be the reason why someone would have a bad day? I don't know. That's what I was bothered by. And that made me, I, I became, I used to be, when I was in college, I used to have that blog that would attack the Raj boxes, et cetera. I realized I need to change like my approach as well. because I need to not ever be personal with my attacks and my commentary. I have to try and be productive and constructive in what I contribute and not go down that personal path. I think I changed a lot of myself thanks to these things that I experienced. That's awesome. I love that you're a very thoughtful person. You reflect on your experiences as opposed to just shove it to

30:42 the side and be like, I was right and they were wrong. Uh, it's so important, right. To, to go through that ebb and flow with. Yeah, absolutely. With the Rajapaksas with Mahinda specifically, um, you write about meeting him for the first time as a child. And I personally, I've had the privilege of meeting, um, a few of them and you describe this aura with our politicians walk us through that because to the, to the Western. mindset, uh, it's very hard to explain that. Like I've met a governor, I've met people in a high in a office in the U S government. It's great. I think, but in Sri Lanka, I feel like it's a lot different when you meet them. Yeah. What is that? Cause you, you describe it in the book and I'm like, I feel like I connect to, to what you

31:28 were describing him as very few people have that kind of, I think Mahinda is singularly that Ranil comes close to it. Most other presidents, while they're president, they yield some power and they have this vibe to them because of all the chaos around them and people focusing on them. But Mahinda had something very unique. I was, of course, I've always been quite critical of his policies, but I think a big part of us trying to figure out how we got to 2022 and the politics of our country is unpacking how we got there. And Mahinda's... Mahindra managed to from like 2000, was it eight, 2000, up to 2000, so the election was 2005, right? Right after the tsunami, 2005 to

32:18 2010 was his first term. That first term was, he managed to single-handedly crush the military, like the LTT, right? Like he managed to, I remember growing up with the war and feeling like this is never going to end. Like every day there's a death toll, every day there's an emergency announcement. And we thought this is going to be life. And I remember when the Cabitigolab attack happened and they blew up this bus full of like these kids and pregnant moms and lactating moms going to a neonatal clinic. And it was like just bodies and bodies of kids and babies. And I remember thinking like, this is not, country like we should be living in and they

33:08 didn't even blur to be honest when i was growing up back in the day yes ethics were not it was not in the vocabulary of yeah and i am i mean we've seen so much growing up it's insane i'm so glad that our the next generation would be protected from that stuff but yeah and um and mahingya managed to take a country in that kind of situation and say you know what i'm gonna go like crush this and I'm going to end this for you. And it took obviously difficult decisions and a lot of, we can now unpack the real damage that happened in the North and East and the inequities in that approach. But at that time for majority of us, and I say majority because it

33:55 is a majority of us and many Sinhalese people and also Tamils, Muslims and others living in this country throughout were impacted by the war and wanted it to end one way or the other. And he managed to get it done. And he did that by purely by his kind of convening and operating power and people line like he could get people in line and get things done. And that had a lot to do with our psyche and our our like our it might come from a place of insecurity of our own as well where we as we have our own daddy issues that we we seek leadership like that um but he managed to deliver I remember like he he had

34:42 this charisma of making you feel like seen and it's it's so it sounds so stupid but it really is it's it was his mode of operation and it worked for a long time. And even now, he's really worn out, but you can see it still, you can see a glint of that there. But through that, he managed to operate the country singularly. Like he was very, like the way he operated for anyone who studies institutions is interesting. It was totally patronage network driven. Anyone who had access to him were able to get an in. and have a special advantage in, in getting access to resources and access to, um, information that

35:30 led to wealth and abundance. And you can see that he, he was an economy on its own, uh, on his own. So yeah, it was interesting how one personality could do that. And I don't know if we'd have any of those in the future for better or for worse. I mean, he definitely uses gifts and he utilized his gift with purpose. Um, That's for sure. You write about how in your book you say politics is beautiful from a distance. I agree. But why from a distance? What happens when you get put a microscope into for the average person? Again, everything is from a distance. We just see that, like I said, the newspaper headlines, what goes on in TV were fed certain narratives from

36:15 different parties. It's Politics is a lot of theater, right? You see all these parades and these like, it's a big circus. It looks beautiful from afar. It looks like, oh, look at these dancers and these military people with their regalia and their, you know, all their medals. But if you were to really unpack the cost of it, it's super, it's a lot of, not just the economic cost, but also the social cost. really it's supposed to keep people in line. Um, so there's very little room in that kind of system for, um, questioning the existing system. Cause you're constantly in, um, in a circus of, okay, we have to do this and then that, and this it's a

