Sunday Times 2
The lighter side of life at the Peradeniya campus
View(s):By Thalif Deen
NEW YORK—The university campus at Peradeniya has long been a community of closed living. Going back to the 1950s and 60s, the university had its own social life, its own sense of values, its own medium of conversation, and most importantly, its own anecdotes and legendary stories—both on and off-campus.
When we graduated after a three- or four-year stint, some of us left behind a trail of sweet memories, broken hearts—and unpaid canteen bills.
The university entrance exam was one of the toughest. If you were in the field of liberal arts, the four most popular subjects were European History, Ceylon History, Government and English.
Sketch generated by Microsoft Copilot (AI), 2025.
If you fail to get all four passes, you are summoned to an interview called “viva voce”, a mediaeval Latin phrase for an oral examination, more often called the “viva” in campus jargon.
The late Mervyn de Silva, a brilliant writer, editor and columnist, armed with a devastating sense of humour, was a product of Peradeniya.
In one of his regular columns, “With Malice to None” by Daedalus, he recounted a hilariously fictitious interview with a soon-to-be undergraduate specialising in Western history. “Who was the first Labour Prime Minister of England?” he was asked at the interview, which drew a blank.
The interview board, which comprised academics and members of the University Senate, provided a clue by playing, on a tape recorder, a popular nursery rhyme at that time, “Old McDonald Had a Farm Eeeya Eeeya U”.
Now, tell us who was the first Labour Prime Minister?
“Mr Farm”. Wrong, try again. “Mr Old”. Sorry, one final try. “Mr Macdonald”. ‘Great,’ said one of the board members. “Let’s give him our prize for brilliant IQ.”
As a general rule, most undergrads skipped afternoon lectures and opted to take a nap—an afternoon siesta—after a heavy rice-and-curry lunch. Mervyn once skipped his nap and decided to attend a rare afternoon lecture, which prompted the professor to sarcastically remark, “Mr de Silva, I notice you skipped your afternoon siesta and decided to attend my lecture.”
“No, Professor, I came to your lecture for my afternoon siesta,” retorted Mervyn amidst laughter.
We went down memory lane, recounting campus anecdotes, when we hosted Mervyn and his wife during their visits to New York in a bygone era.
Meanwhile, in the Halls of Residence, there was a strict dress code: no sarongs at lunches or dinners. And during high-table dinners, mostly hosting British or American academics, a tie was mandatory.
At one of these dinners, one of the undergrads slipped unnoticed into the dining room stark naked, wearing only a tie, described as a relic of British colonialism.
“You want me to wear a tie? “So, I am wearing a tie,” he remarked to himself, in a rebellious tone. But fortunately, he went unnoticed by both the warden and the visiting guest and escaped being unceremoniously expelled from the campus.
Whenever the final examinations were around the corner, there was tension in the air, with most undergrads nervous wrecks. One of them, a final-year law student, suddenly found himself allergic to pen and paper and requested the option to type out his answers after taking a crash course in typing.
When the final results were released, the joke was that he crashed his finals but got through with honours in typewriting.
The campus was also home to off-campus jokes, originating mostly from the Kandy Municipal Council, where one member (MMC) was notorious for dropping heavy bricks and mangling the English language.
Among the jokes spreading across the campus was a proposal in the council for building public toilets in Kandy. While supporting the proposal, he remarked, “We should not only have more and more urinals but also more and more arsenals.”
When he spoke of the bombings during World War II, he said bomBers were coming and bomBers were going. And when his neighbour whispered, “B is silent,” he said, “Sorry, Ombers were coming and Ombers were going.”
In any given year, there were a couple of American PhD students spending an academic year doing their coursework either on Buddhism or Buddhist civilisation. One of them, characteristically American, was heavily built with a gargantuan appetite and devoured all the bread at the breakfast table in one of the halls of residence.
Having picked up some Sinhala words, he was known to shout “Paang, Paang”, crying out for bread.
Asked about the Sinhala word for “more bread”, he was told, “Paang is bread—and Huka Paang is more bread. So, standing in the middle of the dining hall, he kept shouting Huka Paang, Huka Paang, much to the amusement of our Sinhala-speaking hall servants.
And thereby hangs a hilarious tale…