Local View: Remembering Sri Lanka's beloved Arthur C. Clarke
He told me that I sat in the same chair that Yuri Alekseyevich Gagarin (the first human to fly in space) and R. Buckminster Fuller (the avant-garde American architect who invented the geodesic dome architecture) sat in some few years before.
We all came there to pay obeisance to Arthur C. Clarke. “There” was the exotic island nation of Sri Lanka.
I was thrilled, nervous and excited to be talking to the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the scientist who contributed to the practical application of the geostationary orbit and speculated so insightfully concerning its future uses. I had followed his writings and speculations for years.
It was 1983, just 25 short years ago, that I was sent to Sri Lanka as a United Nations’ computer expert. Clarke came to Sri Lanka in 1956 when it was still called Ceylon (of tea fame) and was the chancellor of the University of Moratuwa. Mary, my wife, and children, Richard, Thomas, Benjamin and Margaret, came over and joined me on my assignment as we settled into the Galle Face Hotel.
It was indeed half way around the world. Their time zone was 13½ hours different from Lincoln’s. But in terms of culture and lifestyle it was eons away from where we had ever lived before. It was an undeveloped country; it was a Jewel Island.
Sri Lanka has been in the world news for the last 30 years because of the ethnic strife between the Tamils largely in the North and the Buddhists in the South. Its shores were also decimated during the 2004 tsunami that caused widespread destruction and death to 31,000 Sri Lankans.
When we arrived in 1983, things were rather quiet, but in the end we had to leave because the violence came too close to home.
Clarke was above all of this fighting as he saw Sri Lanka as a little jewel, and his love for her and her gentle people was deeply embedded in his deep understanding of the island’s history and culture. His vision of their future is contained in many of the science fiction stories and novels he wrote.
One novel, “The Fountains of Paradise” (1979), fictionally located on the Island of Rama (around which he wrote several of his novels) concerned the building of a space cargo shuttle “elevator” from the island, coincidently located slightly off the Equator, to raise a payload to a geostationary satellite that would then be manipulated to build a cost-effective space station.
Our conversations always revolved around the future and the role of technology in that future. One major point he continued to make with me was that the future belonged to the “South.” He looked at the globe as not being divided into East and West but rather North and South.
In one discussion he claimed that with the advent of high bandwidth communications technology, the best medicine in the world would come from the South.
His argument was that the North had bureaucratized and regulated medicine to such an extent that they had ham strung themselves in being able to rapidly produce the new physicians that were needed or to learn, apply and bring to the field new procedures or to create new med-tech specialist within the urgently needed time frame challenges that we would be facing.
He saw specialized heart procedures being done remotely from the South at a fraction of the cost by doctors who would have specialized in that discipline and would have kept up through “just-in-time learning” on the latest technology appropriate to a particular procedure.
He held the same view about telecommunications. At the time, a phone call from Lincoln to Sri Lanka required me to register for a time slot when I was in Lincoln before I could be connected to Colombo. From Sri Lanka I merely dialed the international code to my home and I was there in seconds. There were few land lines maintained in Sri Lanka. Everything was microwave, satellite or what we now call wireless communication.
This fell into another of his theme dreams where he saw Sri Lanka and the rest of the developing world “skipping the 20th century.”
Since few Sri Lankans ever had an in-house installed standard black telephone, they did not have to go through the Princess phone stage nor its successors to arrive at the cell phones that so many of them have today.
It will be some years before the literary and scientific critics can fully evaluate Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s contribution to our society.
For me and my family members who meet him in deep conversation or by playing ping pong with him at Colombo’s Otters Club, he will be always be remembered as the futurist that lived and worked in a remote part of the world and nevertheless had an enormous impact on that Jewel Island — and in fact on today and tomorrow’s world in space.
Some might claim he dreamed us there.
We all came there to pay obeisance to Arthur C. Clarke. “There” was the exotic island nation of Sri Lanka.
I was thrilled, nervous and excited to be talking to the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the scientist who contributed to the practical application of the geostationary orbit and speculated so insightfully concerning its future uses. I had followed his writings and speculations for years.
It was 1983, just 25 short years ago, that I was sent to Sri Lanka as a United Nations’ computer expert. Clarke came to Sri Lanka in 1956 when it was still called Ceylon (of tea fame) and was the chancellor of the University of Moratuwa. Mary, my wife, and children, Richard, Thomas, Benjamin and Margaret, came over and joined me on my assignment as we settled into the Galle Face Hotel.
It was indeed half way around the world. Their time zone was 13½ hours different from Lincoln’s. But in terms of culture and lifestyle it was eons away from where we had ever lived before. It was an undeveloped country; it was a Jewel Island.
Sri Lanka has been in the world news for the last 30 years because of the ethnic strife between the Tamils largely in the North and the Buddhists in the South. Its shores were also decimated during the 2004 tsunami that caused widespread destruction and death to 31,000 Sri Lankans.
When we arrived in 1983, things were rather quiet, but in the end we had to leave because the violence came too close to home.
Clarke was above all of this fighting as he saw Sri Lanka as a little jewel, and his love for her and her gentle people was deeply embedded in his deep understanding of the island’s history and culture. His vision of their future is contained in many of the science fiction stories and novels he wrote.
One novel, “The Fountains of Paradise” (1979), fictionally located on the Island of Rama (around which he wrote several of his novels) concerned the building of a space cargo shuttle “elevator” from the island, coincidently located slightly off the Equator, to raise a payload to a geostationary satellite that would then be manipulated to build a cost-effective space station.
Our conversations always revolved around the future and the role of technology in that future. One major point he continued to make with me was that the future belonged to the “South.” He looked at the globe as not being divided into East and West but rather North and South.
In one discussion he claimed that with the advent of high bandwidth communications technology, the best medicine in the world would come from the South.
His argument was that the North had bureaucratized and regulated medicine to such an extent that they had ham strung themselves in being able to rapidly produce the new physicians that were needed or to learn, apply and bring to the field new procedures or to create new med-tech specialist within the urgently needed time frame challenges that we would be facing.
He saw specialized heart procedures being done remotely from the South at a fraction of the cost by doctors who would have specialized in that discipline and would have kept up through “just-in-time learning” on the latest technology appropriate to a particular procedure.
He held the same view about telecommunications. At the time, a phone call from Lincoln to Sri Lanka required me to register for a time slot when I was in Lincoln before I could be connected to Colombo. From Sri Lanka I merely dialed the international code to my home and I was there in seconds. There were few land lines maintained in Sri Lanka. Everything was microwave, satellite or what we now call wireless communication.
This fell into another of his theme dreams where he saw Sri Lanka and the rest of the developing world “skipping the 20th century.”
Since few Sri Lankans ever had an in-house installed standard black telephone, they did not have to go through the Princess phone stage nor its successors to arrive at the cell phones that so many of them have today.
It will be some years before the literary and scientific critics can fully evaluate Sri Lankabhimanya Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s contribution to our society.
For me and my family members who meet him in deep conversation or by playing ping pong with him at Colombo’s Otters Club, he will be always be remembered as the futurist that lived and worked in a remote part of the world and nevertheless had an enormous impact on that Jewel Island — and in fact on today and tomorrow’s world in space.
Some might claim he dreamed us there.
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