37:03 constant song and dance. Um, but if you look at it from afar, it's, it's quite nice. It's entertaining. It is very entertaining. Cause I feel like the WWE, mm-hmm. that type of, I mean, American politics is very much like the WWE. It's like, oh my God, he said this rock bottom. It is beautiful, but I think sometimes it just makes me feel when I read these tabloids and these headlines that what, Are whatever we're doing, whatever we're investing in people that are coming back, is it going to be worth someday or is it not? Is it overnight going to change with the way politics has worked in Sri Lanka? Because that's what most people think, right? Like, okay, if I come back and I put like five years

37:50 of my life back home into this country that I was born in my land, will I lose out at some point? I see a lot of hope. I have a lot of hope in Sri Lanka, despite all that's happened in the past few years. I think we have a lot of talent in this country. I think I'm looking at one right now and a lot of, and in a studio here, I'm seeing like a lot of local talent and the same way, like my opening into the private sector comes from Isru. I'm mostly stuck in policy and government, but I see with Isru and his team, they're building he has a team of robotics engineers building they just built the the first autonomous um advertising and photography robot in sri lanka it's beautiful um

38:38 and i see the talent it's all local it's all kids from moratua and eastern university and all local talent and i do think it's going to pay off and i see already paying off and look at our tech sector they're doing quite well. There's a lot of room for growth, but they're at it. I am very confident about it. And this is all happening despite the conditions for doing business in Sri Lanka being terrible. So if you're doing that, imagine the room for improvement. I'm very hopeful, but I understand that it is scary given the shocks we have seen in the past few years yeah in your book you're right building a life in a country that frustrates me yet still

39:24 feels worth the fight yeah what is that what do you think that is because i mean i i definitely think it's worth the fight for sure what do you think that is why why are we feeling like this It's indescribable, man. Like this country is so, so perfect. I cannot ask for a better place to live. Like it's nice to go out and see the world and, and, and have, I mean, much of my, many of my friends are still in the U S and it's nice to see them. And, um, and, and, and I get to, thanks to work, go to different parts of the world and, and, and see parts of the world. Most people don't get to see, but I love coming back home. It's like, this place is, it's freaking magical. And the dream and the goal is to be

40:12 able to live here and build a life here. I saw something on, I think it was Facebook, someone from Sri Lanka who'd left the country said that Sri Lanka is full of two types of people, people who can either afford to live here or people who are looking to get out. And I think that's so true. I think Sri Lanka has become very expensive to live in. in that if you really want a good quality of life, you need to make a decent amount of money. And if you look at the income classes and if we were in the same income class we are now in the US, we'd be living, we'd have like we'd have private jets. But in our country, the top 5% doesn't have the

41:02 The quality of life, the top 5% in most other countries would. We have to have like, we have to make millions to live a decent life. So the quality of life, it's expensive to live here. So I think, but it still feels worth it because it's just too, it's too good to be true, man. Beautiful. Yeah. What is the immediate vision for you? Um, with the current trend of things for 2040, I think that's like the short term goal or 2030 was, and now it's like 2040. And, uh, you know, I, I helped a friend out with his book called 2048. Asanka Domell. He's the gentleman that is low. We still love the serongs super cool stuff. He's, he's doing

41:49 it for the Olympics. Um, I love his stuff. So good. Right. Yeah. I like that. We're taking control of our our uh culture and identity and presenting it to the world but where do you see sri lanka in in 2040 or where would you like to see sri lanka i would like to see sri lanka in a very good fiscally stable place um where we have we we can take risks in investment without worrying about a potential shock. I hope we would have, we, that our debt portfolios would be in a nice place. Okay. I'm getting really boring now. So I'm going to try to be a little, I don't think you're boring at all. Okay.

42:35 It's, it's, I'm, I'm just, I'm not an expert. So, I mean, I, for me to be, I love that guests, like you are opening the store into this realm and this world that we don't pay attention to most times. Um, And we're just like stuck in our little cubicles of industry and our work. And we're like, Oh, we're focusing on this, but this is very interesting to me. So please keep going. No, I, I, it's hard to predict, but 24 40 would look like because of how shock prone we are, not just economically, but like climate wise. I mean, I saw, I went to the field a few weeks ago and I saw the damage of DITWA. the cyclone on on our country like the infrastructure damage will take a few years in the very least to recover but the livelihoods

