One day I was walking on a road in Colombo when a multitude of useless thoughts came to my mind. I felt that a large number of people in this world, probably amounting to several billion people, had a big problem – The lack of energy to follow their dreams. It might be one of the biggest undiscussed problems in the world, people just don’t have enough energy to do what they want to do. It wasn’t laziness really, but people just weren’t designed to follow the great expectations the world has designed for them to achieve. So on one hand they have great dreams they want to achieve, and on the other hand, they don’t have energy and this causes a lot of unhappiness. But no politician ever talks about it, actually nobody anywhere ever does. Would it benefit a large number of people if somehow their level of energy could be increased?
In a way, the main ingredient in success apart from intelligence and luck is energy (effort). In fact, happiness, confidence, and many other things could be defined in terms of energy. But how could people practically increase their energy levels, maybe by exercise, maybe tea, maybe coffee, maybe by a self-improvement philosophy……. I was fed up with my useless thinking…... and then I looked up and there was a row of second-hand bookshops near a kind of three-road junction.
I went to one of them without any real intention of buying a book and saw a book titled “Indian Ocean Treasure '' by Arthur C. Clarke. Arthur C. Clarke was a slight oddity in every sense of the word. A rocket enthusiast as a teenager, he seemed to have dreamed of space travel, even before anyone had invented a rocket. During World War II, he worked as a scientist and helped in the development of Radar, which helped turn the tables on the Germans at a time when Hitler was very confident about invading Britain. During this time he wrote a paper or rather dreamed for nobody had even gone to space at that time, of placing three satellites in the geostationary orbit above the earth so that they could transmit radio and television signals around the world. For this, he earned the title “Father of Satellite Communications'' much later when it was actually done. Perhaps unsurprisingly he became one of the most famous science fiction writers of his generation. He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick in making the world-famous science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey a few years before the moon landing. His book of the same name became one of the most influential science fiction books of all time. When they eventually landed on the moon, he was one of the people who came on the live telecast of the landing on CBS. According to the book, in the late 1950s, he came to Sri Lanka. One of the non-fiction books he wrote about the Island was – “Indian Ocean Treasure '', a true story of a Treasure hunt in the Great Basses Reef about ten miles into sea off the southern coast of Sri Lanka.
The book was so old that as I was reading it, it crumbled in my hands. Written in the early 1960s the Ceylon he describes seems almost like another country. So much seemed to have happened in the intervening years. Ceylon as it was known then became a republic and changed its name to Sri Lanka in 1972. In 1978 an open market economy was adopted. A civil war erupted in 1979 that lasted 30 years and ended only in 2009. There was a lot of hope for development after that, but the economy never picked up, but like the book crumbled page by page. It seems that a lot of the clever and colorful people left, leaving us dummies behind. But I don’t mind, by God, I don’t as long as I can travel and draw and paint what I see. All you need to be happy here is a sense of humor.
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