I became a lecturer in meditation in the same institute. In the meantime I practiced Anapanasathi Meditation very well. Here they taught you the Dhamma preached by the Lord Buddha. “One day I chanced upon a meditation centre called Battadiya. I stayed at the Golden Temple of the Sikhs following Sikhism. Later, I became a Pentecostal religious follower for a while. I went to ‘Hare Rama Hare Krishna’ centres and observed those practices for some time. “I felt tremendous pain and anguish when I was reminded of my wife and child. He started going about looking for solace from wherever he could find it. He felt the need for peace of mind very strongly. Conditions in the Northern Province simply did not allow Ravi Kumar to go back. His daughter was growing up with relatives.
Ravi Kumar was feeling increasingly desolate at this time. He was then freed on the orders of MGR.” He had been remanded in Thenampette, where I went and saw him when I got the information. He arrested Prabhakaran who was armed with a pistol at the point of time of arrest. But the police chief at the time DIG Mohandas did not like them. MGR who was the Chief Minister tacitly supported them. Neither of them was well known at the time. “Once Prabhakaran had come to Tamil Nadu to assassinate Uma Maheswaran. It was not simply a personal narrative it was intertwined with socio-political issues of the time. Ravi Kumar was recalling a 30 year history. “One day I had a good experience in Tamil Nadu.” “I got information that my wife had been abducted. When the terrorists could not get hold of Ravi Kumar who had left the shores of his motherland because of fighting among the terror groups, they took revenge on his wife. The saddest part of Ravi Kumar’s life was beginning at this time. I was first in Chennai then I lived in Mumbai, working as a travel agent. When I started receiving death threats I decided I would try my best to save my life. I was then married, with a five year old child. He even came to my house and demanded that my students be taught their political doctrine.Īs I could not tolerate all this I left for India. Prabhakaran was getting powerful at this time. They wanted to speak to these students, but I was against it. One day, Terrorists came in and told me that I had to stop these classes. It was during this time that I started teaching Botany as a tuition master. Father and son shot each other because they belonged to two separate groups. He told me that 36 different groups had taken up arms. There was no division according to caste or creed. There were no ethnic tensions between the Sinhalese and the Tamils. But in Bandarawela things were very different. Divisions between them were deep and marked strongly on the basis of the Caste System. One could not go from one family home to visit another. Friendly ties between Tamil families were fading away. Life in Jaffna in the meantime was taking a strange turn. I knew about them and understood them quite well. Since I lived in Bandarawela during my school days, I associated mostly with the Sinhalese. How did the young Ravi Kumar feel about all this at the time? They were in ‘high spirits’ about their new found power. His peers among the youth in Jaffna were getting drawn into brandishing weapons. Ravi Kumar started to narrate his life story to us. I returned to Manipay in 1979 but the political situation there was deteriorating fast.
But I had my school education till grade 10 in Bandarawela. During the reign of terror in the North, he made a living as a tuition master. Arunnethwaraththam Ravi Kumar lives in Manipay, Jaffna. Now when the dark clouds of civil conflict have been dispelled and peace reigns supreme in this blessed land, we came across one man who is trying to spread the soothing balm of the Dhamma among people in the Jaffna Peninsula. There was no one to spread the message of kindness and loving compassion to youth falling rapidly into the clutches of terrorism. This was a time when one could not even find one person who could recite a Buddhist prayer leave alone a monk that could deliver a Budddhist sermon. People in the peninsula drifted away from Buddhism not leaving even a scant clue evidencing its Buddhist heritage. A Translation of the Article published in the Sinhala ‘Divaina’ newspaper of May 11, 2014Īt a time when archeological sites and artifacts were still being discovered as evidence of Buddhist heritage in the Jaffna Peninsula, the dark omen of terrorism started clouding the peace of the entire Buddhist nation.