43:23 damage to people's like livelihoods it's insane like it's going to take these people it's it's taken them back years and it's going to take put them in further debt affect their quality of life they're going to resort to negative coping mechanisms eat less eat less healthy gonna affect their quality of life and it's going to hold them back and i worry about the outcomes of that today on a child when they grow up like it's especially if you're under five and you're not getting the nutrition you need and the education quality you need it's going to hold you back and it's going to have an impact in 10 years and when you try to join the workforce so i worry about those outcomes um but in a glossy picture i do hope our treasury is in a healthy space that our coffers are

44:12 full and i hope our welfare system is functional in a way that it's um it's managed to alleviate poverty to a large extent and is now just providing safety nets to to people but um yeah it's really hard to predict because of the climate situation and how shock prone we are what are we doing to to actually I don't know if we're actually taking steps to prevent. I mean, you can't control the weather, but there's ways you can actually control the effects of it. Right. Um, well, the global warming, there's the Paris alignment that we are trying to meet these, um, targets set by the Paris agreement. But, uh, in terms of like real impact to households, we need better insurance systems for households. I remember in 2018,

44:59 um, I think with the support of the World Bank at the time, I do not recall if they were involved, but with the government, it was a government run program. They began a climate insurance, shock insurance program for just citizens. Anyone who is not insured could insure their house, their livelihoods. And whenever there is a flood or a natural disaster, they could know cash out and and and be able to survive that in a better way but in i think two years in the first godabhi rajpaks administration discontinued it they were like the premium is too much the reinsurance premium

45:46 is too much so we're not going to do it um because the the argument was that the total reinsurance premium the government would have to pay is higher than like the average annual cost of the government because of like flood relief, et cetera. But that was for an average year, like last year, the cost was insane because of DITWA. So we need to not just plan for every year, but plan for that big shock that, you know, that's the whole point of insurance. So I hope we go down a path where we build better safe nets for our people, like at the ground level. And also from a, like a, fiscal angle as well, like have a better contingency

46:33 budget for sharks. Like when the Easter tax happened and we needed money, we were like, why don't we have a contingency, like a proper emergency fund? We should have that. So, yeah, I mean, there's a lot you can do and there are international best practices you can apply. Yeah. It's one of the things that I felt, um, or that I feel is like as a filmmaker and, you know, people that create content. Um, when we see Sri Lanka only whenever something bad happens on the New York times on the economist, like this is a narrative that the world sees us through, which sucks. Um, so our job as filmmakers are now to, how do we position Sri Lanka in, in what we know Sri Lanka is right. We control our narrative. Um, and so as, as we're producing currently,

47:23 we're producing um a series a few a few projects which is exciting I think Sri Lanka's would be very very proud of thanks for doing this like I think we need more of Sri Lanka out there yeah and and I'm glad that we have people like you yeah I mean I mean um on Nat Geo India we have Tasha Marika who's producing a fantastic book from Jaya Flava, who's doing a fantastic show that celebrates Sri Lankan cuisine. And so there's so many partakers in this, in this realm of taking control of our narrative. But what bothers me is again, you know, when you see the pitchfork and the guy with that teeth in the Arigalea just, and that Sri Lanka framed. Yeah. I'm like,

48:11 I have really twisted opinions about the allegory i have i have um gray views on the regular yeah because share share share share i want to know it's it's not popular but i think i can say it because anyone who says this will be told oh you're a rajboxer supporter but my views on the rajboxes are very very visible let's start from how first of all how do we get to the argalia because it's not just like Was it an overnight situation? It wasn't, it was a lead up for many years of just mismanagement of funds or? So let's just talk about the block of the two years. We can talk about how like the previous administration could have done things differently as well, but that's a longer conversation. And I also think they were, the

48:59 previous administration was financially for the most part in on the right track. We had two primary surpluses. leading up to the 2019 election, which means our fiscal health was in a good place when we left it, when we left government in 2019. I still say we like I'm still in government. That's something for me to work out with my therapist. But yeah, I remember in 2019, I worked on a Sajid Premdasa campaign. I was one of the authors of his manifesto. and we were pushing for we all of our policies we're very clear on it um we were not going to slash taxes because it would be attractive to sexy to say we're going to slash taxes but we

49:47 knew it would be the unhealthy thing to do it's going to backfire but i remember back then the opposition the gothabia campaign was like we're going to slash taxes we're going to transition to organic fertilizer we're going to do all of these things they had a very clear pitch as well and people voted for them people said we want less taxes we want organic fertilizer and they cheered him on i mean gothabia rajvax i believe has gotten the biggest mandate strongest mandates to a president has got in the history of Sri Lanka. Not even this current government has that. Not even Anuragumar, Dishanayaka. So people very much celebrated him and wanted his policies. They knew exactly the team he was

50:33 bringing on. They knew the track record of these people and what they were capable of and what their policies are. So they signed up for this. So they had handed him the pen and he just signed with it. So he did exactly what he said he was going to do. He slashed taxes. VAT was brought from like 19, 17 to 8%, things like that. Like it was obviously like you don't need a PhD in economics to know that when you cut taxes, it's going to reduce government revenue and overnight. And it's going to eventually, unless you have this serious plan to recover that, which they did not, it's going to lead to a shortage. I mean, it's going to lead to a deficit that we cannot keep up with. It was all like, it was so predictable.

