By Rajan Philips –

Rajan Philips

Engineer Chandrakumaran passed away on 15 November 2023, in Toronto, Canada. He was a very likeable and much loved person to anyone and everyone who was fortunate to cross paths with him. I first met Chandrakumaran when we were both first year Engineering students and residing at Jayatilaka Hall in Peradeniya. Memories of that residency flooded back when I heard about his sudden passing away. I also feel inspired to remember and praise Chandrakumaran’ s remarkable professional life and the equally accomplished professional family that he and his wife Usha have raised with their wonderfully gifted children – Priya, Harry and Haran. All three of them were born together, and now at 29 years of age, Priya and Harry are Doctors while Haran is a Mechanical Engineer like his father.

Usha and Chandrakumaran met in Bandarawela, where he was already working as an Engineer for the Department of Machinery and Equipment, and Usha was in her first posting as a young Engineer with the Highways Department. Previously, he had worked with the State Engineering Corporation. Among his many projects in different parts of the country was the dredging and cleanup of the Nuwara Eliya lake which was a priority project for then Minister Gamini Dissanayake.

After Sri Lanka, Chandrakumaran went to Nigeria which had become a job destination for Sri Lankan Engineers in the 1970s. Usha joined him later, and they worked in different parts of the country for nearly ten years before migrating to Canada in 1989. Canada has not been an easy place for migrant engineers to readily find professionally satisfying jobs. That did not deter Chandrakumaran, and given his intelligence, mechanical skills and versatility, he was able to land good jobs and work on impressive projects including the expansion of Canada’s largest airport (Pearson International) in Toronto, and the renovation of the mechanical and electrical systems in Canada’s parliament in Ottawa.

His lasting job for nearly twenty years was with Crossey Engineering, a major Mechanical and Electrical Engineering company in Toronto that was founded in1963, and which after its recent merger with Salas O’Brien company in the US has become part of a North American organization of over 2,200 employee-owners operating at more than 70 locations.

Chandrakumaran was highly respected at Crossey for his contributions, his readiness to learn new skills and undertake new challenges, and his ability for providing guidance and mentorship to young engineers. Chandrakumaran had retired from the company five years ago, but his colleagues attended his wake in numbers to pay their respects, and Andrew Pratt, Principal and Head of the Mechanical Department, eulogized at the funeral. Chandrakumaran’s son Haran is now working at Crossey. The legacy continues.

Perhaps the legacy may have started with Chandrakumaran’s father, Sinnathamby Kandiah, who was an Engineer at the old Water Board and went on to work in Zambia after retiring in Sri Lanka. Chandrakumaran was the oldest son of Kandiah and Yogamani, and was raised with his four sisters and two brothers in their lovely garden bungalow on Ramanathan Road, a stone throw from Parameshwara College, now Jaffna University.

Chandrakumaran entered Peradeniya from Jaffna Hindu College in a large of batch new entrants. Hindu College had a well-established science stream with impressive teachers, including Jaffna’s celebrated Math teacher Varadharaja Perumal, whose A’Level classes were known to overlap with first year university math syllabus. Hundreds of his students have gone on to excel in Engineering and Mathematics in Sri Lankan and British universities.

Hindu College also had another prominent teacher, known in Jaffna as “Communist Karthigesan,” and a pre-eminent teacher of English in the Peninsula. Chandrakumaran had benefited from the influence of these two outstanding teachers, and he would often recount his experience of their classes, including how ‘Karthigesu master’ would teach aspiring university entrants the etiquettes of formal dining using cutlery.

My lasting memories of Chandrakumaran are from our first year at Jayatilaka Hall. It was an experience in congenial socialization that has been of lasting benefit not only to both of us, but also, I would like to think, to everyone else who went through their first years in the halls of residence at Peradeniya.

Jayatilaka Hall was one of the first Halls of Residence at Peradeniya, along with the neighbouring Arunachalam Hall, and was located right across from the Science Faculty and was off the main campus roundabout on Galaha Road. Across the roundabout lay the expansive sports fields and beyond were the Arts Faculty buildings including the Geography Building and the Main Library. It was a picturesque setting, as every site on campus truly was. The Engineering Faculty was some distance away, on the west side of the meandering Mahaweli.

The Hall itself was a lovely two-storey building with about 40 to 50 rooms and balconies, spacious hallways, dining and common rooms, a welcoming courtyard and manicured lawns. When the university began in the 1950s, there might have been one student per room with 40 to 50 students in total. In our time there were about 100 students altogether, with 60 first year students at three students per room on the ground floor, and 40 senior students at two per room on the second floor. There were students belonging to all the faculties and coming from all the leading schools in Colombo, Galle, Jaffna, Kandy and Batticaloa.

Jayatilaka Hall, like every other hall of residence in Peradeniya in our time, was a living and pleasant microcosm of the linguistic and religious plurality of Sri Lankan society. The whole campus was a site of pilgrimage where students from different ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, not to mention caste, backgrounds mingled and lived together – expanding their collective consciousness to include others who have not been part of their universe before.

At that time, we could not have conceptualized that our pilgrim experience on campus was a part of the nation making process. Fifteen years would go by before Benedict Anderson (in Imagined Communities) would proffer his pathbreaking insight that social pilgrimages and ‘print capitalism’ (the printing of newspapers and novels) have been the constitutive processes of nation making in modern world history. That Sri Lanka did not succeed in this historical task is a different story. And we are all the poorer for it.

Chandrakumaran had the political awareness of it, and he was also socially prepared for it because of his family’s exposure to life outside the Jaffna peninsula. His mother’s family had lived in Anuradhapura, where Chandrakumaran was born; and his father was born even farther south, in Matara. Yet his upbringing in Jaffna had ensured that he would internalize all the essences of the social and religious ethos of Jaffna society. That ethos is firmly founded on Saiva Siddhanta and is enshrined by the sweep of devotional poems in Tamil literature.

Chandrakumaran was well versed in them, and I had deep curiosity for them given my somewhat blended background of Catholic upbringing among Hindu neighbours and studied interest in Tamil poetry. Our interactions were enriching, perhaps more to me than to him and I cherish my memories of them as I think of him now.

It is now a month after Chandrakumaran passed away. This is also the month of Margazhi, a special month for Tamils, the coldest in the home calendar filled with heavy morning dew. Margazhi is also the month of music and devotion centered on the singing of Tiruppavai and Tiruvempavai. I think of Chandrakumaran and our Jayatilaka days because we used to talk about bands of devotees, walking from house to house in the morning dew of Marghazhi, and singing the seasonal hymns of Andal and Manivasagar. A tradition that predates carol singing and is devoid of commercial embellishments.