51:24 So when people suddenly started losing their minds when exactly what should happen happened, and took to the streets and demanded he be ousted. It was quite funny to me because I felt like accountability, yes, should come from the top, but it's also a bottom up. It's a two way street. Absolutely. And I found it really problematic. And I'm also, a lot of people celebrate the day that Gotar was ousted. I find it really problematic to celebrate it because we are a modern democracy, man. We are an electoral democracy. Less than a century ago, we couldn't vote. We didn't have our own government. We were being governed

52:09 by people who practically invaded our country and essentially enslaved us. And then we have, now we have for many years, many decades have had strong electoral democracy where we've had elections, peaceful transitions of power. and then to have a president be ousted like that. And you know, if he hadn't gotten out, he would have been murdered and butchered in the streets. I mean, that's not, I'm so glad that didn't happen, but we are not those people. We are modern, we are civilized. I mean, what's happening in the US, there's a lot of opposition against Trump, but people are, people in modern democracy see through their, they face the consequences of their elections and their decisions and they see through that. So, I found it a bit problematic that people didn't want

52:59 to hold themselves accountable for their actions. It's up to us to pick our government and then live with those consequences. Absolutely. It was a tricky one because, like you said, I think there's a lot of opinions about how that went down. And when you look at it from hindsight, what did it actually, what did it In your opinion, what did that achieve? Well, look, my previous political allegiance were quite visible. I did like Raniel Vikramasingha. transition presidency worked very well for us. And I'm so glad this current government is following a

53:45 lot of those policies. Um, he is a pragmatist. He'll, he has a thick skin, he'll take the attacks and he'll see things through and he, his economics was, and the team he had were extremely capable people. They managed to get things done. Many of them are still on board with this government. So, um, I like that transition. I'm so glad that it worked out that way. I just, you know, I have mixed feelings because of that. I didn't like how it happened, but I'm glad it happened. Yeah. The change that was required and nobody even wanted to touch it, touch that mantle, but he did, which was really commendable. I have one question for you, which confuses me to this day. We are known

54:34 as democratic socialist republic we've got all of that stuff in in our name what are we what what actually because it's confusing me when we're called the democratic socialist republic of sri lanka i think we need to talk to a constitutional lawyer to really get to the nitty-gritty of that but i just think what i think we've are a little we are very pluralist democracy where we have people who believe a bunch of things right we have capitalists we have socialists we have communists we've had if you look at the past three governments i mean it's a testimony to how you know not set in

55:19 our ways we are that we we can adapt and change and try new things we have parties that are communist and socialists running countries and then we are you know, and the next administration will be a capitalist party. In the government I served, we had a socialist president and a capitalist, social democrat capitalist prime minister. So we are very, we don't quite fit into those labels and those cookie cutters of the textbook, Western kind of political science definitions. But I think we are, we're a modern, I hope we're a modern democracy. figuring itself out. And I hope what happened in 2022 was an anomaly and it won't happen again. We're not, we're not,

56:09 we don't operate as a binary system. I think so. I definitely think that Sri Lanka in general is, as a core is, is never that you can never define it. It, it ebbs and flows. There's a season where the pendulum swings left in the, It's when it swings, right? Constantly just oscillating. I love it. It keeps you on your toes. Um, this story, this has been awesome, man. Like it was really cool to, to just get, get into the world that you, that you operate in. Is there anything apart from this book, which I highly recommend people to read? Um, I've gotten through halfway through before you got into the podcast, cause it was just trying my best to, um, understand the world that you come from and you've written it so beautifully. So well, uh, it's, it's a great read.

56:57 Um, and I recommend everyone grab a copy. What else is on the horizon for you that we should keep an eye out for? Um, there's really nothing I want to plug read the book. Um, I, I, I, when I started working in government, I wish I had a book like this because there's no literature on what it's like to be a young Sri Lankan trying to get into government. So if you are interested in public policy, I'm not saying my way is the right way, but it is a way and it will give you some insight into what it's like and what it was like for me at least. Awesome. Well, thank you for being on the podcast. Thanks for having me, Jason. I appreciate you. This was fun. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you, everybody.